War is Development in Reverse

Posted by and & filed under Conflict Patterns

The UN’s new Sustainable Development Goals are ready for adoption. For the first time, the UN will measure the incidence of one of the most controversial, but important, development indicators: the amount of armed conflict in the world.

SDG2015On 25 September this year, a UN summit will adopt the new Sustainable Development Goals. These will replace the Millennium Development Goals dating from 2000, which expire this year.

Originally Norway pressed for the Millennium Development Goals to include the goal of a more peaceful society. This turned out to be too controversial. Several countries feared that such a goal would legitimize interference by the UN in countries’ internal affairs.

Since 2000, however, it has become increasingly difficult to deny the clear connection between armed conflict and underdevelopment. The major breakthrough came in 2011, when the World Bank’s World Development Report addressed war and development. The report, whose contributors included PRIO and several other Norwegian research institutions, confirmed that war is development in reverse.Read More

This Week in South Sudan – Week 38

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Monday 14 September According to the NGO Forum, a consortium of NGOs, aid workers in South Sudan are being attacked with greater frequency. President Salva Kiir will not lead the government’s delegation to the summit of heads of state and government at the UN General Assembly in New York. According to local officials, thousands of… Read more »

How Russia and America make the same mistakes in Syria

Posted by & filed under Regions and Powers

It will take quite a few voyages by this Russian transport ship to deliver a meaningful force to Latakia. Photo from Bosphorus Naval News.

 

Russia’s apparent escalation in Syria is less dramatic than it seems, but it still represents another depressing development in the ongoing nightmare of the Syrian civil war. While it appears no Russian troops are engaged in fighting, the volume of military cargo delivered from Russia to Syria by sea and air has significantly increased in the last couple of weeks. President Putin did assert that it was “premature” to talk about direct Russian participation in the yet-to-be-built coalition against the various terrorist groups in the country. And even though Putin says it, it might still be true.

Clearly, putting scarce Russians troops on the ground to fight in a hopelessly stagnant civil war is not Moscow’s preferred path. Instead, the recent escalation probably reflects an effort to establish a position of strength from which to bring Moscow back into the center of the diplomacy over Syria. It won’t work, though Russian assistance and weapons to the regime may make the situation in Syria even worse for the population.

 

This argument is elaborated in the Brookings Order from Chaos blog.

Practical Compassion in the Age of Crisis

Posted by & filed under Humanitarianism

A Mayday protest in Hamburg, Germany, champions the slogan “Never Mind the Papers!,” in solidarity with the inbound refugees from Middle East conflicts, May 1, 2015. By Rasande Tyskar.

The news from last week was bleak. Fleeing violence and chaos in the Middle East, horrific accounts detailed the tragic fates of countless people seeking refuge in Europe. Thousands have perished along the way, and many survivors have found themselves in dangerous conditions upon arrival in Europe. Some state reactions have been appallingly inhumane, and many undocumented refugees remain vulnerable to predation and exploitation by human traffickers. Government pledges to approve more refugee applications have been criticized as too little too late, and the immediate needs of countless people remain unmet.

We are being Put to the Test

Posted by & filed under Law and Ethics

We must both take in refugees and preserve our culture and way of living.

A flood of migrants is coming to Europe. They are fleeing chaos and war. They are from all levels of society. The vast majority would have remained in their homelands if they had been able. But as a result of violence, political ineptitude and ideological tugs-of-war, combined with Western policy that has basically been a failure, the situation has become hopeless. They see no other option than to flee.

Refugees at Budapest Keleti railway station in September 2015. Photo: Rebecca Harms. cc-by-sa-2.0.

Our openness and generosity are being put to the test. Turning our backs or making unrealistic assertions that we can help these people where they are is not an option. This does not mean, however, that the choices are straightforward. Just as the primary responsibility of every parent is to bring up and assist his or her own children, our political leaders have a responsibility to take care of their own country. Political leaders should preferably hand over a country and its political system to the next generation in better condition that when they themselves took it over.

