The Duck of Minerva

Sunday, November 22, 2009

Praying for the end of time

President Obama has been receiving a fair amount of heat lately for "dithering" about U.S. policy towards Afghanistan. After all, the administration has been thinking through its Afghan policy since late summer. Critics in the opposition party say the President's decision is "long overdue" and that the "strategy review" needs to move from the "evaluation phase" to the "execution phase" ASAP.

Administration officials have long said that the problem is made complicated by the signal America will send to Afghanistan if it too readily approves a troop increase. Ten days ago, Defense Secretary Robert Gates framed the question in this manner: "How do we signal resolve, and at the same time, signal to the Afghans and the American people that this is not open-ended?"

In some ways, this bilateral relationship between the U.S. and Afghanistan is almost as complex as a summer romance that just won't end -- or blossom.

In April 2002, then-President George W. Bush famously made some very big promises to new-love Afghanistan:

We know that true peace will only be achieved when we give the Afghan people the means to achieve their own aspirations. Peace -- peace will be achieved by helping Afghanistan develop its own stable government. Peace will be achieved by helping Afghanistan train and develop its own national army. And peace will be achieved through an education system for boys and girls which works.

We're working hard in Afghanistan. We're clearing minefields. We're rebuilding roads. We're improving medical care. And we will work to help Afghanistan to develop an economy that can feed its people without feeding the world's demand for drugs.

And we help the Afghan people recover from the Taliban rule....By helping to build an Afghanistan that is free from this evil and is a better place in which to live, we are working in the best traditions of George Marshall.

Especially given these promises, the Obama administration's "dithering" must be upsetting leaders in Kabul (and not merely in the Republican caucus in Washington).

Here's a good rule of thumb: if you highly value an interpersonal relationship, never pause long if your partner asks "Do you love me?"

The title of this post alludes to a classic rock song by the performer Meatloaf, "Paradise by the Dashboard Lights." Most readers are probably familiar with the song lyrics, so there's no need to recount the long story here. Suffice to say that an aroused young man in a heated moment is abruptly stalled by his partner's questions -- his responses will be measured against clear prerequisites:

Do you love me?
Will you love me forever?
Do you need me?
Will you never leave me?
Will you make me so happy for the rest of my life?

If you don't know how that decision turned out, see this video.

Let's hope Obama's "dithering" leads to better policy.

Seeking Grawemeyer Nominations: 2011 Prize

Annually, the University of Louisville awards significant cash prizes in five fields: Music Composition, Religion, Education, Psychology, and World Order.

For about 15 years, I have directed the administration of the Grawemeyer Award for Ideas Improving World Order. Basically, I chair the initial review committee that is housed within the Department of Political Science.

The Award's basic purpose is described on our webpage:

Submissions will be judged according to originality, feasibility and potential impact, not by the cumulative record of the nominee. They may address a wide range of global concerns including foreign policy and its formation; the conduct of international relations or world politics; global economic issues, such as world trade and investment; resolution of regional, ethnic or racial conflicts; the proliferation of destructive technologies; global cooperation on environmental protection or other important issues; international law and organization; any combination or particular aspects of these, or any other suitable idea which could at least incrementally lead to a more just and peaceful world order.

The webpage also includes some useful information about the nomination and selection processes and material about past winners and their prize-winning works.

The 2010 prize will be announced on December 1 and I typically blog about the winner(s) here at the Duck.

The Department is accepting nominations for the 2011 competition until Thursday, January 15, 2010.

The initial submission process is relatively simple: Nominators must complete a very short form (available as a pdf file on the webpage) and submit a nomination letter. We especially encourage nominations from individual scholars and policy-makers, though we most frequently receive them from publishers. Self-nomination is permitted, though all nominators should note that reviewers will see these letters.

Completed 2011 files are due from nominees by February 16, 2010. We will need four copies of the nominated work, though publishers typically provide them for nominated books.

All relevant ideas published or publicly presented in any work between January 2005 and December 2009 are potentially eligible. Previously submitted nominations may be resubmitted.

For further information, just visit the website or contact me or my assistant, Ms. Arlene Brannon.

Simulations in IR Pedagogy

I won't be blogging much until I get back from the west coast, where I've gone this week to assist my colleague Alex Montgomery with his nuclear diplomacy simulation at Reed College. As luck would have it, this issue of International Studies Perspectives has a useful article on simulations as a pedagogical tool in IR classes.

This article reflects some experiences in teaching International Relations (IR) by using films to supplement the use of simulations and role play scenarios. The authors have used simulations and role play scenarios in order to teach complex issues and theories, and to engage the interest of students. By using films to supplement the use of simulations in classrooms, it is suggested that students become more active in their own learning. A number of ways in which simulations and role play can be used in teaching are established here alongside an array of films that can be shown to students to complement such teaching approaches. The use of films to teach IR theory is also listed. It is concluded that the use of simulations, role play, and films in teaching IR can aid student learning especially in terms of IR theory.

Useful reading, along with some scenarios you could easily deploy on your students to get them engaged.

Visualizing War

Two topics that are right up my alley: international conflict and data visualization. Put the two together, and you have a truly thought provoking piece of work.

David McCandless is a "visual journalist" who specializes in visualizing data across numerous subjects. In his latest work for The Guardian's Data Blog, David visualize a ton of data regarding troop deaths and injuries, size of forces by country, as well as the civilian toll in Afghanistan.

Like all good visualizers, David tells a story with his infographics, putting many issues in perspective (likely creating some "oh, I didn't realize" moments for readers) through the use of relational data. For example, David compares absolute measures of troop fatalities by country to fatalities as a percentage of total troops deployed. What one sees is that while the US has lost the most troops by far, the Canadians have lost the most troops as a percentage of those they have deployed:

The piece is chock full of infographics like this. One issue I have with David's analysis comes less from the data (and it's visualization), and more with his commentary. One infographic depicts the number of troops in Afghanistan by country or organization (e.g. NATO, etc). David includes a bubble for private security contractors (PSC), which I think is great as it is a key statistic that we should be taking into account. However, while his own data shows that only 3,000 of these contractors are armed he makes the comment that "that's a huge amount of hired guns". Now David may just be using the common phrase of 'hired gun' to refer to all PSCs, but when talking about PSCs such a phrase implies something very specific (i.e. contractors that carry and use weapons in theater--not just logistical support, etc). If he isn't just using the phrase in the generic sense then the claim is overblown. By his own numbers, armed PSCs only make up a little over 1% of the entire fighting force in Afghanistan (3,000 out of 292,486). I am not sure 1% constitutes a lot of hired guns.

The best part about how David operates is that he provides links to all his data (including what was used for this article) via Google Docs. This is a great practice, one that encourages readers to check his work, look for additional patterns in the data, and ensures that any errors in presentation or interpretation can be brought to light and discussed. (David has altered other infographics based on reader feedback.) I wish more people would adopt the practice.

In any event, be sure to check out David's blog and other work.

[Cross-posted at bill | petti]

Tallying Collateral Damage

Earlier I blogged about the importance and absence of data disaggregating unintentional civilian deaths from total civilian deaths in wars worldwide. To get a preliminary handle on this question, I examined a dataset on civilian victimization developed by Alexander Downes at Duke University for his study on why governments target civilians in war. His dataset includes 100 interstate wars and runs from 1823-2003. It includes low, medium and high estimates for the number of civilian deaths for each party in each conflict, based on available secondary sources. It also includes a separate binary variable for whether there is evidence that governments targeted civilians directly. His not uncontroversial methodological appendices are here. Wars are coded as including evidence of intentional civilian victimization if hostilities included indiscriminate bombardment of urban areas, starvation blockades or sieges, massacres or forced relocation. Civilian deaths in wars not using these techniques can be roughly assumed to be unintentional, or "collateral damage."*

So are unintentional civilian deaths trending up or down in absolute terms and / or as a percentage of all civilian deaths? This analysis - which is a rough first cut, mind you - suggests that collateral damage rather than war crimes may now constitute the majority of civilian deaths in international wars worldwide, and that the total number of collateral damage deaths is 20 times higher than at the turn of the last century.

