Category: 2016

Biodiversity conservation is becoming increasingly militarised. Conservationists are learning from the strategies of contemporary warfare, and this is highly problematic for both wildlife and global security.

Biodiversity conservation and security are becoming increasingly integrated. The recent rises in poaching, especially of high profile charismatic species such as elephants, rhinos and tigers has led to the development of more militarised approaches towards conservation. Rather than producing the claimed win-win-win outcome for wildlife, security and people, it is producing a triple fail. While we are more accustomed to debates around climate change and water wars as the main security risks related to the environment, biodiversity conservation is also increasingly being identified as a critical contributor to national and global security, and biodiversity losses constitute a critical security threat. This is especially the case in current debates about poaching and wildlife trafficking. Conservationists, it seems, are learning from the strategies of contemporary warfare.  This is highly problematic for wildlife and global security.

Does wildlife trafficking produce threat finance or not?

Achim Steiner, UN Under-Secretary General and Executive Director of UNEP, recently stated ‘the scale and role of wildlife and forest crime in threat finance calls for much wider policy attention’. The argument that wildlife trafficking constitutes a significant source of ‘threat finance’ takes two forms: first, as a lucrative business for organised crime networks in Europe and Asia, and second as a source of finance for militias and terrorist networks, particularly Al Shabaab, Lord’s Resistance Army and Janjaweed. Yet, a recent report from UNEP and INTERPOL on environmental crime questions the accuracy of the links between ivory and Al Shabaab. The report points out that ivory may be a source of income for some militia groups including Janjaweed and Lord’s Resistance Army; however it also notes that claims Al Shabaab was trafficking 30.6 tonnes of ivory per annum (representing 3600 elephants per year) through southern Somalia are ‘highly unreliable’ and that the main sources of income for Al Shabaab remain charcoal trading and ex-pat finance. In spite of this, the argument persists that there is a link between the illegal wildlife trade and global security.

Although the value of the global illegal trade in wildlife is difficult to determine due to its clandestine nature, it has been estimated at around US$7.8–$10 billion.  It ranks as the third biggest global illicit activity (after trafficking drugs and weapons). Transnational environmental crimes are often not taken seriously within the broader policy and enforcement community, and so they are perceived as a low-risk and high-reward activity for organised crime networks. However, this is changing, and environmental crimes are rapidly gaining greater attention, and the increasing sophistication of wildlife trafficking networks is a reflection of their link with other serious offences, including theft, fraud, corruption, drugs and human trafficking, counterfeiting, firearms smuggling, and money laundering.

Major donors are also taking this issue seriously, and funding has been made available for anti-poaching and anti-trafficking initiatives. In 2013 the Clinton Global Initiative announced a commitment to raise US$80 million to combat trafficking and poaching as a security threat in Africa. Private philanthropic foundations have also become involved, as indicated by the US$25 million donation to South Africa from the Howard G. Buffett Foundation to support rhino protection efforts in Kruger National Park. The rise in poaching has also intersected with US security concerns, prompting President Obama to issue Executive Order 13648 on Combating Wildlife Trafficking in July 2013, and in 2014 USAID allocated more than US$55 million for activities to combat wildlife trafficking, up from US$13 million in 2012. These concerns have emerged as a major policy initiative of the UK government, beginning in May 2013 when Prince Charles convened a high level meeting to ‘kick start’ a government response to the rise in elephant and rhino poaching – followed in 2014 by the London Declaration on the Illegal Wildlife Trade, and the development of a DfID/DEFRA £13 million ‘Illegal Wildlife Trade Challenge Fund’.

Why is conservation being militarised?

Conservation practice is being increasingly militarised as a result of this new interest in the security implications of poaching and trafficking. Militarisation can be briefly defined as the extension of military approaches, equipment and techniques to wildlife protection, as well as the deployment of armed forces in conservation activity. Countries with elephant, rhino and tiger populations also regularly invoke the argument that wildlife constitutes an emblematic natural resource, which is central to national heritage. For example, on World Ranger Day in 2015 South African Minister of Environmental Affairs Edna Molewa paid tribute to park rangers by stating that they were protecting rhinos as a key part of the country’s natural heritage. Such appeals to natural or national heritage are also frequently overlain with the argument that states have a moral obligation to protect wildlife. The interesting question is: why is there an increased interest in countering wildlife poaching and trafficking with more militarised responses?

War on Terror

First, the integration of security and biodiversity conservation has been extended by the development of a global context centred on security concerns, and this is most obvious in the US-led War on Terror. For states (especially parks and wildlife departments), conservation NGOs, and private conservation organisations, the ability to claim that their activities will contribute to national and global security has provided an important opportunity to justify their continued existence, and to leverage additional funding from donors, governments and private sector. The development of a global context in which security is a leading concern has opened new opportunities to leverage significant resources for conservation. During the 1990s, NGOs in the humanitarian relief sector were increasingly engaged in a competitive market to secure funding and contracts with donors. This dynamic was mirrored in the conservation sector, as detailed by Mac Chapin’s high profile piece for WorldWatch on how the ‘big three’ conservation NGOs of WWF, Conservation International and The Nature Conservancy, had managed to secure the majority of available funding. Competition between NGOs and the dominance of the big three partly explains why conservation NGOs have been so keen to promote the idea that conservation is critical to security. The assumption is that by rendering conservation a security issue, it will allow them to tap in to the greater resources available for security and anti-terrorism initiatives.

