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

EU Russia-Georgia Report Redux

I have a commentary at the Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty website today on the EU's Independent International Fact-Finding Mission on the Conflict in Georgia. It expands on my earlier remarks about the gap between the report's findings and the political spin:

"Those who read the entire report will find it is a masterpiece of legal and evidentiary analysis. The authors have painstakingly synthesized multiple branches of international law with scores of interviews, reams of source material, and numerous reports from NGOs. The report itself is nearly 500 pages 'applying principles to facts.' Despite a few inconsistencies, it is generally fair-minded, objective and apolitical. It should have done the job.

But in putting together the detailed legal analysis too little thought appears to have been given to the political impact or how to frame the report so that its key findings are intelligible to a public and press corps not intimately familiar with the details of international law. In failing to deliver the key findings up front with savvy and punch, the EU Mission allowed the report to be hijacked by interested parties for a continuation of the very political argument it should have put to rest.

For example, after reading the whole thing I must qualify my earlier suggestion that the report doesn't distinguish between the interstate and intrastate dimensions of the conflict. It does at several places. But the title and executive summary do not - which probably explains why journalists and politicians have been able to spin it as they have.

More importantly, the authors' conclusions about Georgia's guilt in "starting" the war with S. Ossetia do rely on what I find to be an unconvincing application of the UN Charter regime to an intra-state war, essentially blurring the distinction between the two.

More on this - and the other "few inconsistencies" I wasn't able to cover in the space limit given me by RFE/RL - are at Current Intelligence, where I'll be posting periodically on war law issues for the foreseeable future.

Sunday Zombie Blogging

See many other zombie roadsigns at Interbent.

Rugby Now An Olympic Sport

Yes, the other big news story of the day. (OK, of yesterday.)

Peace Prize

According to the Nobel website, the Peace Prize is supposed to be awarded annually to "the person who shall have done the most or the best work for fraternity between nations, for the abolition or reduction of standing armies and for the holding and promotion of peace congresses".

In 2009, the Norwegian selection committee decided that the most deserving person is Barack Obama.

Frankly, I'm a little surprised.

Yes, I was pleased in April when the President declared, "clearly and with conviction, America's commitment to seek the peace and security of a world without nuclear weapons."

Furthermore, I was grateful in January when Obama ordered the closing of the prison at Guantanamo Bay and the banning of torture.

And I look forward to the implementation of the plan to withdraw from Iraq by August 2010.

As promised, Obama's has the U.S. talking to Iran. He has the U.S. working hard on peace between Israel and Palestinians.

And yet -- most of these accomplishments are mere promises to act.

The gap between hope and change is fairly large and I'm surprised the Nobel committee decided to award the former. Perhaps they figured that the prestige of the award might help propel some of these plans towards fruition.

Much of the world is pleased (or say that they are), while the Taliban is unhappy (as are opposition groups in Pakistan).

I do not think the choice is bad or outrageous, but it is curious -- more a political statement than anything.

"Oslo Beats Copenhagen": President Obama Awarded Peace Prize

President Obama couldn't convince the Inernational Olympic Committee to let Chicago hold the next summer Olympics, but Nobel Committee decided he's a skilled enough diplomat to receive a Nobel Peace Prize - only months into his Presidency. This is not lost on commentators and twitterers, some of who are referring to this as a "consolation prize" for losing the Olympics bid. ChicagoBlog writes:

"Barack Obama couldn't convince the IOC to award Chicago the 2016 Olympics but somehow managed to sway the Nobel Committee to declare our freshman president deserving of the most distinguished peace prize in the world. Wow.

This isn't as contradictory as it looks. It's partly Obama's humility - which I suspect his trip to Copenhagen was calculated to demonstrate on a low-stakes issue - that makes him an inspirational leader and diplomat. And it is his behavior as a model for the type of attitudes the Nobel Committee wishes to promote - not his effectiveness at any particular initiative - that was the basis for the Committee's decision.

