Demilitarisation or demilitarization may mean the reduction of the armed forces of a state or other political entity; it is the opposite of militarisation in many respects. For instance, the demilitarisation of Northern Ireland entailed the reduction of British security and military apparatuses. Demilitarisation in this sense is usually the result of a peace treaty ending a war or a major conflict. The principle is distinguished from demobilisation, which refers to the drastic voluntary reduction in the size of a victorious army.
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In this Dossier
Demilitarization in the context of Neutral state
A neutral country is a sovereign state that is neutral towards belligerents in a specific war or holds itself as permanently neutral in all future conflicts (including avoiding entering into military alliances such as NATO, CSTO or the SCO). As a type of non-combatant status, nationals of neutral countries enjoy protection under the law of war from belligerent actions to a greater extent than other non-combatants such as enemy civilians and prisoners of war. Different countries interpret their neutrality differently: some, such as Costa Rica have demilitarized, while Switzerland holds to "armed neutrality", to deter aggression with a sizeable military, while barring itself from foreign deployment.
Not all neutral countries avoid any foreign deployment or alliances, as Austria and Ireland have active UN peacekeeping forces and a political alliance within the European Union. Sweden's traditional policy was not to participate in military alliances, with the intention of staying neutral in the case of war. Immediately before World War II, the Nordic countries stated their neutrality, but Sweden changed its position to that of non-belligerent at the start of the Winter War. Sweden would uphold its policy of neutrality until the 2022 Russian invasion of Ukraine. During the Cold War, former Yugoslavia claimed military and ideological neutrality from both the Western and Eastern Bloc, becoming a co-founder of the Non-Aligned Movement.
Demilitarization in the context of Imia
Imia (Greek: Ίμια) is a pair of small uninhabited islets in the Aegean Sea, situated between the Greek island chain of the Dodecanese and the southwestern mainland coast of Turkey. They are known in Turkey as Kardak.
Imia was the object of a military crisis and subsequent dispute over sovereignty between Greece and Turkey in 1996. The Imia dispute is part of the larger Aegean dispute, which also comprises disputes over the continental shelf, the territorial waters, the air space, the Flight Information Regions (FIR) and the demilitarization of the Aegean islands. In the aftermath of the Imia crisis, the dispute was also widened, as Turkey began to lay parallel claims to a larger number of other islets in the Aegean. These islands, some of them inhabited, are regarded as indisputably Greek by Greece but as grey zones of undetermined sovereignty by Turkey.