Wednesday, 18 November 2009Dr. Jorgen Johansen, one of the most well known security and conflict resolution experts, was the guest speaker in the framework of the conference conducted by USAK on November 16th.
Asst. Prof. Havva Kok, Prof. Dr. Ihsan Bal and Assoc. Prof. Sedat Laciner and many distinguished academicians and experts also participated to the conference.
The main subject of the speech is to explore conflicts and dilemmas in the case of new emerging states. This is an important issue to study since the number of states after World War II increased significantly; and today, there are approximately 200 states in the world.
According to Johansen, this number will continue to increase because there are almost 2000 nations which are large enough to establish new states. In that sense, it is important to explore and discuss whether new states are sources of benefits or problems.
Since all territories in the world are occupied, the only way to emerge a new state is a division, which is most of time a painful process. In his opinion, there are three criteria in order to decide advantageous or disadvantageous character of a new state: the methods using in gaining independence; the methods using people who are against independence; and the politics which will be applied after gaining the independence. At this point, Johansen emphasized that most of the new states lacks of tolerance and they have a tendency towards excluding "the others".
According to Johansen, although most of the recent new states are mainly emerged based on armed revolutions, there are five waves of non-armed revolutions occurred after Indian Revolution which should be considered seriously.
Another point on which Johansen emphasized is the concept of power. Taxpaying, working, the army, the police, the civil obedience and the bureaucracy are the main determinants of the power and in the case of a failure even in one of them will be resulted in the total collapse.
In the last part of the presentation, the Kurdish problem in Turkey and the EU-Turkey relations discussed shortly since both of the topics are long issues. |
Wednesday, 18 November 2009
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