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In 2025, six European states — Poland, Lithuania, Latvia, Estonia, Finland, and Ukraine — initiated withdrawal from the Ottawa Convention banning anti-personnel landmines (APMs). This post critically assesses the rationale behind such decisions, warning against the framing of landmines as legitimate tools of self-defence. While the Ottawa Convention has produced significant humanitarian and security gains since 1997, APMs offer only marginal tactical utility, are easily countered in conventional warfare, and frequently backfire, causing friendly casualties and long-term risks to civilians. Their deployment imposes high financial, social, and environmental costs while generating devastating humanitarian consequences, including death, disability, and restricted access to land and services. Justifying withdrawal on grounds of deterrence sets a dangerous precedent, eroding international humanitarian commitments. Instead, this moment calls for reinforcing ethical and legal norms, recognising that the purported benefits of APMs pale against their enduring harm to societies, environments, and post-war recovery.

Recent U.S. funding cuts and freezes to humanitarian demining efforts threaten to reverse decades of progress in clearing landmines and unexploded ordnance worldwide, destabilizing organizations that rely on this support and forcing massive layoffs of demining staff in over 20 countries. The uncertainty and reductions in aid risk increasing civilian casualties, prolonging dangerous contamination, and undermining U.S. humanitarian, security, and geopolitical interests — especially in countries affected by past American-led wars. With other donors unable to fill the gap, the loss of U.S. leadership in mine action will have lasting, deadly consequences.  

Humanitarian diplomacy typically relies on principled engagement to promote compliance with International Humanitarian Law. Yet, many non-state armed groups operate outside formal legal frameworks and lack incentives to align with them. This post argues for a more pragmatic approach: engaging armed groups through the drivers that already resonate with their operational logic. Drawing on concrete examples, it explores five strategic rationales for restraint—such as legitimacy, efficiency, and internal control—and discusses how these can be leveraged to reduce violence and limit human suffering in armed conflict.

The post-Cold War era has ushered in an array of complex challenges, expanding the scope of security agendas for states and multilateral organizations alike. This transformation necessitated regional and international approaches, encompassing multifaceted security threats such as human rights abuses, international terrorism, climate change, migration, pandemics, and cyberattacks. As a result, coordination between civilian and military actors became indispensable. However, this shift brought forth a multitude of civil-military concepts, each tailored to specific entities but resulting in significant confusion due to subtle variations in terminology and interpretation. For instance, the United Nations, European Union, and North Atlantic Treaty Organization employ various civil-military concepts, often sharing similar terms but conveying distinct meanings. Such conceptual disparities can lead to misunderstandings and hinder effective coordination. This paper introduces an analytical tool that categorizes organization-specific civil-military concepts into archetypes and provides a repository of official concepts and their summaries. The analytical framework is based on four core parameters of each civil-military concept, i.e. the main perspective, the scope, the level of applicability, and whether the concept entails a dedicated function. This resource aims to facilitate a common language for navigating and bridging different civil-military concepts. While essential for national militaries in multinational operations, this guide also benefits civilians engaging with military organizations, providing insights into military approaches to civil-military relations and aiding in identifying interlocutors within military structures. Ultimately, this framework accommodates future developments in civil-military concepts, enabling a contextual understanding within the existing conceptual landscape.

The Manipur conflict, which began in mid-2023, highlights deep-seated ethnic tensions between the Meitei and Kuki-Zo communities, escalating into a humanitarian crisis with over 225 deaths and the displacement of 60,000 people. Amid the violence, improvised weapons like "pumpi guns" have gained prominence. Rooted in historical resistance movements, pumpi guns are crafted from locally sourced materials, reflecting resourcefulness and resilience. Their widespread use underscores the challenges of regulating non-industrial weapons in conflict zones. These weapons are pivotal for community defense and symbolic of local craftsmanship and identity, especially in the hill districts. Pumpi guns have evolved in design and utility, serving both defensive and offensive roles, including ambushes and territorial control. Despite their efficacy, they pose risks such as misfires and injuries. The conflict's dynamics are further complicated by cross-border exchanges with Myanmar, including the trafficking of precursor materials and 3D-printed arms. Addressing this issue requires a multifaceted approach, combining stricter arms control, enhanced stockpile security, and regional cooperation. Socio-economic measures, such as vocational training and economic integration, are critical to offering alternatives to illicit weapons production. However, sustainable peacebuilding efforts must address underlying grievances, foster trust between communities and authorities, and integrate rebel groups into state structures to ensure a holistic resolution.

