All right. I'm here to talk about building peace in Georgia, international organisations and conflict resolution in Southwest there.
And has the I realised in looking at the programme that probably building peace in Georgia should have been in inverted commas.
But we are given recent events, the, if you will, the institutional background to this kind of analysis is pretty simple.
If you look at where international organisations are involved in security came from and you take a long perspective,
basically there have been various moments, particularly in 20th century,
where people states took the view that international organisations were one means of solving the,
if you will, the collective action problem of war and therefore producing peace.
Now, in thinking about the role of these organisations, regional and universal, in building peace through at least two ways of approaching the topic.
One is to look at it institutionally and productively.
You take a look at the roles, the organisation, the practises, the politics of international institutions.
You generate hypotheses which we love to do in political science.
And then you apply them to cases in the sort of top to bottom approach.
Or you can take a case and see what that case might tell us about the performance and the promise of multilateral institutions.
In other words, bottom up, I have to say I prefer the second.
My case is Georgia. I've been working on Georgia with great pleasure and a fair amount of pain over the years.
For about 20 years, I want to do four things.
One is first, I guess I should ask, how many in this audience have ever been to Georgia?
Oh, thank you. One. All right. With apologies to my friend, I will give a brief introduction on the characteristics of Georgia.
Secondly, a background to account of conflicts. Third, an account of the roles of international organisations in the effort to build peace.
And fourth, what lessons we might draw. Now, my account.
I'm sorry to say, may sound rather harsh.
I think it's reasonably accurate, but I don't mean to give offence to the huge number of people whom I have known over the
years involved in the activities of these organisations who were making a genuinely,
genuinely genuine effort to address the real problems of this country and its people.
So context first. Georgia is, as you know, a successor republic to the Soviet Union.
So a weak state, its elites and structures had no experience of sovereignty or independent decision making.
The society has for the last 6000 years or so been fragmented along multiple communal lines, which we now call ethnic lines.
In 1989, the last Soviet census, 70 percent of the population was ethnically Georgian.
What that means is not entirely clear because there is substantial, fragmented identities amongst the Georgians themselves.
In addition, eight percent Armenian, six percent Armenian, six percent, Russian three percent or set and one percent abhors.
So I guess that's a demonstration of the proposition that small groups can create big issues.
These multiple communal identities were strengthened in the Soviet era quite
deliberately by the Soviet authorities who who encouraged the development of,
if you will,
diverse identity and institutionalised it through structured constitutional structures of autonomy in the Georgian case in South Ossetia and Abkhazia.
And Jarda, retrospectively,
I think one can conclude that this was sort of semi-conscious effort to set minority and majority elites against each other union.
Republics, in order to be able to rule more effectively by dividing these institutional and cultural artefacts,
were built into a long history of deep grievance between Abkhaz or Setton Georgian populations.
The second characteristic is the proximity to a large state, Russia, that had its own deep historical role in the region.
And I guess, as we saw in August 2008, is not really interested in giving up that role.
A state which evinces an aspiration to primacy throughout what used to be the former Soviet Union minus the Baltics.
We hope the economy reasonably poor.
It had been highly integrated into the larger Soviet economy.
When the Soviet Union collapsed, those markets collapsed, leading to a massive economic crisis that lasted for about nine years.
So conflict in Georgia one. Well, there there are basically three dimensions to this issue.
One is South Ossetia. This mini conflict erupted in 1990.
The first time in Georgia at the time was headed for independence under a an extremist majoritarianism nationalist elected government,
a government which questioned the legitimacy of the presence of these minorities in Georgia, notably the offsets.
This was a government that was unhappy with the inherited structure of local autonomy, is in this many regions inherited from Soviet times.
So not surprisingly, minority elites in these regions were somewhat insecure about their future in a united Georgia South Ossetia in 1990.
Its prints Soviet then voted to leave Georgia and join NATO, which is across the border in the Russian Federation.
The Georgian government responded by annulling self-assessed. Is that is that autonomy?
And that basically rolled forward into a two year conflict until June of 1992 with several hundred deaths.
The displacement of 60 to 100000 people in June of nineteen ninety two,
there was a ceasefire and cessation of hostilities mediated by the president of Russia.
And that cease fire was policed. Between 1990 to and 2008 by a mixed ad hoc peacekeeping force comprising Russians, Georgians and assets.
