by Mark Weston | Jul 15, 2008 | Africa, Economics and development
West Africa’s drug problem is spreading beyond the borders of Guinea-Bissau, which I wrote about a few months back. The UN has warned that her nextdoor neighbour, Guinea, is vulnerable too, although in last month’s mutiny by soldiers all the records of the country’s counter-narcotics unit were, rather suspiciously, destroyed. And in Guinea’s nextdoor neighbour, Sierra Leone, police have just arrested eight “white people with queer accents” who were attempting to smuggle 600 kilos of cocaine into Lungi airport in a plane disguised with a Red Cross logo. Sierra Leone’s clued up police spokesman has worked out from their accents that they might be South Americans. Not surprisingly in the light of the destroyed narcotics records in Guinea, a number of police and airport staff were also arrested, including the chief of airport police and the airport manager. The haul was worth 33 million Euros, and it wouldn’t take a very large share of that to persuade a few poor Sierra Leoneans to pull some strings and smooth your path into the country.
Guinea-Bissau, Guinea and Sierra Leone are all fragile states which, like tottering companies, are vulnerable either to complete collapse or to takeover. Guinea-Bissau is in the process of being taken over by the drug cartels – the trouble is, unlike in business where being bought up can sometimes calm the waters, in the world of the resource curse takeover and complete collapse often go hand in hand.
by Richard Gowan | Jul 14, 2008 | Climate and resource scarcity, Conflict and security, Cooperation and coherence, Influence and networks, North America
You don’t have to believe that the end of the world is nigh to enjoy this blog, but it helps. A scan of recent posts throws up Alex on “life after the flood”, Charlie on why the government won’t tell you when that flood is coming, and David on how John McCain is a harbinger of much nastiness to come. Fair enough – the future does look sort of shit right now. But, I hear my co-authors cry, can we quantify the level of shitness, possibly through the utilization of funky social science?
Their answer? In sum, “ooh yeah”. Alex set out some ideas on how G8 leaders could spice up meetings on the Guardian website last week, and his proposals sound more productive than the reality by a long shot:
Global leaders need to develop much deeper shared awareness of common challenges – and each other’s positions on them. Today’s summits are too formal and rushed to produce that. Leaders should spend more time together outside the tightly scripted confines of formal meetings – the original idea behind the G8 – and they should employ full-time rather than part-time “sherpas”, tasked to think through (and even “war game”) future scenarios, rather than fill time drafting communiques.
Now, I’m basically kept on this blog as the in-house miserable reactionary with a remit to point out that very little is really new out there, but I do actually believe in a lot of this stuff. But, as ever, I sense a historical precedent coming on. Reading Alex’s piece, I wondered what rules the G8 gamesters might follow. The set that came to mind were penned by Herman Kahn, a Cold War-era RAND thinker who founded the Hudson Institute. Here are his guidelines on “The Uses of Scenarios”:
(1) They serve to call attention, sometimes dramatically and persuasively, to the larger range of possibilities that must be considered in the analysis of the future. Scenarios are one way to force oneself and others to plunge into the unfamiliar and rapidly changing world of the present and the future;
(2) They dramatize and illustrate the possibilities they focus on in a very useful way. (They may do little or nothing for the possibilities they do not focus on);
(3) They force the analyst to deal with details and dynamics that he might easily avoid treating if he restricted himself to abstract considerations;
(4) They help to illuminate the interaction of psychological, social, economic, cultural, political, and military factors, including the influence of individual political personalities upon what otherwise might be abstract considerations, and they do so in a form that permits the comprehension of many such interacting elements at once;
(5) They can illustrate forcefully, sometimes in oversimplified fashion, certain principles, issues, or questions that might be ignored or lost if one insisted on taking examples only from the complex and controversial real world;
(6) They may also be used to consider alternative possible outcomes of certain real past and present events, such as Suez, Lebanon, Laos, or Berlin;
(7) They can be used as artificial “case histories” and “historical anecdotes” to make up to some degree for the paucity of actual examples.
