Targeted sanctions’ impact over rebel groups has not been examined by scholars, making it unclear whether the policy mechanism has the capacity to peacefully resolve intrastate armed conflicts and cease hostilities by weakening rebel groups. Considering the mentioned, the paper explores how targeted sanctions impact rebel groups, and suggests that properly monitored and effectively enforced targeted sanctions have the capacity to weaken rebel groups, via shortening rebels’ economic, military and political resources. Using the method of structured, focused comparison, the suggested hypothesis is empirically tested on the rebel groups of Revolutionary United Front in Sierra Leone and the National Union for the Total Independence of Angola in Angola. The findings of the study revealed that effectively monitored and enforced targeted sanctions are capable of lessening rebels’ military and political resources, however, observing sanctions impact on economic resources proved difficult. Based on the analyses and findings the paper suggests that imposition of targeted sanctions should be initiated at the early warning phase of a conflict, rather at the point when the intensity of conflict has reached its peak.

The United Nations Security Council, as highest custodian of peace and security in the international community, is subjected to change in the international environment, but is in itself not inclined to, or likely to change in the near future. This is because its structure is entrenched in international law, which also upholds the pre-eminence of state sovereignty in the prevailing international relations environment. The pre-eminent position bestowed upon the UNSC by the UN Charter and an entrenched international adherence to its current structure, mainly due to conflict’s close association with reality politics and international power structures associated with a pre-dominant interest driven international system of states, make international consensus on changing the UNSC near impossible. This environment is, therefore, subject to the competitive pursuit of state interests and influenced by power relations, as Realists contend. However, this behavioural nature of the international system continues to be challenged in order to conform to the principles that underwrite the philosophies, the theories and the structures of human rights, humanitarian principles, idealism and their correlating systems of law in democracy. South Africa’s diplomatic positioning in this regard since 1994 assumes a structural approach by calling for change in the international system, to broaden international community, and specifically African, contributions to and participation in global governance. As concerns the UNSC, the South African diplomatic agenda has targeted the ingrained hegemony of the Council’s permanent core, the Permanent Five, and their veto. In theory, South Africa subscribes to the Ezulwini Consensus, which is a common African position that demands two permanent seats for the continent. The country has, in line with its diplomatic endeavour, also pronounced itself ready to assume such a seat in a transformed Council, even though Africa has not collectively endorsed (a) candidate(s). In the interim, South Africa is using strategic diplomatic manoeuvres, at the regional as well as global level, to steer the debate on UNSC reform and to lobby for its own permanent inclusion. South Africa, therefore, conducts diplomacy of engagement across the international diplomatic spectrum in support of a diplomacy that seeks to engage rather than isolate or disengage and which is aimed at making a difference in this mediation, creating convergence, also through bridging divergences in the international debate on reform of the UNSC. / Dissertation (MDIPS)--University of Pretoria, 2013. / lmchunu2014 / Political Sciences / unrestricted

This study examines the extent to which Responsibility to Protect (R2P) principles are embedded in the African Union’s interventionist framework. The AU has been heralded as a trailblazer of R2P, enshrining its attendant principles in the Union’s 2000 Constitutive Act, five years before the emerging norm’s adoption by world leaders at the 2005 World Summit. However, in the case of the recent humanitarian crisis in Libya, and the UN Security Council’s subsequent intervention during 2011, the AU failed to invoke R2P, jettisoning Article 4(h) of its own Constitutive Act and insisting on a negotiated solution to the crisis. This position placed the Union on a collision course with several other regional organisations, notably the North Atlantic Treaty Organisation which assumed a leading role in the implementation of the UNSC mandate to intervene. The AU’s actions also placed into question the rhetoric-reality nexus of its responsibility to protect. At issue is thus the matter of norm localisation, and whether lack thereof and/or other challenges are inhibiting consolidation of R2P within the AU’s security culture. The study therefore traces the institutionalisation of the guiding tenets of R2P within the evolving AU Peace and Security Architecture, and investigates the operationalisation thereof (arguably the most contentious dimension to the global discourse on R2P) in the case of the 2011 UNSC intervention in Libya. / Dissertation (MA)--University of Pretoria, 2015. / Political Sciences / Unrestricted

The intervention in Libya is the best example to date to judge the implementation of the Responsibility to Protect. In 2011, public demonstrations started in Libya seeking political and economic reforms in the country. In return, the Libyan President Maummar Al-Qaddafi threatened mass atrocities in Libya. This allowed the UNSC to sanction the use of force against Qaddafi’s regime in order to protect civilians. First, under resolution 1970 (2011), the UNSC referred the case to the International Criminal Court and applied sanctions. Second, via resolution 1973 (2011), the application of force was approved for the express purpose of “protecting civilians.” This thesis assess whether the military intervention in Libya in 2011 was R2P case. This question is answered by an analysis based upon the UNSC’s Resolutions, Council’s proceedings, and other official documents. / May 2016

No description available.

