KARACHI: ASCE seminar on conflict resolution today
By Our Reporter
KARACHI, Nov 15: The two-day international seminar on “The role of Europe in conflict resolution, conflict management, peace building and peace keeping from the Balkans to South East Asia” begins here on Wednesday.
It is being organized by the Areas Study Centre for Europe of the University of Karachi, in collaboration with Hanns Seidel Foundation, in which eminent scholars from Europe, Middle East, South Asia and Pakistan would agitate the issue.
Organizers said the end of the cold war and the unravelling of the huge multi-national Soviet Empire that not only transformed the bipolar international order into a unipolar one, the events brought in their wake many new threats to international peace and security. Europe, which had been the catalyst of this change, was also struck by the negative fallout from the transformation. The seminar would also deliberate the evolving situation in the backdrop of the Yugoslav crisis that led to an extension of NATO’s role in European Security, beyond its traditional scope of activities; it also confirmed that Europe still needed NATO mechanisms and US support. The EU also made serious efforts to build effective mechanisms to establish its own Security and Defence Identity(ESDI), which would enable it to act independently of the US, whenever the need arose, but allow it to use the resources of NATO.
With the end of the cold war, a perception that became widely prevalent in governmental and scholarly circles in Europe was that the Muslim regions contiguous to the continent, such as North Africa and the Middle East were becoming a source of threat to European and global peace and security. This was owing to the rise of Islamist fundamentalism and militancy, which were fanned by resentment against the West, for neglecting festering conflicts in the Islamic world, such as those of Palestine-Israel and Kashmir. The European Union tried to bridge differences with its Muslim neighbours in the Mediterranean region though its comprehensive Euro-Mediterranean partnership programme, aimed not only at improving its relations with the Arab world, and bringing together in a single forum the apparently implacable foes - the Arabs and the Israelis but also at stabilizing the region through strongly enmeshed economic and commercial partnerships. This programme achieved numerous economic and, political successes, but could not make any progress in resolving the key issue in the Middle East - the Palestinian-Israeli conflict.
The horrific events of 9/11 strengthened the post-cold war unilateralism of the sole superpower, the US and although the West declared that its ‘war against terror’ was not against Islam, the political and civilizational differences between the West and Islam emerged as a de facto pivotal issue in the post-Sept 11 international scenario.
The European Union and most of its member-states tried to play down the ‘clash of civilizations’ aspect of the ‘war on terror’, but events in Afghanistan and later Iraq, inevitably brought this dimension of the anti-terror campaign into prominence.
In this two-day international seminar, it is hoped that a number of aspects of this theme will be discussed and debated and that some broad conclusions will be arrived at by the participants.