In Brazil, for at least 15 years, civilians have participated in a series of training sessions for UN peacekeeping operations, generally organized by military personnel. Most of the time, this participation has been secondary. In 2022, Brazil once again hosted a remote site of Exercise Viking: this is an international mega-training, assisted by computer, which aims to prepare civilians, police and soldiers to be deployed in missions by international organizations in unstable contexts, including peacekeeping operations. By describing the participation of civilians in this Exercise and comparing it with the previous edition, from 2018, the article aims to demonstrate that, in contrast to the participation of civilians in other trainings in Brazil, Viking 22 broke with the existing paradigm by offering a opportunity to insert civilians in joint training, thus becoming an important precedent for future exercises on peace operations.

No Brasil, há pelo menos 15 anos, civis participam de uma série de treinamentos paraoperações de paz da ONU, geralmente organizados por militares. Na maioria das vezes,essa participação tem sido secundária. Em 2022, o Brasil sediou novamente um site remoto do Exercício Viking: trata-se de um mega-treinamento internacional, assistido porcomputador, que visa preparar civis, policiais e militares para serem desdobrados emmissões de organismos internacionais em contextos instáveis, aí incluídas as operaçõesde paz. Ao descrever a participação de civis neste Exercício e compará-la com a ediçãoanterior, de 2018, o artigo visa demonstrar que, em contraste com a participação de civisem outros treinamentos no Brasil, o Viking 22 rompeu com o paradigma existente aooferecer uma oportunidade de inserção de civis em treinamentos conjuntos, configurando-se, assim, como um importante precedente para futuros exercícios sobreoperações de paz.

Why are some non-state armed groups more violent than others? Why do some groups resort to inhumane means and methods of war while others restrain from doing so? In trying to answer these questions, a growing number of scholars and practitioners have focused on the drivers of restraint behaviour. However, defining and measuring restraint can be challenging. In this post, Henrique Garbino, Doctoral Candidate at the Swedish Defence University, discusses how we can define and measure restraint focusing on the use of landmines and similar explosive devices by non-state armed groups. This post is based on Henrique’s recent article, “Rebels Against Mines? Legitimacy and Restraint on Landmine Use in the Philippines,” published in Security Studies on 23rd June 2023. 

Joint training is usually cited as a possible solution to the lack of coordination and cooperation between the various actors present in the area of a peace operation. Exercises are an opportunity to promote mutual understanding, trust, cooperation and interoperability among organizations, including civilian, law enforcement and military. Ironically, planning such exercises is itself a coordination and cooperation challenge. This article explores the multidimensional exercise planning process and offers advice on incident design. The recommendations deal with the composition of the planning team, the definition of participants and training objectives, the interaction between participants and between different levels, the multidimensional nature of the exercise and prioritizing the quality, not quantity, of incidents.

What drives restraint in armed conflict? Recent studies have examined different factors contributing to restraint behaviour, mainly focusing on strategic incentives, such as seeking legitimacy from international audiences or securing support from local communities. In this post, Henrique Garbino, Doctoral Candidate at the Swedish Defence University, and Matthew Bolton, Professor at Pace University, explore, instead, how traditional humanitarian norms protecting the innocent, the land, and the body may influence restraint on the use of landmines and similar explosive devices. They conclude that we should not perceive such norms as inadequate alternatives to international humanitarian law; instead, they may serve as a basis for extending global norms beyond the existing laws of war.

Rebels have become the most prolific users of landmines but still display significant variation in how they employ and restrict the weapon’s use. This article argues that how rebels exercise restraint on landmine use depends on which audiences they rely on most. In a comparative case study of three Philippine rebel groups—the Moro Islamic Liberation Front, the Abu Sayyaf Group, and the New People’s Army—this article highlights three main findings. First, rebels reliant on voluntary compliance from local communities are more likely to limit the effects of landmines on their perceived constituency. Second, when rebels have conciliatory relations with the government, they are more likely to comply with national law, reciprocate government behavior, and limit the effects of landmines on the government’s constituents. Finally, rebels seeking legitimacy from human-rights-conscious foreign sponsors are more likely to comply with international law related to landmine use.