The ratio of collateral damage victims to war crimes victims has dramatically increased since the end of the Cold War. According to Downes' dataset, between 1823 and 1900, unintentional deaths constituted 17% of all deaths in war. Since 1990, that number has risen to 59%.

In other words, the majority of civilian deaths since 1990s have not been war crimes but have been perfectly legal "accidental" killings. Of course this could partly be a result of a decrease in direct targeting of civilians over time, which would be a good thing.

But collateral damage is not only increasing as a percentage of all civilian deaths.
The number of collateral damage victims is also increasing over time in absolute terms. Between 1823 and 1900, 84 civilians per year on average were the victims of collateral damage. Since 1990, the number is 1688 per year - a twenty-fold increase.

So it's not just a question of collateral damage staying constant while war crimes drop. According to this data, at least, collateral damage is actually taking many more lives than ever before - despite purported increases in precision munitions.

What does this all mean? First, because this cut at the numbers is so rudimentary and so based on data designed to track actual civilian victimization rather than collateral damage, it seems crucial to gather some genuine data on the actual problem. Human rights and humanitarian law organizations should launch cross-national studies aimed at determining the actual numbers. They should also regularly disaggregate their civilian casualty data into intentional v. unintentional in their reporting.

But if these numbers are anywhere close to correct (and I suspect if anything they are conservative) this analysis suggests an urgent need for a rethinking the laws of war designed to protect civilians. In the 1970s, when the [added: Additional Protocols to the] Geneva Conventions were hashed out, a key concern of governments' was to protect civilians from intentional attack. War crimes are dropping in part because international laws against targeting civilians are working. Collateral damage is increasing in part because of the absence of such clear-cut rules. It's time for this to change.
___________________
*It's a crude measure because in any given conflict, some civilians may be targeted directly and others may be "collateral damage;" but collateral damage counts here show up only for wars in which there was not also intentional civilian victimization. The data is also limited to interstate wars. But assuming Downes' data is more or less accurate, we can derive a very conservative set of collateral damage numbers by tallying all civilian deaths for each war in which the state killing civilians was coded as not having done so intentionally. (I used the mid-level estimates in the dataset).

Not getting enough of real war?

Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 2 has just been released. According to the BBC:

Analysts believe the game could sell as many as 5m units globally on its first day.

It is the sixth installment in the Call of Duty series and gives players the chance to be a member of a military strike force that takes on a Russian ultra-nationalist terrorist group.

It sees the combat team traveling to Russia, Afghanistan, Kazakhstan, Brazil and into orbit, in an attempt to thwart the terrorists.

I haven't seen it yet, but apparently one level has the player joining in a massacre of civilians at an airport. I'm not sure how to read the idea that the developers thought it appropriate to include participating in war crimes as part of the experience.

This level and intensity of violence has led to public feud between two British MPs -- one a critic and the other a defender of gaming. The defender is now taking to Facebook to defend Modern Warfare 2 and the gaming industry.

All of which should help sales....

Syria updates

Back in fall 2007 and spring 2008, former Duck blogger Peter Howard was carefully following reports about the apparent Israeli attack on an alleged Syrian nuclear facility of some sort. I just linked Peter's last post on the event, from April 2008, and to a Duck search result that should unearth his entire series of posts. The Israel target was quite mysterious and the rumors associated with the attack far outnumbered the facts.

The German periodical Der Speigel has a lengthy story on-line dated 2 November that attempts to tell the tale.

According to Erich Follath and Holger Stark, Israel's "Operation Orchard" destroyed a secret nuclear reactor -- perhaps linked to Iran's nuclear program. However, that allegation is not stopping the Obama administration from trying to improve relations with the Syrian regime (which is apparently reducing its ties to Iran).

The world has changed a lot since 2003 when the neocons were saying "on to Syria" in the wake of the initial successes in Iraq. Now, former AIPAC executive director Tom Dine is working for a group trying to improve US-Syrian relations!

Finally, in a new twist, Syrian President Bashar Assad is reportedly thinking about the Gadhafi pathway towards international respectability: renounce a failed WMD program.

Assad has been considering taking a sensational political step. He is believed to have suggested to contacts in Pyongyang that he is considering the disclosure of his "national" nuclear program, but without divulging any details of cooperation with his North Korean and Iranian partners. Libyan revolutionary leader Moammar Gadhafi reaped considerable benefits from the international community after a similar "confession" about his country's nuclear program.

Peter, if you are reading, I hope you enjoy the new turns in the tale.

How Many of War's Civilian Casualties are "Collateral Damage"?

This is an important question from a legal and humanitarian perspective.

In legal terms, targeting civilians is a war crime. Accidentally killing or maiming them in the pursuit of legitimate military objectives is, well, just too bad. So in judging government's records of compliance with the law, one needs to measure the difference.

There are policy ramifications to such measurements as well. Over time, atrocities against civilians seem to be falling. But at the same time, some governments seem more complacent than ever about accidental deaths. The assumption behind the wiggle room in the law is that if countries do their best not to hit civilians, then collateral damage will always be the least of the problem for civilian populations. And perhaps this was true in earlier times. But what if in fact the majority of civilian deaths worldwide now come from these "accidents of war"? If so, this would suggest that the laws of war are woefully outdated - that even if fully implemented they do not, in fact, do enough to protect civilians. In that case, humanitarian organizations really should be in an uproar.

So what percentage of total civilian deaths are "collateral damage" and is this percentage trending up or down over time? I've begun investigating the answer as part of my current book project, and as far as I can tell, no one really knows. Human rights reporting generally doesn't distinguish intentional from unintentional deaths, treating all civilian casualties as the tragedies that they are. Neither do academic tools such as the Dirty War Index or various datasets on conflict fatalities in general or civilian victimization. Even databases that count casualties for specific wars, like the Iraq Body Count, tend to break down the data into the type incident (suicide bombing v. shooting) rather than the intent of the perpetrator. And if a comprehensive study exists tracking unintentional civilian deaths worldwide, I haven't heard of it.

So if any of you has, please let me know.

Pakistan's Bigger Picture

Terrorist bombings. Government push-back. Nuclear brinkmanship. Drone attacks.

The security situation in Pakistan has become so synonymous with mayhem, violence and the threat of state collapse that the Human Security Report Project has just launched a new blog, the Pakistan Conflict Monitor.

In the context of those developments, the thriving civil society, democratic sentiment and rule of law in many parts of Pakistan are easy to forget. Matt Barlow writes at Current Intelligence about why we should pay as much attention to fashion shows in Karachi as to clashes in Waziristan, in order to grasp the complexity of Pakistan's changing times.

"Freedom Fries" A Threat to National Security

When I make the connection between health and national security in my classes, we usually talk about pandemics or bio-warfare. But check this out: a new study from the Army Times tells us that unhealthy diets also drastically reduce America's military readiness.

Turns out 35% of young Americans between the ages of 18-24 are unfit to serve in the military because they're too fat, up from 6% 20 years ago. Noah Schactman has more.

Is this any surprise, really?

Perhaps the US government should declare a global war on cholesterol in the name of national security. Only instead of using unmanned drones to target those freedom-hating global corporations who market high-fat meals to our kids, perhaps DHS could just team up with USDA to get fresh fruits and vegetables into our public schools, and pop / candy machines (and fast-food propaganda) out. Updating the USDA's definition of "junk food" would be a start. Clearly, the safety of our shores depends on it!

Step Aside Blackwater/XE Services...

The "market" seems to be working in some sectors in Iraq and Afghanistan. New private security firms are popping up everywhere. Ten thousand Ugandans have gone to work as security guards in Iraq in the past two years. Now many are looking for work in Afghanistan. From the BBC:

Seth Katerema Mwesigye, an instructor at Watertight, says the money has made him wealthy by Ugandan standards.

