by David Steven | Sep 5, 2007 | Conflict and security
First, the Economist on the role ‘amateur’ health care workers can play in building public health systems:
The idea is to harness people’s existing culture of self-help and get subsistence farmers to carry out simple medical tasks which are beyond the capacity of a pathetically inadequate health system…
In Congo alone, the [World Health Organisation] has recruited more than 35,000 community workers for its river-blindness project; they get nothing for their labours except the knowledge that they are protecting their families from disease.
Volunteers from each village are taught how to measure out the annual drug doses, fill in the obligatory record forms, and watch out for side-effects. WHO supplies the drugs and the villagers do the rest themselves. WHO was forced to devise the strategy after it received an offer from Merck, a pharmaceutical firm, of free supplies of a drug to people at risk of river blindness.
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by Alex Evans | Aug 24, 2007 | Cooperation and coherence, Influence and networks
Another week, another comparison between the US and the last days of Rome. This week, the man full of woe about military overstretch and fiscal implosion is David Walker – the Comptroller General of the United States and head of the Government Accountability Office, no less – who writes in the FT that:
America’s fiscal, healthcare, education, energy, environment, immigration and Iraq policies are in need of review and revision. Timely action is needed because Washington’s historical crisis-management approach to dealing with hard public policy choices is no longer prudent.
Rather than discussing whether America today is or isn’t like Rome’s last days in the late fourth century CE, I’ll just note how successfully the “US heading into a decline-and-fall scenario” meme continues to propagate itself (c.f. last week’s post about Thomas Homer-Dixon‘s latest book), not least among Americans themselves – and make two additional observations.
One is that the “decline and fall” meme of popular imagination – riots, starvation, conquest, a thousand years in the Dark Ages – rests on an incomplete, and rather Atlanticist, view of Rome. After all, there is the small matter of the eastern empire, i.e. Byzantium, as it became. Gibbon’s Decline and Fall of Rome runs for a full 1,045 years beyond Alaric’s conquest of Italy in 408CE, all the way to the fall of Constantinople in 1453.
Byzantium’s rise after the split of the Roman Empire provides a precise illustration of Homer-Dixon’s central point: if breakdown can lead to collapse, it can also be a springboard for transformation and renewal. This is a useful and important counter-meme to the riots / starvation / Dark Age meme – and one which deserves to be propagated more often.
The other observation is simply: we could do with some more constructive historical analogies than the ones we have today. Other than the decline-and-fall analogy, the other one most discussed today is Vietnam; another relentlessly gloomy reference point in the popular imagination. (Update: I have just remembered the subject of my last post – whether Iraq is at a ‘Weimar moment’. So I include myself in this criticism!)
Maybe we could do with some more hopeful historical analogies; so here are three starters for ten. Other suggestions welcome.
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by Alex Evans | Aug 14, 2007 | Conflict and security
If you’re off on holiday shortly and casting around for some readable tome, try Thomas Homer-Dixon’s outstanding The Upside of Down. Homer-Dixon’s 300 page essay on global risk trends and the prospect of a multidimensional ‘perfect storm’ is a real page-turner that skips neatly from the decline and fall of Rome to the great San Francisco earthquake and fire of 1906, seeking to extract the key lessons from each to apply them to the current predicament.
The book’s recurring theme is that resilience is all about being able to make creative use of moments of breakdown so as to turn them into processes of renewal – rather than sliding into outright collapse (a la Jared Diamond). So, for instance, after we’ve had Homer-Dixon’s epic description of the city fathers of San Francisco enlisting heavy artillery pieces to blow up one of its more well-heeled avenues – this in a last, desperate, and ultimately successful attempt to create a firebreak – we learn that the earthquake and fire led to the creation of the Federal Reserve Bank.
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by Alex Evans | Jul 12, 2007 | Climate and resource scarcity, Conflict and security
Regular readers of GlobalDashboard know that we’re big fans of fourth generation warfare theorists William Lind and John Robb. Both writers have warned persistently that 4GW isn’t just something that happens “over there”, in Anbar or Helmand. It’s “over here”, too, whether “here” is low-intensity war in Mexico (see the Economist on Mexico’s drugs conflict a couple of weeks ago), or proliferating use of 4GW tactics by home-grown insurgents in the UK.
Lind, reviewing John Robb’s new book, summarises the latter’s conclusions approvingly:
Robb correctly finds the antidote to 4GW not in Soviet-style state structures such as the Department of Homeland Security but in de-centralization. What Robb calls “dynamic decentralized resilience” means that, in concrete terms, security is again to be found close to home. Local police departments, local sources of energy such as roof top solar arrays – I would add local farms that use sustainable agricultural practices – are the key to dealing with system perturbations. To the extent we depend on large, globalist, centralized networks we are insecure.
John Robb, though, thinks that as the use of 4GW tactics “over here” proliferates, things will develop much further:
Members of the middle class will (take) matters into their own hands by forming suburban collectives to share the costs of security — as they do now with education – and shore up delivery of critical services. These “armored suburbs” will deploy and maintain backup generators and communications links; they will be patrolled by civilian police auxiliaries that have received corporate training and boost their own state-of-the-art emergency response systems.
And in case you thought the idea of decentralised local energy and food independence was only for survivalists in Michigan: we have news for you.
by David Steven | Jun 27, 2007 | Climate and resource scarcity, Economics and development
Over the last couple of days, we’ve been blogging from the Chatham House conference – Climate Change: Politics versus Economics.
As the conference made clear, there is growing consensus about what a full-term solution to climate change would look like: concentrations kept below 450ppm or even a shade lower.
This target allows some fairly easy sums to be done. How much can we emit to keep below those limits? When will emissions need to peak? How far will they need to decline from this peak?
IPCC answers for these questions are a peak by 2015, with a decline of as much as 85% by 2050.
Add to that a professed commitment by leaders to get a deal on a post 2012 framework in place by 2009 – and you have a clear and demanding ‘signal from the future’.
That matters. It allows politicians to begin to understand the deal they will be required to make. It helps them build the alliances at home that will give them credibility on the world stage.
It also gives them an idea of the how much climate change is likely to happen – what level of risk they need to prepare for, how much resilience will be needed against future changes.
This is particularly important for developing countries. I firmly expect them to play a much bigger role in the climate change debate over the next year or so.
At the moment, the strongest voices on climate change (Merkel, for example) come from the developed world. More recently, the big emerging economies have become increasingly influential voices.
There is a line that says that that extends the circle far enough – 30 or so emitters make up 90% or so of global emissions. Why bother with countries that emit less than 1% of the world’s total?
The answer is that developing countries are important not because of their emissions, but because of they will bear the brunt of unchecked climate change.
Take people who already experience unforgiving climactic conditions and who have so few reserves that they live their lives on a knife edge. Add extra stress. The likely consequences are obvious…
That’s why I think we’ll soon see the emergence of new voices from the developing world, able to talk with real authority about why the big emitters need to act swiftly to curb their emissions. (more…)
