Managing crises

In the past decade, NATO has devoted increasing time and resources to crisis management. Indeed, the Alliance is currently running three crisis-management operations in the former Yugoslavia as well as supporting the US-led war on terrorism. Moreover, as NATO improves its military capabilities, this sphere of activity appears set to expand. This issue of NATO Review, which is entitled 'Managing crises' and published on the eve of the Prague Summit, November 2002, examines this aspect of the Alliance's work. In the first of four articles devoted to this theme, Dana H. Allin of the International Institute for Strategic Studies in London analyses the evolution of attitudes to intervention since the end of the Cold War. Mihai Carp of NATO's Political Affairs Division examines the Alliance's groundbreaking efforts to head off conflict in Southern Serbia and the former Yugoslav Republic of Macedonia. Mark Laity, NATO's deputy spokesman, analyses the media policy that underpinned much of that work. And John Kriendler of the George C. Marshall European Center for Security Studies in Garmisch-Partenkirchen, Germany, considers the importance of early warning in crisis management, the Alliance's approach to early warning and NATO's new Intelligence Warning System.

Elsewhere, in the debate, Steven Everts, a senior research fellow of the London-based Centre for European Reform and director of its transatlantic programme, and Gary Schmitt, executive director of the Project for the New American Century in Washington DC, discuss whether military power is still the key to international security. Michael Rühle, head of policy planning and speech writing in NATO's Political Affairs Division, reviews two must-read accounts of the Alliance's past, present and future. In an interview, Kristin Krohn Devold, Norway's defence minister, explains security thinking in her country. Features cover an initiative to stimulate informal dialogue between the European Union and NATO and the award of the first NATO Science Partnership prize. And Gareth Evans, a co-chair of the International Commission on Intervention and State Sovereignty and former foreign minister of Australia, examines how and when states and intergovernmental organisations should intervene on humanitarian grounds. Charts illustrating the largest survey of public attitudes in Europe and the United States to a range of security issues, carried out under the auspices of the German Marshall Fund of the United States and the Chicago Council on Foreign Relations, round out the edition.