The long-term aim of this human security project is to build the technical and institutional capacity, as well as the political will, to record details of every single victim of violent conflict, worldwide. This represents the next step beyond existing estimation and other aggregate ‘measurement’ of human losses (such as numerical totals) to the identification and documentation of each and every individual who is killed or injured in armed conflicts. Among other benefits, such recording acts as a memorial for posterity and a recognition of our common humanity across the world. Most importantly, it will ensure that the full cost of conflict is known and can be understood to the greatest extent achievable, and become an immediately applicable component, and resource for, conflict prevention and post-conflict recovery and reconciliation.
Achieving the aims of this project will require the active participation of states and inter-state bodies (up to and including the United Nations), and such activity may eventually become codified in formal and binding agreements on parties to conflicts. State support will be hastened by strong civil society advocacy, highlighting the moral and practical advantages.
The group's Joint Communique issued earlier this week details their goals and is below the fold.
In short, on ethical grounds, I hope they will succeed. As an analyst, though, I'm interested in the determinants of success of such new ideas that challenge existing practice - since some like the landmines campaign take off and result in new global norms, while many others fall flat. What do you think of this one, dear readers? Is the RCACP a candidate for the next global norm campaign? Or one of many great ideas doomed to fizzle and die before it hits the global stage? (My two cents - they definitely need a catchier name...)
RECORDING CASUALTIES OF ARMED CONFLICT PROJECT JOINT COMMUNIQUE
"The organisations listed below [the fold] announce the formation of the first international network of organisations who publicly record the victims of armed conflict as individuals, which has now begun its activities.
We believe that documenting the details of every human killed in war is a moral act based on recognising the value of every human life. We also believe that it is necessary for justice, holding the prosecutors of war to account, as a means to overcome uncertainties about deaths which are only recorded as numbers, and as a way of constructing a lasting historical memory of the dead.
Failure to comprehensively record every individual casualty of war can only bring greater pain and suffering. This suffering ranges from the denial of the experience of victims’ families, all the way through to community grievances which stimulate the renewal or escalation of violent conflict through politically motivated claims. The only long term answer to these problems is the establishment of detailed and certain truth.
We will collaborate to raise our capacity, visibility and collective strength, thereby enhancing casualty recording activities worldwide. Together we will be better able to overcome the problems we face every day in our work. Our final goal is that the world recognise the need to record every casualty of every conflict wherever it happens.
We call on governments and intergovernmental agencies to support the activity of casualty recording worldwide.
Afghanistan Independent Human Rights Commission (AIHRC) B'Tselem Conflict Analysis Resource Center (CERAC) Darfur Peace and Development Elman Peace Centre Guatemalan Forensic Anthropology Foundation The Human Rights Center The Humanitarian Law Centre INSEC The Institute for Conflict Management Iraq Body Count Kaah Foundation National Society for Human Right Organisation for Human Rights Activists (OHURA) Organization for Somalis Protection and Development (OSPAD) Palestinian Center for Human Rights The Research and Documentation Center of Sarajevo Rift Valley Institute Somali Human Rights Association (SOHRA) Sri Lankan War Victims Registry
"No blank checks... hold people accountable for results..." Or what? We're not going to give them billions of dollars in aid?
As I wrote at Current Intelligence, what I liked about the speech is that President Obama began by using just war theory to draw a clear distinction between the war in Iraq (illegal, unjust, and one he opposed) and the war in Afghanistan (legal, justified and one he did and continues to support). The two conflicts have been so muddled under the rubric of the "global war on terror" and so much of Iraq's bad PR has rubbed off on Afghanistan that this point needed to be made. He was drawing on and reconstituting the UN Charter regime when he reminded us that the initial 2001 war was authorized by Congress, legitimized by the Security Council and involved a broad coalition, and took place only in response to the Taliban's refusal to apprehend or extradite individuals suspected of a crime against humanity under the doctrine of universal jurisdiction.
