Crisis management – by and for whom?
Heidi Öst shares her time between the Mediation Office and her position as a researcher at the Åland Islands Peace Institute. The blog is written by the peace institute’s present or former staff, guest researchers, board members or invited guest writers. The opinions are the author’s own. As discussed previously in this blog (in Swedish under the heading “Krig eller fred?“), the concept of crisis management is a relatively new concept that has set roots in international and national political rhetoric. Just the other week the Swedish and Finnish Foreign Ministries hosted a seminar to discuss a comprehensive approach to crisis management as part of the process of the drafting of a new Strategic Concept for the military alliance NATO. The topic of the seminar is a good example of the mixing up of civilian and military concepts. It has been argued that the comprehensive approach is commonly understood as an approach aimed at integrating the political, security, development, rule of law, human rights and humanitarian dimensions of international missions. In the seminar however it became strikingly clear that different actors attach different preconditions to such integration. It is also clear that NATO’s ambition to manage crisis is not uncontroversial. […]
Report from NATO New Strategic Concept Seminar
On the 4th of March 2010 a NATO New Strategic Concept Seminar was organized in Helsinki by the Foreign Ministries of Finland and Sweden. The NATOStrategic Concept is a document that guides the Alliance as it pursues its agenda of safeguarding the common security interests of its members. Thetopic of the seminar was the integration of civilian and military actors in crisis management. Heidi Öst, researcher at the Åland Islands Peace Institute, participated and has written a report from the event.The report can be downloaded here.