APCMCOE Newsletter
Friday November 25, 2011
Welcome
Welcome to the final APCMCOE Newsletter for 2011. It's been quite the year for the Centre with new people, busy projects and, just recently, our 3rd birthday.
We hope the stories below provide you with some interesting reading.
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Building tomorrow’s civil-military capabilities – CMIS wraps up for another year
The Asia Pacific Civil-Military Centre of Excellence held its annual Civil-Military Interaction Seminar (CMIS) in Sydney, 7-10 November 2011.
With beautiful Sydney Harbour and its iconic bridge as a backdrop, participants representing 21 countries, the United Nations and the African Union were treated to presentations and case studies from a range of Australian and international speakers.
One session that attracted considerable interest was on how social media technologies can be used in international responses to natural disasters, armed conflict and complex emergencies.
Read more...
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Centre launches new documentary on the topic of Protection of Civilians
The Australian Government, in partnership with the United Nations Institute for Training and Research (UNITAR), has produced a new documentary on the Protection of Civilians entitled Mandated to Protect.
The documentary was launched by His Excellency, Mr Gary Quinlan, Ambassador and Permanent Representative of Australia to the United Nations, and Michael G Smith AO, Executive Director of the Centre, in New York on 3 November 2011.
Led by the Asia Pacific Civil-Military Centre of Excellence, the documentary was produced in partnership with the Department of Foreign Affairs and Trade, the Australian Agency for International Development, and UNITAR.
Read more...
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Same space – Different mandates
The Centre and the Australian Council for International Development (ACFID) have recently produced the provisional document Same Space—Different Mandates: A Guide to Australian Stakeholders in International Disaster and Conflict Response.
Developed in collaboration with the Australian Agency for International Development (AusAID), Australian Defence Force (ADF), Australian Federal Police (AFP), Australian Red Cross, and members from the Australian NGO community, Same Space—Different Mandates aims to improve the collective understanding of those involved in international natural disasters and complex emergencies.
Read more...
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Comment sought for Civil-Military Common Language Guide
The Centre has released the first draft of its Civil-Military Common Language Guide for comment.
The Guide is designed to promote a common understanding among Australia’s key responders to international disasters and conflicts, by building a common understanding of terminology across police, military, government and non-government practitioners.
It seeks to clarify commonly used civil-military terms, which are often contested, inconsistently interpreted or employed by a limited number of actors, and thus unfamiliar to many. It will be a particularly useful resource for those who are new to the civil-military sector.
Read more...
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New Civil-Military Occasional Papers – focus on Afghanistan
With the publication of the latest in the Centre’s Civil-Military Occasional Papers series, the Centre continues its contribution to the body of learning in the civil-military community. In particular, the three papers published this week look at the role of policing in a civil-military context as well as offering a snapshot of the current state of the counterinsurgency and its legal aspects in Afghanistan.
In Occasional Papers 3 and 4, Dr William Fish and Dr Beth Greener consider the complex issues surrounding international policing, including the growing convergence between the police and the military in the western developed states and the historical separation from military functions by outlining the key roles of police forces and analysing why policing was purposefully developed to differ from military structures and roles.
Read more...
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Swedish course improves approach to the protection of civilians
Representatives from Australia, Africa, the Middle East and across Europe gathered for six days from 11-17 September 2011 on the island of Sandö, approximately 400km north of Stockholm for the Folke Bernadotte Academy’s Field Strategies for Protection of Civilians Course in Sweden.
The course focused on developing personal skills and tools so that protection strategies can best be developed according to the needs of individual communities.
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Thailand tabletop exercise tests ASEAN response to disaster management
The Centre recently provided expert support to a disaster management table top exercise (TTX) in Bangkok, co-hosted by the Governments of Thailand and Vietnam from 7-9 September 2011. The exercise was the third in a series of ASEAN Member State workshops on cooperation between defence establishments and Civil Society Organisations (CSOs) in non-traditional security.
The principal aims of the TTX were to test existing regional arrangements and procedures and to exercise Thai mechanisms and plans for humanitarian assistance and disaster relief. The event also included an “academic day”, designed to update the participants on recent developments in procedures and disaster management organisations in ASEAN.
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Peace and stabilisation project
One of the Centre’s biggest programs this year is the Multiagency Peace and Stabilisation Operations Project (MAPSOP).
The MAPSOP team has conducted eight national and three international events since December 2010, each one designed to enhance Australia’s civil-military capabilities for conducting peace and stabilisation operations and to strengthen national and international civil-military relationships.
Read more...
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Peace and stabilisation operations in focus at Washington DC conference
The Asia Pacific Civil-Military Centre of Excellence partnered with the US Center for Complex Operations (CCO) in Washington, DC in September to deliver an international conference at the United States National Defense University (NDU). The conference, titled ‘Building Security Capacity’, was a key activity within the international stream of the Centre’s Multiagency Peace & Stabilisation Operations Project (MAPSOP).
The MAPSOP project manager Rebecca Shrimpton said the conference aimed at promoting better understanding of the role of security actors, including the armed services, law enforcement and civilian oversight institutions, in peace and stabilisation operations.
Read more...
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A Tale of Two Centres: US-Australia centres collaborate on Asia-Pacific region civil-military activities
Representatives from the Asia Pacific Civil-Military Centre of Excellence and the Hawaiian based Center of Excellence – Disaster Management and Humanitarian Assistance (COE-DMHA) recently came together for a week in Canberra to discuss better ways of working cooperatively to deliver civil-military activities in the Asia-Pacific region.
The Centre team led by Executive Director, Major General (retd) Michael G. Smith AO, and the COE-DMHA contingent, led by Director, Lieutenant General (retd) John F. Goodman, spent three days swapping ideas, sharing experiences and developing a cooperative agenda of activities for the next 18 months.
Apart from developing closer ties between staffs of the two agencies and identifying greater opportunities for collaboration, one of the key objectives of the workshop was the planning of a new, jointly hosted Civil-Military Interaction Course for the region.
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Civil-Military Digests
The Centre has begun publishing a regular collation of interesting reading across the civil-military affairs sector.
All Civil-Military digests are available from the Centre website.
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Finding the Centre online
In addition to our web site and this newsletter, the Centre can be found online in a number of places, where we share and contribute items of interest to our community.
You can find the Centre contributing in these places:
Tweets on Twitter
Our page on Facebook
Photos on Flickr
Video on YouTube
Publications and presentations on SlideShare
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