But I have some critical reactions too. On Democracy Now this morning Congressman Kucinich was blasting the speeech as well as the strategy. I thought many of his remarks missed the point, but he was correct in saying that the speech badly conflates the Taliban and al-Qaeda. It's the Taliban the troops would be facing in Afghanistan - as Gen. McChrystal reported in September and Senator McGovern reiterated on NPR today, only perhaps 100 members of al-Qaeda remain in the country - yet it is the spectre of al-Qaeda that Obama is using as a justification for the troop increase. I like Presidents to clarify rather than confuse, so this troubled me, but I do see this as rhetoric not as a conceptual error in the strategy itself. Obama knows full well this is a counter-insurgency, not a counter-terror operation, and his new rules of engagement reflect that understanding. But I'd have liked to see him try to sell the US public on nation-building per se as in our vital national interest rather than fall back on tired old Bush Admin rhetoric about new attacks and threats to our own borders.
I was also troubled that Obama didn't weed out the term "cancer" from the speech before he presented it. He used this term twice to describe insurgent and anti-American currents in South Asia and transnationally. Equating those who think, believe or act differently from us as pathogens (or anything sub-human) should be beneath this President and is not necessary to make his case.
The press release describes the award-winning ideas from Parsi's Yale University Press book:
Improving relations between Iran and Israel is the key to achieving lasting peace in the Middle East, says the winner of the 2010 University of Louisville Grawemeyer Award for Ideas Improving World Order.
Trita Parsi, co-founder and president of the National Iranian American Council, earned the prize for ideas set forth in his 2007 book, "Treacherous Alliance: The Secret Dealings of Israel, Iran and the U.S." He received the award from among 54 nominations worldwide.
The rivalry between Iran and Israel is driven more by a quest for regional power rather than by conflicting beliefs, Parsi says. Instead of trying to isolate Iran from the rest of the world, the United States should rehabilitate Iran into the Middle East's economic and political order in return for Iran making significant changes in its behavior, including ending its hostilities against Israel.
Parsi interviewed more than 130 senior Israeli, Iranian and U.S. decision-makers before writing "Treacherous Alliance," which also won a Council on Foreign Relations award last year for most significant foreign policy book.
Parsi said “the thesis of the book is that what you are seeing in the Middle East right now is not an ideological battle between democracy and theocracy. You’re seeing a classic power struggle between some of the most powerful states in the region.”
Iran and Israel are using the rest of the Middle East as a stage for that competition, he said.
“When you do have a strategic competition, and a strategic rivalry, there actually is room for compromises, there is room for accommodation and there is a possibility of a win-win situation,” Parsi said. “But if you have an ideological battle, then you are left with a position in which there is only the victory of one side over the other and conflict essentially becomes inevitable.”
Paradoxically, both Israel and Iran want their competition viewed as an ideological struggle because that is each nation’s best hope for winning support from friends in the region, he said. Few of those friends would be particularly interested only in helping Israel or Iran become predominant powers in the region, Parsi said.
The antipathy between the two nations goes back only about two decades, he said.
For most of their history, Parsi said, “the relations between the Jewish people and the Iranian people tended to be very positive.”
The Louisville newspaper story points out some of the recent controversy surrounding NIAC's alleged lobbying -- and many of the smears against Parsi are reminiscent of the attacks on John Mearsheimer and Stephen Walt for their book on the Israeli lobby.
I'm quoted in the press release:
"Most efforts to achieve peace in the Middle East focus on the clash between Israel and the Palestinians," said Rodger Payne, a UofL political science professor who directs the award. "Parsi says the best way to stabilize the region is for the U.S. to act in a more balanced way toward Iran and Israel, which would de-escalate the geopolitical and nuclear rivalry between the two."
The book is an interesting work of IR scholarship, with a fundamentally realist take on the relations between Israel and Iran. Interestingly, Parsi argues that Iran long acted upon realist thinking towards Iran even as its talk reflected ideology.
Disclosure: I chair the Department Committee that overseas the administration of this prize. This entails soliciting external book reviews, chairing a first-round screening committee, bringing together a panel of experts to evaluate and rank a set of semi-finalists, and making sure that the information gleaned from these processes is advanced to a Final Selection Committee.
Serbia is going to the World Court today to ask for an advisory opinion on the independence of Kosovo. The US and most of the EU has recognized a new Kosovar state; Russia, Serbia, and most of the rest of the world has not. The Serbian Foreign Minister observed that the decision to go to court marked a "paradigm shift...the first time in the history of the Balkans that somebody has decided to resolve an issue of significance using exclusively peaceful means." That's a bit of a stretch. Serbia's ambassador to France said that Kosovo's declaration, as well as its recognition, "is a challenge to the international legal order, based as it is on the principles of state sovereignty and territorial integrity." He's right.