Technological Innovations

Second, recent innovations in military technology, especially for surveillance purposes, have also driven a demand to find new markets to expand its use (and profitability). This includes the use of drone technology to monitor wildlife populations in areas hit by poaching. The drones can also collect important information on human activity in the area – which is especially welcome in regions where there are concerns about the activity of rebel groups and militias that threaten state (or even international) security. The growing intersections between the two are evident in the development of a new range of surveillance networks which draw together government agencies, international intelligence agencies, wildlife conservation NGOs and private sector risk analysis companies. Such surveillance techniques are used to gather data on individuals and networks suspected of engaging in illegal hunting and trafficking of wildlife products; these use the same techniques associated with counter-insurgency operations, including the extraction of mobile communications data, development of informant networks and use of covert surveillance.

The rise of private security

Third, the rise in privatised forms of security in the post-Cold War era is also reflected in biodiversity conservation: private security companies provide training for anti-poaching operations as well as direct enforcement. This can be placed in the context of the growing use of private military companies in international interventions, including Afghanistan and Iraq. This is especially significant because it heralds a new era in conservation, in which national governments permit direct contracts between conservation NGOs and private security companies, with an authorisation to use deadly force under certain circumstances. A good example is the ways WWF has turned to the private sector to deliver security operations in protected areas that they manage on behalf of states. In Dzangha-Sanga National park in Central African Republic, funding from WWF-Netherlands, WWF-US and WWF-International is used to pay for anti-poaching operations and training under the auspices of Maisha Consulting. The company describes itself as a provider of environmental security via special investigations, training and operations in complex security situations. Numerous conservation NGOs have to grapple with complex security situations, especially if they seek to continue their projects and support when conflicts break out, or when militias move into the same area, and PMCs are regarded useful allies.

The triple fail

The rise of these approaches is deeply problematic for two reasons: they produce responses that are not effective for countering terrorism and insecurity, and equally they do not help us tackle poaching effectively. Instead they act as counterproductive distractions. The militarisation of anti-poaching including the growth of surveillance techniques and ‘intelligence-led’ approaches, fails to address the dynamics that drive poaching. These include a powerful mix of demand from wealthy communities around the world, poverty, inequality and the lack of opportunities in poorer source countries, the collusion of officials, organised crime networks and private transport companies. Simply focusing on military-style protection of wildlife from poaching is not effective: it can produce short term protection, but ultimately undermines wildlife conservation because it pits local communities against wildlife, reducing support for wildlife amongst people who live with it: the very people conservation ultimately relies on.

Rosaleen Duffy is professor of the political ecology of development at SOAS, University of London. In September 2016 she joins the Politics Department in the University of Sheffield and will begin a major research project ‘BIOSEC: Biodiversity and Security: understanding environmental crime, illegal wildlife trade and threat finance’, (EURO 1.8 million funded by an ERC Advanced Investigator Award).

Women have been leading contributors to ISIS’s strength and capabilities. Female operatives have held influential positions in the group’s proto-state which have been crucial to the advancement of the group’s cause.

The self-proclaimed caliphate, the Islamic State of Iraq and Syria (ISIS), poses the greatest terrorist threat to the international community today. ISIS’s goal is relatively simple – establish a global caliphate. However, the group’s state-building ambitions have faced recent setbacks due to counter-terrorism successes – the group’s territorial claims in Syria and Iraq and foreign recruitment has declined substantially. Faced with the loss of its caliphate, ISIS has become more reliant on local populations to maintain its stronghold. As a result, many Syrian and Iraqi citizens are left vulnerable to ISIS’s terror tactics, especially women and children.

ISIS’ treatment of women has placed the organization among the world’s worst perpetrators of gender-based violence. Their brutal tactics include: imprisonment, torture, sexual abuse, and the execution of thousands of Syrian and Iraqi women. Such barbaric treatment is not reserved for non-Muslims; fellow Muslim women are abducted and exposed to horrendous sexual atrocities.   Many women become sex slaves and are sold in markets for a little as $13 USD. Despite their inhumanity towards so many women, ISIS successfully recruits a substantial number of marginalized Syrian and Iraqi females to the caliphate. In fact, ISIS depends on its population of local female to obtain their state-building ambitions.

Incrementally, Syrian and Iraqi women have attained influential roles in the caliphate despite the inhumane treatment of women in the caliphate. ISIS utilizes the local women residents and their cultural expertise to advance its cause. Their responsibilities include caring for ISIS soldiers as wives, birthing the next generation of jihad fighters, and maintaining order within ISIS’S network of women. Despite their work, international media outlets and counter-terrorism reports have primarily focused on the participation of Western women in ISIS, thereby undermining the role of Syrian and Iraqi women.  To gain better insight on Syrian and Iraqi women’s role in ISIS, delving into the underlying motivations of these women can enable experts to assess and comprehend ISIS’s seduction and lure.

