Richard mentioned Mike Davis’ compelling book Planet of the Slums a while back and I’ve recently finished it, coincidentally it seems, just at the point when shanty towns and squatter camps in and around Jo’berg have erupted into violence. As Davis argues in his book
the contemporary mega-slum poses unique problems of imperial order and social control that conventional geopolitics has barely begun to register. If the aim of the “war on terrorism” is to pursue the erstwhile enemy into his sociological and cultural labyrinth, then the poor peripheries of developing cities will be the permanent battlefields of the twenty-first century.
In Jo’berg attacks have taken place in Alexandra, Reiger Park, Diepsloot, and Primrose. Estimates of the numbers of immigrants chased from their homes range from 13,000 to 20,000 with police patrolling the streets and the army called in to quell the violence – the first time they have been on the streets since the end of apartheid.
The wave of violence against foreigners in South Africa has now spread to Cape Town where Somalis and Zimbabweans have been attacked by mobs who have looted their homes and shops overnight. The cause of the outbreak is down to rapidly escalating food and fuel prices mixed with a healthy dose of xenophobia with South Africans accusing foreigners of increasing crime and taking jobs.
There’s a great article in this week’s New Yorker about a new form of therapy designed to treat the estimated 20% of Iraq and Afghanistan veterans who are returning to the US with post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD).
The therapy is based on virtual reality – using a specially-modified version of the game Full Spectrum Warrior, which was partly designed by the Pentagon as a training programme, though civilians can also buy it and play it on their PCs or consoles.
The special therapeutic version, called Virtual Iraq, uses a head-set that fully immerses the player in the environment. Psychologists then use it to re-expose the patient to the incident that caused their trauma, the incident which is lodging in their memory like shrapnel, and not letting them get on with their life.
The programme can be modified to quite detailed specifications – the psychologist can take the patient to a number of different environments, such as walking through a market, or driving along a road in a Humvee, and can introduce elements such as helicopters flying over head, people shouting in Arabic, even ‘the smell of burnt hair’.
Noticed while browsing the ever insightful Kevin Drum: The graph, from the Human Security Report 2007 shows that as terrorist incidents have risen in Pakistan, opposition to terrorism has also risen. The report goes onto suggest that ‘terror campaigns that lose public support will eventually be abandoned, even if the terrorists themselves remain undefeated.’ This is something government’s understand but their actions suggest otherwise. The idea that without public support terrorism will fail is, I think, the principle reason for why the UK Government has switched a good chunk of its resources to the Prevent strand of CONTEST.
Not long ago, readers will recall, Richard wrote a downcast post explaining why think tank reports are often condemned to live out their lives in a dusty cupboard, unwanted and unread. So it’s a pleasant duty to report a happy tale of think tank research having a genuinely decisive and traceable global impact – within 10 days of publication.
With the prospect of a good northern hemisphere wheat harvest getting ever more probable, the really big outstanding worry on food prices in the immediate term has been rice prices (which have trebled just this year) – especially since cyclone Nargis hasn’t done Burma’s production figures any good whatsoever.
But as Tom Slayton and Peter Timmer of the Center for Global Development pointed out in a briefing paper published on 9 May, there was also a potential solution: export some of Japan’s 1.5 million tons of surplus rice. Problem was, they explained, Japan couldn’t do this without permission from the US (the original source of much of the rice) – and without that permission, the rice would be fed to pigs and chickens in Japan.
Fast forward to ten days later – and Japan’s vice minister for agriculture was announcing plans to export 200,000 tons of rice to the Philipinnes, one of the most over-stretched rice importers, "as fast as possible", with US officials having worked flat out to make it happen (when they could have used WTO rules to block the move). While much more will need to be done, the impact is already clear, as the authors explain in a CGD blog post :
Before we released our CGD Note last week, world rice prices were hovering above $1,000 per ton (the FOB price for Thai 100% B, a widely accepted market marker). Word that Japan might unload its surplus contributed to subsequent price declines in both Bangkok and Chicago. We hope that today’s news — and subsequent announcements by other countries in a position to export surplus rice in the days and weeks ahead — will lead to further declines that will help to lower world rice prices closer to levels that are affordable to the world’s poor.
The post explains more about how the process happened so fast, including tracing how the story retained momentum through op-ed pieces and well-timed Congressional testimony. As the authors say, "Japan and the U.S. should take a deserved bow for their quick actions ". But it’s Slayton and Timmer themselves who really deserve the curtain call here. Bravo.