That leads us to the question: is it possible to preserve what we can broadly call our European culture(s) and identity while at the same time taking in large numbers of migrants?

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Refugees are Also Migrants. And All Migrants Matter

Posted by & filed under Humanitarianism, Media, Migration

Initial refugees of migrants in Italy, 2015. (Carlos Spottorno, British Red Cross, CC BY-NC-ND)

The recent debate over word choice has taken turns that undermine humanitarian principles and cloud the view of how migration is unfolding. The Washington Post, the New York Times, the Guardian, the BBC, and others have examined the usage of ‘refugees’ versus ‘migrants’ over the past week. The general impression is that ‘migrants’ are being thrown to the wolves. The most insidious contribution, sadly, comes from the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR).

But first, the origins of the current debate: in mid-August 2015, Al Jazeera announced that the network will no longer refer to ‘migrants’ in the Mediterranean. This word, an online editor argued, has become ‘a tool that dehumanises and distances, a blunt pejorative.’ The network’s solution is to drop ‘migrants’ and instead use ‘refugees.’ The announcement was met with a groundswell of cheering in social media.

The essence of Al Jazeera’s argument is that if we sympathise with people, we should call them refugees in order to humanize them. But, as Judith Vonberg argued in her lone and brave critical response, ‘Al Jazeera gives credence to the illiberal voices telling us that migrants are not worthy of our compassion.’

A few days after Al Jazeera’s announcement, the UNHCR published a news item on its website, entitled ‘“Refugee” or “migrant”–Which is right?’ To encourage dissemination through social media, the article was accompanied by an image of a distressed mother and two children, with the words ‘Refugee or Migrant? Word choice matters’ superimposed.

The UNHCR doesn’t call for dropping migrants, but asks that the people crossing the Mediterranean be labelled ‘refugees and migrants.’ This stance appears to be a reasonable compromise, but is equally unsettling. It reflects the agency’s insistence that refugees and migrants are ‘fundamentally different’ from each other.

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Why the ISIS Threat is Totally Overblown

Posted by & filed under PRIO Annual Peace Address

One of the most remarkable phenomena of the last year is the way ISIS, the vicious insurgent group in Iraq and Syria, has captured the imagination of the public in Western countries. And as usual, officials and the media have fallen over themselves to respond with urgency.

Americans had remained substantially unmoved by even worse human catastrophes in the past, such as genocide in Cambodia in the 1970s and in Rwanda in 1994, as well as sustained criminal predation in eastern Congo in the years after 1997. But following a set of web-cast beheadings of Americans in the late summer and fall of 2014, some 60 to 70 percent of the American public now says ISIS presents a major security threat to the United States. Only 17 percent had advocated sending American ground troops to fight ISIS after it surprisingly routed American-trained (and spectacularly ill-led) Iraqi forces in Mosul, Iraq, in June 2014. However, the beheadings abruptly boosted that support to over 40 percent. For a while in February 2015, after the death of an American captive, Kayla Mueller, support spiked even higher — to upwards of 60 percent. A similar phenomenon has taken place in Europe. In the Czech Republic, for example, the public has come to view Islamist terrorism to be the country’s top security threat, even though it has never experienced a single such episode.

ISIS positions in Kobane under attack.

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World War II Becomes a Chinese War

Posted by & filed under Regions and Powers

70 years ago, Japan signed an agreement of formal surrender on an American warship in Tokyo Bay. The anniversary of this event will be marked in Beijing today, September 3rd by a massive military parade in which Chinese and Russian soldiers march together.

Vladimir Putin and Xi Jinping at the BRICS summit 2015. Photo: Wikimedia Commons

President Xi Jinping’s most important guest during the parade will be Russian president Vladimir Putin. Thanks to Putin, the memory of World War II has shifted from Europe to Asia. Xi and Putin will celebrate their joint victory over German Nazism and Japanese militarism.