Motivations of Local Women to Support ISIS

Women are motivated to support terrorist organizations for multiple reasons. It is important to realize that every woman is motivated for a different, or combination of, reasons. Therefore, it is challenging to determine the exact motivation of any one individual. ISIS’s three year long terror campaign has spread fear and demonstrated its power to control the community. During an ISIS raid on Syrian and Iraqi towns, many households were permanently destroyed – the group harassed, tortured, and murdered individuals that were not compliant. Often, male family members are killed, leaving females to be easily targeted by ISIS. Many women joined the group in order to stay alive.

The absence of an effective government has allowed ISIS to exploit the local resources and infrastructures. As a result, ISIS is able to operate a quasi-state — developing an Islamic court, a functioning military, and a law enforcement force. Leveraging this advantage, the group controls the local public facilities and services including banks, transportation systems, post offices, grocery markets, etc. ISIS’s ability to rule the land make joining the organization a viable solution for the deprived. Many women turn to support the caliphate for access to basic necessities, such as food, water, and shelter.

The Roles of Local Women in ISIS

A) Domestic Roles

According to ISIS’s Manifesto for Women, a woman’s highest achievement is being a dedicated wife, mother, and nurturer. Her primary functions are to take care of her husband and birth the next generation of jihadists that will continue ISIS’s legacy. Women are expected to remain in the house, hidden and veiled, while they undertake chores such as providing daily meals, cleaning uniforms, and keeping a spotless house. Girls are expected to submit to marriage by sixteen or seventeen years old while they are youthful, pure, and attractive. In the caliphate, younger women are quickly married off to ISIS operatives. However, in true ISIS fashion, the group continues misuse outdated Quranic scriptures to its advantage by legalizing the marriage of nine-year-old girls by glorifying the life of Prophet Mohammed and his young wife. Young girls that are be subjected to this perverted act are locals under ISIS’s rule.

B) State Building Roles

While ISIS is notorious for its hardline position on marriage and motherhood, the group’s state-building ambitions permit certain women to undertake jobs outside of the home. Unprecedented in its scopes, ISIS is critical in explaining the importance of recruiting career professionals to help the group attain its objective of creating a jihadi proto-state. In fact, in 2014, an audio recording of ISIS leader Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi surfaced, urging scientists, preachers, judges, doctors, engineers, and scholars to join the caliphate.  Currently, ISIS controls the public and private facilities, which provides them with access to unlimited resources, including existing employees. ISIS’s need for skilled professionals is not limited to men; both genders are responsible for fulfilling their “civil duties”. Nonetheless, regardless of a male’s prior occupation, the majority are placed in ISIS’s military, leaving women to handle the daily activities. Subsequently, there is a larger presence of women undertaking instrumental roles; there are growing numbers of female nurses, educators, and administrators from the area.

C) Operational roles

Women of ISIS are also able to participate in offensive combat operations and defensive military activities. In 2014, ISIS created Al Khansaa — an all-female brigade that predominately consisted of Syrian and Iraqi women. The female unit was reportedly formed to enforce ISIS’s strict conception of Islamic morality. ISIS has imposed a dress code requiring all women to wear two gowns to conceal their body shape, black hand gloves, and dark layers of two face veils year-round. No makeup is allowed. To enforce the rules, the brigade patrols towns with AK-47s to ensure that women are compliant. However, the force responsibilities have drastically expanded, which demonstrates how influential women are in the terrorist group. The women perform a variation of activities, including recruiting, intelligence gathering, and overseeing prisoners. ISIS depends on the brigade to lure women; spy on the community and bring in individuals that voice unfavourable sentiment about the organization; and monitor detention camps detention camps where thousands of kidnapped Yazidi Christian and foreign hostages are imprisoned.

To date, one of the most influential women of ISIS has been a Syrian national, Umm Sayyaf. Before capture by the U.S. military, Sayyaf was a principal advisor to the caliphate leadership on all critical matters relating to women. Her elevated rank highlights how heavily the insurgency has come to rely on certain women to retain soldiers and run day-to-day operations. In her later interrogations by U.S. military personnel, she revealed information regarding the inner-workings of the network including recruitment, intelligence, and sex slavery. Umm Sayyaf also disclosed that the ISIS leader of ISIS, Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi, appointed her to supervise the American hostage Kayla Mueller.

Conclusion

Although international news has reported that ISIS has recently faced some setbacks in their territorial claims and foreign recruitment, anticipating the immanent demise of ISIS is a stretch. The group will be maintained for years to come, as a result of its sophisticated network of Syrian and Iraqi women. The participation of local women exponentially raises the threat due to an increasing number of operatives, a unique tactical advantage, and additional technical expertise. Despite their impact, counter-terrorism studies tend to ignore the involvement of Syrian and Iraqi women and in doing so exclusively focus on the participation of foreign recruits. This omission leads to incomplete counterterrorism objectives and possible unbearable consequences.

ISIS has successfully recognized that empowered women are the foundation of a resilient and stable community. Female operatives will continue to participate at all levels, and the international community must not ignore such contributions. Failure to implement significant changes could lead to the regrowth of ISIS territorial claims and capabilities. By understanding the motivations of, and the roles held by, local women in ISIS this article can help initiatives to counter the group.

