Confidence-building measures (CBMs) or confidence- and security-building measures (CSBMs) are actions taken to reduce fear of attack by both (or more) parties in a situation of conflict. [1] The term is most often used in the context of armed conflict, but is similar in logic to that of trust and interpersonal communication used to reduce conflictual situations among human individuals. [1]
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Confidence-building measures between sovereign states for many centuries included the existence of and increased activities by embassies, which are state institutions geographically located inside the territory of other states, staffed by people expected to have extremely good interpersonal skills who can explain and resolve misunderstandings due to differences in language and culture which are incorrectly perceived as threatening, or encourage local knowledge of a foreign culture by funding artistic and cultural activities.
A much more grassroots form of confidence building occurs directly between ordinary people of different states. Short visits by individual children or groups of children to another state, and longer visits (6–12 months) by secondary and tertiary students to another state, have widely been used in the European Union as one of the methods of decreasing the tensions which had earlier led to many centuries of inter-European wars, culminating in the first and second world wars.
The use of confidence-building measures (CBMs) as an explicit security management approach emerged from attempts by the Cold War superpowers and their military alliances (the North Atlantic Treaty Organization and the Warsaw Pact), as well as the European neutral and non-aligned states, to avoid conventional or nuclear war by accident or miscalculation. [2] The term appears to have been first used [2] : 20 in United Nations General Assembly resolution 914 (x) in 1955, [3] prompted by the U.S. "Open Skies" proposal. CBMs became a significant component of arms control during a series of negotiations and agreements produced by the Conference on Security and Co-operation in Europe (CSCE; which later become the Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe, OSCE) of the early 1970s. [2] : 28–29 CBMs were a major component of the Helsinki Final Act Document (August 1975), the Stockholm CSBM Document (September 1986), and the Vienna Document (November 1990) and its iterations of 1992, 1994, 1999, and 2011. [4] Other CBMs during the Cold War included Latin American joint military manoeuvres and exchanges of military observers, with a meeting on 8 January 1984 of Central American states agreeing to set up a detailed registry of military installations, weapons and personnel and methods of direct communication; and the 1975 Sinai Interim Agreement between Israel and Egypt. There are also other historical instances of what appears to be confidence building prior to the Cold War and outside of the European context. [2] : 23–24
In international relations, the way that confidence-building measures are intended to reduce fear and suspicion (the positive feedbacks) is to make the different states' (or opposition groups') behaviour more predictable. This typically involves exchanging information and making it possible to verify this information, especially information regarding armed forces and military equipment. Here, "positive" and "negative" refer to the mathematical nature of the feedback; positive feedback leads to worsening intensity in a conflict, while negative feedback leads to de-escalation of the conflict, a "peace spiral" or Gradual Reduction in Tension (GRIT). [1]
More in-depth modelling of peace and armed conflict situations as complex dynamical systems suggests that intractable long-term armed conflict can be interpreted as the result of the reduced dimensionality of a system, in which the system is changing but remains near an attractor that maintains the conflict. The existing negative and positive feedbacks prevent a change to a state of peace. Confidence-building measures can change the properties of the system, increasing its dimensionality, so that in the higher dimensional system, positive feedback loops to resolve the conflict are able to overcome the negative feedbacks that tend to maintain the conflict. [5] : 47–52
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If the feedback model assumed by the confidence-building measure mechanism is correct, then the rapidly developing improvement in communication between ordinary people by the internet should provide extremely robust, fast methods of information exchange and verification, as well as improved people-to-people contacts and general building of trust networks, reducing the intensity and frequency of wars. Evidence, however, suggests that the Internet is as likely to inflame opinion and increase conflict (or at least tensions) as individuals are exposed to significantly different points of view.
