BONN Agreement – More Than 50 Years of Spill Response Cooperation

In 2019, the BONN Agreement celebrated 50 years of continuous cooperation in dealing with marine pollution in Europe. This makes the Bonn Agreement the oldest regional agreement in the world established by governments for jointly dealing with and responding to pollution incidents. The first “Agreement for Cooperation in Dealing with Pollution of the North Sea by Oil” was signed in 1969 by the eight states bordering the North Sea: Belgium, Denmark, Germany, France, the Netherlands, Norway, Sweden and the United Kingdom. This was shortly after the oil tanker “Torrey Canyon” broke up off Cornwall in 1967 spilling 117 000 tonnes of oil in the first major pollution disaster affecting Western Europe. In 1983 the agreement was expanded to include “other harmful substances” as well as oil and the European Union became a Contracting Party. In 1989 the agreement was amended to include aerial surveillance. In 2010, Ireland was included and in 2019, at the 50'th anniversary, a new enlargement of the geographical scope was approved by including the Bay of Biscay through Spain's accession and a new task related to the monitoring of air pollution from ships was incorporated. The area of the Bonn Agreement now covers the Greater North Sea and its approaches, comprising most of the heavy density traffic area and oil fields in Western Europe. During these 50 years, the cooperation has resulted in a number of achievements on different topics. Some of these are: - aerial surveillance and detection of marine pollution,- harmonized pollution reporting format,- common quantification of oil spills through the Bonn Agreement Oil Appearance Code,- systems for reimbursement of costs when rendering assistance as the Bonn Agreement provides for mutual assistance between Contracting Parties,- joint exercises,- information sharing on experiences and on research & development findings,- Bonn Agreement region-wide risk assessment through the BE-AWARE project. In October 2019, the agreement's 50th anniversary was celebrated and a ministerial meeting was held. This paper will give an overview of the history, the achievements and the future for the Bonn Agreement.

AFGHANISTAN IN THE IMMEDIATE POST-TRAUMA CASE INVESTIGATING POLITICAL DEVELOPMENTS IN THE YEARS (2002-2008)

Afghanistan has been ruled under informal arrangements of power for most of its life. Due to conventional politics, political institutions have been less prioritized over time. Historically, Afghanistan has been short of a sound and secured political environment owing to multitudes of problems: geostrategic location, ethnic disorder, the conservative-liberal ideological gap, the sectarian divide, its tribal structure, etc. Afghan code of political conduct is based on longstanding traditions under which matters of local and even national importance are settled by the Jirga (local council) following those rules. The Head of a tribe is always cherished and his words carry weight. The Jirga system still prevails in Afghanistan and the Pashtun belt of Pakistan. Despite being an archaic scheme, the Jirga system has its merits in Afghan’s social and political lives as it decides their day-to-day matters within due space of time, and its assessments are valued because of the tribal social code. In the current political developments following the Bonn Agreement, 2001, the informal provisions of power have been given a legal role as the Loya Jirga approved the Constitution and played an active part in the Interim and Transitional Afghan setups. This research paper presents a short history of power patterns in Afghanistan and studies its current political system at national and sub-national levels.

An Enduring Lesson from the History of Peacemaking in Afghanistan

Peace processes offer opportune moments for social and political transformation in embattled nations. There is no perfect formula or peace recipe. As per the existing literature, the ‘ripeness’ of circumstances and timing of a peace process and pertinence of the ‘substance’ of settlements to the root causes of conflict are the main components of a viable peace agreement. In the past 30 years, Afghanistan experienced two unsuccessful peacemaking episodes: first after the Soviet withdrawal in 1989 and the second following the removal of the Taliban in 2001. While failure of the former is primarily attributed to the complexities of circumstance at the time, ineptness of the latter is linked to the primacy of imposed deadlines over inclusive consultations and inadequacy of contents of the Bonn Agreement. By briefly examining substantive characteristics of peacemaking processes in the context of Najibullah’s National Reconciliation Policy and the Bonn process, this article argues that meaningful structural change in favour of an inclusive and participatory political system and institutionalization of a regional balance of interests in foreign relations remain central to enduring peace in Afghanistan.

Legitimizing the De Facto Decentralized Afghan Government

Following the dissolution of the Taliban administration in 2001, the Bonn Agreement laid a roadmap for the reconstruction of the Afghan state. The product of this agreement was the 2004 constitution that established Afghanistan as a unitary republic. The unitary state is not a viable model for Afghanistan, which has never in its history been ruled by a centralized government. There has been a significant academic debate surrounding federalism as a solution to this problem, however there is a lack of stability in the periphery of the state to support even this. Further, a significant portion of the debate misidentifies federalism as a proposed solution to an overstated ethnic problem. To build government control, recognizing and legitimizing the valuable role that tribal and strongman provincial administrations fill in Afghanistan is the correct solution for the ongoing state-building project in the country. By formally relinquishing aspects of sovereignty such as the monopoly on violence and limited legislation, Afghanistan’s periphery administrations will be better able to exert some degree of governmental control to facilitate progress until the state can handle deeper reform.