Amanda N. Spencer currently works in the counter-terrorism and anti-financial crime division at Deutsche Bank Securities.  She holds a master’s degree in global affairs from New York University and is passionate about contributing to the world of counter-terrorism. Her research explores the multifaceted roles of women in violent extremism. Her most recent research study on the women of ISIS is available at the Journal of Strategic Security: “The Hidden Face of Terrorism: An Analysis of Women in the Islamic State.”

Donald Trump’s victory in the US presidential elections has raised serious questions about whether the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action, a landmark nuclear accord signed in July 2015, has a future.

The election of Donald Trump as US President potentially means very uncertain times for the future of US-Iranian relations. For example, during his presidential campaign trail, Trump declared—“My number one priority is to dismantle the disastrous deal with Iran”. If the Trump administration acts on his campaign rhetoric, there is a distinct possibility that it will be overwhelmed by multiple contradictions and problems.

The Iran Nuclear Deal

The deal, formally known as the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action (JCPOA), stripped Iran of the ability to develop a nuclear weapon system into the next decade in exchange for the gradual lifting of crippling sanctions.  The deal holds Iran to agree to cap enrichment levels of uranium at 3.67 percent for the next fifteen years, which will cut the Iranian enrichment capacity by two-thirds. Under the agreement, Iran ended up shipping the lion’s share of its 20 percent enriched uranium abroad. The deal also provided for more intrusive monitoring by the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA), the UN’s nuclear watchdog, and for the heavy water reactor at Arak to not produce weapons grade plutonium. On November 20th 2016, as a gesture of good will, Iran shipped its remaining heavy water abroad as well. Thus, the breakout capability of Iran to potentially make a nuclear bomb was noticeably extended from two-months to a year, giving further assurance to the international community that the Islamic Republic will not be closer to making a bomb any time soon.

In exchange, Iran would be relieved from the nuclear-related sanctions, and if it violates the agreement, the sanctions will be re-imposed through a snap-back mechanism built in to the agreement.  Since the signing of the agreement, all the reports by the monitoring agencies, including the IAEA, indicate that Iran has abided by its end of the bargain. Seen in this context, it is easy to understand the expression of concern and apprehension surrounding Trump’s ascent to power among many members of Iran’s ruling elite.

What President Trump could mean for US-Iran relations

Two very different futures in US-Iran relations may lie ahead.

• Withdrawal

First, the Trump administration may decide to withdraw from the nuclear deal, impose further sanctions on, and try to isolate Iran.  Trump may seek better ties with Russia and tolerate the Assad regime in Syria in an attempt to defeat and dismantle the Islamic State in Iraq and Syria (ISIS). Trump has declared the defeat of ISIS to be his number one priority in the Middle East and seeks to partner with the anti-ISIS coalition. Yet Iran has been actively involved in the war against ISIS in Syria in alliance with Russia.. It thus remains to be seen how the Trump administration could resolve this contradiction if it tries to defeat ISIS whilst simultaneously escalating tensions with Iran.

Since the Republicans currently control both houses of Congress and many of their members were opposed to the deal when it was signed, bolstered by their electoral victory, they may introduce new bills demanding the renegotiation of the agreement, or prevent sanctions relief, and propose the imposition of new US unilateral sanctions on Iran. In November 2017, the US Senate passed a bill with a vote of 99 to 0 to extend the Iran sanctions for another decade, and the Obama administration—which previously had threatened to veto such a bill— has stated that the president is not likely to veto it. In addition, the Trump foreign policy team has stated that they plan to impose new sets of sanctions on Iran for its missile defense system. These new political developments are certain to evoke a reaction from Tehran in kind. If such an escalation of the anti-Iran campaign in Washington continues, despite the Islamic Republic fulfilling its obligations under the nuclear deal, absent new diplomatic breakthroughs between Tehran and Washington, in all likelihood, the deal as we know it now would be dead and Washington’s tensions with Tehran would grow. If this outcome materializes, it would undermine the Rouhani administration and the moderates and would strengthen the position of hardliners in Iran’s factional politics.

President-elect Trump, who identified the nuclear pact as “disastrous” and “the worst deal ever” and labeled the Islamic Republic as “the foremost terrorist state” is less likely to oppose further congressional sanctions on Iran. Hence, while the newly appointed Secretary of Defense, General James Matthis, has stated that he would not be inclined to scrap the nuclear deal, he has also stated publically that it is not ISIS but Iran that is the single most critical security threat to the United States. dditionally, the powerful pro-Israeli lobby group, the American Israel Public Affairs Committee, the neo-conservatives and influential foreign policy voices on the right—like the National Security Adviser, General Michael Flynn, John Bolton, James Woolsey, and Newt Gingrich— have been pushing hard for further containment of and confrontation with Iran.