"I was a student at Makerere university, but when I left, I did not have land. When I came back, I bought land and cows. All that money came from Iraq."

Mr Masiko says that Iraq has proved to be a lucrative opportunity for security firms and their Ugandan recruits.

But he says the company now needs to stay ahead of the increasing competition in the security sector and look for opportunities in new places.

"More companies are coming in and they are ready to recruit for much less than we are offering which is $700 or $1,000 (£600) per month," he says.

"Also you realise that other countries are coming into the market on the other side.
Originally Kenyans were not doing security work but today, there are more than 500 of them in Iraq and they work for as little as $400 per month.

"So we are facing competition.

"But all eyes are now on Afghanistan. We hope that as it opens we are going to get more business there," he says.

This is the future that Deborah Avant began warning about nearly a decade ago when she began work on The Market Force: The Consequences of Privatizing Security. It's still the best read on the topic.

I Am Shocked, Shocked To Learn That Human Rights Reporting is Political

James Ron and Howard Ramos have a piece in Foreign Policy on how Human Rights Watch and Amnesty International select countries to criticize. Especially, they talk about how media coverage drives human rights reporting:

Human rights groups are partly true to their mission, since they report more on countries with more human rights problems...Amnesty and Human Rights Watch also seek visibility and impact, however... Like any advocacy organization concerned with real-world effects, the watchdogs feel compelled to respond to media interest. Supply rises with demand; the more journalists who ask about a country, the more information watchdogs will supply.

...This, for better or for worse, is the way the news game is played. The media report on issues or countries it thinks readers care about, and advocacy groups of all stripes respond in kind, creating the virtuous (or vicious) cycles that drive public attention.

Hmmm... well, the actual study they are describing in their article is a bit more nuanced. In the scholarly version, media coverage is only one of several factors explaining reporting patterns, including whether an organization has previously reported on the same topic; or how powerful the target of influence is. But then again, Ron and Ramos are writing for a beltway journal now, so ~~nuance be damned~~ they can be forgiven for a little simplifying.

Still, the media-watchdog relationship may be over-determined in this account. Surely it goes both ways: Human Rights Watch and Amnesty do not just follow the news, they create it with their reports. Consider Darfur, a festering civil war which suddenly became politically interesting early in 2004. The first media report on Darfur occurred directly as a result of the pioneer journalist having read an Amnesty International report on Darfur published six months earlier.

Third, it will be interesting to see if this model, to the extent it is valid, holds true for thematic human rights issues rather than country-reporting. I don't have statistical tests to show you (not yet anyway), but I can think of lots of counter-examples to the argument that media attention drives watchdog attention on thematic issues. (Journalists loves "robot menace" stories, but so far these organizations have not gone there.)

Regarding the alleged viscious/virtuous circle, Ron and Ramos go on:

Whether this is this a good or a bad thing depends on your ethic of moral engagement. If you believe in Quixotic struggles and think watchdogs should swim valiantly against the tide, you'll castigate Human Rights Watch and Amnesty for investing more resources, time, and energy on countries already in the news. 'What about Niger?' you'll ask. And if you're young and rebellious, you might even mutter something nasty about corporate sellouts under your breath.

But if you believe an advocacy group's highest purpose is to make a difference, you'll support the strategy of focusing on targets of opportunity. You'll also think that investing scarce activist resources in low-interest struggles should be done sparingly, lest the few watchdogs we have go bankrupt in pursuit of lost causes.

Nicely articulated. Then again:

1) Most of the mudslinging about Amnesty comes from the young and rebellious? Really? To me it seemed more like the old, cranky and conservative.

2)Amnesty and HRW aren't "the few watchdogs" we have; they are simply the most visible and well-networked - see this paper by Amanda Murdie and her collaborators.

3) I worry about the reification of "low-interest struggles" in this piece. Low interest to whom? Not those in Niger. And not inevitably. Darfur too was once an ignored crisis.

So a really interesting question is what role human rights organizations can and do play in generating "interest" - in advancing the human rights agenda - in the absence of media attention; and why they choose to play that role sometimes and not others.

It's a minus-sum game

The superficiality in the debate on Afghanistan is getting downright absurd. Last week, David Brooks claimed the problem was Obama's "determination deficit." This week, the New York Times saw fit to give more space to Fred Kagan who claims that McChrystal's recommendations will work as long as the administration gets moving on the right political strategy to augment McChrystal's military strategy.

Let's face it: Afghanistan today is a minus-sum game. There is no simple set of course corrections that will not have significant downsides. David Sanger's piece yesterday and the lead editorial in Tuesday's NYTimes lay out the stark realities. The Times' editorial identifies no less than 13 different political and security imperatives that the US must get Karzai to do. The US must get Karzai to:

1. build a viable government
2. appoint a new group of ministers and provincial governors
3. reform the Interior Ministry
4. develop better leadership for the agriculture ministry
5. develop better leadership for the energy ministry
6. develop better leadership for private development agencies
7. reach out to the opposition
8. choose competent technocrats for senior jobs
9. break ties with unsavory cronies
10. prosecute General Abdul Rashid Dostum for his crimes
11. cut ties with his brother who is a big player in the opium trade
12. woo mid-level Taliban leaders in from the cold
13. develop a plan to accelerate training of the Afghan security forces.

And as if these were not challenging enough, the Times rightly notes that there is not much time to get this right.

Kagan laments that the administration has not yet developed a list of resources to help persuade Karzai to implement these types of changes. But, take another look at the Times' list -- are there any that either Karzai or the US could address effectively in the short-run and without setting in motion a series of unknowns? The last thing we need is the idea that there are simplistic solutions floating around out there waiting for the administration to find.

The External Validity of Terrorism Studies on Israel/Palestine

The growing desire to understand both the rationality of suicide terrorism, as well as test theoretical concepts empirically has generated several interesting political economic studies of terrorism. As such, a recent paper in the NBER caught my eye for several reasons. The article, entitled "The Economic Cost of Harboring Terrorism," adds to this body of work by focusing on an area that has yet to be explored. Very often the question of interest in these studies is, "how do terrorist attacks affect the target economy?" In this paper the authors reverse the question and ponder, "how do terrorist attacks affect the economic conditions of the area from whence the attack came?"

The question is a very good one, and the authors investigate it with a unique data set:

Our analysis overcomes these difficulties by relying on a detailed data set of suicide terror attacks and local economic conditions together with a unique empirical strategy. The available data set covers the universe of suicide Palestinian terrorists during the second Palestinian uprising, combined with quarterly data from the Palestinian Labor Force Survey on districts’ economic and demographic characteristics, and Israeli security measures (curfews and Israeli induced Palestinian fatalities).

The punchline...

...a successful attack causes an immediate increase of 5.3 percent in the unemployment rate of an average Palestinian district (relative to the average unemployment rate), and causes an increase of more than 20 percent in the likelihood that the district’s average wage falls in the quarter following an attack. Finally, a successful attack reduces the number of Palestinians working in Israel by 6.7 percent relative to its mean. Importantly, these economic effects persist for at least two quarters after the attack.

While I think this paper introduces a very important research paradigm, I have a concerns with some of the technical assumptions built into their analysis, and the overarching reliability of research focusing exclusively on terrorism in the Israel/Palestine conflict. With respect to the technical assumptions there is one line in the paper that struck me as very problematic: "Our empirical strategy exploits the inherit randomness in the success or failure of suicide terror attacks as a source of exogenous variation to investigate the effects of terrorism on the perpetrators economic conditions."

I find it very difficult to accept the notion that success and failure is random across suicide attacks—especially within this particular conflict. There is clearly no support for a theory that selection of suicide attack sites is random; therefore, it follows that the success of an attack would also be a function of both the selected target as well as the learning process occurring by both the attackers and defenders. There is, therefore, an expectation of high autocorrelation across success for attacks happening within a relatively small geographic area. Such difficulties highlight the general problem of external validity for terrorism studies that focus solely on the Israel/Palestine conflict.