"Obama has as President created a new climate in international politics. Multilateral diplomacy has regained a central position, with emphasis on the role that the United Nations and other international institutions can play. Dialogue and negotiations are preferred as instruments for resolving even the most difficult international conflicts. The vision of a world free from nuclear arms has powerfully stimulated disarmament and arms control negotiations. Thanks to Obama’s initiative, the USA is now playing a more constructive role in meeting the great climatic challenges the world is confronting. Democracy and human rights are to be strengthened.

Only very rarely has a person to the same extent as Obama captured the world’s attention and given its people hope for a better future. His diplomacy is founded in the concept that those who are to lead the world must do so on the basis of values and attitudes that are shared by the majority of the world’s population.

For 108 years, the Norwegian Nobel Committee has sought to stimulate precisely that international policy and those attitudes for which Obama is now the world’s leading spokesman. The Committee endorses Obama’s appeal that “Now is the time for all of us to take our share of responsibility for a global response to global challenges.”

UPDATE: Heather Hamilton provides a healthy response to the cynicism at Connect US Fund Blog.

UPDATE: In the NYTimes today, Ross Douthat asks whether the correct response would have been for Obama to politely decline the prize. I think he has a point.

Mad Scientists? Try Bemused.

Senator Tom Coburn knows how to rankle political scientists. Float a bill claiming all their work is bunk and should receive no government funding. For those who want to read it, here's Coburn's explanation. This is stirring up some ire and concern among political scientists in the blogosphere. Some of my colleagues even feel "picked on."

Well look.

1) To be fair, he's not really saying our work is bunk. Just that it's not "science." He doesn't give a definition of what he thinks science is, but apparently it's something like pornography: he knows it when he sees it:

"...biology, chemistry, geology, and physics... these are real fields of science in which new discoveries can yield real improvements in the lives of everyone."

2) So, let's take Coburn on his own terms instead of pointing out that he is "acting like an ignorant jackass". If to be "science" your discoveries have to benefit people's lives, figuring our how to make government work better would seem to count to me. People's ability to profit from such so-called "basic research"* as how "robotics can help individuals with severe disabilities" is wholly contingent on a government providing education, roads, infrastructure, and (how ironically) funding the robotics research. You're not going to get a lot of research into "bones that blend with tendons" in a failed state situation like Somalia; people's lives are not improving very quickly in places like North Korea. Everything begins with good governance and security. But we wouldn't want any studies of how to achieve that.

3) Oh, that's right. Actually we would. Which is why DOD is reaching out to social scientists in order to do its job of protecting the nation more smartly. Also why, according to the NSF website:

"Congress established the NSF in 1950 "to promote the progress of science; to advance the national health, prosperity, and welfare; to secure the national defense…"

Yep. Turns out we don't actually have to take Coburn's argument on its own terms, because Coburn's entire argument is based on a faulty understanding of the purpose of the NSF, which is not simply to promote applied research as he claims but to ensure in part that the US government has the social scientific data needed to understand precisely the issues he claims are irrelevant to science. Like international conflict. Like democracy, campaigns and elections. Like political change, and regime transitions. Like international political economy. Like political psychology and political tolerance. True, you don't need to understand these things in order to succeed at some forms of applied science - just ask the Nazi doctors. You do need them for science as Coburn defines it - where new discoveries benefit the lives of all.

So you can see why this whole thing strikes me as very, very funny - less like being picked on by a bully and more like watching a very cute two-year-old throw a tantrum before bed. You more want to laugh than get riled, much less worried about your ability to make a living.

I was especially tickled by the fact that the conference on YouTube and the 2008 Election Cycle I blogged about last year was among Coburn's examples of "government waste." (As a faculty member in the department that hosted the conference, I would like to express my humblest apology on behalf of our discipline.)