The second element of conflict in Georgia was an intra Georgian conflict.
As South Ossetia deteriorated, as the economy declined, state gradually collapsed.
The opposition to the sitting government grew a little bit impatient.
The Georgian National Guard revolted against it, marched off from South Ossetia to Tbilisi, the capital city,
proceeded to shell the centre of Tbilisi to the ground and managed to achieve the departure of the elected president in January 1992.
He went off first to Chechnya and then to Armenia, and his supporters fomented a rebellion in western Georgia.
Earlier in the spring of 1992, Georgian forces shifted their attention to western Georgia in a number of punitive expeditions.
The rebels took sanctuary in a positive. This gave Georgian forces a reason to go after Abkhazia.
The ALP has also gave the Georgians a reason they declared sovereignty in August of 1992.
Sounds there are two good reasons to go after the other. Has the Georgians attacked in August?
Took So Sukhumi, the uproars government fled north, coming back with the support of substantial numbers of Russian volunteers in the spring of 1993.
Georgian military collapsed. It was a chaotic retreat back into Georgian held territory,
and the rebellion in western Georgia then began again, and the Georgian state consequently neared collapse.
Georgia requested Russian intervention. Russia intervened and stopped the Upper House conflict and suppressed the single Western Georgian rebellion.
Sequences.
Two hundred and fifty thousand refugees into western and central Georgia and also into the Russian Federation, several thousand more deaths.
Russia mediated that ceasefire to in April 1994, creating a security zone between the two territories and installing a peacekeeping
force nominally under the jurisdiction of the Commonwealth of Independent States.
Actually, Russia, so, so much for the conflicts.
From 1994 to 2008, they were basically frozen.
There was the sustained effort to resolve them and to reconcile the populations that these regions were stymied.
For reasons I'm happy to get into a discussion, but not now.
Low level security incidents persisted along the lines of contact in South Ossetia.
There was a small partisan war of Georgians against the Abkhaz cause there in the late 1990s.
Both said that Abkhaz authorities harassed Georgian civilians in areas under the control of secessionist authorities.
It was sort of a low level mess, which lasted a very long time and was really rather resistant to,
if you will, international organisational treatment. They returned to war in some of those that year in August 2008,
producing a decisive defeat of the Georgian military and effectively its destruction, this time by the Russians and the Georgian military.
And the Georgian ethnic population was expelled from South Ossetia by Russian forces, who then consolidated a buffer around South Ossetia.
The Abkhaz took advantage of this to clear the last areas of up Huslia under Georgian control.
That overall effect was another hundred and one hundred.
Two hundred and twenty thousand displaced.
A cease fire, an eventual withdrawal of Russian forces from Georgian territory back into these two enclaves.
The insertion of an EU monitoring force to monitor the cease fire.
Abkhazia and South Ossetia reiterated their claim to statehood.
That claim was then recognised by the Russian Federation and also by Nicaragua, for reasons that are not immediately clear to me.
Anyway, there we are. The EU installed a monitoring force, having mediated the cease fire, and here we are.
In summary, Georgia presents a, if you will, a garden variety of post-Cold War conflict interest state in its origins and in its nature.
It involves multiple ethnic groups and their elites competing for position and conditions
of weak and ineffectual state structures and in deteriorating economic situation.
In addition, it evinces a disproportionate interest on the part of a neighbouring major state,
creating a sustained pattern of intervention in a larger sense still.
The Georgian conflicts have been met by widespread indifference on the part of the rest of us,
so there's no real capacity to balance the effect of the neighbouring power.
One last point in summary and then I'll get on.
You'll be pleased to know where two international organisations may give them the benefit of ten more minutes.
I think six things are good.
I think one thing that is interesting in a sort of general sense from this experience is it indicates the perils of implementation,
principle of national self-determination. National self-determination is, of course, a good thing, I suppose.
But every time it is implemented through statehood, you risk generating several follow on claims for the same right.
And that is clearly what happened in Georgia. The roles of international organisations.
I will be brief. I want to get on to lessons. International organisations have been involved in the effort to regulate these issues since 1992.
The CSC, then OSCE, took the lead in South Ossetia from December 1992 and they established a mission of long term duration in Georgia.