That's really what's at issue here. A Serbian friend of mine constantly reminded me during the Kosovo War that what NATO was doing was a violation of fundamental legal norms, and while he was right he never quite grasped that his point may be increasingly irrelevant. The norms are changing. What are the new norms, and how will they emerge? An advisory opinion of the ICJ isn't going to settle these issues, but it might have some influence on the debate. Keep watching.
Good coverage of an under-reported area of the world. It left me with two thoughts:
First, via Facebook, my colleague Virginia Haufler suggests this story shows that corporations rather than states are running the show in issue areas such as conflict minerals - both as trouble-makers and potential governors. (Haufler makes this argument at greater length in a chapter of a forthcoming book, Who Governs the Globe) And I thought the same thing when I first watched the segment. Certainly as Scott Pelley framed it, corporations should be the targets of influence for consumer campaigns aimed at stemming the flow of conflict minerals. Still, I'm not sure that means states don't have a role to play in enforcing such codes of conduct. I think it may mean not that corporations rule but that issue areas like conflict minerals are cases where multi-level, multi-stakeholder governance would be required to create solutions. The Kimberley Process for conflict diamonds exemplified this approach (though it is not without its drawbacks, as this new report suggests). Certainly the segment suggested that we need an advocacy movement for "conflict gold" like the one for "conflict diamonds" in order to bring corporations and source countries to heel in the service of a more humane trading system.
But in that regard, I was left with another question. The role of the gold trade in fueling conflicts may have previously been overshadowed by the earlier success story of the conflict diamonds campaign, in a classic case of "permissive norm effects." By highlighting a small piece of a bigger problem, campaigns risk legitimizing or at least rendering less visible the other pieces of the problem. But DRC is the source of many minerals critical to Northern industries, not just gold. In the same way that diamonds from African mines were regulated to the exclusion of gold, does the narrow focus on gold now risk coming at the expense of attention to other lucrative minerals, such as coltan?
Notably, organizations working in the area of DRC conflict resources, such as Global Witness and the Enough Project, are taking a broad view, so the focus on gold may be the media's rather than the campaign's.
UPDATE: I was able to reach John Prendergast, who appeared in the segment, to verify whether 60 Minutes' characterization of the issue maps onto the Enough Project's campaign. He told me that though Pelley locked onto gold early on and retained that focus throughout, advocacy groups such as Enough are actually focusing on consumer electronics - not just coltan but:
"the three T's: tin, tungsten and tantalum... we're focusing on cell phones, laptops and other electronic products because everyone uses them and if we demand conflict free electronic products the supply and demand logic will help do the job."
A wise strategy, in my mind. What do readers think?
By delaying payment Dubai has not only created serious doubts about its dedication and ability to repay its loans, but also the credit worthiness and risk-level for other sovereigns. The price to insure against debt-default by Dubai more than doubled (from $300M to $675M). Additionally, the price of default insurance rose in general for many sovereigns, including Bulgaria, Abu Dhabi, Hungary, the U.K. and the U.S. (see graphic below).
It's unclear at this point to what extent concerns for default (or an actual default) by Dubai would act as a contagion, setting off another global financial crisis. On Friday, global markets took a significant hit based largely on investor reaction to the payment delay. U.S. and Asian markets took the biggest hits, with European markets managing to close higher on the on the day. At first glance, the sell-off for firms linked to Dubai World was contained on Friday. Additionally, the amount of risk at stake in this case is minuscule compared to the financial crises of a year ago. The Financial Times notes:
Credit Suisse, for example, assumes that European banks account for half of Dubai’s debt, estimated at about $80bn. If they lost 50 per cent on their exposure, bad loan provisions would rise by 5 per cent next year, equivalent to a €5bn after-tax hit. Compared with the $1,700bn of toxic assets European and US banks have wiped out in the credit crisis, that is a drop in the Burj Al Arab swimming pool.
