Pod Academy

Jeremy Seabrook talks to Caspar Melville about life in Muslim communities in the slums of Kolkata, and paints a powerful and shocking picture of people who have suffered centuries of expropriation, loss, driven migration and involuntary separations and now find themselves at the wrong end of globalisation. The conversation draws on the study by Jeremy Seabrook and Imram Ahmed Siddiqui, People Without History (Pluto Press)

Caspar started by asking Jeremy to describe  the Kolkata slums.

Jeremy Seabrook:   The first thing you notice in the poorest part of Topsia is the canal – which is the channel for waste water.  So the first thing you notice is the smell.  The smell of decaying garbage and sewage.  It is overwhelming. The second is the way houses have been constructed out of industrial debris, old bamboo, wood, boxes, and old bags of fertiliser and phosphate, all kinds of stuff. It is a very improvised looking place.  It is very stony, the houses are very close together.  There is just about room to trundle a cart from which people are selling mouldy bananas, specked oranges, the very poor quality goods that are on sale for the people who live here.  This is perhaps one of the worst places in Kolkata.  It is very crowded, very densely populated.

As you walk in the thoroughfare, you see many people who are addicted to drugs. It is a major outlet for opium, ganga, heroin.  People are seriously addicted.  You only have to open one of the curtains in front of the huts and you can see 6,7 or 8 men who are stoned out of their minds.  It is all done in the daylight, in full view of the officials – the police, the local authority, the local communist party (though of course they have just been defeated in the elections, but it won't make any difference to these people).

The huts have very sparse interiors -  maybe an old tin chair, a trunk, a string with changes of clothing across the room, a bed roll.  Sometimes a huge wooden bed fills the whole room, on which the whole family sleeps.

And what strikes you is that everybody is working.  They are sitting on the threshold, women especially, and they are cutting away the rubber from sandals moulded in local factories.  Or they are making and selling snacks in the streets.  Everybody is doing something, even young children.

The slum areas of Kolkata have changed considerably over the 10-15 years I have been going there.  Topsia in Kolkata is an archaic form of dwelling - made of industrial rubbish.  At one time all slums were like this, but now people have got a bit better off, and they are making their houses out of tin, metal or rough brick.  Or they are renting rooms in roughly made and illegally built brick-built slums – they are illegal and could be demolished at any time.  So although it apparently looks as though the worst of the slums are being eliminated – poverty has been stacked up inside high rise dwellings.  Inside they are just as crowded, insanitary, dark, fetid and unpleasant as the things they replaced, but they are no longer so visible to the visitor from outside, who thinks ‘oh they are buildings, they must be OK’.

Two things are happening with the urban poor. Firstly they are being stacked up vertically. And secondly, compression.  They are being squeezed into a smaller and smaller area of the city’s base.  As the middle class expands, so new areas are taken over for development.  You get all these building sites with artists impressions of places called ‘Mayfair Towers’ or ‘Berkley Villas’,they're idealised views of what these places will be.  They are rising up in slum areas but whoever moves in won’t want the eyesore of the poor people living close.  So you can see that the next lot are ripe for eviction.

There is a constant process of movement and change.  Slums are not static.  They are in a ferment of economic activity and also of social uphe...

This is the first of a new occasional series of ‘Research Bytes’ podcasts – looking very briefly at a cross section of research projects in an academic institution.  In this podcast we talk to six academics from Goldsmiths, University of London.

Goldsmiths is, of course,  the alma mater of most of the YBAs - Young British Artists – Damien Hirst, Mark Wallinger, Gillian Wearing, Sam Taylor Wood and has a long history of cultural study, artistic expression and iconaclism.

So it is not surprising to find academics in every department at Goldsmiths concerned about creativity.    And we start the podcast by looking at  Professor Joydeep Bhattacharya 's research project on the neuroscience of creativity.

Next up is composer Jeremy Peyton Jones, from Goldsmith’s music department who is involved in practice research – on a project called 'Ending's, around the last pages of books including James Joyce's Ulysses and Jack Kerouac's On the Road.

Computers and creativity come together in Dr Kate Devlin’s research – she is not only a computer expert but also an archaeologist, seeking to understand the past better using computer technology.

A colleague of Kate Devlin’s in the Department of Computing is Dan McQuillan, lecturer in creative and social computing, and human rights activist who has been involved in establishing Crypto Parties, where people share computer skills particularly aimed at staying out of the way of the NSA, and when I spoke to him, he was getting ready for the first Crypto Festival.