It is not surprising that researchers often default to data on terrorist attacks from this conflict. Given the relative openness of Israel's democratic government, the media attention on Palestine, and the—unfortunate—frequency of attacks there exists are large amount of data from this conflict. As I have mentioned before, however, it is very difficult to infer causality from this data given the natural interconnectedness of the conflict dynamics. As I mentioned, there any large-N study of terrorism in this context has enormous selection problems, as terrorists learn innovate to evade the defensive tactics of the ISF, and the Israelis create new policies that may provoke and dissuade the terrorist activities. There are no other ongoing low-intensity conflicts that have issues at this level, making it difficult to draw parallels between findings from research focusing and Israel and Palestine and another other conflict.

I am curious as to others' thoughts on this issue of external validity, and welcome your comments.

Photo: Norman G. Finkelstein

Representing Children of Genocide

This week I served on a panel discussion for Jonathan Torgovnik's photo exhibit on the Rwandan genocide at the Woodrow Wilson School Bernstein Galley at Princeton University. The exhibit contained extraordinary photographs of female genocide survivors and their children born as a result of genocidal rape.

There is also a extremely evocative video available here.

I was asked to comment critically on the exhibit and the accompanying book, Intended Consequences: Rwandan Children Born of Rape. The review I presented was mixed.

On the one hand the exhibit is very much needed. Children like these are growing up in conflict zones wherever sexual violence has been endemic, and there is a dearth of attention to their needs by the international community. Torgovnik's images and accompanying narratives urge us never to forget the horrific events of 1994, and never to under-estimate the intergenerational consequences of such violence.

On the other hand I worried that the photos and accompanying texts reproduce two narratives about children of genocidal rape that draw attention away from their own human rights - something I've written about recently in a Millennium article. Though references to the lives of the children are sprinkled through Torgovnik's book, the majority of the testimonies are about the rapes themselves (situating children as products of genocide rather than as children who need help) and the struggles of the mothers in the aftermath (situating children as the source of these struggles rather than the victims of their mother's neglect, abuse and stigma from the community).

The women's needs and the earlier question of genocide prevention are extremely important and neglected topics in their own right. But conflating them with the topic of the children diverts our attention, I fear, from the child rights dimension of the issue. The book should perhaps have been titled "Intended Consequences: Rwandan Women Raising Children Born of Rape," if the focus was to be on the mothers.

A child rights view of this issue would begin from a different starting point, I argued. It would:

1) Make the children's present lives, not their mother's traumas, the frame of reference. Rather than regurgitating the troubles from which they resulted, explore how the social stigma around their origins affects their everyday social, psychological and political worlds and what this means for their human rights and healthy development. As I spoke to Torgovnik afterward, it was obvious that his interviews with the mothers had allowed him to glean considerable data on precisely these factors; I would have liked to see them more front and center in the materials that resulted from his project - or to see other projects that do take this perspective.

2) Include children born of rape as a diverse category. This project focused only on children kept by their mothers, but research has shown that many of these kids end up with other caregivers facing a different range of issues. (Admittedly, following the larger category of children born of genocidal rape is a much taller order, and as Torgovnik rightly told me afterward, you must start somewhere.)

3) To the extent possible, allow children to tell their own stories. Of course this often isn't possible for very small children, but these Rwandan kids are teenagers now and surely have thoughts about the genocide, about school, about bullying, about discrimination, about relationships with their parents and siblings that could be a basis for understanding how they are doing relative to other kids growing up after a genocide - even without raising sensitive questions about things they may or may not understand. I worry when I see adults speaking about children, with children's voices absent. Admittedly it can be extremely difficult to secure access to interviews with such children. Still, finding a way to let these children have a voice is going to be very important to really assessing their needs and strengths as we gradually move beyond treating them as an invisible population.

4) Represent children only in ways consistent with their view of themselves and not in ways that will contribute to their marginalization, and protect them from the harms that can come from participation in research studies about sensitive topics. Here my view of Torgovnik's work is mixed. His choice not to interview the children as such, while it prevented them from exercising participation rights, was meant as a form of protection. He also took efforts to make certain the photos would not be distributed in Africa, so the hope is that the images will do some good in drawing donor and humanitarian attention to the issue without contributing to further stigma within local communities. But I wonder about whether video disseminated on the Internet can be controlled in this way, and I worry about the psycho-social impacts on a Rwandan teenager who gains access to images of him or herself online, now or later in life, next to text of his mother's disparaging comments. Torgovnik's answer to this is a thoughtful one - you have to weigh the very small likelihood of that happening despite your best efforts against the good that can come to the children as a population from advocacy attention to the problem.

Which brings me to:

5) Projects such as these should serve the goal of improving protective measures for children. On this point, Torgovnik is to be strongly commended. He has used the publicity from his work to create an NGO, "Foundation Rwanda" which channels money from Northern donors to pay for school fees for these children, who otherwise cannot access free schooling through the Rwandan government's survivors' program. So his project has made a concrete positive difference in many children's lives. The money for the initiative is a direct result of donations received after the publication of his photos in the British and German press. The program is implemented confidentially, so it doesn't mark the kids as recipients of such aid in a way that might risk a backlash. As such, it also provides an example of "best practice" that bigger child protection organizations could use if they chose, to counter their claim that it's impossible to do programming for this population without doing them harm. I have written more about this path-breaking initiative here.

Ultimately, I think this project raises an important question in human rights advocacy: how to balance the dignity and participation rights of vulnerable or stigmatized populations with the desire to generate resources with which to promote their betterment. Thoughts?

Nuclear news

I'm beginning to think that a number of important people in the Obama administration must have read the Keir Lieber and Daryl Press piece in Foreign Affairs, March/April 2006, which explained burgeoning U.S. nuclear primacy, and have taken seriously the potential risks of primacy.

Just more than 10 months since George W. Bush left office, the new administration in Washington has already taken a couple of important steps to reassure other states that the U.S. is trying to reduce the risks.

Duck readers may recall that Bill blogged about the Lieber-Press thesis two and a half years ago -- and then Dan mentioned a practical application in summer 2008. Also, I typically assign the reading in my film class during the week we view "Dr. Strangelove."

Nonetheless, I should briefly explain the argument for those who are just joining the discussion. Essentially, the scholars claim that the U.S. is undermining classic notions of deterrence by pursuing nuclear first-strike capabilities versus Russia, China and other lesser nuclear powers. They point to modernization of various American weapons, as well as deterioration (or negligence) of potential rival arsenals. New burrowing weapons and missile defense technologies contribute to the problem as they magnify nuclear war-fighting capabilities.

If Leiber and Press are right, the U.S. might think the unthinkable in some future political crisis and attempt a "splendid" nuclear first strike against a weaker foe -- including Russia. Even if the U.S. is not tempted to attack, potential adversaries might believe that Washington could attack. Therefore, such a state might think it has to "use 'em or lose 'em" and would thus be tempted to launch a preemptive strike in a crisis situation. Nuclear primacy isn't good for crisis stability, even if its advocates think that it might provide the U.S. with tangible advantages.

Arguably, policy signals and moves by the Obama administration reduce the risks of nuclear primacy somewhat dramatically. Most prominently, several months ago, the President called out "clearly and with conviction, America's commitment to seek the peace and security of a world without nuclear weapons." The U.S. is a long way from eliminating weapons, of course, but embracing an abolitionist goal stands in stark contrast to the idea of nuclear primacy. Obviously, concrete followup would be needed to ameliorate the risks outlined by Leiber and Press. The signal itself may have some value.

More tangibly, this past month the administration announced that it was scrapping the Bush-era plans to deploy extensive missile defenses in Europe. While the planned system was ostensibly designed to reduce threats from Iranian nuclear missiles, most Eastern European (and Russian) foreign policy elites saw the defenses as a way to reduce Russian nuclear threats. Missile defenses might be virtually useless against a large Russian missile attack, but they arguably have much greater utility against a so-called "ragged" retaliatory capability that would exist after an American counterforce attack. Again, Lieber and Press specifically point to missile defenses as an element of American nuclear primacy and there's good evidence that Russian genuinely feared US systems.

