Cornell International Affairs Review

Can Environmental Peacebuilding Tools Effectively Combat Terrorism in the Democratic Republic of the Congo?

Jake Hall — 2024-01-09

Since the 2014 breakout campaign of the Islamic State (IS) in Iraq and Syria, IS affiliates have proliferated across the African continent. Given the consistent failure of military campaigns against violent extremist groups (VEGs), policymakers have begun to explore the use of alternative tools like environmental peacebuilding to address the root causes of these conflicts. This paper discusses trends in violent extremism in Africa; highlights the relationship between the environment, conflict, and peacebuilding; and assesses the utility of employing environmental peacebuilding frameworks to combat the Allied Democratic Forces (ADF), an IS affiliate in the Eastern Democratic Republic of the Congo (DRC). The author finds that while environmental peacebuilding may slow recruitment by VEGs in Africa and could reduce conflict within the DRC, it is unlikely that such strategies would effectively stop the Allied Democratic Forces because the group is not primarily reliant upon locally generated funding, does not draw voluntary recruits locally, and relies rather little on the local population for support.

Women and the Islamic State

Laurel Bloom Comiter — 2024-01-09

Women affiliated with ISIS in a voluntary role, often hailing from the West, are often presented either as passive accessories and victims or as deviant, gender-norm-defying monsters.1 In fact, women are an indispensable component of ISIS, taking up roles both as perpetrators of violence and as mothers and educators of the next generation of ISIS fighters. Through the creation of an original database, I examine the roles and experiences of ISIS-affiliated women before, during, and after their time in the organization. I make connections between individuals’ roles and experiences and highlight identifiable trends in the behavior of these women. These findings suggest that there are misunderstandings in current counterterrorism efforts and policies. The data and hypotheses presented in this study provide a foundation for future data collection efforts and for the construction of fuller accounts of the nature and determinants of the behavior of this important category of women.

U.S. Engagement and the Conditions for China's Socialization into the Liberal International Order

Yue Lu — 2024-01-09

A long-standing narrative in U.S. engagement policy toward China draws a tacit causal link between engagement and Beijing’s socialization into the U.S.-led liberal international order (LIO).1 Amid recent decreasing faith in engagement, this article constructs a framework tailored to explaining the conditions for China’s state socialization into the hegemonic order when the U.S. tries to engage China. It contends that the socialization of a still-rising China is an arduous cause that hinges on four conditions: the accommodation of China’s interests in international institutions, the existence of a problematic situation, status recognition, and the absence of obstacles to domestic internalization. To test the socialization premise, the article applies the framework to a theoretically most-likely case of China’s socialization—U.S. post-2009 engagement with China on global climate governance. It finds that despite some ambiguous signs of state socialization, China’s adoption of the U.S.-promoted co-leader identity was primarily rooted in domestic changes in interest perception and was thwarted by domestic obstacles—economic development and energy security—to the internalization of the idea of Chinese climate leadership.