In 2015, 54 countries had developed National Action Plans (NAPs) on UN Security Council Resolution (UNSCR) 1325 to integrate gender perspectives into all areas of their peace and security policy-making and practices. Today, that number has grown to 64. There appears to be growing commitment among UN member states, such as Australia, to implement their international commitments to advance the Women, Peace and Security agenda.

But to have any impact on the lives of women and girls in conflict and to influence the process and outcome of peace processes, these NAPs can’t just be statements of commitment. They need robust monitoring and evaluation frameworks to ensure accountability, with indicators, targets, benchmarks and reporting mechanisms to measure the effectiveness and outcomes of strategies and actions. It’s in ensuring accountability to NAP commitments that civil society has the most pivotal role to play, according to the UN.

The 2015 Global Study on the Implementation of UNSCR 1325 highlights Australia’s shadow reporting process, undertaken by civil society organisations, as an example of best practice in facilitating that accountability. The Fourth Annual Civil Society Report Card, launched this week in Canberra, offers an independent and public assessment of the Australian government’s commitment, on paper and in practice.

Many of the Report Card’s key findings echo those of the Independent Interim Review of the Australian National Action Plan on Women, Peace and Security. Noting the absence of a rigorous monitoring and evaluation framework, both the Review and the Report Card point to challenges in holding the government accountable against its commitments.

The Report Card finds that more needs to be done by the government to realise the transformative vision of the Women Peace and Security agenda, specifically in its core areas: facilitating women’s participation in all areas of peace and security activity, and accounting for differential impacts of security policies on men and women.

For example, this week’s announcement of increased funding to the AFP for crime fighting and counterterrorism should be balanced by an equal investment in both international and national women’s organisations working towards stabilisation, preventing crime, terrorism and violent extremism. The Report Card advises that countering violent extremism and terrorism requires an ‘approach that is gender-aware, evidenced-based, preventative in design, and that includes women as decision-makers in all policy responses’.

Similarly, the decision to support US-led airstrikes in Syria in response to the Assad regime’s use of chemical weapons needs to consider a gender perspective. That would require more than simply stating, as Prime Minister Turnbull did, that the strikes were a ‘swift and just response to a regime that ‘gass[es] its own people, women, and children, babies.’ It requires leadership and expertise to advise on the impact of the strikes upon women and girls; their continued protection needs in the aftermath of any military action; and the impact of those actions on the resolution of conflict. Australia’s foreign policy, development and humanitarian responses to the Syria crisis must advocate and commit support for women’s rights organisations; for women’s leadership in humanitarian action; and women’s participation in the peace process. Such action—which draws on a rapidly growing evidence base that identifies the positive links between the presence of women’s human rights and political stability—would establish Australia as an outstanding leader on women, peace and security.

While there are chances to improve practice, Australia has already made some strides.. The Report Card notes the progress made by the Australian Defence Force and the Australian Federal Police in operationalising the Women, Peace and Security agenda. That includes: the significant steps taken to address sexual and gender based violence; DFAT’s work supporting women’s participation in peace processes; and the whole-of–government assistance provided by the Australian Civil-Military Centre, including its support for civil society through funding the Annual Civil Society Dialogue and Report Card.

And the government’s establishment of the Office of the Ambassador for Women and Girls; its commitment to increasing the number of women in senior and pivotal peace and security decision-making roles; its efforts to recruit and retain women in the ADF and AFP; and its commitment to mainstream gender in all foreign policy and development practice remain positive signs. And what’s more, the message is penetrating across government.

The government’s Women, Peace and Security efforts and civil society’s responses have, as the Report Card notes, started a conversation. That conversation is replete with promising rhetoric and commitments, but has some distance to travel. The goal is to make Women, Peace and Security mundane; an everyday and unremarkable part of peace and security policy-making and practice. It’s time to move beyond measuring successes in ‘firsts’ or in the language of ‘laying foundations’. Continuing the conversation between government and civil society and working in partnership to develop a strong second National Action plan is the next step.

The horrific chemical attack that took place in Syria’s Idlib province this week is yet another brutal milestone for those living fractured lives in a broken country. It’s thought that upwards of 80 people were killed, at least 30 of them children; 22 of the victims were from one single extended family. Now in its seventh year, the war is estimated to have killed over 400,000 people, displaced 6.3 million and led 4.8 million to flee the country. Those numbers are diabolical. A gang of four from the Century Foundation recently held a sizable discussion on where things stand in Syria, one year after their first meeting. It’s worth setting some time aside for, especially after today’s news that the US has launched 59 Tomahawk missiles at regime-controlled Shayrat airfield and is said to be cobbling together an international coalition to oust Basher al-Assad. Watch this space as the implications unfold.