We’ve just learned that Goldsmiths computer whizzes has won a major government grant for PhD students to take forward the digital games industry in the UK

Another important Department at Goldsmiths is the Education Department – Pod Academy has had other pieces about their groundbreaking research – this time I spoke to Clare Kelly,  who heads up the BA in Education, Culture & Society, about her work on children’s literacy

My last port of call in Goldsmith’s was with Dr Jo Lloyd, lecturer in occupational psychology – who is currently working on policies and practices for transgender people in the workplace

 If your college or university would like us to make a similar podcast, showcasing some of your research,  drop a line to [email protected]

“I began to see some of the high profile, very dramatic experiments in social psychology of the 1950s and 60s, as what they were – metaphors. We invest them with a truth and authority that often goes way beyond what we’ve demonstrated in the lab” says Gina Perry.

The particular experiments she is taking a fresh look at in her book, Behind the Shock Machine, are the Milgram experiments, conducted at Yale University in 1963, which suggested that 65% of people would give fatal electric shocks to complete strangers if asked to do so by an authority figure.  These experiments have been used to ‘explain’ the behaviour of Nazis in the holocaust.

Stanley Milgram’s findings are shocking, but are they valid?  That is the central question Perry seeks to address.

Craig Barfoot’s interview with Gina Perry explores the evidence....

In this podcast about how neuroscience is offering new approaches to treatments for drug addiction, science journalist Ryan O'Hare speaks to

Harry Shapiro of Drugscope,  the UK organisation supporting professionals working in the field of drug misuse.

Dr Amy Milton, a lecturer and researcher in the Department of Psychology at the University of Cambridge

Barry Everitt, Professor of behavioural neuroscience at the University of Cambridge.

Dr Sunjeev Kamboj, a lecturer in clinical psychology at University College London

Andy [not his real name], a recovering addict

[Andy] - “Trying to justify to yourself that you could take it possibly take it very sporadically, but yeah, there’s a lot of mental trickery going on,”

[Sunjeev Kamboj] - “There isn’t really, at the moment, any long-term treatment that you receive and then stop taking and you’re cured,”

[Harry Shapiro] “When someone has collapsed all of their problems into one, to the exclusion and detriment of everything else in their lives, that’s addiction,”

[Amy Milton] - “We need to think of addiction much more as a chronic disorder so it’s more like treating diabetes or hypertension than some short term disease”

Ryan O'Hare:  When it comes to drug and alcohol addiction the numbers speak for themselves. With 800 million pounds a year being spent on drug treatment and recovery services in the UK alone, it’s estimated that one in five of us have experienced addiction or know someone who has.

Although there are a number of treatments to try and tackle the problem in the short-term, such as chemical replacements, and abstinence and psychological therapies for the dependence, relapse in the long-term is still a problem.  Harry Shapiro is head of communications for the UK charity, Drugscope.

 Harry Shapiro:  There’s a bit of a kind of mantra, cliché, whatever, there’s many ways into addiction and many ways out. There is no typical pathway out, and some people won’t go anywhere near a treatment system but might manage to get off the actual drinking or drugs and then might spend much of their time in AA or NA meetings. So, there are several pathways that people will take and they will jump from one to another.”

For someone who has become used to using drugs or alcohol as a way of coping with problems there is always the chance that if more problems present themselves that there’s a kind of learned behaviour there and the way that you deal with this, in terms of coping, is to go back on drugs or start drinking again.

One of the reasons why a lot of residential rehabs are based sited well out of city centres, out in rural communities and all the rest of it, is this idea that you need to be well away from your old haunts and your old habits. Because it’s true, people do start getting cravings, some people do, if they walk past some alley way where they used to shoot up a few years ago, it all kind of starts coming back.

RO'H: We are becoming more and more aware that getting someone off of drugs and alcohol is only half the problem. The challenge for the long-term means trying to target the very mechanism which has evolved to help us make sense of the world around us, our memory.Though, brilliantly adapted to help us find food, a partner and to avoid the dangers of our environment, it can also be one of the biggest barriers to long-term drug treatment.

But in order to understand the underlying pathways used by our brains, we need to start with something a little more every day.

Walk into a bakery and the smell of fresh bread hits you. Immediately it stirs up a thousand memories, you may not even be aware the process is happening, you may start to salivate, and your stomach may even start to rumble with hunger.