It would appear at first blush that, financial speaking, there isn't a great threat of a Dubai default leading to a global financial meltdown (however, I have not seen data on the holders of credit default swaps [cds] and to what extent they've assumed too much risk, as AIG did last year). However, I do wonder about the other major variable in financial crises--the psychological risk. Financial crises are the result of both economic and psychological variables interacting in dangerous ways (namely, a positive feedback loop where negative economic conditions feed into negative views on the market which leads to actions that increase negative economics conditions which feed into negative views on the market, etc, etc). As Mark Gongloff notes:
Every episode of sovereign worry raises market fears of contagion, "reminders that pockets of post-credit-excesses are intact and destabilizing," Gluskin Sheff chief economist David Rosenberg told clients on Friday.
To me, that is the real risk. With states' balance sheets in total disarray around the globe, investors will not long for worrisome indicators and troublesome cases to analyze (think of the conditions that facilitate brush fires). We'll see to what extent this scenario plays out in the coming days. Would love to hear feedback from sovereign debt specialists and global finance experts.
As a once-a-year-antidote to my usual posts on human (in)security, today let me briefly note a few positive news stories about which we should all be thankful this season:
2) Political leaders may not have figured out how to do it yet, but protecting the planet we live on is a cause whose time has come. Two under-reported signs of progress: Leaders of nine religious faiths recently agreed at the UN to treat protecting the Earth as a religious duty. And Brazilian farmers, responding to demand for "green" products, are taking up reforestation. I am thankful for every small, butterfly-wing-like step in the right direction.
According to CNN, administration officials just announced that after a "review" of US landmine policy, they will maintain the policy of previous administrations in refusing to sign the Ottawa treaty. According to State Department spokesperson Ian Kelly:
"We made our policy review and we determined that we would not be able to meet our national defense needs nor our security commitments to our friends and allies if we sign this convention."
A report this month by the International Campaign to Ban Landmines found that mines remain planted in the earth in more than 70 countries and killed at least 1,266 people and wounded 3,891 last year. More than 2.2 million anti-personnel mines, 250,000 anti-vehicle mines and 17 million other explosives left over from wars have been removed since 1999, the report said.
This is probably just another example of the US refusing to commit while planning to comply. Still, from our "multilateral" President, this strikes me as another disappointment.
Jon recently blogged about humanitarian law and violence in video games. Last month two Swiss NGOs published a 46-page report on the topic, examining a number of popular game for their laws-of-war content, finding them lacking and proposing industry-wide norm change:
The aim of the study is to raise public awareness among developers and publishers of the games, as well as among authorities, educators and the media about virtually committed crimes in computer and videogames, and to engage in a dialogue with game producers and distributors on the idea of incorporating the essential rules of IHL and IHRL into their games which may, in turn, render them more varied, realistic and entertaining.
Do we need international law requiring video game makers to follow international law in their video games? Sure, as long as this resulted in lucrative consulting gigs for law professors….
Well, the report does not actually propose game-makers 'follow the law' but rather 'incorporate the law' so that, for example, players who commit war crimes incur at least the risk of punishment.
The goal is not to prohibit the games, to make them less violent or to turn them into IHL or IHRL training tools. The message we want to send to developers and distributors of video games, particularly those portraying armed conflict scenarios, is that they should also portray the rules that apply to such conflicts in real life, namely IHRL and IHL.
At any rate, it certain strikes me that this is a candidate issue for a corporate social responsibility campaign. We ask companies to acknowledge and minimize negative externalities of their products with respect to the environment, public safety or health. Why not with video game content as well?
I know the EU is often dysfunctional, but this really shocked me. Last week, the EU selected Herman van Rompuy, the Belgian prime minister, as the European Union’s first president, and Catherine Ashton of Britain, currently the group’s trade commissioner, as its high representative for foreign policy. (She's also the Baroness Ashton of Upholland).
Rompuy has been on the job in Belgium for less than a year and Ashton has no foreign policy experience.
So much for the arguments that we might get some form of balancing -- hard or soft -- from Brussels. Looks like France and Germany were so concerned about Blair becoming the EU's first President that they pushed for this minimalist team....
The EU has a $13 trillion economy -- roughly on par with the United States. I know Javier Solana had a lot of detractors, but he carried some weight and could leverage his skills and experience to move Brussels into a more active role in the world. It's hard to see how the tandem of these two unknowns will raise the profile of the EU's common foreign and security policy.
From the NYTimes: “It’s going to be difficult to explain to the public why there was so much fuss about the Lisbon Treaty if all we get is someone no one has heard of,” said one E.U. official speaking on condition of anonymity.