In the recently released book Civil Wars: A History in Ideas, David Armitage looks at how the concept of ‘civil war’ has developed over the last two millennia. Turns out it’s been surprisingly slippery, as this elegant review points out:

‘Armitage’s insight is that the concept of the civil war has become one that is best understood, or perhaps only understandable, by reference to the struggles that inevitably accompany its invocation. One person’s freedom fighter is another’s terrorist, as the saying goes. So too one person’s civil war is another’s criminal conspiracy or treason plot or coup d’etat. The language matters because entire worlds of meaning – moral, political, and legal – follow from the choice of words. And so people embrace or reject the label because of the train of consequences that will follow from its successful invocation.’

Hats off to the ANU’s National Security College team for pulling together the Women and National Security conference that went down in Canberra this week. If you couldn’t get along, never fear: thankfully there was a remarkable level of digital fluency among those who did, so head on over to the #WaNS collection on Twitter to catch up with the goings-on. The Shadow Minister for Foreign Affairs Penny Wong delivered a dinner keynote which won mad props online; check out an edited extract here on The Strategist.

Two stateside national-security sites have recently had their work scrutinised and celebrated by some big-deal operations. Lawfare had it’s time in the sun in The New York Times: ‘How a Wonky National-Security Blog Hit the Big Time’. And Nieman Lab was digging the erudite efforts of War on the Rocks: ‘War on the Rocks is a national security site for a military “tribe” that knows what it’s talking about’.

And finally, Rex Tillerson: Hemingway or Kerouac? After his sparse statement this week on North Korea’s latest missile moves, it seems that prolix stream-of-consciousness isn’t his thing. His 23-word statement was equal parts remarkable, confusing and off-beat. As you could almost fit State’s statement into a tweet, former Caerus Associates boss, Erin Simpson, naturally took to the Twitterverse to deliver a surgical strike in the form of this GIF thread. Boom.

Podcasts

This week, two good listens from the Harvard Kennedy School’s PolicyCast. First up is a snappy lecture on public diplomacy and journalism in the post-truth world, which was delivered by Rick Stengel, a former managing editor of Time who until recently headed up Foggy Bottom’s public diplomacy effort (31 mins). The second involves another Obama-era official in Josh Earnest, who talked Trump and Clinton and pulled back the curtain on some key moments during his time wrangling the White House press corps (32 mins).

Video

The FT’s foreign affairs chief, Gideon Rachman, has just released a new book, Easternization: Asia’s Rise and America’s Decline. The thesis is familiar, with Rachman outlining how the status quo is being remade, before offering a plan for how we might stay upright as the sands shift. He was at CSIS this week to launch the book, sitting down for a meaty conversation with Senior VP for Asia Mike Green (56 mins).

Events

Brisbane: If you’re in Brissie next week, be sure to get along to Peter Layton’s speech to the AIIA. Peter will survey Beijing’s efforts to win friends and influence people in Southeast Asia, and will also turn his mind to how Canberra should be calibrating its efforts in response. Registration essential.

Sydney: CSIS’s Andrew Shearer will be back in Oz in a couple of weeks, and will be stopping by the USSC at Sydney Uni to talk about the Trump administration’s first few months in office and what’s on the cards for the alliance relationship. Details here.

The recent breakdown of the cessation of hostilities (CoH) in Syria has potentially ushered in a new and even darker phase of the Syrian civil war. While it may prove foolhardy to make predictions about what will happen in Syria, the necessity of finding a political resolution for the battered country requires some much-needed foresight. Here I outline three potential scenarios that may help pave the way towards such a resolution.

Another externally-imposed ceasefire

Over the last few weeks, the cessation of hostilities in Syria has looked increasingly unstable. While there have been numerous attacks on rebel-held areas during the past two months, in recent days the frequency of airstrikes (both regime and Russian) has increased dramatically.

The CoH was, for all intents and purposes, imposed by Russia and the US on the other parties to the conflict; it was nominally self-enforced. Violations were reported to US authorities via a telephone hotline, WhatsApp or email in what was a rather lax reporting mechanism with many of its own issues. While numerous analysts thought that the exclusion of Jabhat al-Nusra in the CoH would be its downfall, the overall ‘looseness’ of the agreement appears to have meant that when it better served the interests of a party to break it, they’ve done so.