Since the end of the Cold War, American military superiority has been an undeniable fact.  But this superpower dominance is not the norm in world affairs.  With the rise of China as a ‘peer rival’ of the US, are we seeing a return to a more contested ‘business as usual’ ? And if we are, what are the implications?

In this podcast, Pod Academy’s Craig Barfoot speaks to Dr Ian Speller, co author of Understanding Modern Warfare (Cambridge University Press 2008, £25.99) about various developments in naval capability, and in particular the naval aspects of China’s resurgence.  China is expanding its navy, and although Washington sees this as a threat, the Chinese themselves say any developing country would want to build up its sea power (given that historically threats to China have come from the seas,  it is perhaps understandable that they would feel this way).

But for now, the US navy fleet has greater capability than all the rest of the world’s fleets put together.  This fleet is deployed in international waters as ‘protector of the global commons’, and it is not uncommon for fleets from different nations to meet and acknowledge each other in international waters.  But as global politics, and economic power, evolve and change – how long will this situation continue?

Dr Ian Speller is a Lecturer in the Department of History at the National University of Ireland, Maynooth. He also lectures in defence studies at the Irish Defence Forces Military College and in maritime strategy at the UK Defence Academy and at the National Maritime College of Ireland. He is the author of The Role of Amphibious Warfare in British Defence Policy, 1945-56 (2001) and the editor of The Royal Navy and Maritime Power in the Twentieth Century (2005).

Our podcast explores aspects of modern naval warfare, but Understanding Modern Warfare also looks at

Strategy

Land warfare

Air and space warfare

Irregular warfare

Weapons of mass destruction

Dr Speller is one of a number of co-authors, the others are:

David Jordan, King's College London

James D. Kiras, School of Advanced Air and Space Studies, Maxwell Air Force Base, USA

David J. Lonsdale, University of Reading

Christopher Tuck, King's College London

C. Dale Walton, Missouri State University

If you have enjoyed this podcast you may also be interested in one or more of the following podcasts:

Empire: the features of American global power

The East India Company and its legacy 

Divided Nations: global challenges, global governance

UN in DRC 2: The challenges of the UN’s new offensive approach

Clasificadores trundle round Montevideo collecting and sorting the rubbish that others throw away.  But now the city authorities want to clean up their act.  Ben Weisz reports.

Ben Weisz: Friday 26th July, 2013, Montevideo, Uruguay. Dozens of horse-drawn rubbish carts have blocked the Avenida 18 de Julio, one of the city centre’s main roads. They’ve pulled up to protest outside Montevideo’s Palacio Municipal, headquarters to the city council or Intendencia.

The carts belonged to members of UCRUS – the union of clasificadores of solid urban waste. Clasificadores do their rounds of the city, some in horse-drawn carts, others pulling hand-carts or even shopping trolleys, rummaging through the large rubbish containers stationed on Montevideo’s streets. They salvage what they can, sort it, and sell it on.

A survey carried out by the Intendencia in May 2013 counted 3188  clasificadores in the city, though as you will hear, UCRUS puts the figure much, much higher. The Union was protesting recent changes proposed by the Intendencia to ban the clasificadores’ horse-drawn carts, or ‘carros’ from three city centre districts, and to limit the collection and sorting of waste in other districts to those “duly authorised” by the Intendencia. Clasificadores see this as a threat to their livelihood – the three central districts are seen to be the areas whose rubbish skips contain the richest pickings, while there are fears that only large multinationals with fleets of bin lorries will be “duly authorised”.

The clasificadores want to protect their way of life from its perceived threats. Not only the new rules proposed by the Intendencia, but toughening economic climates . This programme investigates the question of whether it is sustainable for Uruguay to protect the clasificadores lifestyle in the 21st century. There are fears that child labour is rife among families of clasificadores. The Intendencia worries that the presence of clasificadores is holding back both the city’s infrastructure and its ability to organise a modern system of waste recycling.

But are these fears justified? And what will the human cost be if the perceived threats to the clasificadores’ livelihoods become reality?

As with most industries in Uruguay, the Clasificadores have their own Union. UCRUS- the Union of Clasificadores of Solid Urban Waste. Travelling north, away from the hustle and bustle of the city centre, you arrive in the impoverished Villa Espanola district. Occupying a small hut on the Camino Corrales, UCRUS hold their meetings. In a store cupboard, filled with books of Marxist-Leninist theory and propaganda posters,

I spoke with Walter Rodriguez, UCRUS’s president. I asked him why the Clasificadores felt threatened by the intendencia proposals.