Already, the announced new missile defense plans look far less threatening to Russia. The replacement systems have the added bonus of potentially being more effective against Iranian threats -- and the altered plan has not unduly hurt relations with Eastern European NATO partners.

I should note that the Pentagon is hastening the pace of the "bunker buster" bombs developed potentially to strike underground nuclear facilities in countries like Iran or North Korea. While this arguably moves the U.S. towards nuclear primacy, it seems to be a much greater threat to new proliferants than to the Russian arsenal.

...didn't see this coming....

The first oil contract with the Iraqi government goes to China's CNPC and they are not hiring local labor. From the BBC: "Left Behind By Iraq's Oil Rush on why the locals are not getting jobs:

There were hopes too, when the Chinese company first arrived, of an employment bonanza.

"We thought everyone will find a job," said Zahi, a village elder.

So far, they have taken on just a handful of al-Mazzagh's residents as guards.

But the CNPC says there is little more they can do for local people.

"We are sorry, but they don't have skills and they can't speak English," says a site manager who agreed to come out to talk to the BBC.

English is a job requirement?

Karadzic trial

Radovan Karadzic, the leader of wartime Bosnian Serbs, was a no show today at the opening of his trial at the International Criminal Tribunal on Yugoslavia. He's planning to defend himself against eleven counts of genocide, war crimes, crimes against humanity and other atrocities.

The reason for his no-show? One of his legal advisors told the BBC that from the scope of the trial - thought to include 1.2 million pages of evidence, numerous crime scenes and hundreds of witness - it was understandable why Mr Karadzic, who is not a trained lawyer, had stayed away.

I guess mounting a defense against genocide can be time-consuming.....

More broadly, this case illustrates the dilemmas of criminal tribunals and transitional justice. On the one hand, victims generally tend to be supportive at the beginning of such trials and look to such trials for some type of closure. But because of the cumbersome rules of evidence and cryptic rules of procedure, we can expect extensive recesses and other delays in the coming months and years -- many of which will resemble today's circus-like atmosphere where the defendant simply refuses to appear.

The fiasco of the Milosevic trial produced a growing literature critical of international criminal tribunals and skeptical of the utility of these types of prosecutions. Much of that literature evaluates these types of prosecutions through the lens of restorative justice (broadly how the procedures fail to promote reconciliation) or norms production (how these trials often fail to deter future crimes). I think these are all valid critiques. But, if we look purely through the lens of retributive justice (whereby the focus is on the punishment of a particular crime), I think trials against the likes of Milsovic, Karadzic, and the other most notorious war criminals are probably worth the candle.

Bosnia Faltering

As Charli pointed out a while ago, I co-authored a piece in the current issue of Foreign Affairs on the backward slide in Bosnia over the past three years. My co-author, Patrice McMahon, and I noted that the institutions created by the Dayton Peace Accords in 1995 successfully ended the war, but created a decentralized duel-entity political system based on ethnic quotas and divisions that are now contributing to the current crisis. For the better part of a decade, the international community poured money and resources into Bosnia's post-war state-building experience. In large part, the extensive international effort hid (and ignored) the underlying problems of ethnic segregation in many communities, pervasive corruption, and the disfunctionality of state institutions. By and large, the successful end of the war and the absence of any organized inter-ethnic violence convinced many in Washington and Brussels that Bosnia was a great success story.

However, for reasons we unpack in the article, the contradictions left unresolved at Dayton began to intensify beginning in late 2005 and we began to observe a series of disturbing trends: the re-emergence of ethnic chauvinism, heightened nationalist discourse, economic stagnation, and international missteps, complacency, and fatigue. These have contributed to an intensifying crisis this year in which there is complete political deadlock on all major issues and there is almost no functioning central governing institutions. Serb leaders are now openly talking about secession of Republika Srbska (RS) while many Bosniak leaders are calling for the effective dissolution of the RS.

Since that piece went to press in early August, things have continued to deteriorate.

In the past two weeks, Deputy Secretary of State Jim Steinberg and Carl Bildt, former High Representative for Bosnia (OHR) and current Swedish Foreign Minister (Sweden currently holds the EU presidency), initiated two separate meetings in Sarajevo to try to break the current impasse. They presented a package of reforms ostensibly designed to establish some functionality to state institutions and told the Bosnian parties that no EU or NATO membership talks would be forthcoming without the reforms. However, the latest talks on Tuesday broke down as the Serbs balked at efforts to shift some powers from the entity level to a stronger central government while Bosniak and Croat officials criticized provisions that would leave in place entity voting structures (thereby allowing the Serbs veto authority over most national legislation).

While both Bildt and Steinberg tried to put a positive spin on events, the international effort had an air of desperation to it.

Much of the problem is that the international community is divided on its overall assessment of the situation in Bosnia and in its approach to resolving the sitution.

The Europeans do not view the current situation as a crisis. For the most part, Brussels sees the political stalemate as an irritant, but ultimately its position is that nothing will move forward in Bosnia until the international community closes OHR and ends Bosnia's status as an international protectorate of sorts. As a result, Bildt's general approach to the recent talks has been to secure some small concessions from the three ethnic groups but not to shake things up fundamentally. The priority seems to close OHR as quickly as possible regardless of the potential consequences.

The Obama administration, by contrast, is much more inclined to view the situation as serious. The political stalemate not only hampers EU ascension efforts, but will also contribute to greater nationalist rhetoric, and possible return to some levels of violence. The Americans wanted to get an agreement on constitutional reform before the end of the year and the start of next year's campaigning for national elections. However, Obama's commitment to a multilateral effort led the administration to defer some of the initiative to Bildt and the EU. In the end, the compromises and constitutional reforms put forward by the US and EU representatives were too weak to garner support from any of the three major groups in Bosnia.

For my money, I applaud the renewed attention to Bosnia. However, Brussels and Washington will have almost no influence in the internal Bosnian political dynamic until they get their collective act together. The various factions in Bosnia clearly see the gaps in the US and EU positions and will not even begin serious discussions unless they see a unified international front. I don't envision a return to a full-blown war as we saw between 1992 and 1995, but I am very concerned about greater political fragmentation that could very easily spark a return of organized militia violence.

Perhaps I'm being a bit over-sensitive to that threat, but I recall the level of complacency in 1991 and early 1992 when too many folks in Brussels and Washington seemed to dismiss the idea the war could come to Sarajevo -- which, as we were told over and over was a very cosmopolitan city that had hosted the 1984 Winter Olympics, war won't happen there....

Drone Wars Kill on Average 33% Civilians

Peter Bergen and Katherine Tiedemann published an analysis at the New America Foundation a couple of days ago on civilian deaths from drone strikes in Pakistan. Key points from the callout on the site:

"The Obama administration has dramatically ratcheted up the American drone program in Pakistan. Since President Obama took office, U.S. drone strikes have killed about a half-dozen militant leaders along with hundreds of others, a quarter of whom were civilians."

Actually, the call-out understates the percentage of dead civilians: if you read the piece it looks like the study shows civilians comprise actually around 33% of those killed in drone strikes. That's a third, not a quarter, folks.

Three other quick reactions below the fold, and more once I've had the chance to crunch some numbers of my own.

1) It's good to see a measured analysis of collateral damage from drone deaths, since the numbers are wildly over or underreported by the parties to the conflict. Their Methodology is here; the Appendix with their data is here. We need some tracking like this for collateral damage at the global level. Unfortunately most studies of civilian deaths either aggregate all civilian deaths or focus on intentional deaths which are war crimes. It's hard to know what percentage of all civilian deaths and injuries are "collateral damage" of this type, but it would be useful to ignite a policy discussion about acceptable levels of damage.