Part V Case Studies, 44 Afghanistan

This chapter turns to the case study of Afghanistan. It first examines the Bonn Agreement that marked the start of the creation of the new Afghan State, and the status and development of the multinational military organization that was created to provide the security conditions conducive to the new State taking root, the International Security Assistance Force (ISAF). Next, this chapter looks at the status and development of the parallel military mission undertaken by the US-led coalition, known as Operation Enduring Freedom (OEF), to fight against al-Qaeda. Because of the way in which the missions of ISAF and OEF became blurred together in very real senses as the war in Afghanistan wore on, this chapter considers the challenges posed to the effective operation of the two status-of-forces agreement (SOFA) regimes. It also looks at how these challenges impacted and informed the new agreements that became effective in 2015.

Peace and Exclusion

What does a “responsible end” to war in Afghanistan mean? As a panacea for international disengagement, the Afghanistan Peace and Reintegration Program (APRP) was launched in 2010. After the 2001 intervention, the Bonn Agreement laid the foundations for a new Afghan state. Its exclusion of the Taliban signaled continuing conflict. The APRP is ostensibly designed to address this and other exclusions and foster an “inclusive peace.” This article probes the peace process at the macro-, meso-, and micro levels within the context of ongoing war. It examines the abandonment and marginalization experienced by women, segments of the insurgency, civil society and human rights groups as well as fragile communities undergoing reintegration. I argue that these exclusions are facilitated by a coalescence of interests that have reinforced the cycle of war and deepened exclusion. Consequently, the peace process has become incapable of offering real solutions, instead functioning as a pretext for excluding already marginalized groups.

Contemporary Afghanistan Outlook: Between Counterinsurgency and Search of the Social Contract

This article is based on reassessment of the contemporary results of counterinsurgency and nation-building in Afghanistan. Nation-building initiatives have been started in the country since the Bonn agreement in December 2001. This agreement brought into reality the current governing system of Afghanistan. Counterinsurgency in Afghanistan has been initiated in full mode since 2009 after a sound success on Iraqi frontier. However, each operational area is bringing its own specifics into play. The same was with Afghanistan. The newly established constitutional presidential republic has faced with inheritance of unresolved sensitive ethnical identity issues, confrontation between different groups for self-governing authority and security of essential resources. These preconditions have brought a diversified and even confrontational social environment into reality. Prolonged military operations in Afghanistan could show that diversified social environment and misevaluated cultural heritage has led to misleading assumptions that centralized presidential governing system could become an effective ruling model for post-Taliban country. One of the key notions of this article is that historical lessons taught by long years of colonialist rule in Afghanistan has not been learned and misevaluation of diversified and confrontational local entities has brought another historical lesson of Afghan tribal resistance. More than that, diversified and confrontational entities of Afghanistan have not been a favorable subject for possible social contract. The term social contract was introduced as explanatory method of national political behavior and systemic structure by Jean Jacques Rousseau in 18th century Europe. Afghan society has become the subject to this model of political philosophy only as counterinsurgency campaign gained full capabilities around 2009. Reassessment of long term nation building efforts in this article is based on evaluation of Afghan social contract’s progress.

ESTIMATION OF THE THICKNESS AND EMULSION RATE OF OIL SPILLED AT SEA USING HYPERSPECTRAL REMOTE SENSING IMAGERY IN THE SWIR DOMAIN

The thickness and the emulsion rate of an oil spill are two key parameters allowing to design a tailored response to an oil discharge. If estimated on per pixel basis at a high spatial resolution, the estimation of the oil thickness allows the volume of pollutant to be estimated, and that volume is needed in order to evaluate the magnitude of the pollution, and to determine the most adapted recovering means to use. The estimation of the spatial distribution of the thicknesses also allows the guidance of the recovering means at sea. The emulsion rate can guide the strategy to adopt in order to deal with an offshore oil spill: efficiency of dispersants is for example not identical on a pure oil or on an emulsion. Moreover, the thickness and emulsion rate allow the amount of the oil that has been discharged to be estimated. It appears that the shape of the reflectance spectrum of oil in the SWIR range (1000–2500nm) varies according to the emulsion rate and to the layer thickness. That shape still varies when the oil layer reaches a few millimetres, which is not the case in the visible range (400–700nm), where the spectral variation saturates around 200 μm (the upper limit of the Bonn agreement oil appearance code). In that context, hyperspectral imagery in the SWIR range shows a high potential to describe and characterize oil spills. Previous methods which intend to estimate those two parameters are based on the use of a spectral library. In that paper, we will present a method based on the inversion of a simple radiative transfer model in the oil layer. We will show that the proposed method is robust against another parameter that affects the reflectance spectrum: the size of water droplets in the emulsion. The method shows relevant results using measurements made in laboratory, equivalent to the ones obtained using methods based on the use of a spectral library. The method has the advantage to release the need of a spectral library, and to provide maps of thickness and emulsion rate values per pixel. The maps obtained are not composed of regions of thickness ranges, such as the ones obtained using discretized levels of measurements in the spectral library, or maps made from visual observations following the Bonn agreement oil appearance code.