Walter Rodriguez: The state has pursued a series of measures which are set to harm clasificadores. The big producers of waste, the supermarkets, the factories, all of these generate great riches in terms of materials to recycle. Nowadays they are punished by the City Council if they give their waste to the rubbish carts of the clasificadores. The first time, they’re hit with a fine – I don’t remember exactly how much – the second time, a bigger fine, and the third time they can even come and close down the business, the factory, whatever it might be. So we understand that this is another little move in a game which has been going on for a while now – they want us to disappear from the streets.

BW:  Walter suggested that the Intendencia’s plans to ‘duly licence’ refuse collection was a sly means of privatisation by the back door, eliminating clasificadores in favour of large multinationals.

WR: What they really want is privatisation – that multinationals deal with all the rubbish. Nowadays, hanging over us is the idea…no,

For the last twenty years of his life, Marcel Duchamp was working secretly in a studio in New York to construct an installation called Étant Donnés, Things Given. In this, the final part of our series, Seeing is Believing: the Politics of the Visual, Rod Stoneman analyses Things Given and he reflects on how Duchamp opened new ways of thinking about art and creativity. The series is presented and produced by Esther Gaytan Fuertes

You will find other podcasts in the series here:

Podcast 1 on Fashion images

Podcast 2 on graffiti

Podcast 3 on music videos

Podcast 4 on film and climate change

Rod Stoneman: For the last twenty years of his life, Marcel Duchamp was working secretly in a studio in New York to construct an installation called Étant Donnés, or ‘things given’, —one, the waterfall, two, the lighting gas— which no one in the outside world was aware of. These images show the outside door and in that wooden door there are two small peep holes which, if the spectator gets close, you look through into the interior and the image [above] indicates what can be seen.

And the most extraordinary aspects of this major work by certainly one of the twentieth century’s most significant visual artists, was to make something outside of the public domain and only release it after his death. So there was no marketing, there was no gallery, there was no commercial dimension. It was a most significant commitment to an activity but it was done in a way that, very subversively, was outside of the art world, the art market.

A few years before he died he gave a speech called ‘The creative act’.  Interestingly before ‘The death of the author’ by Roland Barthes or Foucault’s essay or The Role of the Reader by Umberto Eco, Duchamp talked about the way the meaning of the work of the art is actually made by the spectator.

His Étant Donnés offered the spectator a direct and physical experience of that meaning. Duchamp legislated that it couldn’t be photographed the first 15 years of its existence in the Philadelphia Museum of Art. Obviously this was an epoch —in 1968 when it was constructed in that Museum— it was an epoch before everyone had a camera in their mobile phone. But actually the first photographs of it were only seen in the 80s, when that restriction had been lifted. So the spectator had to see it directly and personally and its implications and its meanings were constrained to that one-to-one relationship.

This actually indicates something of a different way of making art and a much wider and more open and more democratic basis for art-making —leaving aside the commercialised, celebrity basis of commercial art galleries and artists. Duchamp actually suggested that all activity of making, which can be embarked upon by a wide or inclusive range of people actually could be understood as art-making. And it occurs to me that when sometimes people suggest that only professional training and high ability should legitimate creativity that the activity that everyone makes in the middle of the night, which is the highly textured coloured specific strange work of dreaming is actually an indication of the way Duchamp is right. Artistic creativity, imagination, intelligence and meaning are manufactured in a strange brilliant way by all of us on a daily basis. And the definition of what could be seen as a work of art needs to be rethought.

I hope you’ve enjoyed this series. Remember you can listen to the six parts of Seeing is Believing: the Politics of the Visual on Pod Academy’s website, where you can also find our other podcasts and stay up to date with the latest research. 

 

Rod Stoneman

Seeing is Believing: the Politics of the Visual by Rod Stoneman is published by Black Dog (UK £19.95, US £29.95) It explores the complex and reciprocal dynamic between world and image...

‘Due to lack of interest, tomorrow has been cancelled’  was the title of a famous 1971 TV documentary about how the world was walking towards ecological disaster with its eyes shut. In this, the fourth installment of our series Seeing is Believing: the Politics of the Visual, Rod Stoneman remembers the impact of the images of that programme  and how it echos today in the growing concern about climate change.