From the Netanyahu administration’s standpoint, discarding the nuclear deal would have a dual impact. On the one hand, such an initiative would prevent the Islamic Republic from reaping the benefit of sanctions relief, thus allowing it to expand its economic and political influence in the region- an undesirable outcome for the Israeli leadership.–On the other hand, unilaterally tearing up the deal would remove all the inhibitions on the part of Iranian leaders to develop a nuclear arsenal, another undesirable outcome for Israel. To prevent this from happening, US/Israeli cyberattacks on Iran’s nuclear program, using sophisticated worms such as Stuxnet, or even military strikes, could be ordered in future.

The Israeli leadership would therefore most likely favor an option in which the current nuclear agreement would stand, but with a new interpretation which would prevent Iran from receiving the full economic and political benefit of sanctions relief. In other words, the nuclear agreement should not lead to normalization of relations with Tehran and the policy of containment of the Islamic Republic with the ultimate goal of regime change should persist. It is also important to note that, since Trump’s cabinet is so far is dominated by hard-liners, they are likely to be in favor of accelerating pressure on Tehran and ensuring that it does not reap the benefit of sanctions relief and expand its regional power.

• Limited Rapprochement

The second option offers a different outlook, one that serves both countries’ national interests, whereby the Trump administration could consider seeking a limited rapprochement with Iran, holding out the prospect of future diplomatic—if not commercial—ties between the two countries.  This option uses the nuclear deal as a way to ease tensions between Tehran and Washington on other longstanding problems. This approach will also render Iran more responsive to cooperation on specific issues of regional conflict such as the fight against ISIS and the Taliban while at the same time making progress toward possible venues for cooperation, such as shaping the future of Syria, Iraq, Yemen, and Afghanistan.

The advantages of this approach will outweigh its costs, as Tehran and Washington are likely to find several overlaps in pursuit of their foreign policy interests. Moreover, this approach would allow Washington to build up a new momentum to accommodate Tehran’s emerging economic interests while also using its leverage over the country’s regional role to mitigate the negative impact of instability in the Middle East. The challenge is to recognize that building trust and sustainable cooperation between Tehran and Washington is the key first step to reversing the troubled and tumultuous status quo of tensions and enmity between the two nations.

While Trump may not seek a new sanctions regime against Iran so long as the latter abides by its obligations, the influence of neo-conservatives in his administration probably means that the removal of first-order sanctions, imposed by the US, is unlikely to happen any time soon.

Tehran’s Reaction

Iran’s President Hassan Rouhani has noted that the election of Donald Trump as the US president will have no effect on Iran’s foreign policy conduct. Rouhani has also stated that the nuclear deal is independent of the new US administrations’ decision and cannot be rescinded by the government’s change in Washington. “Iran’s sagacity,” Rouhani has asserted, “was in having the nuclear deal endorsed as a resolution by the UN Security Council and not just an agreement with a single country or administration, so it cannot be changed by decisions of one government,”.  A recent US Senate vote to extend the sanctions on Iran for ten more years is likely to undermine Rouhani’s position, who sees that his chances of getting re-elected in May 2017 are quickly vanishing under the threat of further sanctions by the United States.  Sensing that, given these sanctions, he cannot ultimately make good on his promise of an economic renaissance after the nuclear deal, Rouhani was emphatic: “If the Iran Sanction Act is carried out, it will be a clear and obvious violation of the [nuclear] agreement and will be met with a very harsh response from us.”  The Obama administration has said that the new round of sanctions did not violate the nuclear agreement.

The United States, one observer notes, cannot unilaterally unravel or amend the agreement without violating international law. Any attempt to directly undermine the deal or even renegotiate it will isolate the United States- not Iran.  Beyond Iran, pulling out of the deal would also risk intensifying tensions in the region, most notably in Syria, Yemen, Iraq, and Afghanistan, countries in which Iran has played a significant role. This choice is equally fraught with difficulties in part because several key nations have signed off on this agreement. Thus, unilaterally negating or sabotaging the nuclear agreement is likely to have serious international implications beyond the region. The United States is likely to emerge out of step with the UN resolution and all the signatories to this agreement.

Furthermore, such a policy is imbued with so many deep uncertainties that it may backfire.  The real question is, then, what exactly can the United States do if Iran continues to abide by its obligations under the nuclear deal and continue its rapprochement with the European Union by simply deepening their commercial and trade ties with those countries?  Cognizant of the unpredictability surrounding the future of US policy toward Iran, the Islamic Republic has kept the option of walking away from the deal open, while not abandoning its “Eastern Strategy” that is predicated on maintaining its extensive bilateral ties with Beijing and Moscow. The Islamic Republic is likely to continue to maintain these ties as an insurance policy against the possible continuation or escalation of Washington’s policy of containment and confrontation. Along the same lines, should Trump adopt hostile policies toward Iran, this will likely empower the Islamic Republic’s hardliners, creating more political pressure on the moderates there, thus complicating their chances of winning the 2017 presidential elections. Should this scenario materialize, Tehran is likely to assume a more aggressive regional policy posture in response to Washington’s belligerence.

 The Future: which option will Trump take?

