by David Steven | Sep 11, 2010 | North America
No – not the planned Islamic Community Centre in Park Place – but the prayer room on the 51st floor of World Trade Center’s South Tower, where some of the building’s Muslims used to gather to pray:
“We weren’t aliens,” Mr. Abdus-Salaam, 60, said in a telephone interview from Florida, where he moved in retirement. “We had a foothold there. You’d walk into the elevator in the morning and say, ‘Salaam aleikum,’ to one construction worker and five more guys in suits would answer, ‘Aleikum salaam.’ ”
One of those men in suits could have been Zafar Sareshwala, a financial executive for the Parsoli Corporation, who went to the prayer room while on business trips from his London office. He was introduced to it, he recently recalled, by a Manhattan investment banker who happened to be Jewish.
“It was so freeing and so calm,” Mr. Sareshwala, 47, said in a phone conversation from Mumbai, where he is now based. “It had the feel of a real mosque. And the best part is that you are in the epicenter of capitalism — New York City, the World Trade Center — and you had this island of spiritualism. I don’t think you could have that combination anywhere in the world.”
There was a more makeshift facility at the top of the North Tower – a stairwell, where the Muslim staff of Windows on the World would “lay a tablecloth atop the concrete landing in the stairwell and flatten cardboard boxes from food deliveries to serve as prayer mats.”
Update: Meanwhile, Newt Gingrich (with his third wife, Callista – seemingly the first adult woman to be synthesized in a test tube) has released a new feature film, hailing “the end of times… the final struggle” against Islam.
[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dPBv1tZhd-E&feature=player_embedded[/youtube]
Newt, who plans to run for President, claims that “America is experiencing an Islamist cultural-political offensive designed to undermine and destroy our civilization.” Happy times.
by Richard Gowan | Sep 10, 2010 | Global system, North America, Off topic
What is life like inside a hot-shot New York think-tank? What does it really feel like to, say, pick up a phone and talk to the answering machine of a mid-level UN official?
If you’ve always wanted to know the answers to these questions but never dared ask, the International Peace Institute has a video just for you. IPI (with which I have worked on and off for some years) is 40 years old this year. And it has just released a 15-minute video to celebrate. It’s entitled IPI’s History As Told By Those That Lived It and you can access it here (I can’t embed it in this text). See if you can spot all the glamorous IPI staff-members above. It’s like Mad Men for policy wonks!
by Richard Gowan | Sep 10, 2010 | North America, Off topic
“How can you reduce animal pain and increase their comfort in your laboratory?”
This is not a question I ask myself often, as I do most of my research among humans. However, I am somehow on the mailing list of Lab Animal Welfare Compliance – get your sample copy here – which is a magazine for people who test things on rats, etc. This week it features an interview with Bernard Rollin, a bioethicist based in Colorado, who is not impressed by all the experiments he sees…
In perhaps his most controversial beginning advice, Rollin suggests avoiding what he calls the “mindless scientific method.”
Example: Rollin recalls working with PIs [Principal Investigators] seeking an alternative for knife castration of beef cattle, which was conducted with anesthesia traditionally. The PIs were testing whether a reproductive hormone that served as immunological castration would be a more humane method. They gave 100 bulls injections, and had a control group of 100 bulls that were to be knife castrated.
“Those researchers could have used historical controls,” Rollin says. “Members of the research team have witnessed thousands of these before. You don’t need 100 more. That’s the ‘mindless scientific method’ — you don’t need to prove the obvious.”
Ouch.
by Alex Evans | Sep 10, 2010 | Climate and resource scarcity, Conflict and security, Global Dashboard
That’s the question I tackle in a background paper prepared for next year’s World Development Report, which the World Bank has just published (pdf) on its website.
So what’s the answer? In a nutshell, that although climate change and scarcity do indeed pose real conflict risks (especially in fragile states), the relationship is more complicated than you might think from all the media stories about ‘water wars‘ and the like.
In reality, after all, it’s hardly ever possible to separate climate or scarcity impacts from wider political, economic and social drivers. As the Norwegian Refugee Council note, for instance, the problem with the idea of ‘climate refugees’ is that it “implies a mono-causality that one rarely finds in human reality”.
So it is with conflict, most of the time: it’s just not possible to separate land, water, food, energy and so on from the wider political economy context. (As one of the authors I came across put it, “it is difficult to imagine how conflict in any developing country could not involve renewable resources … developing country elites fight over renewable resources for the same reason that Willy Sutton robbed banks: that’s where the money is”.) On a related note, the paper argues that
A political economy-based approach to understanding scarcity also underscores the importance of the point that scarcity should not be viewed in isolation from the contextual factors that make an individual, community or society vulnerable – or resilient – to its effects. While disputes over the ownership, consumption, distribution or governance of scarce resources can increase the risk of violent conflict, the key to reducing the risk of such conflicts may have less to do with access to the resources per se than to the livelihoods that they enable. Creating alternative livelihoods not reliant on these resources, or improving access to social protection systems and safety nets, may therefore be equally viable approaches to achieving the same end.
Bottom line? Yes, resource scarcity and climate change will increase the risk of conflict – but more often as a threat mutiplier than as stand-alone drivers of conflict. And that means donors and developing country governments alike will have to think much harder about resilience across the board – and especially about questions of the effectiveness and legitimacy of natural resource governance regimes.
by Alex Evans | Sep 10, 2010 | Articles and Publications, Reports
Background paper for the World Bank’s 2011 World Development Report by Alex Evans on whether resource scarcity and climate change will cause increased violent conflict (September 2010)
Download Report