To listen to other podcasts in the series, which is presented and produced by Esther Gaytan Fuertes, click on the links below:

Podcast 1 on Fashion images

Podcast 2 on graffiti

Podcast 3 on music videos

Rod Stoneman: This photograph [above] is a picture of Los Angeles under smog, a problem that’s been addressed in recent years but for a long time, the inhabitants of Los Angeles were living through a self-inflicted ecological disaster. This came in focus for me personally when I saw a BBC science programme, Horizon in fact, in 1971 when I was in college. The title of this Horizon programme was, ‘Due to lack of interest, tomorrow has been cancelled’. And for 45 minutes the programme assembled a case of the danger to the planet, talking about the Colorado Dust Bowl, the overuse of DDT pesticides killing species, the smog in Los Angeles for sure, and a lake in Russia which had been eliminated by factory pollution. And the television programme ended with the memorable phrase of an American scientist saying “Maybe Man is like a dinosaur shot in the back brain —maybe already dead, but it doesn’t know it”.

What I can’t help but reflecting on now is the way in which such a strong warning, if you like, in a BBC programme was something that I was able to ignore for the following 30-40 years and like most other people in Western countries the issue of ecology was set aside. As it began to emerge onto political agendas in 2005, 2006 —even the urgency was beginning to be brought home— the media found it very difficult to foreground the ecological questions because they don’t fit within most news agendas, most criteria for coverage. And there’s really never really been a strong, iconic image —I mean, perhaps at other point, when the hippies being a subculture taking ecology more seriously, when the hippies were active the famous picture from the NASA spacecraft of the blue planet tried to have that effect. But really there is been no equivalent to —if you take the historical example of the Lisbon earthquake, which was devastating when it happened, which was in 1755, and a had a subsequent effect on the Enlightenment, on Voltaire and other European philosophers thereafter. Something like the tsunami in Indonesia in 2004 and the earthquake in Haiti in 2010, there are not directly linked to the human abuse of the planet and therefore have not shifted perception in an effective way.

Trying to understand and explain how the ecological crisis has really had little impact over the years, because there were scientists from previous centuries, the Scandinavian Svante Arrhenius in 1896 or GS Callendar in the 1930s were warning about the dangers of climate change and of global warning but in a very optimistic way, they seemed to think that, as the planet got warmer, it would be good for agriculture and there’d be more crops for a larger population. And that’s symptomatic of a kind of anthropocentric ego, which means we, mankind, are the centre of all things and our ego is expansive and it’ll work out ok for us.

The pathetic fallacy in literature —‘it rains in the town, it cries in my heart’, would be an example— is another version of human self-centeredness, the sense that it’s got to work out for us because the centre of all the things.  And maybe the smog in Los Angeles is somewhat better now, but the general attitude about the urgency of the catastrophe we face has not really taken it on board, has not come to the point where... Well,

The music video:  "What had been a liberating possibility for visual artists working in film, to bring their work towards a wider audience, without the pressure of narrative, without the necessity to tell stories, has become an absolutely fixed promo for the consumerism aimed at the youth market".

So says Professor Rod Stoneman in this, the third in Pod Academy’s series based on his book, Seeing is Believing: the Politics of the Visual. which is produced and presented by Esther Gaytan Fuertes.

In this podcast, Rod Stoneman talks about the visual experimentation made possible by the music video, which pushes the boundaries of mainstream narrative film.

You can find other podcasts in the series here: Podcast 1 on Fashion images and Podcast 2 on graffiti

Rod Stoneman: This image [above] comes from a film called Berlin Horse made by Malcolm Le Grice in 1970, an experimental film from the London Filmmakers’ Co-op. And it’s a striking visual image made from permutations of colour printing, using loops, a horse going round in a circle and a clip from an early American silent film, working alongside music in an interesting way. The music is created by Brian Eno using loops of guitar chords, which the chords are of different lengths so as they go round they change the relationship of the different sets of guitar chords to one another. And it suggests a previous history of work with sound and image happening in the experimental domain: Kenneth Anger made Scorpio Rising and Kustom Kar Kommandos even within I’d say mainstream films but even within feature film productions like Performance by Nicholas Roeg and Donald Cammell there is a sequence where Mike Jagger comes out of character to create a music video, you could say, or premonition of, and Bob Dylan’s famous film with the different lines from Subterranean Homesick Blues.

These are precursors of something that really developed when music television started in the early 70s, when MTV was created. Gary Kemp from Spandau Ballet was absolutely right when he said, video was something that a band had to be good at; if you weren’t visual, if you couldn’t work in front of a camera you were not going to happen as a band.

