by Alex Evans | Jun 14, 2010 | Influence and networks
American anti-Muslim wingnuts are, needless to say, having a field day over plans to build a mosque and community centre two block away from Ground Zero.
But at a recent protest organised by SIOA (‘Stop the Islamization of America’), there was an exquisite moment of irony. Two arabic-speaking men, who were set upon by the protestors and had to be rescued by the NYPD, turned out to be Egyptian Christians – who’d come to join the anti-Muslim protest.
Full details from Mike Kelly:
At one point, a portion of the crowd menacingly surrounded two Egyptian men who were speaking Arabic and were thought to be Muslims.
“Go home,” several shouted from the crowd.
“Get out,” others shouted.
In fact, the two men – Joseph Nassralla and Karam El Masry — were not Muslims at all. They turned out to be Egyptian Coptic Christians who work for a California-based Christian satellite TV station called “The Way.” Both said they had come to protest the mosque.
“I’m a Christian,” Nassralla shouted to the crowd, his eyes bulging and beads of sweat rolling down his face.
But it was no use. The protesters had become so angry at what they thought were Muslims that New York City police officers had to rush in and pull Nassralla and El Masry to safety.
“I flew nine hours in an airplane to come here,” a frustrated Nassralla said afterward.
by Alex Evans | Jun 14, 2010 | Climate and resource scarcity, Influence and networks
One of the many strands of discussion at a Ditchley Foundation conference on climate change last week was the vexed question of how public opinion shapes the political space open to leaders on climate. There were many furrowed brows on this, not least given that the polling numbers on climate change are all heading the wrong way, all over the world – perhaps unsurprisingly, given the combination of the recession and media coverage of ‘climategate’.
My own take on this is that when we think about public opinion in the climate context, we’re a bit too fast to look at it through the lens of NGOs and the media – both of which had, I think, a terrible summit at Copenhagen.
Take NGOs first. For the most part, they concentrated on highly technical issues, as they have throughout the past decade – acting, in other words, like negotiators despite not having any bargaining chips. When they tried to look up a bit, and set an overall agenda, it was so vague as to be meaningless (“ambitious, fair, binding” – more on that here). Finally, as the summit fell apart, they retreated to their habitual comfort zone of arguing that it was all the fault of the US and EU, who had been unforgivably horrid to poor old China. (See Mark Lynas for a blistering critique of that view.)
Then, of course, there’s the feral nature of the 24/7 news media, which cheerfully overlooks its own agenda-setting role even as it peddles its sensationalised stories of stitch-ups, scandals and show-downs.
The Guardian’s John Vidal deserves singling out for an especially dishonourable mention here. Just two days in to Copenhagen, he ran a breathless piece saying that Copenhagen was “in disarray” following the leak of a draft agreement that “would hand more power to rich nations”. Never mind that the content of his piece was highly questionable (as we pointed out on GD at the time). The effect was to poison the atmosphere just as the summit began – leading the Indian environment minister to say in April this year that the summit had been “destroyed from the start” by the Guardian leak. Nice one, John!
So given that it would appear to be unwise to expect either NGOs or the media to help shape public opinion more constructively, what’s left? One suggestion at the conference was a bigger role for faith leaders – who are indeed getting steadily more active on climate.
But my hunch is that it’s social networking technologies that are the key opinion formers to watch.
We’ve seen how breathtakingly fast they are at aggregating information – as during the Mumbai attacks, for instance, where Twitter was consistently 60-90 minutes ahead of the news media. We’ve seen how they aggregate opinion as well as information – which can of course be as much of a curse as a blessing. And we’ve seen how they can organise action – not just protest, but also more proactive policy solutions.
But what we haven’t seen, yet, is how all these elements could combine in the face of stronger climate impacts – not just an extreme weather event, but an impact that could really trigger awareness of the potential for irreversible shifts. Strikes me that social networking technologies would be a highly unpredictable and interesting wild card in such circumstances – and potentially rather more useful than either NGOs or the media.
by Alex Evans | Jun 14, 2010 | Climate and resource scarcity, Conflict and security
What do countries do when they run out of oil? That’s the question posed by Oxford University’s Joerg Friedrich in a fortcoming journal piece in Energy Policy (already available here). Friedrich give three examples of strategies taken by countries facing this very issue in the past, which go like this.
First, you can opt for predatory militarism, where Japan before and during World War Two provides his case study. According to Friedrich, “the spectre of future resource shortages had played an important part in shaping Japan’s imperialist strategy ever since the end of World War One … when an American oil embargo became imminent, in 1941, Japan pre-emptively attacked the US and radicalized its war of conquest in order to gain access to the oil supplies of the East Indies”.
A second strategy, he reckons, is totalitarian retrenchment, which is what North Korea did after the Cold War. “When subsidized deliveries of oil and other vital resources from the Soviet Union were disrupted, the ‘Hermit Kingdom’ reacted in a shockingly reckless way. Elite privileges were preserved in the face of hundreds of thousands of North Koreans dying from hunger.”