Nevertheless, the fact that the CoH lasted as long as it has says something about what can be achieved by the major players if their interests align. Herein lies a potential avenue for action. As the war wears on, the al-Assad regime appears to be increasingly reliant on its international and regional backers—Russia, Hezbollah and the Iranian Republican Guards—for economic and military support. There’s also an increasing realisation by the US and Russia that bombing ISIS is only exacerbating the jihadi threat they’re attempting to eradicate. Those disparities, coupled with the relative, albeit limited, success of the first countrywide ceasefire, could be exploited by savvy politicians and policymakers to create a new CoH that combines mutual interests.

Imposing a no-fly zone in southern Syria

After the intervention in Libya, the international community hasn’t shown much appetite for a no-fly zone in Syria. However, somehow alleviating the aerial bombardment of rebel-held parts of southern Syria may be a way to create a viable alternative to regime control in the form of rebel governance that has, and could further, spring up in the south.

The southern governorates of Dara’a, al-Qunaitra and as-Sweida are arguably the best places to first attempt a form of ‘humanitarian corridor’ or no fly-zone. The group that controls much of the area, the Southern Front, is relatively coherent, has deep links with local communities and is purportedly more ‘secular’ than its Western compatriots. These three governorates also directly border Jordan which has made their cooperation and coordination with the US and Saudi-backed Military Operations Centre, located just outside Amman, relatively effective. That existing support could potentially be expanded to encompass the establishment of a no-fly zone via a number of means including: a US, Jordanian or Arab imposed or supported no-fly zone; economic or diplomatic incentives to stop Russia and/or the regime from bombing the area; and/or potentially some sort of limited and well-surveilled surface to air missile program, the murky history of those in Afghanistan notwithstanding.

As Nicholas Heras notes, so far, the al-Assad regime seems to have deliberately destabilised rebel-controlled areas so that governance structures, which could be seen as a competitor to the state, have not had the chance to emerge. That’s because, ‘In the event of any grand bargain struck over Syria, the negotiating power of the Assad-led statelet would likely be enhanced by the destablization of rebel-controlled areas and struggles by the opposition to create a successor state’. While alleviating the terror for civilians caused by constant aerial bombing, a no-fly zone could also boost the negotiating power of the Syrian opposition.

Extension or reconfiguration of local truces

Since the early days of the uprising, siege and starvation have been used by the al-Assad regime as a weapon of war. Local truces were originally envisaged to offer access to food and medical supplies in areas besieged by the regime in exchange for ‘security arrangements‘. Unfortunately, the majority of local truces have a relatively dim history in Syria, but perhaps the idea can be reconfigured and strengthened to allow local truces to play a role in supporting larger, political efforts to end the violence.

That will require the terms of any future agreements to be more specific and preferably in writing, adequate monitoring mechanisms to be put in place and some leverage to coerce signatories into meeting their obligations. As the recent failed effort to provide even the most basic aid to besieged Daraya shows, agreements must be made more transparent and robust if there’s any chance of them being successful initially or part of any larger political effort.

The way forward…

Six years of unimaginable violence necessitates that analysts think outside the box for solutions to the Syrian crisis. Over this time the al-Assad regime has proven itself an incredibly stubborn interlocutor and shown that it won’t change course easily, if at all. However, mounting economic losses combine with the growing realisation that the bombing of ISIS targets by the US and Russia is counter-intuitive to their own security interests, only increasing the strength of jihadi groups. While all players to this conflict are rightly concerned about regime collapse, finding a way of retreating from cycles of violence so life can continue on the ground or a political solution negotiated abroad is more vital now than ever.

‘Things are seldom what they seem’—so wrote the librettist W.S. Gilbert in HMS Pinafore. The current refugee crisis in Europe looks like a humanitarian tragedy on a large scale, the biggest in Europe since WWII. It is. But, more than that, it’s a strategic crisis with profound implications for Europe, the Middle East and the rest of the world.

One of the clearest examples of the law of unintended consequences was the generation of refugee flows from Iraq and Afghanistan in the wake of the decision by the Bush administration to sanction the 9/11 bombings by destroying Saddam Hussein’s government in Iraq and denying al Qaeda use of Afghanistan as a terrorist training ground. As Israel has found to its cost, refugee flows have strategic effects. This is equally true of the growing refugee flows from Iraq, Afghanistan and Syria, not to mention the refugee crisis in North Africa and Yemen.