In an interview with CNN in September of 2015, Trump the businessman revealed his concern about America being shot out of the Iranian market, while the Chinese, the Russians and the Europeans have expanded their trade and commercial ties with Iran since the signing of the agreement in July of 2015. Trump should know that the US cannot hope to emerge as a major economic partner for Iran by imposing a new set of sanctions or ratcheting up political pressure on Tehran. It may turn out that Trump, like his Republican predecessors, would conclude that US bilateral trade, military and political ties with its Arab Gulf Cooperation Council (GCC) allies are much more significant than Iran.

It is also likely that Trump, the candidate of the Republican Party, who had to appeal to that conservative constituency, would turn out to be different from the Trump the president. He may find it necessary to move ideologically to the center and heed the centrist logic of power politics. His past record as a businessman, who regularly funded the political campaigns of both Democrat and Republican politicians, and repeatedly changed his position on political issues during the presidential campaign, may predispose him toward adopting an erratic as well as a pragmatic course with no clear political vision. This may lead to a foreign policy style that would be more transactional rather than ideological.

However, having won the presidency as a Republican candidate, he could be captured by the very party establishment that he derided during his campaign.  So far his campaign promise of “draining the swamp” has turned out, in practice, to involve filling his administration with hawks from the Republican Party, Washington insiders and the Wall Street establishment. Therefore, it is possible that he will decide to outsource his Iran policy to a cabinet dominated by conservative hardliners. In that case, the anti-Iran agenda discussed above would become ascendant. In the past, many Republican politicians have stated that the complete political capitulation of Tehran is the only acceptable outcome that they would support. However, if he chooses to play an active role in formulating his administration’s Iran policy, then Trump the pragmatist may have the sway.

While the early signs are not promising, it is simply too early to know which option the Trump administration will choose and what the details of his future policies might be, but there is no reason to believe that things will improve beyond present conditions, and more than likely, there is reason to believe that Trump may be a far better ally to Israeli Prime Minister Netanyahu and the Saudi Royal family than was the Obama administration, a realistic possibility for which Tehran has surely a contingency. How these emerging realities will play out in coming months and years remains to be seen. The choice for the Trump administration—engaging or isolating Iran—couldn’t be more stark and profound.

Mahmood Monshipouri, PhD, teaches Middle Eastern Politics at San Francisco State University and the University of California at Berkeley.  He is the editor, most recently, of Inside the Islamic Republic: Social Change in the Post-Khomeini Iran.

Manochehr Dorraj, PhD, is professor of International Affairs and Middle Eastern Studies at Texas Christian University (TCU).  He is the author of From Zarathustra to Khomeini: Populism and Dissent in Iran and coeditor of Iran Today: An Encyclopedia of Life in the Islamic Republic.

Author’s Note: This contribution is a shorter version of the article “Resilience and environmental security: towards joint application in peacebuilding” by Schilling et al. 2017

Resilience is a widely used concept among development, environmental, security and peacebuilding organisations. However, it has rarely been applied together with the concept of environmental security, despite the obvious ways in which the concepts complement each other. These concepts can be jointly applied in the peacebuilding sector. Environmental security sharpens the scope of resilience, while resilience allows for taking issues into account that a traditional environmental security perspective might miss.

‘Resilient communities’, ‘climate-resilient pathways’, ‘resilient future’, ‘resilient planet’: there are hardly any key terms in the development, climate change, security, and peacebuilding sectors that have not been combined with ‘resilience’. Due to the malleability of and enthusiasm for this concept, it has been depicted as the ‘new superhero in town’ replacing sustainability as the key guiding concept and buzzword in the international development community.

Less prominent but still widely used, at least implicitly, is the concept of environmental security. The term can relate to the absence of risks posed by environmental changes or events to individuals, groups or nations. But it can also focus on the environment itself and how human behaviour, including conflict, affects the security and integrity of the environment.

Several international organisations, including International Alert, adelphi, and the United States Agency for International Development (USAID) are working on combined approaches to environment, conflict and security issues. However, resilience has hardly ever been applied in conjunction with the concept of environmental security, despite their potential complementarity. Particularly in the peacebuilding sector, joint application of the concepts is promising because it could help to create an understanding of the extent to which people are at risk due to environmental factors (environmental security), and the extent to which people are able to adapt to environmental risks (resilience).  Further, a joint application could help to understand the impacts of environmental factors on conflict dynamics and vice versa. Against this background, develop a framework which allows non-governmental organisations (NGOs) working to implement peacebuilding projects in developing countries to jointly apply resilience and environmental security.

Joint framework for environmental security and resilience in peacebuilding

Natural resources and the environment are the key elements linking environmental security and resilience to peacebuilding (see figure). Based on a six-step process, we combine the key strength of environmental security, its emphasis on the importance of the environment, and the key strength of resilience, namely the appreciation of complexity and local agency. The purpose of the process is to identify the states, changes, risks and disturbances, drivers and mechanisms, impacts, and measures and responses from an environmental security and resilience perspective to gain a better understanding of conflict dynamics and identify entry points for peacebuilding.

In step one we use the environmental security perspective to determine the key elements of the environment and natural resources that are important to a specific community or group of people, while the resilience perspective identifies how and by whom natural resources and the environment are managed. Together the environmental security and resilience perspectives help to answer the question of whether tensions or conflicts over the identified resources exist.