Third, he offers what he calls socio-economic adaptation – which, he argues, is what Cuba successfully achieved when faced with the same challenges as North Korea. While the end of subsidized deliveries from the USSR presented a massive challenge here too, “there was no mass starvation comparable to North Korea. Instead, Cubans relied on social networks and non-industrial modes of production to cope with energy scarcity and the concomitant shortage of food. They were actively encouraged to do so by the regime in Havana”.
It’s an engaging analysis, and worth reading the whole thing – and I absolutely share Friedrich’s concern about the risk of hugely damaging zero sum games as resources get scarce.
But as with many other peak oil analyses, I hesitate about the implied assumption that the answer to peak oil is necessarily local. I’d love to hear Friedrich’s take on what might an internationalist approach to managing increasing resource scarcity might look like. Cuba’s hardly the best case study for examining that, of course, given that it also faces the small matter of a US trade embargo. But it’s still a big – and largely unexamined – question.
by Richard Gowan | Jun 10, 2010 | Conflict and security, Europe and Central Asia, Middle East and North Africa, North America, Off topic, UK
What am I talking about here?
You’ve seen this story in a thousand cop shows. The aged policeman, a week from retirement, takes one last case with an ambitious young partner. They bicker. They learn to work together. They face down a bad guy at dawn. The old guy gets to go home…
Ah-ha, the reader will think, this will segue into an analysis of the Lethal Weapon movies, in which Danny Glover famously played a cop worried about getting old…
Not so. I am, in fact, trying to capture the EU’s dilemma over diplomacy with Iran. Yesterday, the Security Council approved new sanctions on Tehran. The EU supports these, and will add to them. But, whereas the “E3” (Britain, France and Germany) used to lead efforts to constrain Iran at the UN, there are new officers on the beat:
In the short-term, this is primarily a U.S. success. Washington has largely replaced the EU in diplomacy around Iran – a switch made clear when President Obama announced new intelligence on Iranian activities at September’s G20 summit in Pittsburgh.
Other players have been involved too. Saudi Arabia and the Gulf States have been sending clear signals to Beijing that it should get tough with Iran or risk damaging their bilateral relations – a powerful warning, given China’s reliance on Gulf energy supplies.
Russia, the inveterate rogue cop in this story (the type normally played by Harvey Keitel) has also come good, at least for now. Whether thanks to U.S. engagement or because of concerns over its economy, Moscow has turned against Iran, tipping the scales at the UN.
At times, European leaders have been irritated by their reduced profile on the issue. Last month, The Economist reported that President Sarkozy hopes to use France’s presidency of the G20 in 2011 to reassert a leadership role on Iran – among a small host of priorities.
In reality, the Europeans are now consigned to the Danny Glover role on Iran: backing up the U.S. in diplomacy at the UN rather than playing the starring role. That’s not necessarily a bad thing. The E3 should be satisfied that the U.S. has now adopted their strategy, even if matters could turn nasty at short notice. And like Mel Gibson in Lethal Weapon, Washington will need back-up when things do bad…
by Richard Gowan | Jun 7, 2010 | Africa, Conflict and security
This is how some international interventions end:
What if you add in a gorilla? The beleaguered UN mission in the Congo – which David Axe and I have been blogging to and fro about of late – has a wild airlift option:
In continuing efforts to preserve gorillas, one of the world’s most endangered species, the United Nations mission in the Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC), will next month carry out a second airlift of six baby gorillas to a sanctuary where they will be cared for before they released into the wild. “Together, the orphaned gorillas are hoped to form a new “family” of 10,” the UN Environment Programme (UNEP), which recommended the airlift along with INTERPOL, said in a press release yesterday.
The operation, planned for mid July, is the second to be conducted by the UN peacekeeping force in DRC as part of a wider effort to combat the illegal cross-border trade in baby gorillas, which has intensified in recent years with the proliferation of armed groups in the region. The first rescue was conducted by the peacekeeping mission on 27 May, when four eastern lowland baby gorillas, seized from poachers, were flown to safety by UN helicopters to a sanctuary in Kasughu in North Kivu province. The ultimate objective is to rehabilitate the gorillas and to reintroduce them back in their natural environment.
According to a report by UNEP entitled “The Last Stand for the Gorilla”, unless urgent action is taken to strengthen the enforcement of environmental law and counter poaching, endangered gorillas may largely disappear from the Greater Congo Basin, in the next 15 years.
Previous projections by the agency in 2002 suggested that only 10 per cent of the original ranges would remain by 2030. Those estimates now appear too optimistic, given the intensification of pressures including illegal logging, mining, charcoal production and increased demand for bushmeat, of which an increasing proportion is ape meat.
This is a pretty depressing statement about the state of the Congo. I’m glad we’re saving the gorillas. But what about the people the UN will ultimately leave behind?
