THE Syria crisis and Arab Spring demonstrate that a new kind of armed conflict has emerged, raising uncomfortable questions about the role of international agencies, one of the world’s leading research bodies warns in its annual survey.

Meanwhile, all five legally recognised nuclear states, including Britain, are either deploying new weapons systems or have announced plans to do so, and none of them has shown anything more than a “rhetorical willingness” to disarm, says the 2012 Yearbook of the Stockholm International Peace Research Institute (Sipri).

“While the various uprisings [of the Arab Spring] shared a number of traits, including large demonstrations, non-violent actions, the absence of single leaders and the use of central squares in major cities, they also differed in certain respects. The extent of the demands made by the protesters varied, ranging from improved economic situations to regime change, as did the level of violence,” says the report.

“The events of last year were not isolated in terms of contemporary conflict trends ... Taken together, these changes suggest that there’s a new kind of conflict environment emerging, one in which international interventions become far more difficult to carry out,” stated Dr Neil Melvin, director of Sipri’s armed conflict programme.

“Unfortunately, the global community has yet to fully grapple with the ongoing structural changes that define today’s security landscape, changes that often outpace the ability of established institutions and mechanisms to cope with them,” said the Sipri director, Bates Gill.

The report points to the tension between growing acceptance of the principle that state sovereignty is not a licence to kill — established in the UN’s 2005 General Assembly resolution on the “responsibility to protect” (R2P).

“The crucial question is whether the new geopolitics of intervention that appeared to have emerged [in 2005] is in fact sustainable, or whether, as suggested by the subsequent response to the situation in Syria, a more familiar and more cynical geopolitics will in fact reassert itself,” Gareth Evans, former Australian foreign minister and president of the International Crisis Group, says in the report. However, he described himself as an optimist, saying a “new normative commitment to civilian protection is alive and well”.

Though the US and Russia are reducing their strategic nuclear weapons arsenal as a result of the new START treaty, all five “legally recognised” nuclear weapon states — China, France, Russia, the UK and the US — are either deploying new nuclear weapon delivery systems or have announced programmes to do so, and appear determined to retain their nuclear arsenals indefinitely, says Sipri.

At the start of 2012 eight states possessed approximately 4,400 operational nuclear weapons. Nearly 2,000 of these are kept in a state of high operational alert. If all nuclear warheads are counted, these states together possess a total of approximately 19,000 nuclear weapons compared with 20,530 at the beginning of 2011.

India and Pakistan continue to develop systems capable of delivering nuclear weapons and are expanding their capacities to produce fissile material for military purposes, the report warns. Israel is widely believed to have produced plutonium for its nuclear weapons arsenal. The report adds. “Israel may [also] have produced non-strategic nuclear weapons, including artillery shells and atomic demolition munitions, but this has never been confirmed.” — The Guardian, London