That may all seem quite useful. But beware where your ideas come from: Kahn is now largely forgotten, but in his day he was a notorious advocate of nuclear war-fighting. Some of his writings on the subject were reproduced verbatim by Stanley Kubrick in Doctor Strangelove. He used his scenarios to suggest that death-rates after a nuclear exchange might be acceptable, and he treated most arguments against nuclear weapons as “nonissues” or “almost nonissues” until the end of his career. And while some of his presentations lasted for literally days on end, most of his projections are now dismissed as baseless tosh.
None of which is to say that gaming scenarios, or even Kahn’s guidelines, should be abandoned. But if we are to promote a new generation of scenario-planning, strategy-making, war-gaming and thinking about resilence, we shouldn’t forget that a lot of the intellectual tools at our disposal have been passed down to us from defense intellectuals we might feel distinctly uncomfortable with.
It’s obvious really. But worth keeping in mind.
by Alex Evans | Jul 4, 2008 | Climate and resource scarcity, Conflict and security
David and I are both out in Japan to speak at a conference on climate change organised by the United Nations University .
Highlight of the day so far: sitting next to the engineering director at Nissan’s technology planning department over lunch, who (it transpired) knew everything there is to know about electric cars. Back at the end of May, I wrote that electric cars were miles away from commercial roll-out. Well, turns out that they’re much closer to reality than I’d thought. Nissan will be rolling out electric cars in Japan in 2010, followed by the US and (in Europe) Denmark in 2011, and then the rest of Europe in 2012.
Think that’s interesting? Try this: on current electricity prices in Japan, a full charge for the car (enough for about 100 miles of driving) might cost as little as 50 cents . Meanwhile, the cars themselves won’t be much more expensive than conventional combustion engine equivalents either.
All in all, a pretty compelling proposition for consumers with oil prices as high as they are. Which left me wondering two things.
The first is simply: will electric power systems be able to cope with the additional demand if take-up of electric cars is rapid? The UK, like many countries, has seen its capacity margin (the gap between peak electricity demand and the amount of power that can be generated with all power stations running at full tilt ) diminish in recent years. People whose job it is to worry about resilience fret about whether the lights would stay on if there were big outages in generating capacity at the same time as spikes in demand – we came close to such a scenario a few weeks back. If cars that used to run on petrol start running on electric power instead, then that problem gets much tougher.
Second, it will be interesting to see what the carbon savings involved look like. Electric cars are only as green as the kind of generating capacity used to charge them up. If the power’s from wind or nuclear, then they’re fabulously clean; if it’s from coal, then they might be even dirtier than petrol cars. So if electric cars do end up adding lots more demand on power grids, governments and power companies had better get a move on with installing low carbon generating capacity if they want them to be a blessing rather than a curse.
All in all, it’s exciting that electric cars are so close – but the power sector must be biting its fingernails.
Update: Sam Roggeveen has more on both of these issues.
by Charlie Edwards | Jun 18, 2008 | Conflict and security, Cooperation and coherence, Europe and Central Asia
While the national football team’s loss to Italy last night heralded the end of an era for French football and possibly Raymond Domenech tenure as coach, a new era in French national security and defence policy was being ushered in by President Sarkozy.
In a sentence: The new French white paper is a radical departure from traditional French defence policy and recommends a plethora of new policies that seek to transform internal structures of government regarding intelligence and crisis management while simultaneously articulating a shift in approach to international affairs.
It’s good, far better than the US National security’s strategy and better in some areas than the recent UK strategy. Terrorism ranks as France’s primary threat (pourquoi?).
The two key takeaways are the wholesale transformation of France’s crisis management structures and the five strategic functions of national security strategy.
The strategy offers a well worn narrative beginning with the end of the post-Cold War world and the effects of globalisation. There are some clear parallels with work done in the UK, US, Singapore and elsewhere but some notable differences. Like the UK NSS the French white paper takes an all-hazards approach, dealing with active, deliberate threats but also with the security implications of major disasters and catastrophes of a non-intentional nature.
