Military Coups d’État and Guinea’s Rocky Road to Political Stability

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While the fate of Guinea’s former President Alpha Condé remains unclear following a military coup on September 5, the ongoing political turmoil is most likely a beginning of a repetitive cycle of a semi-democratic military governance observed across West Africa.

Military parade following the coup in Guinea. Photo: Aboubacarkhoraa / Wikimedia Commons

Security Defection: Domestic vs. International Community Reactions

Guinea is, yet again, facing political uncertainty after elite security forces overthrew the president in a coup. The coup was led by the head of Guinea’s special forces, Lt. Col Mamady Doumbouyah, who is said to have served in the French legion and received military training from the United States, through US AFRICOM (U.S. Africa Command). Following the coup, Col. Doumbouyah appeared on Guinean state television together with his armed soldiers. They announced that the president had been detained, the constitution dissolved, and that a nationwide curfew had been imposed.

The unfavorable political development of this impoverished, yet resource-rich nation comes as no surprise for many. This coup followed a year which saw numerous violent protests led by the main opposition party, headed by Cellou Dalein Diallo and his supporters, against a constitutional change and an election which was allegedly fraudulently won by Alpha Condé’s party. It should be noted that despite holding the world’s largest bauxite reserves, Guinea remains one of the poorest countries in the world, with most of its population living under less than 1 dollar per day.Read More

Denmark Leading the Race to the Bottom: Hostility as a form of migration control

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Since the refugee crisis of 2015, Denmark, the first signatory of the 1951 Refugee Convention, has been at the forefront of the debate around deterrent migration policies. Until recently, Denmark has been recognized as an egalitarian country with an exemplary welfare system. Now, this reputation might have been irrevocably tarnished as the Danish government continues to set itself apart from its Scandinavian counterparts with increasingly hostile migration control measures.

Illustration: Gordon Johnson / Pixabay

Deterrence within the EU Context

In the wider context of EU asylum policies, the principle of deterrence is by no means a novelty. The so-called “refugee crisis” has unequivocally altered the public discourse and politics around refugee protection frameworks.

Although there have been various policy responses to this crisis, which have been aptly described as an “exogenous shock” (Hagelund, 2020), recent developments have revealed a clear trajectory towards hostility as a form of migration control.

The focal point of this hostility has been the deterrence of potential refugees, and performative, cruel measures aimed at reassuring a secondary audience: the concerned members of the public within the territory of the receiving state (Collyer, 2020). Read More

Corona Apps – Going Global

Posted by , and & filed under Beyond the COVID Curve, Governance

On 8 April 2020, less than a month after the World Health Organization (WHO) announced that the SARS-CoV-2 outbreak was a pandemic, Mareile Kaufmann posted a PRIO blog entitled “Corona Apps – Where Are We Headed?” on the use of digital tools in the “war against corona”, asking what the emerging “digital collective action” really entails. Her post focused on a corona tracking app commissioned by the Norwegian Institute of Public Health, but she also noted how Chinese authorities were using the AliPay payment system and Alipay Health Code to track Chinese citizens who were required to stay in quarantine. “What needs extra attention here is the ways in which the surveillance of movement conducted in one context is used for other purposes over time,” she wrote. Eighteen months later in the pandemic, it is time to revisit corona apps, which have now been launched in many different parts of the world, with a variety of outcomes. We can only scratch the surface and take stock in a post such as this, which is why we summarize the key developments in Norway, India and China to represent a wide range of countries that have adopted Covid-19 tracking apps.

Photo: Vazovsky CC BY

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Book review: Ethics of Drone Strikes. Restraining Remote-Control Killing

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by Christian Enemark (ed.) Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2021. IX + 204 p The increasing use of armed drones has raised a series of ethical and legal questions. The fast-evolving development and sophistication of technologies that drones combine (aerospace, robotics, satellites, artificial intelligence) have stimulated intensive debates about the need of international regulation, tackling the… Read more »

Remembering 22 July: Litigating Memorials

Posted by & filed under Law and Ethics

As of July 2021 the memorials commemorating the 22 July attack include the Government Quarter, with the temporary memorial plaque and the 22 July Centre; Hegnhuset on Utøya; the 1000 iron roses next to Oslo Cathedral; 52 identical commemorative stone sculptures in affected municipalities across Norway; and as well as multiple other memorials situated in hospitals, parks and public places.