In step two, we determine changes in natural resources and the environment before identifying the losers and winners of these changes. The resilience perspective allows us to take the overall complexity of the socio-economic and political context into account.

The objective of step three is to understand the interaction of different risks. The environmental security perspective pays particular attention to risks to the environment as well as risks caused by the environment. The resilience perspective adds socio-economic and political considerations, such as strong increases in food prices, regime changes and social instability.

Step four aims to identify the key drivers and mechanisms of the changes and risks, identified under step 2 and 3. For example, if a reduction of rainfall is identified under step 2 and in step 3 an increased drought risk is noted, then step 4 explores whether the reduction of rainfall and drought risk can be attributed to global climate change or local factors such as deforestation.

Step five focuses on impacts. For example, one can ask whether the droughts and loss of harvest identified on the environmental security side and/or the increases in food prices identified on the resilience side, lead to hunger and how hunger in turn interacts with impacts of existing conflicts identified in the peacebuilding column.

Step six is particularly important because at that point we consider the actual measures and responses to environmental, socio-economic and political changes at different scales in order to determine the effects on conflict potential as well as to identify entry points for peacebuilding.

For example, if we identify hunger as a key impact under step five, the government could invest into irrigation schemes or (temporarily) subsidise staple food. This could reduce the conflict potential and strengthen the social contract between the government and the affected communities. However, for each measure taken, consideration must be given to who is affected, either positively or negatively (see dashed arrow connecting step six and two). On the resilience side, the capabilities (including knowledge, technology, networks and financial assets) and responses of the communities strongly depend on the social capital of the group concerned. For example, a loss of harvest might not result in hunger because the affected community might receive remittances from family members living outside the drought affected area. Our framework enables peacebuilding organisations and other stakeholders from development organisations and humanitarian assistance to identify core risks to environmental security without losing sight of the wider political and cultural structures into which these insecurities are embedded.

In Practice: Palestine’s Good Water Neighbor’s Project

The Good Water Neighbors (GWN) project in Palestine shows the advantages of combining a resilience and an environmental security perspective in peacebuilding. Palestine suffers from a number of environmental insecurities, most of which are related to water scarcity and pollution. But these insecurities are embedded in and interact with wider political contexts, such as the Israeli occupation of the West Bank, tensions between various Palestinian groups, and dominance of technocratic, liberal peacebuilding approaches. In order to address this complex reality, GWN facilitates cooperation on environmental issues between Israeli and various Palestinian groups, thus increasing resilience to socio-political and environmental shocks simultaneously. Examples of such activities include transnational environmental education, establishing water infrastructure shared between both sides, and common protests against environmentally harmful infrastructure (such as the Israeli separation barrier).

Conclusion

Overall, the framework offers a possibility for environmental security to sharpen the scope of resilience, while resilience allows for taking issues such as governance into account that a traditional environmental security perspective might miss. The framework helps identifying the states, changes, risks and disturbances, drivers and mechanisms, impacts, and measures and responses from an environmental security and resilience perspective to gain a better understanding of conflict dynamics. However, when applying the framework continuous attention should be also paid to ambivalent effect of depoliticisation which is a risk both concepts entail.

On the one hand, steering away from contentious political debates, such as those related to the wider Israeli-Palestinian conflict, provides an entry point for peacebuilding projects. Social groups and even official actors can be involved without taking a stance on contentious political questions. On the other hand, avoiding discussions on structural inequalities means that some root causes of environmental insecurities, such as the unequal distribution of water resources between Israel and Palestine, are difficult to address. When applying the framework further attention needs to be paid to other pitfalls of resilience and environmental security, namely the redistribution of responsibility to the local level and potentially justifying external intervention. If these issues are kept in mind, the framework can be a useful tool, especially when analysing conflicts where natural resources and the environment play key roles.

Rebecca Froese is a PhD candidate in the Department of Earth System Sciences at the University of Hamburg and a member of the research group Climate Change and Security (CLISEC) at the University of Hamburg. Her research focuses on development cooperation and the role of non-party stakeholders in implementing and financing climate action.

Janpeter Schilling holds a Klaus Töpfer Junior Professorship for Landuse Conflicts at the University of Koblenz-Landau. He is an associated researcher at the research group Climate Change and Security (CLISEC) at the University of Hamburg, the peacebuilding organisation International Alert in London and the Peace Academy Rhineland-Palatinate in Landau. His research focuses on environmental security, conflict and resilience.  

Tobias Ide is head of the Research Field Peace and Conflict at the Georg Eckert Institute and currently a visiting researcher at the School of Geography, University of Melbourne. He is an associated researcher with the reserach group Climate Change and Security (CLISEC) at the University of Hamburg. He works on environmental conflicts, climate security, environmental peacebuilding, and the representation of peace and conflict, especially in school textbooks.

Sarah Louise Nash is a 2016/17 Mercator-IPC fellow at Istanbul Policy Center, Sabanci University and an associated researcher with the research group Climate Change and Security (CLISEC) at the University of Hamburg. Her research focuses on the politics of climate change and human mobility.