Unlike the UK NSS which was primarily the creation of a small group of policy makers inside the Cabinet Office the French Government have put a huge amount of effort into their new strategy. The composition of the Commission included government agencies, the armed forces, parliamentarians, academia, think-tanks, independent experts and industry. And in a striking similarity with the Conservative Party’s approach, the Commission took evidence from individuals from 14 countries on 5 continents with televised and on-line hearings. Furthermore there were more than twenty in-depth field visits in defence and national security units and facilities.
For a more indepth analysis…
(more…)
by Alex Evans | Jun 14, 2008 | Climate and resource scarcity, Conflict and security, Economics and development
At a seminar held yesterday as part of IPPR’s Commission on National Security, we got onto a discussion of how far aid donors still need to go in sorting out their approach on conflict prevention. The problem isn’t with the specialist departments that deal with conflict within donor agencies – which are often excellent (e.g. the CHASE department in DFID) – but rather with long-term systemic issue areas that just aren’t mainstreamed properly throughout donors’ work. For me, four spring to mind.
First, governance. I’ve written about this at length before on GD, and I still think the same now. When European donors think governance, they think about techie work in the executive branch: public financial management, anti-corruption commissions, that sort of thing. What they overlook is the politics: elections, what happens in the smoke-filled rooms of the ruling party, the process of bargaining between states and citizens. And it’s here that conflict risk – or risk reduction – is often to be found.
Second, resilience. Many donors have great work underway on specific areas of resilience – like peacebuilding, adaptation to climate change or disaster risk reduction. But donors often fail to identify the syngergies between these different kinds of resilience work – as International Alert did in their report on climate adaptation and peacebuilding last year. How about a more joined-up approach across the board that focuses really hard on identifying the sources of resilience in different developing countries, and then working to build them up? After all, about the only thing that’s clear about the next couple of decades is that they’ll be increasingly turbulent. You wouldn’t know it from looking at donors’ country programmes.
Third, scarcity. Disputes over land in Kenya; water as a threat multiplier in Darfur; riots over food and energy prices in more than 30 countries this year alone; the looming shadow of climate change. Scarcity issues are set to become one of the principal obstacles to achieving the MDGs, and a major source of increased conflict risk. Helping partner countries to manage competing claims to scarce resources – at all levels from local to global – should be a core competence in donors’ policy and programme work alike. Is it? Nope.
Fourth, counter-insurgency and fourth generation warfare. Whether you’re looking at the Taliban in Afghanistan, MEND in Nigeria, drug lords in Mexico or organised crime in the Balkans, there are plenty of participants in the ‘global bazaar of violence’ who are interested in hollowing out weak states – not the same as causing them to collapse, as Daniel and I were discussing earlier this week – so as to give them the space and legitimacy to operate as they want. Alas, it’s the military coming up with the really innovative approaches on this – not aid donors.
As should already be clear, these aren’t so much new agendas for aid donors, as cross-cutting ones: involving joining up the dots between current areas of work, being willing to take more risks, and realising that being an effective donor in the 21st century is as much about influence and the quality of your people as it’s about cash.
They also involve forging a lot of new, more coherent relationships: with new donors (like the Gates Foundation); with new country players (like China); and – perhaps most of all – with other parts of government (c.f. DFID and the the Foreign Office).
But here’s a key point: it’s crucial that we don’t throw the baby out with the bathwater.
I always hesitate when I hear people in the UK calling for DFID to be merged back into the Foreign Office, or for the International Development Act to be revised or scrapped. True, there are [numerous] times when DFID needs to interpret its poverty reduction mission with a bit more verve and imagination. But remember why it was necessary in the first place to make DFID independent and to create the Act to protect it.
We do need a more substantive conversation about joining up the dots on aid and foreign policy – both in Britain and internationally – in order to get better at conflict prevention. But before we can start it, there need to be some upfront guarantees of no sliding back to aid being a tool for pursuing narrow, short-term national interests.