One purpose of which was to observe the operations of the peacekeeping force in South Ossetia to keep a
watching brief on the security situation in the region and to facilitate negotiations leading to a settlement.
The UN also entered in nineteen. 92 in the establishment of, you know, Meg, the U.N. observer mission in Georgia.
A little peacekeeping force in nineteen ninety four.
Its mandate was changed and expanded to basically monitor the activities of the parties to the conflict,
to observe the Russian peacekeeping force, to facilitate talks focussed on resolution.
The E.U., the E.U. at the time these conflicts broke out.
The EU had no foreign policy or security personality. It has developed one.
And as it has developed one, it has become increasingly engaged, not least in Georgia,
leading to its monitoring and mediation role in 2008 assessment.
International organisations have been involved in these conflicts for 17 years now.
They were incidental to the earlier cease fires, which were essentially mediated by the dominant power in the region, Russia.
There was no real progress towards peace during the frozen period of these conflicts.
International organisations were marginalised during the resumption of conflict during 2008.
It's pretty bleak. It would be wrong, by the way, to say that they were completely irrelevant.
The presence of international organisations on the ground in the field had several positive effects.
First of all, they did facilitate negotiations when the parties were interested in negotiations.
I'll get back to that. Second, they're monitoring presence in the zones of conflict did reduce the risk of inadvertent resumption of hostilities.
They also contributed modestly to the protection of the human rights of civilians caught in the middle of all of this.
And to be fair to the EU, it played a fundamentally important role in bringing the latest phase of hostilities to an end.
What lessons do we draw from this experience?
First of all, the autonomous role of international organisations in the pursuit of peace is distinctly limited in key respects.
To state the obvious, they are made up of states. These states have different levels of interest in any given context.
The interests of these states may conflict in any given context,
and that constrains the capacity of multilateral organisations to pursue peace effectively.
In Georgia, the impact of these organisations on peace processes was limited by one the
low policy priority for most major members of the organisations in question,
and that translated into an unwillingness to commit significant diplomatic and other resources to the pursuit of peace.
There were a small number of members, notably Russia, that were really interested in what was going on.
Who did consider Georgia a priority issue.
But they were more interested in defending their particular state interests than in pursuing a collective strategy towards peace operations.
The second point concerns how these institutions work. What are their decision rules?
It is interesting that in August 2008, the Security Council did not produce a resolution on the renewal of conflict in Georgia.
The reason for that is very simple. One veto bearing member of the Security Council didn't want it.
So the UN is constrained in its response by the veto.
The OSCE is constrained by a consensus rule and decision making.
If you've got someone who is resistant to effective multilateralism as part of the supposed consensus, you don't get a consensus in the EU context.
Foreign and security policy is a matter of national competence, not the competence of the organisation.
So essentially, again, any effective action on the part of the EU depends significantly on consensus amongst the members.
All three organisations therefore lead to a lowest common denominator outcome in which which which appears to me.
This sounds awful. Awful. It's sort of appearing to be engaged and interested without really being engaged and interested.
Thirdly, there's the matter of standard operating procedures here.
National organisations, international organisations, and particularly the U.N., Yohann can project it later,
tend to offer a tend to attempt to implement standard templates to rather specific situations
to deliver standardised responses on the basis of the accumulated past experience conflicts.
On the other hand, in this part of the world, as elsewhere, are the product of historical,
cultural and political processes that are deep and specific to the case in question.
And they place a premium on case knowledge, flexibility, adaptability, innovation.
You and I don't think is known for significant achievement in any of those areas.
Complex bureaucracies in the larger sense tend toward standard operating procedures.
Are poorly adapted to the task of pursuing peace.
In contrast, in my view to, for example, nongovernmental organisations which are much more flexible at the end of the day.
And fourthly, I think another lesson you draw is that the contributions of international organisations
to the pursuit of peace are positive when the parties to conflict want them to be.
If there is no societal and political willingness on the part of those in conflict
to engage seriously with the tough decisions necessary for conflict resolution,
then the efforts of international organisations to pursue peace that are likely to be frustrated and futile.
In our in my case, there's little evidence of success on the part of international organisations in
shifting key players towards compromises necessary for durable peace and also little
evidence that international organisations have been successful in shifting popular
attitudes significantly towards recognition that compromise is necessary for peace.