Ten Years After: Democratisation and Security Challenges in South East Europe

Austrian National Defence Academy

2001

Kosovo Crisis: Lessons Learnt in Crisis Management
Marina Mitrevska

Abstract

Challenges and dangers that the modern international community encounters have smaller specific weight regarding to cataclysmic scenarios from the period of the Cold War. However, given in such scale, they represent an alternative for insecurity. Ethnic conflicts, radical nationalism and internal conflicts represent the scenario of the modern international scene, staged by the new relations and the old suffocated contents. ¹ Apart from this, modern international relations have acquired new attributes which emerged as a result of the unequal economic development, demographic expansion, and so on. ² Namely, the new challenges and temptations only confirm the fact that international relations are vitally changing and the international community has to bare that in mind. Complex crises do not recognise national borders and unless they are managed properly they could influence the security and stability on macro and micro level. In that course precisely is focused the question on how to explain in such conditions the division of “stability zone” and “crisis zones”? ³ Perhaps as a substitute for the division “East — West”? Although we cannot perceive them as equal generators ofinstability, there is still a strong prerequisite that the “crisis zones” will represent a challenge. This emphasises the fact that endangering the peace and the security has modified the itinerary or its priority. That means that within the relation peace–conflict–crises–war little serious interference has occurred. That is why the crisis concept established within a wider context of the cycle depends on the strategy determination when handling crises, which on the other hand is accepted as an assumption that the contingency concept, which is an adequate for a conflict phase, is a rational approach.

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Endnotes

Note 1: Vukadinovic R., Medunarodni odnosi, (Zagreb: Fakultet politickih znanosti, 1995): 89.   Back.

Note 2: McNamara R.S., The Changing Nature of Global Security and its Impact on South Asia, (Washington DC: Washington Council on Non Proliferation, 1992): 3-4.   Back.

Note 3: Singer M. and Widawsky A., The Real World Order: Zones of Peace Zones of Turmoil, (New York & New Jersey, 1993): 3.   Back.