Just as the vast movement of peoples in the first millennium of the Christian era destabilized the empires of Rome and China, so too the mass migration of people from the Middle East may have long-term strategic effects. There are four that are worth considering.

First, throughout history, among the quickest to flee civil wars are the educated and mercantile classes, taking with them the skills and human resources, not to mention substantial financial assets. Such assets are necessary for the economic reconstruction that is essential to precipitate the restoration of political and social stability. The stories currently being told by Syrian refugees as they arrive in Austria and Germany—often in well-spoken English and French—suggest that the wish for a new life doesn’t contemplate a return home.

Second, at least in the short term, the arrival of hundreds of thousands of refugees imposes enormous economic and social strains on the receiving countries. Jordan, Lebanon and Turkey, are struggling to accommodate millions of desperate people; it’s a struggle made even more difficult by the near-bankruptcy of the principal UN agencies. Indeed, the same problems currently confront Pakistan, with its 1.5 million registered Afghan refugees.

Third, the long-term integration of very large numbers of refugees in receiving countries can generate substantial social and political problems for both the new arrivals and the long-established residents. The rise of the radical right and Islamic terrorist cells in both Britain and France has as much to do with the difficulties of integration as it does with racism and xenophobia. Closer to home, one has only to look at the consequences of Indonesia’s transmigrasi program relocating impoverished Javanese in Kalimantan and West Papua to see how political instability and violence is the inevitable result.

And finally, the translation of historic grievances to distant countries can fuel instability in both the departing and receiving nations for generations. In traditional strategic analysis, warning has three key vectors: extant military capability, the time taken to acquire new military capability, and motivation. Of these three, motivation is the sleeper—something the UK discovered in the lead-up to the Falklands War.

As Australia continues its inexorable slide down the list of wealthy nations (we are currently in the second eleven, and headed for the third eleven within the next two decades), we’ll find that military strength as a means of reinforcing our global authority and influence will increasingly become a sign of impotence instead of power—if it hasn’t become so already.

Good strategy involves moving early to secure long-term advantage. Australia’s future security will be significantly more dependent on a strong rules-based international system and sound regional economic arrangements than on military partnerships, useful though they might be in the short term.

At a time when the UN is deeply stressed and its agencies unable to cope with current refugee, health and food pressures, Australia and like-minded countries would be acting in their long-term best interests by supporting a concerted program of reform and evolution. Short of a major world cataclysm of the kind Philip Bobbitt chronicles in The Shield of Achilles, quick and dramatic reform of the UN is unlikely. But concerted pressure from its membership could lead to the kinds of changes to the structure of the UN Security Council and other agencies that are evidently needed.

As the present global refugee crisis is demonstrating on a daily basis, tokenism and symbolic gestures are the immediate resort of governments—except Angela Merkel’s. The refugees heading towards Europe are numbered in the hundreds of thousands, and millions are already living in impossible conditions in camps across the Middle East—not to mention over 7 million people displaced within Syria itself. Resettlement programs in the thousands are nothing more than vain gestures.

For Australia, there are precedents. Phil Orchard reminded us in his recent post here on The Strategist that the 1989 Comprehensive Plan of Action addressed the Indo-Chinese refugee problem. More recently, Prime Minister Howard’s $1 billion response to the Boxing Day tsunami of 2004 was both immediate and generous.

At a time when Australia is spending over $1 billion per year to keep refugees locked up on Nauru and Manus Island, and $50 million to resettle just four former refugees in Cambodia, the government’s pledge of $44 million looks paltry.  A donation of $1 billion to the UNHCR, together with concerted diplomatic action with like-minded countries to address the global refugee problem systematically, would be an initiative in our own long-term strategic interest.

So far, Australia’s response to the current refugee crisis has been confused, slow, small and unconfident. As Gilbert’s patter-song continued, ‘Gild the farthing if you will, yet it is a farthing still’. This is a case where strategic leadership would also serve the government’s interests well.

There is no more serious decision for Government than to commit Australian forces to conflict. It is not, I believe, one that is ever taken lightly. But should it be ceded to both houses of parliament?

The answer is no.

It’s the longstanding position of the Australian Labor Party that it is the responsibility of the executive to deploy Australian forces. It is a view I share wholeheartedly. The executive carries the moral and political responsibility for this most difficult decision. And it bears the weight of that through its conscience and the ballot box. The parliament does not. Read more