The great irony of this example is that one of the key features of the conference was practical, applied research - the kind he claims political scientists never do (maybe because he has his terminology backward).* For example, Chirag Shah's TubeKit is a tool engineered to make it easy for political scientists to systematically analyze the impact of user-created video content on political processes; keynote speaker Richard Rogers' Issuecrawler does the same for web-sphere analysis. You can argue with whether those things - or game theory models that let us predict and respond to political behavior - are a public good (then again you can argue about whether biofuels are a public good too). But you can't claim political scientists don't use NSF money to build tools or that these tools don't have practical applications. Or, if you do, then your argument is based on assertion and opinion, not fact; it's simply not grounded in the available empirical evidence. In other words, it's not scientific.

I'd rather make policy based on facts and evidence. So would many of our leaders. And that's the simplest reason why funding scientific research on political phenomena is and should remain among our government's many priorities.
_______________________

*Basic research is precisely what Coburn seems to oppose - the pursuit of knowledge for its own sake. The term for what he is describing - science that has practical or commercial applications - is "applied research." The fact that he doesn't know the difference should be a pretty strong signal about his credibility.

"Women as Prey" in Guinea

Though my post about serious issues in IR through gendered lenses got less attention than tongue-and-cheek discussion with Dan Drezner, it has been almost impossible to ignore gender in the news the last couple of days, so I think I'll re-try blogging about gender and IR.

The New York Times led a story yesterday, front page, above the fold, called "In a Guinea Seized by Violence, Women as Prey" and followed it up with an article called "US Envoy Protests the Violence in Guinea" later online.

The article recounts that "women were the particular targets" of "rapes, beatings, and acts of intentional humiliation," further evidenced by the public distribution of humiliating rape pictures taken on a cell phone. Adam Nossiter, the author of the article notes that at least 157 people were killed in the breakup of a protest on Sept. 28, "but even more than the shootings, the attacks on women, horrific anywhere, but viewed with particular revulsion in Muslim countries like this one - appear to have traumatized the citizenry ..." Witnesses testified to seeing several rapes, including gang-rapes and the combination of sexual violence and beatings.

Nossiter explains that "rape is a fairly common tool of military repression in Africa, but large-scale violence against women has not been a previous government tactic here." The article concludes with Guinean sources calling for the junta to lose power as a result of this behavior, and the follow-up article quotes U.S. envoys and Secretary of State Hillary Clinton taking a similar stance.

There's an obvious point for those who would see IR through gendered lenses here: women's rights. What happened to the women who were raped in Guinea is terrible, fraught with gender subordination, violent, and should never happen to anyone ever again.

It would be a mistake for gender analysis of this situation and the news stories portraying it to stop there, however.

Through gender lenses, I'm interested in the question of how it came to be that "rape is a fairly common tool of military repression" (the article adds "in Africa," but most research on wartime rape shows that the prevalence of rape as a weapon of war is not geographically or culturally limited). What is it about rape that makes it an effective tool of repression and war-fighting (or, if not effective, perceived as effective or desirable)?

I don't think its possible to understand that question without reference to the gendered nature of war (see the work of Carol Cohn, Ann Tickner, Cynthia Enloe, etc.). There are a number of different tools in this literature to help to understand and analyze this reporting about the situation in Guinea. With limited time and blog space, here's just one idea:

The argument that Jean Elshtain originated (and which has been built on by my work, Iris Marion Young's, and Lauren Wilcox's, among others) that expected roles in war are distributed on the basis of gender (where men are expected to be "just warriors" who bravely defend and protect women "beautiful souls" who are at once innocent of war but its casus belli), is instructive here. If one side's warriors are motivated by proving their masculinity (that's Joshua Goldstein's argument, www.warandgender.com) and protecting the feminized "other" at home, then it makes sense that the other side would want to "get" the (symbolic and actual) motivation that its opponent is fighting "for" - wartime rape (and rape in the context of oppression, like that reported in Guinea), then, can be seen targeting the (symbolic and actual) "heart" of the enemy.