As for Ashton, here's what one of her former colleagues said: "To think that we wanted Blair and we ended up with Cathy Ashton. It's such an indictment of Gordon," said one member of the government hours after the appointment was announced.
I was just complaining to a friend how I'm not such a fan of the Iphone I recently bought, but here's a reason to rethink: the new Iphone Death Star app.
I know most of you must have thought I disappeared from the blog world. Apparently, I've found something I am unreliable about. I'd tell you it has been a crazy semester, but that would be a bad excuse. I'd promise to do better, but its a promise I'm not sure I can keep. So, instead, I'll just post (for the second time in one night) about something I've been doing some work on ... helping to start the LGBTQA Caucus of the ISA.
The purposes of the Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, Transgendered, Queer, and Allies Caucus of the International Studies Association (hereafter the LGBTQA Caucus of ISA) are:
A. To promote fair and equal treatment of members of the Lesbian, Gay, Transgendered, Bisexual, and Queer (hereafter LGBTQ) community in the International Studies Association (hereafter ISA) and in the profession of international studies, in areas including but not limited to graduate school admission, financial assistance in schools, employment, tenure, and promotion. B. To combat discrimination against and provide support for LGBTQ faculty, student, and professional members of the International Studies Association. C. To encourage the application of the skills of scholars and students of international studies to combat discrimination on the basis of sexual orientation. D. To promote the recruitment of new members to the Caucus specifically and ISA generally.
The Caucus will be voted on at the Governing Council Meeting on February 16, 2010. The petition with initial signatories (well more than the required 50) have been turned in already, but I'm posting this here both to let you know it is under consideration, and also to let you know that, if you'd like to express your support for the group, signatures are still being accepted. If you'd like to find out more, drop me an email.
David Kirkpatrick yesterday wrote in the New York Times about how the health care debate is reviving the abortion debate in US politics. I read this article right after I saw a film that several of my feminist colleagues and friends recommended, called "Not Yet Rain." Among other things at issue in this film is the Helms Amendment to the U.S. 1973 Foreign Assistance Act, which prohibits the use of U.S. aid funds to "motivate or coerce" or "perform" abortion as a method of family planning, but has been interpreted to deny assistance to clinics that mention abortion as an option or perform it in cases of rape. The Helms Amendment has made the news a number of times recently.
Abortion is an issue my (inner) lawyer has thought a lot about, both in terms of gender equality and in terms of the constitutional justification for its legality in the United States. I've written about the importance of abortion rights for gender equality, and the shakiness of privacy as a legal grounds to justify it. I've worked up an argument about abortion as a 13th Amendment right in the United States, arguing that the instances in which we deny the right to abortion are among the very few times that the United States government can compel someone to do labor (we do still call it that, right?) against their will.
But the simultaneous presence of abortion rights on the national and international agenda is more than an issue for the U.S. constitution, and more than a two-level games question. While some work has been done on the embodiment of the state, and some work has been done on individuals in international relations, the question of the role of the (actual) body in global politics is an important one that needs more attention in IR.
Katherine Moon, in Sex Among Allies, examined how the bodies of women prostitutes in South Korea were crucial to the U.S./South Korea security negotiations in the 1970s. Fundamentally, the abortion/aid debate is about the foreign policy of/about women's bodies. These are times when the embodiment of IR/foreign policy is, in some sense, obvious, though the role and meaning of the body in these debates requires exploration. Study of the body in IR, though, could go even further, to study the essence of embodiment and physicality in global politics, considering that the body is a fundamental part of political economy, security and war, and everyday political interactions.
While I don't have a whole lot deep to say about it right now, it seems to be like there is an important research program to be had in the global politics of the body and the body in global politics, building on (feminist and other) work that has addressed physical/sexual exploitation, civilian immunity, and other phenomena and exploring new questions about how physicality impacts politics not only at the individual level, but across levels of analysis (like the abortion debate), and specifically at the state and international levels.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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).
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.
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).
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.
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.
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.
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!
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.
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.
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.
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.
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 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.
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.
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?
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.
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.
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.
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.
The Oxford Research Group has launched a Recording Casualties of Armed Conflict (RCAC) Project, that is both attempting to more systematically aggregate casualty counts worldwide, and calling on human security NGOs and governments to standardize measures:
The growing desire to understand both the rationality of suicide terrorism, as well as test theoretical concepts empirically has generated several interesting 