It's absolutely clear that, at that moment, MTV offered a possibility for brave and experimental work which didn’t have to be concerned with story telling or narrative to connect with contemporary music and reach a wider audience. But, quite quickly industrial constraints exerted themselves and some videos were taken to be too difficult or too experimental or —occasionally the phrase was used— not ‘MTV- friendly’. That excluded some work, also contracts to be drawn up —I mean, a pop-promo is precisely a promotional tour— and contracts began to be drawn up defining what the film-maker had to achieve in terms of, say, featuring a medium close shot of the lead singer of the band within the first 30 seconds.

So that began to close what had been a liberating possibility for visual artists working in film, to bring their work towards a wider audience, without the pressure of narrative, without the necessity to tell stories. The current version of music videos is an absolutely fixed promo for the consumerism, aimed at the youth market. MTV itself has moved off to other formats, to reality television, and the space for something as extraordinary as Malcolm Le Grice’s Berlin Horse —which, interestingly, was used in the Doves’ music video Catch the Sun in a rather decorative way— the space for new visually experiment has really been closed off.

If you have enjoyed this podcast, remember you can listen or download the rest of this series from our website, www.podacademy.org

Seeing is Believing: The politics of the visual is published by Black Dog (UK £19.95, US £29.95) It explores the complex and reciprocal dynamic between world and image in this most visually mediated society.

This is the second in our two-part series on the UN's new offensive mandate in the Democratic Republic of Congo in which SOAS’s Dr Phil Clark talks to Paul Brister from Pod Academy about some of the causes of the conflict in the Eastern Democratic Republic of Congo, and some of the challenges facing the United Nation’s (UN) new Intervention Brigade that has recently deployed there. [You can find the first podcast in the series here]

This podcast looks at the implications of the UN in DRC and its new proactive and aggressive approach – for the DRC, the wider region and for peacekeeping and the UN itself. It also contains a postscript outlining some of the developments that have taken place since Paul spoke to Dr Clark.

First Paul Brister gives some background on peacekeeping...

Paul Brister:  UN peacekeeping missions are normally authorised by UN Resolutions passed under Chapter 6 of the UN Charter, and are guided by three basic principles: consent of the parties; impartiality; and non-use of force except in self-defence and defence of the mandate. A UN peacekeeping force is thus deployed in a context where there is a peace to be kept. It often involves monitoring and enforcing a cease-fire agreed between two or more former combatants, who view the UN force as being neutral and impartial.

Of course events on the ground can change rapidly: cease-fires may be broken, consent can become withdrawn, peace keeping forces may be tempted to stray into peace enforcement. And in the past the UN Security Council has been to slow to react. The classic case is Rwanda in 1994. During the 100 days of mass-genocide, the commanders of the UN forces on the ground [United Nations Assistance Mission for Rwanda (UNAMIR)] repeatedly made ardent requests for authorisation to use their Belgian troops to intervene. These demands were consistently rebuffed and their mandate was never beefed up. Instead the troops were forced to stand idly by and helplessly watch the butchering. The UN troops had found themselves with a weak peacekeeping mandate in a situation that urgently required peace enforcement and were thus useless.

Peace-enforcement operations are authorised under Chapter 7 of the UN Charter and have far more robust mandates, sanctioning armed intervention to impose a solution. They tend to take place in a context of conflict rather than peace – a situation that is preferred by one or more of the belligerents. Therefore, unlike with peacekeepers, peace-enforcers are not welcomed by at least one of the belligerents and are not regarded as neutral. The insertion of a peace-enforcement force can convince belligerents that compliance with an imposed peace is less painful to battling this force. Sometimes though, the conflicts have proved too deep-rooted and intransigent, and little more than a pause between rounds has ensued. In other cases the cycle of violence has been broken, providing the conditions necessary for a political process that paves the way to a lasting peace.

Usually the aim of peace-enforcement has been to bring belligerents to the negotiating table. The goal has not been military victory but facilitating a settlement. And peace-enforcement operations have generally been outsourced or sub-contracted to other organisations. Although, for example, the UN Protection Force in Bosnia (UNPROFOR) was authorised to use enforcement action, coercive action was in reality left to NATO, which had been sanctioned to undertake enforcement measures alongside the UN peacekeeping force. This culminated in the replacement of UNPROFOR by the more ‘muscular’ NATO-led force, IFOR. Although the NATO-led operation rested notionally in the hands of the Security Council, in real terms NATO leaders, not the UN, called the shots. 

Historically, it has generally been the case that the more aggressive the UN mandate for military action has been,