In the book I am writing right now, Gendering Global Conflict (for Columbia University Press), I make the argument that women are a Clausewitzian center of gravity. According to Clausewitz, a center of gravity is something that is the "heart and soul" of a belligerent - that is, that it must have to win the war and that its opponent eliminate and thereby eliminate that belligerent's will or ability to fight. The uniqueness of the Clausewitzian concept is that, unlike many theorists who followed him, Clausewitz recognized that a center of gravity does not have to be entirely material, but, instead, can be symbolic or representational. I argue that feminist analysis shows that (innocent, civilian) women are that thing - the thing that a belligerent's soldiers fight for and without whom war has no justification. This is both because innocent women are a casus belli, and because they are seen as producers/reproducers of the nation. This logic also tells us something about when belligerents attack "their opponents'" civilians - belligerents attack civilians as a proxy for women (and sometimes women civilians directly, e.g., wartime rape) in order to attack and dismantle opponents' center-of-gravity/will to fight. This explanation accounts for attacks on civilians in a more complex and nuanced way than belligerent desparation, and accounts for other observable phenomena (like claims that wars are being fought for innocent women, and genocidal rape).

URGENT: Stop Coburn Amendment to End NSF Program for Political Science

Senator Tom Coburn (R-OK) has proposed an amendment to the Senate Commerce, Justice, Science appropriations bill, which will end the National Science Foundation's program for political science.

I have set up an online petition to rally opposition to this amendment, and I ask any and all readers to sign it, and pass it on to anyone and everyone. I also encourage everyone to call their senators and ask them to stop amendment 2631 to H.R. 2847.

http://www.petition2congress.com/2/2508/keep-nsf-political-science-program/

UPDATE: The petition has generated over 2,000 letters to Congress in less than 24 hours!

Read any good books on Afghanistan?

The Wall Street Journal reports today that the Washington policy community has been busy reading books on the Vietnam War to gain insights about what to do next in Afghanistan. According to the WSJ:

The struggle to set the future course of the Afghan war is becoming a battle of two books -- both suddenly popular among White House and Pentagon brain trusts.

The two draw decidedly different lessons from the Vietnam War. The first book describes a White House in 1965 being marched into an escalating war by a military viewing the conflict too narrowly to see the perils ahead. President Barack Obama recently finished the book, according to administration officials, and Vice President Joe Biden is reading it now.

The second describes a different administration, in 1972, when a U.S. military that has finally figured out how to counter the insurgency is rejected by political leaders who bow to popular opinion and end the fight.

It has been recommended in multiple lists put out by military officers, including a former U.S. commander in Afghanistan, who passed it out to his subordinates.

The two books -- "Lessons in Disaster," on Mr. Obama's nightstand, and "A Better War" on the shelves of military gurus -- have become a framework for the debate over what will be one of the most important decisions of Mr. Obama's presidency.

...In Washington, books are flying off shelves. None of the major bookstores near the White House have the recently released paperback edition of "Lessons in Disaster" in stock, and one major shop in the Georgetown area, Barnes & Noble, said all its remaining copies were being held for buyers.

I'm all for reading as much as possible about history and presidential decision making, and I value comparative analysis, but I'm just curious -- eight years into the war in Afghanistan, is anyone reading any good books directly on Afghanistan?

Basterds All

Blogging was light over the weekend while I was in DC on field research. But at least I finally got to see Inglorious Basterds while visiting my brother. Whew. Various bloggers have complained about the questionable values imparted in the film and a human security specialist can't really argue with that.



But then again it wouldn't be a Quentin Tarantino movie otherwise... see? See?



Actually, I thought that compared to his earlier stuff this was pretty tame. (Or maybe I'm just desensitized. Yeah, that's probably it.) I was much more intrigued by the historical revisionism in the film's premise than I was in the narrative about soldiers acting unjustly in the context of a just war. I think the suspension of disbelief required by the ending undermines the power of Tarantino's depiction of violence - by forcing us to figure he's painting a picture of an alternative timeline where the war ended differently, he's inviting us to believe that in fact "our boys" would never really have behaved that way - instead of destabilizing our cherished assumptions about the "good war." Ha.