2) This goes to a second point of the article: the shaky legality of drone strikes. Unlike willfully targeting civilians, accidental harm to civilians is permitted by the law, as long as it's proportionate to the military gains achieved by these strikes. So, does hitting militants in civilian areas constitute a "proportional" means of attack if you know approximately 1/3 of your victims are civilians? To me this seems unreasonably high, particularly since the drones are justified on the basis that they are more discriminate than other weapons systems. In legal terms, the problem is there's not an internationally-agreed-upon means to judge proportionality. I wonder how Duck readers would answer this question.

3) Ethics aside, a related point is the political impact of so many civilian deaths, which has made US drone policy quite unpopular in Pakistan, even among those who would prefer the Taliban be driven out of the Federally Administered Tribal Areas; and they provide militants with ready-made propaganda fodder. Bergen and Tiedemann write:

While there is little doubt that the strikes have disrupted al Qaeda's operations, the larger question is to what extent they may have increased the appeal of militant groups and undermined the Pakistani state. This is ultimately a lot more worrisome than anything that could happen in Afghanistan, given that Pakistan has dozens of nuclear weapons and is one of the world's most populous countries.

Given that President Obama has expanded this drone program in the FATAs since he took office, it's probably time we had a discussion of the costs and benefits, in human security and national security terms.

(S)Light Reading

No joke.

Radical definitions of gender

The Special Rapporteur's report on "Protecting Human Rights and Fundamental Freedoms While Countering Terrorism" is making headlines for something other than countering terrorism - for (gasp) what CNSnews.com reporter Adam Brickley calls "a radical definition of gender" which he notes the UN General Assembly has already rejected several times, and implies is dangerous to global social and political organization. Others have decried the "co-optation" of the anti-terrorist report to redefine gender, argued that the report attempts to "hamstring actual counterterrorism efforts", and an "excuse to turn a blind eye towards innocent civilian bloodshed."

So what did Special Rapporteur Martin Scheinin write that was so controversial?

In relevant part, Scheinin explains that "gender is not synonymous with women, and, instead, encompasses the social constructions
that underlie how women’s and men’s roles, functions and responsibilities, including in relation to sexual orientation and gender identity, are understood." He argues that "gender is not static; it is changeable over time and across contexts," and goes on to use that observation to justify the exploration of the gender, sex, and sexual-orientation-based impacts of counterterrorism policies.

The horror!

Certainly, the objections that I cite to the report are mostly from far-right-leaning media. That said, they contain some important implications - not only that it is acceptable to understand gender as fluid, but also that such an understanding should be understood as a security threat not only to (American) people generally but to women specifically. There's not a counterdiscourse in the media (or even on left-leaning blogs) that makes the argument that I would make: that fluid definitions of gender are not only accurate, but essential to individual and collective human security.

The Scheinin report makes the important point that sexual minorities, particularly transgendered people, are often (and often with women) disproportionately negatively affected by policies that are intended to counter terrorism. It also argues that we should understand gender subordination as a problem in counterterrorism policy, even as it takes a number of different forms and causes problems for a number of different sorts of people.

Defining gender narrowly encourages the "boxing" of people into particular roles, expecting certain behaviors of them on the basis of perceived association with sex classes. Such expectations negatively (and even violently) affect people's lives on a daily basis everywhere in global politics - in wartime rape, domestic violence, sex trafficking, labor gaps, the list goes on ... Narrow understandings of gender make people insecure. Not broadening them.

Human Rights Watch: Between Two Worlds

Human Rights Watch founder Robert Bernstein lit a fire under human rights activists yesterday with his NYTimes op-ed yesterday, criticizing the organization for its focus on Israel rather than more autocratic regimes in the Middle East.

His argument is really about organizational mandate and issue selection: faced with the need to select among the many abuses competing for intention, how should a group like Human Rights Watch prioritize its activity? Bernstein argues it should focus on closed societies, not open ones:

At Human Rights Watch, we always recognized that open, democratic societies have faults and commit abuses. But we saw that they have the ability to correct them — through vigorous public debate, an adversarial press and many other mechanisms that encourage reform.

That is why we sought to draw a sharp line between the democratic and nondemocratic worlds, in an effort to create clarity in human rights. We wanted to prevent the Soviet Union and its followers from playing a moral equivalence game with the West and to encourage liberalization by drawing attention to dissidents like Andrei Sakharov, Natan Sharansky and those in the Soviet gulag — and the millions in China’s laogai, or labor camps.

Human Rights Watch issued a rebuttal yesterday:

Human Rights Watch does not believe that the human rights records of "closed" societies are the only ones deserving scrutiny... "Open" societies and democracies commit human rights abuses, too, and Human Rights Watch has an important role to play in documenting those abuses and pressing for their end.

To some extent this debate hinges on a tricky distinction between human rights law and humanitarian law. Human rights law governs what a state may do to its own people; since the movement has typically focused on civil and political rights, it makes sense to pay greater attention to non-democracies whose very governing structures violate the rules, than flinging barbs at violations on the margins of already free, democratic societies.

But humanitarian law governs what a state may do to the enemy in time of war, and it is humanitarian law that is relevant to the reporting on Israel that Bernstein is primarily addressing, as well as much reporting on the US. With respect to IHL, this distinction (if valid at all) breaks apart entirely, as the openness of domestic institutions has little bearing on the record of countries in war: militaries of democracies are no less likely to abuse noncombatants in time of war. In fact, Alexander Downes has found they may be more likely to do so.

In short, whatever the merits of Bernstein's argument with respect to human rights (further picked apart by Michael Yglesias) it pretty much falls apart completely for IHL.

I think the tension Bernstein points to highlights HRW's tenuous position at the interstices of two separate networks - human rights and humanitarian law. As Stacie Goddard points out in a recent study, betweenness of this type positions an actor to play a useful brokering role in international society, contributing to the development of new norms and ideas, and also increasing one's influence within and between networks. However this latest PR snafu also highlights the disadvantages of being caught between two worlds with two different standards for human security agenda-setting.

Uh oh...

Could Afghanistan get any messier? I'd like to have anyone advocating McChrystal's recommendations explain to me how this would work... From the New York Times "Audit Said Likely to Show Karzai has 48 Percent of Vote":

Mr. Karzai’s campaign officials have complained about the work of the five-member panel, saying that foreigners were unfairly influencing its outcome. And Mr. Karzai himself indicated this weekend that he might oppose the results, setting off a flurry of last-minute diplomacy by western officials.

If he is shown to have won less than 50 percent of the vote, a widely anticipated conclusion, Mr. Karzai has few legal options. A runoff with his main opponent, Abdullah Abdullah, is constitutionally mandated to take place within two weeks. But Mr. Karzai could use his influence over the Independent Election Commission, the Afghan body that will certify Monday’s results, to reject the findings.

That would pitch Afghanistan into a constitutional crisis just as the Obama administration is trying to make a decision on whether to send more troops here to halt the Taliban’s advance in the country’s deepening war.

Constitutional crises really are not helpful to counterinsurgency strategies....

Update: OK, so we've all heard the news that Karzai has agreed to a run-off on November 7 and thereby averting the constitutional crisis -- for now. Everyone is abuzz about whether or not the election commission can pull together a nation-wide election run-off in less than three weeks and/or whether or not Karzai will come to some kind of power-sharing agreement with Abdullah and avoid the need for a run-off.

But, I'm fascinated by the backroom negotiations and how Senator John Kerry became the point person in the negotiations -- 20 hours over five days. One big question: Where's Holbrooke? As usual, Nukes and Spooks seems to have the best story in "Where's Dick?"

Three administration officials, who asked not to be identified by agency, told us that, while Holbrooke is laboring away hard behind the scenes, he's received direct orders from the White House to cool it publicly while Washington desperately tries to unscramble the Afghan electoral mess between President Hamid Karzai and his main challenger, Abdullah Abdullah.

"This process is so sensitive. He'd love to deal with this. The White House thinks ... it's not the time for him" to be out front, one of the officials said of Holbrooke.

Perhaps it was that reported shouting match in Kabul a few weeks back between Karzai and Holbrooke?