Existing and proposed confidence-building measures in the context of arms control, also called confidence and security-building measures (CSBMs), can be categorized by three main types. Confidence building can also be viewed as an overall process, rather than a collection of individual measures. In a monograph distributed to the Conference on Disarmament in 1997, [6] Macintosh divides CSBMs into informational type (A), verification type (B) and constraint (C) measures. [7]
Informational and similar type measures include: [7]
Verification and similar measures, such as those of the Treaty on Conventional Armed Forces in Europe, include: [7]
Types of limitations include: [7]
An alternative analytic approach to understanding confidence building looks at broader process concepts rather than concentrating on specific measures. [7]
Confidence building, according to the transformation view, is a distinct activity undertaken by policy makers with the minimum intention of improving some aspects of a traditionally antagonistic security relationship through security policy coordination and cooperation. It entails the comprehensive process of exploring, negotiating, and then implementing tailored measures, including those that promote interaction, information exchange, and constraint. It also entails the development and use of both formal and informal practices and principles associated with the cooperative development of CBMs. When conditions are supportive, the confidence building process can facilitate, focus, synchronize, amplify, and generally structure the potential for a significant positive transformation in the security relations of participating states. Confidence building in this view is a process that constitutes more than the sum of its parts. [7]
When confidence building leads to the institutionalization of a collection of new rules and practices stipulating how participating states and non-state actors should cooperate and compete with each other in their security relationship, the restructured relationship can reduce the likelihood of armed conflict by redefining expectations of normal behaviour among participating states in a way that is more likely to handle conflict by non-military means. [7]
A peace process is the set of sociopolitical negotiations, agreements and actions that aim to solve a specific armed conflict.
Security is protection from, or resilience against, potential harm. Beneficiaries of security may be persons and social groups, objects and institutions, ecosystems, or any other entity or phenomenon vulnerable to unwanted change.
Peacekeeping comprises activities, especially military ones, intended to create conditions that favor lasting peace. Research generally finds that peacekeeping reduces civilian and battlefield deaths, as well as reduces the risk of renewed warfare.
The Biological Weapons Convention (BWC), or Biological and Toxin Weapons Convention (BTWC), is a disarmament treaty that effectively bans biological and toxin weapons by prohibiting their development, production, acquisition, transfer, stockpiling and use. The treaty's full name is the Convention on the Prohibition of the Development, Production and Stockpiling of Bacteriological (Biological) and Toxin Weapons and on their Destruction.
An insurgency is a violent, armed rebellion by small, lightly armed bands who practice guerrilla warfare against a larger authority. The key descriptive feature of insurgency is its asymmetric nature: small irregular forces face a large, well-equipped, regular military force state adversary. Due to this asymmetry, insurgents avoid large-scale direct battles, opting instead to blend in with the civilian population where they gradually expand territorial control and military forces. Insurgency frequently hinges on control of and collaboration with local populations.
The original Treaty on Conventional Armed Forces in Europe (CFE) was negotiated and concluded during the last years of the Cold War and established comprehensive limits on key categories of conventional military equipment in Europe and mandated the destruction of excess weaponry. The treaty proposed equal limits for the two "groups of states-parties", the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) and the Warsaw Pact. In 2007, Russia "suspended" its participation in the treaty, and on 10 March 2015, citing NATO's alleged de facto breach of the Treaty, Russia formally announced it was "completely" halting its participation in it as of the next day. On 7 November 2023, Russia withdrew from the treaty, and in response the United States and its NATO allies suspended their participation in the treaty.
In computing, data validation or input validation is the process of ensuring data has undergone data cleansing to confirm they have data quality, that is, that they are both correct and useful. It uses routines, often called "validation rules", "validation constraints", or "check routines", that check for correctness, meaningfulness, and security of data that are input to the system. The rules may be implemented through the automated facilities of a data dictionary, or by the inclusion of explicit application program validation logic of the computer and its application.
Data cleansing or data cleaning is the process of detecting and correcting corrupt or inaccurate records from a record set, table, or database and refers to identifying incomplete, incorrect, inaccurate or irrelevant parts of the data and then replacing, modifying, or deleting the dirty or coarse data. Data cleansing may be performed interactively with data wrangling tools, or as batch processing through scripting or a data quality firewall.
The following outline is provided as an overview of and topical guide to business management:
Confidence-building measures (CBMs) were a key element in the Central American peace process. Although CBMs have always existed in some form or another in the hemisphere's conflict situations, the Central American peace process for the first time in a Latin American conflict explicitly used CBM terminology and techniques. This was no accident, and reflected the key role played by the UN and by certain outside actors in bringing these ideas to the peace process.
