The new public diplomacy and Afghanistan
Last week, I gave a talk at the Defence Academy on the new public diplomacy, focusing in particular on its implications for Afghanistan.
The full text is after the jump or read it as a pdf.
Are our cities going feral?
Reading Alex’s argument about the hollowing-out of governmental authority, I am reminded of Richard Norton’s term a “feral city”, something he defines as a metropolis with over a million people in a state whose government has lost the ability to maintain the rule of law within the city’s boundaries yet remains a functioning actor in the greater international system.
In a feral city social services are all but nonexistent, and the vast majority of the city’s occupants have no access to even the most basic health or security assistance. There is no social safety net. Human security is for the most part a matter of individual initiative.
Yet a feral city does not descend into complete, random chaos. Some elements, be they criminals, armed resistance groups, clans, tribes, or neighborhood associations, exert various degrees of control over portions of the city. Intercity, city-state, and even international commercial transactions occur, but corruption, avarice, and violence are their hallmarks.
Read more here in the Naval War College Review.
Crucial to the term, I think, is the assumption that “ferality” can visit any city, even if for only for a few hours. Look at Copenhagen, a model of tranquility, wrecked by riots in 2006 and 2007.
Failed states, failed cities
Things keep going from bad to worse in Naples, where the piles of uncollected rubbish are still heaped up. Last week, the head of a waste disposal firm turned ‘super-witness’ – who was due to testify about links between corrupt politicians and the Camorra, Naples’ mafia – was gunned down in the street. According to John Hooper in the Guardian:
The Carabinieri, the military police, said yesterday the killing was impossible to reconstruct because no one would admit to having seen it. However, after a search for bullets and casings, they concluded that at least 18 shots were fired from two 9mm-calibre automatics. Orsi was hit twice in the chest and once in the head, suggesting that, in classic mafia style, he was given a “coup de grace” by one of the killers as he lay dying.
Why the Camorra’s interest in trash? Because they’re big players in the sector, Hooper explains – not least in illegally dumping toxic waste which they truck down from the north of Italy. That’s also why the people in and around Naples are opposed to the government’s plan to build incinerators to get rid of the rubbish backlog; they figure that the Camorra would take them over within about ten minutes, and use them to burn the toxic stuff too.
Meanwhile, Mexico‘s also sliding. Last month, the country’s acting chief of police was gunned down. According to the Economist:
One of his bodyguards, who was also wounded, managed to wrestle the police chief’s assailant to the ground and arrest him. Mr Millán was conscious for long enough to ask his killer who was behind the hit, but died before he could get a reply. The answer to his question, provided later by investigators, helps cast some light on why it is so hard to end drug-related violence in Mexico. They say that his assassin was sent by José Antonio Montes Garfias, another federal police officer.
The week leading up to May 13 saw 113 murders in Mexico, including 17 in just one day – and estimates of total deaths due to organised crime range from 1,100 to 2,500 people this year. 2,700 federal troops have now been deployed. As the Economist concludes, “the war on drugs has never seemed less like a metaphor”. And here’s the real catch: “success in disrupting drug cartels only leads to more violence as gang members fight to fill power vacuums and continue to supply the ever-lucrative drug market”. (See also John Robb’s recent write-up.)
In Naples and Ciudad Juarez alike, organised crime’s basic stance towards the state is the same as you’d find with Hezbollah in Lebanon, MEND in Nigeria or the Taliban in Afghanistan. The aim is not to cause the collapse of ‘official’ governance. Rather, it’s to keep the state ‘hollowed out’: so short of capacity and legitimacy that insurgents or organised crime can step into the gap, and then not only operate freely, but also start building up legitimacy powerbases of their own (c.f. another example of the Camorra in action).
Panic buying 101
Here in the UK, it looks like next week will see a major strike by the tanker drivers who keep Shell petrol stations fuelled up – catalysing fears of a potential repeat of the fuel crisis of October 2000. The government has already been drawing up emergency plans, and for the last few days has been calling on motorists not to panic buy stocks for their cars.
I’ve always thought that calling on people not to panic buy is the one measure guaranteed to trigger a rush to build up personal stockpiles. But it emerges that the Cabinet Office’s Civil Contingencies Secretariat is (as ever) several steps ahead of the game: the injunctions against panic buying were precisely designed to get people to start panic buying. The FT’s Jean Eaglesham has the details:
The government assumed that the “buy as normal” message issued by the prime minister on Tuesday would prompt those prone to panic-buying to do exactly that. “We’d rather people started filling their tanks now, giving time for the forecourts to restock before the strike takes hold, than over the weekend,” a government insider told the FT.
The strategy appears to be having some effect. Sales of petrol were up about 10 per cent on Tuesday, compared with the previous week, according to the latest estimates from the Department for Business.
Note to self: never play poker with these people.
Interventions work
Do interventions work? With the vicissitudes of the Iraq and Afghanistan interventions and conflict returning to the Balkans, it is hard to answer in the positive. But the always well-read Nick Grono of ICG alerted me yesterday to this fascinating report – Human Security Brief 2007.
Against current wisdoms, it says that conflict in Africa has dropped dramatically:
Between 1999 and 2006 (the most recent year for which we have complete data), sub-Saharan Africa’s security landscape was transformed. The number of armed conflicts being fought in the region fell by more than half. The number of people being killed dropped even more steeply—by 2006 the annual battle-death toll was just 2 percent of that of 1999.
It goes on to say that while in 2002 there were 26 non-state conflicts in sub-Saharan Africa, this number has dropped by more than half across the region, and their death tolls had fallen by some 70 percent.
Why is this happening? Because of international intervention:
Research suggests that the drivers of this remarkable decline in armed conflicts in sub-Saharan Africa are to be found not in long-term structural change, but in the post-Cold War surge of policy initiatives designed to stop wars (“peacemaking”) or prevent them from starting again (“postconflict peacebuilding”).
So despite the poor coordination, underpowered missions, occasionally illegal activities of UN soldiers, the lack of political will to push through large-scale peace-deals etc. etc. intervention actually works.