When Russia invaded Crimea and sent troops into eastern Ukraine last year, an ice front was created in Europe that made it impossible for Russia and Ukraine to commemorate the Great Patriotic War together. Xi was the only high-profile guest during the parade held in Moscow on 9 May. Angela Merkel arrived only afterwards.

The partnership between Russia and China is now being reaffirmed. West and Central Europe’s wartime history has been put in parentheses. Even the US War in the Pacific War is played down. One result of the “Asiafication” of the memory of war is that less emphasis is being placed on reconciliation. Instead, World War II is being used to emphasize the lines of conflict in the world today.

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The Dangers of Alarmism

Posted by & filed under PRIO Annual Peace Address

Threat identification and threat inflation are clearly important elements in international affairs. However, determining which threats and fears people and policymakers will embrace as notable and important is difficult. Thus, the American public and its leaders have remained remarkably calm about the dangers of genetically modified food while becoming very wary of nuclear power. The French see it very differently. In the United States, illegal immigration from Mexico is seen to be a threat in some years, but not in others. The country was “held hostage” when Americans were kidnapped in Iran in 1979 or in Lebanon in the 1980s but not when this repeatedly happened during the Iraq War or in Colombia. Milošević in Serbia became a monster worthy of attention and alarm, but not Mugabe in Zimbabwe or SLORC in Burma or Pol Pot in Cambodia or, until 9/11, the Taliban in Afghanistan.

John Mueller at the PRIO Annual Peace Address.

However, it does seem that every foreign policy threat in the last several decades that has come to be accepted as significant has, in the process, been unwisely exaggerated. As a result, over the last several decades, alarmism has been prominent in thinking about international security. When successfully generated, alarmism very frequently leads to two responses that are serially connected and often prove to be unwise, even dangerous. First, a threatening event is treated not as an aberration, but rather as a harbinger indicating that things have suddenly become much more dangerous, will remain so, and will become worse—an exercise that might be called “massive extrapolation.” And second, there is a tendency to lash out at the threat and to overspend to deal with it without much thought about alternative policies including ones that might advocate simply letting it be. There is, as Noël Coward once put it in different context, a “dread of repose.” I would like to examine alarmism during the Cold War about the nature of the Soviet threat and alarmism after 9/11 about the threat presented terrorism. I conclude with a discussion about the relevance of deterrence to the process.

With this I do not wish to suggest that all fears are unjustified or that international threats are never underestimated. In fact, I suspect that some of the tendency to inflate threats in the period after World War II derives from the fact that the threat presented by Adolf Hitler’s Germany had been underappreciated in the period before it (and Hitler was keen to help: in virtually all of his foreign policy speeches of the 1930s, he spoke of his ardent desire for peace). The post-war proclivity toward exaggeration and overreaction may also stem in part from the traumatic prewar experience with Japan when there had been something of a tendency to underestimate its capacity and, in particular, its willingness to take risks. Robert Jervis has suggested that “those who remember the past are condemned to making the opposite mistakes.” The pre-war experience with Hitler and with Japan may have been too well remembered.

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Putin’s Pivot to Asia: Profit-Free, but Problem-Rich

Posted by & filed under Regions and Powers

The bilateral meeting in Beijing will be demonstratively cordial but loaded with mutual disappointment. Putin cannot fail to see that his hopes for harvesting rich dividends from closer Russian ties with China have failed to materialize and delivered him to a position of one-sided dependency. Xi, meanwhile, has few doubts about the trajectory of Russia’s crisis and probably understands that Putin’s mismanagement brings risks of a catastrophically hard landing. While Russia’s aggressive assault on the European security system is not helpful for China’s plans regarding the evolutionary transformation of the global order. Vladimir Putin has announced his intention to address the United Nations General Assembly in late September; and in the absence of the likes of Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, Hugo Chavez or Muammar Qaddafi, he might receive a rousing ovation for the most anti-American and “down with the Western hegemony” speech. But China will likely hardly be entertained.

This is the bottom line from my article in Eurasia Daily Monitor, August 31.