Photo: Kristin B. Sandvik / PRIO

Commemoration also happens through naming buildings and streets after victims: A sports hall in Orkdal called ‘Sondrehallen’ or a street in Oslo called ‘Isabels vei’. Enormous amounts of commemorative work have gone into the design and location of these memorials, sometimes resulting in contested administrative or juridified processes.

In this blog post, I focus on the legal mobilization by local residents against the plans for a national monument in the Municipality of Hole, the site of the Utøya massacre: first the proposal for Memory Wound at Sørbråten, later followed by a different proposal for a memorial at  the Utøya quay.

This mobilization included intensive use of administrative complaints procedures, threats of ‘going to court’ and the subsequent use of lawyers, legal action and legal proceedings as means to terminate processes relating to the national monument.

Originally, the plan was for a memorial to be ready near Utøya in 2015. In March 2021, after a difficult court case, it was finally determined that the memorial could be completed at the Utøya quayside. From a socio-legal perspective, the tensions embedded in post-terror commemorative work and the sometimes-contradictory role of law in these processes are important to unpack. The organized local opposition to a national monument, the arguments used to bolster this resistance and the decision to engage in legal mobilization have been surrounded by considerable stigma and condemnation. What follows are some of my initial thoughts on the issue.Read More

Book club review*: Savage Ecology – War and geopolitics at the end of the world

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*An in-depth review from @SecDialogue by Jairus V. Grove. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2019, 368pp. ISBN: 978-1-4780-0484-4 Welcome, reader, to a new experience for the Security Dialogue blog. While we will continue to feature standard book reviews, in our book club reviews we present a novel kind of in-depth engagement with interesting books. First… Read more »

Broadening the Concept of Humanitarian Accountability

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Since the 1990s, Western humanitarian organizations have increasingly been concerned with developing tools to assess the efficiency of aid delivery, to establish minimum standards and benchmarks for aid projects, and to convincingly communicate their organizational transparency and accountability to stakeholders.

As an extension of these debates, attempts have been made to carve out common guidelines for how to better conceptualize and operationalize accountability. Legality and morality often conjoin to inform humanitarian actors’ conceptualization of accountability as rules and regulations have determined humanitarian standards, whereas moral stances such as neutrality, independence, humanity and impartiality are supposed to guide operational focus and procedures.

South Sudanese refugees in Uganda. Photo: EU/ECHO/Anouk Delafortrie / Flickr CC BY-ND 2.0

The concept of accountability contains two core components: to be responsible for one’s actions and answering for this responsibility. It is to be understood as a two-way relational process of “being accountable to” and “holding accountable”.

Within the humanitarian regime, accountability has commonly been understood within a model of “upward” and “downward” accountability, which refers to responsibilities flowing between humanitarian actors and their donors and recipients respectively. Upward accountability largely revolves around transparency and donors’ financial control over humanitarian actors, based on a set of predefined criteria, standards and expectations. Downward accountability – that is, the regulatory framework for feedback and interaction between aid providers and recipients – continues to take a back seat when compared to this ever-present emphasis on financial transparency.

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Artificial Intelligence, Warfare, and Bias

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Image by Gerd Altmann from Pixabay

When you think about Artificial Intelligence (AI) and war, you might find yourself thinking about killer robots, like those we have seen in movies such as The Terminator.

In reality, AI and warfare looks quite different from these popularized images, and today we see many countries around the world exploring the use of AI and implementing AI systems into their militaries and defense programs. With this increased interest in AI, there has also been a growing debate about the ethics and legality of using AI in warfare. While there are many concerning aspects about AI being utilized in warfare, one that is particularly troubling, but has also received less attention, is that of biased AI systems.

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Contingency Planning in the Digital Age: Biometric Data of Afghans Must Be Reconsidered

Posted by and & filed under Humanitarianism, Security

The situation in Afghanistan changes by the minute. In this blog post, we want to call attention to a largely overlooked issue: protection of Afghan refugees or other Afghans who have been registered biometrically by humanitarian or military agencies. Having collected biometrics from various parts of the Afghan population, for different purposes and with different technical approaches, recent events teach us a vital lesson: both the humanitarian and the military approach come with significant risks and unintended consequences.

Photo: Cpl. Reece Lodder / United States Marine Corps

Normally, humanitarian biometrics and military biometrics are considered separate spheres. Yet, as we show in this piece, looking at military and humanitarian biometric systems in parallel gives a strong indication that the use of biometrics in intervention contexts calls for reconsideration. Neither anonymized nor identifiable biometric data is a ‘solution’ but rather comes with distinct risks and challenges.

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