USA, USA, USA....

The National Brands Index is out with its 2009 survey results and the United States has taken the top spot. It "soared" from seventh place in last year's survey to number one. How can this be?

Well, I'm going to go out on a limb here and predict that you won't read this in The Weekly Standard, from the National Brands Index press release:

"What’s really remarkable is that in all my years studying national reputation, I have never seen any country experience such a dramatic change in its standing as we see for the United States in 2009,” explains Simon Anholt, NBI founder and an independent advisor to over a dozen national governments around the world. "Despite recent economic turmoil, the U.S. actually gained significant ground. The results suggest that the new U.S. administration has been well received abroad and the American electorate’s decision to vote in President Obama has given the United States the status of the world’s most admired country.”

OK,OK... we all knew Obama was going to rescue America's global reputation. Great, but I'm still a bit of a skeptic:

First, for the data wonks out there, here's the only mention of methodology I could find anywhere about the survey and its only this simple description from the press release:

Conducted annually in partnership between independent advisor Simon Anholt and GfK Roper Public Affairs & Media beginning in 2008, the Nation Brands IndexSM measures the image of 50 countries with respect to Exports, Governance, Culture, People, Tourism and Immigration/Investment. Each year, approximately 20,000 adults ages 18 and up are interviewed online in 20 core panel countries.

I'm intrigued by the use of online polling, but I'm not buying the whole top "brand" result until I see some evidence and methods which apparently are not released for proprietary reasons. Oh well....

Second, the whole thing of reputations in IR tend to be over-rated. I still like Jon Mercer's work on the topic. Dan posted months ago on the whole values vs. policy angle on anti-Americanism and the broader trends on America's current image seem to track with an expectation that Obama will change American policies.

Finally, Canada dropped to seventh? What's up with that?

Whodunnit: The Five-Day War

The EU released its report on the August war between Georgia and Russia on Wednesday, and for the last two days the press has reported that it proves "Georgia started the war with Russia." Even Joshua Keating, who offers a more even-handed round-up at Foreign Policy, says the claim that AP's claim that "Georgia Started the War with Russia" is "basically correct."

I've only finished the first volume of the report so far, but this is not how I read it at all. Actually, it says exactly the opposite on pg. 31 and 32:

"Any explanation of the origins of the conflict cannot focus solely on the artillery attack on Tskinvali in the night of 7/8 August... overall, the conflict is rooted in a profusion of causes comprising different layers in time and actions combined."

The "Georgia started it!" frame appears to be grounded in two findings. The report acknowledges Georgia's armed attack on Tskhinvali was in violation of international law, and also argued that this attack constituted "the first shot" in what became a larger conflict.

But I don't see how that's an argument that Georgia "started" the war with Russia. Georgia committed an illegal attack on an population center within its own territory - escalating what was already a low-intensity war within Georgian borders. Russia internationalized this "war" by sending troops across the border in violation of the territorial integrity norm. And given that the report also casts doubt on Russia's claim to have done so to protect civilians, it's hard to see how one illegal act within one's territory can be construed as blame for an international war. At any rate, the report itself nowhere claims as much.

What's most interesting about Volume I of the report, though, and what may explain the way its findings have been misinterpreted, is that it appears to conflate the civil and interstate wars of which the "August war" was composed. This is particularly ironic given that the report's authors "notice with regret an erosion of the respect of established principles of international law such as territorial integrity" (p. 31) but then, ironically, blur those very principles in failing to distinguish the civil and interstate elements of the conflict. It is not until p. 36 that the 45-page report summary even acknowledges that there were these two different components to the war; the fact that the authors do not disaggregate these aspects in assigning blame muddles the legal analysis completely.

No wonder both sides can claim the report is a victory for them.