Women in combat roles are present in at least 40% of armed rebellion movements, yet the narrative of women outside of traditional roles in conflict is invisible in various discursive communities of practice. Silence and misrecognition are the root of this issue: to be considered as agents and full partners of social interaction, female combatants need to exist in the discourse of leaders and institutions. Embedded in the feminist IR theory, I utilise Critical Discourse Analysis and Feminist Poststructuralist Discourse Analysis to unveil the extent of recognition given to female fighters in data internal and external to conflicts. United Nations Security Council Resolutions 1325, 1820 and 1889 are analysed to explore whether women are institutionally ‘allowed’ to exist as agents in war beyond the roles of victim and peacemaker. Analysis of discourse from the Zapatista Army of National Liberation and the Kurdistan Workers’ Party then serves to dive deeper into the recognition of female fighters by the leaders of armed struggle movements. Despite the ambitions of gender equality of all three actors, the research reveals that a greater level of feminist ideology seems to exceptionalise female combatants, thus not including and recognising them to the same extent as men.

This thesis investigates the role nonpermanent members have on the United Nations Security Council (UNSC). This as the contemporary scholarly debate on the UNSC tends to exclude the nonpermanent members in the study of the only international institution that can bind all UN members under its decisions. Building on the slim literature existing on why states seek the nonpermanent seats, this thesis uses the case of Sweden in order to investigate whether Sweden has met its objectives during its first year on the council. This case also contributes to a broader question of the potential influence nonpermanent members can have on the council. The results of this thesis are in line with the research it is building on, inherited from a liberal strand of international relations, that Sweden has influenced outcomes in line with its objectives and that nonpermanent members can influence the council in terms of resolutions, making them relevant to study in research concerning the UNSC. It also provides additional knowledge to the existing research it is building on by expanding the scope in how nonpermanent members can influence the council, which can be used in future studies.

No description available.

This security study attempts to explain the dynamics of international conflict management of an intrastate conflict, through a combination of three theoretical frameworks. The conflict in Syria is shown to be managed mainly through strategies using coercive diplomacy, and some main contributions within the research field relating to strategies of coercion are used for guidance, to important factors which could affect coercive international conflict management, as well as to additional theories which could enhance the study’s explanatory power through a combined theoretical framework. The two added theoretical frameworks are Power Balancing and a Multidimensional concept of Power. With the aid of analytical tools derived from this combined framework the conflict management is analysed within both a multilateral and unilateral setting, offering some explanation as to why international conflict management (practiced by UNSC multilaterally and USA unilaterally) has shown so little progress in regard to the conflict, as well as why one significant, though limited, result could be achieved regarding the destruction of the Syrian regime’s chemical weapons arsenal.

This thesis focuses on the problem of determining appropriate skeletal configurations for which a virtual animated character moves to desired positions as smoothly, rapidly, and as accurately as possible. During the last decades, several methods and techniques, sophisticated or heuristic, have been presented to produce smooth and natural solutions to the Inverse Kinematics (IK) problem. However, many of the currently available methods suffer from high computational cost and production of unrealistic poses. In this study, a novel heuristic method, called Forward And Backward Reaching Inverse Kinematics (FABRIK), is proposed, which returnsvisually natural poses in real-time, equally comparable with highly sophisticated approaches. It is capable of supporting constraints for most of the known joint types and it can be extended to solve problems with multiple end effectors, multiple targets and closed loops. FABRIK wascompared against the most popular IK approaches and evaluated in terms of its robustness and performance limitations. This thesis also includes a robust methodology for marker prediction under multiple marker occlusion for extended time periods, in order to drive real-time centre of rotation (CoR) estimations. Inferred information from neighbouring markers has been utilised, assuming that the inter-marker distances remain constant over time. This is the firsttime where the useful information about the missing markers positions which are partially visible to a single camera is deployed. Experiments demonstrate that the proposed methodology can effectively track the occluded markers with high accuracy, even if the occlusion persists for extended periods of time, recovering in real-time good estimates of the true joint positions. In addition, the predicted positions of the joints were further improved by employing FABRIK to relocate their positions and ensure a fixed bone length over time. Our methodology is tested against some of the most popular methods for marker prediction and the results confirm that our approach outperforms these methods in estimating both marker and CoR positions. Finally, an efficient model for real-time hand tracking and reconstruction that requires a minimumnumber of available markers, one on each finger, is presented. The proposed hand modelis highly constrained with joint rotational and orientational constraints, restricting the fingers and palm movements to an appropriate feasible set. FABRIK is then incorporated to estimate the remaining joint positions and to fit them to the hand model. Physiological constraints, such as inertia, abduction, flexion etc, are also incorporated to correct the final hand posture. A mesh deformation algorithm is then applied to visualise the movements of the underlying hand skeleton for comparison with the true hand poses. The mathematical framework used for describing and implementing the techniques discussed within this thesis is Conformal GeometricAlgebra (CGA).