ONUCA was a United Nations peacekeeping mission deployed in Central America in 1990 and 1991.
The South American experience with confidence-building measures has been markedly different from the Central American one for the obvious reason that South America did not live through the protracted conflict and peacemaking process which dominated Central America in the 1980s and early 1990s. Thus, there was no UN peace-keeping presence in South America, and there was no overarching treaty or Contadora/ Esquipulas Treaty framework in which to ground specific CBMs.
The Sochi agreement was a ceasefire agreement ostensibly marking the end of both the Georgian–Ossetian and Georgian–Abkhazian conflicts, signed in Sochi on June 24, 1992 between Georgia and Russia, the ceasefire with Abkhazia on July 27, 1993.
The military doctrine of Russia is a strategic planning document of the Russian Federation, representing a system of official state-adopted views on preparation and usage of the Russian Armed Forces. The most recent revision of the military doctrine was approved in 2014.
In international relations, defence diplomacy, refers to the pursuit of foreign policy objectives through the peaceful employment of defence resources and capabilities.
The Moscow Summit was a summit meeting between U.S. President Ronald Reagan and General Secretary of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union Mikhail Gorbachev. It was held on May 29, 1988 – June 3, 1988. Reagan and Gorbachev finalized the Intermediate-Range Nuclear Forces Treaty (INF) after the U.S. Senate's ratification of the treaty in May 1988. Reagan and Gorbachev continued to discuss bilateral issues like Central America, Southern Africa, the Middle East and the pending withdrawal of Soviet troops from Afghanistan. Reagan and Gorbachev continued their discussions on human rights. The parties signed seven agreements on lesser issues such as student exchanges and fishing rights. A significant result was the updating of Soviet history books, which necessitated cancelling some history classes in Soviet secondary schools. In the end, Reagan expressed satisfaction with the summit.
The Vienna Document is a series of agreements on confidence and security-building measures between the states of Europe, starting in 1990, with subsequent updates in 1992, 1994, 1999 and 2011. The Vienna Document 2011 was adopted by 57 Organization for Security and Co-operation in Europe (OSCE) participating states, including the states of Central Asia and Russia. It described its zone of application (ZOA) as "the whole of Europe, as well as the adjoining sea area and air space".
The Heart of Asia – Istanbul Process (HoA-IP) is an initiative of the Republic of Afghanistan and the Republic of Turkey, which was officially launched at a conference hosted by Turkey in Istanbul on 2 November 2011. Since then, Afghanistan supported by fourteen Participating Countries of the Heart of Asia Region and 16 Supporting Countries beyond the region as well as 12 Regional and International Organizations is leading and coordinating this Process. It is a platform for promoting regional security, economic and political cooperation centered on Afghanistan through dialogue and a set of Confidence Building Measures (CBMs).
The Colombian peace process is the peace process between the Colombian government of President Juan Manuel Santos and the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia (FARC–EP) to bring an end to the Colombian conflict, which eventually led to the Peace Agreements between the Colombian Government of Juan Manuel Santos and FARC-EP. Negotiations began in September 2012, and mainly took place in Havana, Cuba. Negotiators announced a final agreement to end the conflict and build a lasting peace on August 24, 2016. However, a referendum to ratify the deal on October 2, 2016 was unsuccessful after 50.2% of voters voted against the agreement with 49.8% voting in favor. Afterward, the Colombian government and the FARC signed a revised peace deal on November 24 and sent it to Congress for ratification instead of conducting a second referendum. Both houses of Congress ratified the revised peace agreement on November 29–30, 2016, thus marking an end to the conflict.
In the complex system approach to peace and armed conflict, the social systems of armed conflict are viewed as complex dynamical systems. The study of positive and negative feedback processes, attractors and system dimensionality, phase transitions and emergence is seen as providing improved understanding of the conflicts and of the effectiveness or ineffectiveness of interventions aiming to resolve the conflicts.