Instead, it's Sen. John Kerry - a man not known for shouting - who has been in the Afghan capital, dickering with Karzai in the hopes of getting him to accept a run-off, or a compromise with Abdullahx2.

I gotta say, I can't imagine Holbrooke is a very happy camper....

Youth Violence in Rio and Elsewhere

Much was made over the weekend of 14 gang deaths in Rio, host of the 2016 Olympics, forcing Brazil onto the defensive. I wonder if the same attention would have been given to the following news story from last week, had Chicago won the bid:

Community activists said the recent murder of a Fenger High School honor student exposes a problem many teens face every day: safe passage to and from school.

“I wonder how many more teens will be murdered while coming home from school,” said Leonardo D. Gilbert, a Local School Council member in the Roseland community. “All this kid was trying to do was go home and it cost him his life. If we are going to save our children from violence we must make sure children have a safe way home from school.”

According to Chicago police, Derrion Albert, 16, was murdered after school on Sept. 24 while waiting for a bus to go home. Duncan, who previously was the CEO of Chicago Public Schools, said watching the videotape beating of Albert was “terrifying, tragic and horrible for America to watch.”

Since Albert’s death there have been vigils, anti-violence marches and community meetings to discuss ways to keep children safe when traveling to school. “I am going to die anyway so until that day comes I am going to hold my own,” said William Jenkins, 16, a sophomore at Fenger. “Almost everyday I have to fight my way home because I get picked on because I live in the projects rather than the ‘hood.”

One girl explained how in 2008 she and her sister, both Fenger students, were attacked on a Chicago Transit Authority bus coming home. “They (Fenger students) busted out the back windows of the bus, then came onto to the bus and sprayed mace in our faces,” Stephanie Patterson, 17, a senior, recalled. “The bus driver did nothing. School administrators did nothing when our parents told them and the police didn’t do anything but make out a report.”

“We go to school to learn, not to see violence or worse yet murder,” she said. “After you’ve seen so many of your friends get killed it starts to affect your ability to function in school and life. That is where many of us Altgeld kids are today.”

Would be Live-Blogging the ISSS/ISAC Conference

... but for the fact that, though security specialists can theorize the millitarization of cyberspace they cannot manage to provide wireless access at their otherwise excellent academic conferences.

Will my IPhone be sufficient to the task? Stay tuned.

8:25 am PST: Geostrategy and Post-Arctic World panel, James Manicom draws interesting links between nationalism and EEZs. Offshore territorial disputes in the Arctic & Spratlys are less about resources or geopolitics and more about identity. Hm.

8:35 irony: melting arctic continental shelf both tells us climate change is real and scary and provides new and exciting ways to contribute to the problem. But only if oil hits $80 a barrel. Also ice is only at it's third thinnest this year - thickening right now not thinning.

8:43 Barry Zellen: Indigenous issues will matter resolving tensions btwn sovereignty, territory, identity and natural resource claims in a post-arctic world. Could the Inuit become the Saudi royal family of the 21st century? (Canadian?) Northwest Passage per se will become less passable therefore less relevant if warming trends continue. New trans-Polar sealanes will Solve maritime pracy problem. (? I think not... piracy hotspots will move.)

8:56 superior model 4 conf panels: speakers who know and like eachother interjecting into one anothers presentations = exciting synergistic format

10:46 compelxity State disorder and global commons panel. Frak missed the maritime piracy paper while hobnobbing. But Justin Logan has very thouhtful views on failed states. U know it will be a good talk when the speaker introduce shimself as a "bad politicAl scientist." but he only means he's challening conventional wisdom, hey Isnt that part of what we do? His key Argument, spelled out in a recent CATO paper: failed states r not the scurity threat we have thought.

11:14 Useful insight: the idea that state failure is more threatening than invasion by other states may be true and meaningless if incidence of interstate war is approaching zero. Is CATO throwing out the baby with the bathwater, though? Logan's argument seems to support a standardization of measures for state failure to derive useful insights (it’s true that if you lump together current indices and get both N Korea and Somalia as “failed states” this doesn’t tell us much). But I’m not sure “ignore people who talk about failed states” is a useful policy prescription.

11:28 Curse of the multiple commenter. Brevity, for frak’s sake!

11:37: Does the US have a national maritime policy? What is it? Where does the navy fit into grand strategy?

11:50: This conference has had a number of panels/papers invoking the global commons as a way to lump papers together, but the concept of the commons – what it means, how it’s changing, how governance is problematized in these areas - has been under-discussed on these panels.

1:37 Total caffeine saturation achieved. Must read papers on cyber-security, cluster munitions, UAVs and bioweapons gy in the next 2 hours to fulfill discussant duties. Comments to follow.

Obama's Decisionmaking Style

There has been a lot of criticism of President Obama's decision making style in the last couple of weeks. Last week, Dan Balz had this description:

The president, according to one official, came to last week's meeting with his top advisers armed with a list of questions, carefully written down in his precise handwriting, that were designed to generate a thorough airing of the choices available and the underlying analysis behind them.

So far so good by my reading.... But, apparently this approach is problematic and Balz jumps to this conclusion:

...The longer Obama waits to make this decision, the more he will be subjected to questions about whether he is tough enough and resolute enough to be commander in chief. This was the very question that dogged him throughout his campaign for president. Did this relatively young and even more inexperienced politician have the skills needed to lead the country in a time of war and terrorist threats?

…These are important differences worth debate and analysis by the experts. But for Obama, the risk is that this decision will be framed simply as a question of his fortitude -- his willingness to make a tough decision (as he seemingly did last spring in announcing an initial troop increase) and then stick to it. Not just his political opponents at home but leaders around the world will make potentially lasting judgments about the president's strength based on what happens over the next weeks or months as he weighs his options.

Now we have Thomas Ricks with this gem:

No matter what you think President Obama should decide on Afghanistan, what do you think of his decision-making process? He appeared to make a decision in March, and then indicated five months later that he hadn't, and then engaged in a very public discussion that appears to pit the White House against U.S. generals. I don't know anyone who is comfortable with how he has handled this. Do you?

Let me take a stab at this. I've spent quite a bit of time over the past fifteen years studying presidential decision making and the use of force and this is one of the best processes I've seen. A couple of points: First, in the post-World War II period most presidential decisions on the use of force have been relatively rapid decisions in response to particular crises or triggering events. Circumstances often dictated the necessity of quick decisions, e.g., Truman on Korea in June, 1950; Eisenhower on Lebanon; Reagan on Grenada; Bush 41 on Kuwait, Clinton on Kosovo. The situation in Afghanistan is an entirely different type of case. The situation is deteriorating, but there is no immediate time pressure.

Second, as a result, we should be comparing apples to apples and we have had a number of cases in which presidents have had some luxury of having time to weigh a change in strategy or resources. What is interesting about many of these cases is how quickly and casually various presidents have made decisions on troop escalation or changes in strategic objectives without thorough analysis or consideration of various counterfactuals. Truman, for example, was seduced by MacArthur's early successes and MacArthur's promises/wishful thinking that he gave the go-ahead to cross the 38th parallel without a full analysis of likely Chinese responses. Johnson's decision making processes were faulty on so many grounds.

George H.W. Bush's decision to shift from Operation Desert Shield to Operation Desert Storm was based largely on a series of individual conversations and small-group briefings with advisers than with a full-scale deliberative process. While the outcome of the Persian Gulf war may seem to be a validation of this approach, it nonetheless generated significant anxiety at the time within the administration and the military about timing of the war, resources, military planning and logistics, etc...

The bottom line is that there is no set of exigent circumstances dictating a decision today or tomorrow in Afghanistan. Obama has tasked his advisers and their staffs to do a thorough review of the strategic objectives and then a review of the various approaches to meet those objectives. The White House also has been clear that this will not be an open ended process and that Obama will make a decision by the end of this month. Ultimately history will judge Obama more on the outcome of his policy decision than the process, but for those of us who study decision making processes, this is about as sound as it gets.

Russia and the Responsibility to Protect

Cleitus the Black has left a long comment in the thread about my Georgia War report commentary that requires a response longer than I can give there. (For someone who appears to be on permanent hiatus from his/her own blog, CTB certainly seem to find time to leave lengthy dissertations in comments on other people's...)

CTB asks:

"What is the international standard for an 'acceptable' number of Russian (or American, etc) citizens living in a foreign country that may be killed before the parent state intervenes without a UN mandate?

The EU report shows that 'only' 850 people - Georgians, Russians, and Ossetians were killed in the course of the entire 5 day conflict... We may surmise that of that total, perhaps as few as a hundred were killed in Georgia's initial attack on the South Ossetian capital...

But then again, in the first day of the Rwandan or Bosnian genocides (in the first day of ANY historical genocide, for that matter) how many people were killed? I am quite certain the answer is comparatively few, and the deaths are mainly among the fighters of the weaker group as the stronger group moves to assert control. The real killing begins once control of the target population has been gained."

First, I think CTB is mixing metaphors, since intervening to protect one's own citizens is not the same as intervening to protect the citizens of another state. But let's assume that Russia genuinely went in to protest S. Ossetians, not Russians per se. Would this be acceptable under the Responsibility to Protect doctine?

By way of answer, I will refer readers back to a post by CTB's own colleague Diodotus, who also seems to have vanished from the blogosphere since, penned last August. Diodotus analyzes whether Russia's claim to a humanitarian intervention was substantiated based on the facts of the case, drawing on the R2P report put out by the International Commission on Intervention and State Sovereignty.

Diodotus points out that even if we take CTB's claim at face value - that even a few dead civilians should meet the threshold requirements for an intervention, there are a few other criteria to take into account:

"The R2P doctrine is not simply a green light for great powers to violate small states' territorial integrity whenever they can reasonably claim civilians are at risk. Rather, it carefully balances humanitarian concerns with the UN Charter regime. Intervening governments must not only demonstrate just cause, but they must meet several other criteria as well:

Right Intention: The primary purpose of the intervention must be to halt or avert human suffering...

Last Resort: Every diplomatic and non-military avenue for the prevention or peaceful resolution of the humanitarian crisis must have been explored.

Proportional Means: The scale, duration and intensity of the planned military intervention should be the minimum necessary to secure the humanitarian objective in question.

Reasonable Prospects: Military action can only be justified if it stands a reasonable chance of success, that is, halting or averting the atrocities or suffering that triggered the intervention in the first place.

Anyone can see that Russia's intervention satisfied the last of these criteria quite nicely. And although the jury is still out, for the sake of argument let us accept Russia's claim that the Georgian government's crackdown on separatists in S. Ossetia was indiscriminate and thus constituted just cause for an intervention. Even if so, it is hard to argue that Russia's means have been proportionate to its goals, that Russia exhausted any non-military avenues first, or that Russia has actually acted solely out of humanitarian objectives.

Perhaps most importantly is the question of right authority: who decides on the legitimacy of such a move? The Commission recognized the validity of such arguments, then made by Russia and China, that a humanitarian intervention norm would create a slippery slope toward the dissolution of the non-aggression norm entirely. So they devoted an entire chapter to the question of the authority to determine whether such an intervention should take place. It first stresses that to be genuine, humanitarian intervention must be multilateral, not unilateral; that it ought to be endorsed by the Security Council; and failing this (as it did in the case of Kosovo and now Darfur) could be legitimized under a Uniting for Peace resolution in the General Assembly. Point being, a single state exercising this "responsibility" on its own, without even a discussion among its peers, would negate the concept entirely."

More Momentum for the Social Sciences--Nobel Edition

For those that have not yet heard, the Nobel Prize for Economics (actually named the Sveriges Riksbank Prize in Economic Sciences in Memory of Alfred Nobel) was awarded this year to two recipients, one of whom--Elinor Ostrom--is a Political Scientist. As Tyler Cowen of Marginal Revolution notes:

It's a nod in the direction of social science, rather than economics per se. It's another homage to the New Institutional Economics and also to Law and Economics. It's rewarding larger rather than smaller ideas, practical economics rather than abstract theory.

For those interested in a deeper discussion of her work, Henry Farrell at Crooked Timber provides an excellent overview and personal reflection on Ostrom.

As a political scientist, this is especially gratifying and I think reflective of some broader trends in social science, whereby the best insights and research culminate from the cross-fertilization of ideas from multiple disciplines within the social sciences (as well as the hard sciences). If you look at some of the more recent winners, their work transcended the discipline of economics and had a much broader impact on the study of human behavior and social dynamics broadly.

Personally, my research focused on decision-making, signaling & reputation, and conflict. The work of recent winners, such as Thomas Schelling (game theory), Daniel Kahneman (behavioral economics), A. Michael Spence (signaling), John Harsanyi & John Nash (game theory), and Douglass North (path-dependence, neo-institutionalism), all played a role in how I approached (and continue to approach) those issues.

Maybe a day will come when the prize is renamed the Nobel Prize for Social Science--another step towards the social sciences getting their day.

[Cross-posted at bill | petti]

The Logic of Violence in Counterinsurgency

I have alluded to the work of Jason Lyall on the use of indiscriminate violence in counterinsurgency in the past. Briefly, Lyall's paper (recently published in JCR) examines how the Russian army used targeted and non-targeted shelling in Chechnya through a pseudo-natural experiment. The paper is fascinating, however, I always had two major issues with it; first, Lyall claims randomization and thus indiscriminate violence through the "harass and interdiction" pattern of shelling used by Russians. With even my limited exposure to US Army protocol, it is difficult to claim that this pattern is truly random. More importantly, though, is Lyall's always struck me as an extremely useful empirical analysis in search of a theory.

A recent working paper entitled, "The Political Economy of Counterinsurgency Violence," seeks to fill this void by offering a simple formalization of counterinsurgency strategy. In fact, the author ask an extremely important question in the opening paragraph:

Why are counterinsurgents often so brutal toward civilians if classical counterinsurgency theory is correct in suggesting that successful counterinsurgents must win—not destroy—the hearts and minds of the population?

To understand this dynamic the author models counterinsurgency as a game with three players. First, a coalition bwtween a rebel group and their popular support within a community, and second the counterinsurgent. To achieve its goals, the counterinsurgent seeks to divide this coalition through a mixture of violence and concession, which tempts some side in the coalition to defect on its partner for short-term gains and forgo long-term goals. Formally, the game is played as a public goods game, where each player has some level of "profit" it extracts from the insurgency, which is offset by the cost of participation. Thus the counterinsurgent seeks to short-circuit the profit chain through the threat or execution of violence.

What falls out of this model is an very interesting observation about how insurgency are a function of the active micro-economies where they take place. As the author states:

The rebels’ profit from insurgency increases due to windfall and black market revenue, external aid, natural resources, taxation, remittances, looted property and labor, and the availability and attractiveness of the rebels’ sanctuaries. An increase in the rebels’ accountability to the population and a decrease rebel profit results from restrictive geography, vulnerability to the population’s disloyalty caused by the nature of the rebel group’s organization, and the presence and strength of quasi-judicial institutions with which to sanction rebels’ abusive behavior...Factors negatively and positively affecting the actors’ relative profit during insurgency ought to correlate with the government’s use of indiscriminate violence.

The model is clever, and the author's keen attention to the work of key counterinsurgency scholars comes through in his incorporation of critical elements of insurgency in the model. What is interesting, however, is how the model does not do a good job of predicting the kind of indiscriminate violence observed by Lyall in his research. The author here uses case studies from Guatemala and Turkey to support his theory, but given the high profile of Lyall's work it would have been much more satisfactory to get a model that explained those observations. Of course, it is not the job of a modeler to fit data, and it may simply be the case that Lyall's natural experiment is flawed, and this model requires better data for testing; either way, the article is very engaging and I highly recommend it.

Photo: New Internationalist

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