Jürgen Scheffran is professor of geography and head of the Research Group Climate Change and Security (CLISEC) at the University of Hamburg, Cluster of Excellence ‘Integrated Climate System Analysis and Prediction (CliSAP) and the Center for Earth System Research and Sustainability (CEN). His research specialities are climate and conflict research, sustainability science, resilience and energy and human security.

Neuroscience, the scientific study of the nervous system, is a rapidly emerging interdisciplinary scientific approach, offering exciting new insights into our understanding of human behaviour. Could it also help us overcome many of the difficulties of peacebuilding?

Why do violent conflicts arise so easily? Why do groups and nations believe that their own violence is justified but not that of the other sides? How do political or religious fundamentalist ideologies capture the minds and hearts of people and groups, often beyond the value of their own lives?  Why do people often believe, or create, their own versions of ‘truth’? Why does peacebuilding take so long  – and be so darned difficult?

As a social and political psychologist, these questions have absorbed and challenged me for decades. Then, some years ago I came across a relatively new science – or parts of other sciences – which helped me to re-think many of my ideas about the difficulties of peacebuilding.  These were the emerging ideas that question whether or the not the ways in which we as humans have been physically shaped by the exigencies of evolution, have left us with some body/brain legacies which, if left unattended, seem to hamper our capacities to live together and to resolve our conflicts peacefully. Many of these processes are currently being studied by businesses, educational institutions, governments and others for their possible use in shaping human behavior, but not as yet in any conscious way by social and international conflict resolvers.  These new fields are called variously biopsychology, genopolitics, political physiology, behavioral genetics, cognitive neuroscience, etc. What do they suggest to us that may be of use to those in the peacebuilding professions?

We are strangers to ourselves

Contrary to what most of us believe, our human capacity for rational judgment is much (much!)  shallower than we think. We are limited by our nature as human beings whose very existence throughout history was often dependent upon instincts and emotions to survive.  Mostly, it is the emotional brain that drives us, in this case the amygdala, the part of our brain that deals with our memories, pleasures and fears. Millennia of evolution have shaped us to feel first and think (if at all) afterwards. Research using Functional Magnetic Resonance Imaging (fMRI shows) that feelings usually precede the analytic and logical reasoning that comes from our anterior cingulate cortex, which controls our logical thinking, and this is true particularly in times of stress.  Our ‘emotional’ and ‘reasoning’ minds coexist uneasily. Our choices are often instinctual, dictated not only by our brain structures, but also by hormones such as adrenaline, norepinephrine and cortisol, which inform our response to fear messages. Thus when we feel threatened, or someone – and particularly a leader, or would be leader  – tells us that we are being threatened, our amygdala fears overwhelm the cortex thinking that is needed to rationally respond to complex and changing situations. This supremacy of emotions is particularly relevant in situations termed “weak psychological situations” such as crises or situations characterized by uncertainty or conflict.

Our brains differ

Genetically, the power of the amygdala can differ from person to person, and enables some of us to tolerate uncertainty more easily, and to be more open to those we see as ‘others’. fMRI scans have shown that these differences in biology, and in genetics, influence differences in attitudes and beliefs.

At one end of the spectrum, people, often called traditionalists, or conservatives, are influenced more by their amygdala. Having genetically greater sensitivity to fear and uncertainty they are more likely to advocate policies that protect the existing social structure from both external out groups and internal, norm-violator threats. They have a greater need for order, structure, and certainty in their lives, resist change more often, and are less open to risk taking. Researchers have shown that they are usually more supportive of policies that provide them with a sense of security:  hence their greater backing for e.g. military spending, capital punishment, patriotism, and tougher laws on immigration.

On the other end of the continuum, there are people who are genetically more open to new things, and to new experiences – these are often termed ‘liberals’. fMRI scans have shown that they can better tolerate uncertainty, and cognitive complexity,  take risks more often, and have wider and more diverse friendships.  They often exhibit stronger preferences for social change and for equality when compared with traditionalists. Researchers have identified a variant called DRD4-7R, which affects the neurotransmitter called dopamine and a further 11 genes which are responsible for inclining people towards liberal or conservative beliefs: these are genes involved in the regulation of three neurotransmitters—dopamine, glutamate and serotonin—and also G-protein-coupled. There is speculation that evolutionary wise it may have proved useful to have such varied types of individuals in a society so as to ensure the best survival responses to different sets of societal and group challenges.

We are ‘groupish” people

There is a now an increasing, and welcome, body of literature stressing the innate tendencies for cooperation between people, in contrast to the competitiveness that previous evolutionary psychology has suggested is the norm. However, it appears that although biologically humans have evolved for cooperation, it is mainly with those people they perceive as their own group. Experiments have shown that bonding within groups is assisted by the hormone oxytocin, a rise in the level of which appears to provide a ‘glue’ between people, making them demonstrably more generous, trusting and compassionate towards their neighbours.

Spraying oxytocin into people’s noses increases a sense of belonging, or connectedness to a group, and makes them more willing to cooperate with them. However, research has also shown that while oxytocin can increase levels of cooperation within a group, it can also promote ethnocentric behavior, increase our suspicion and rejection of ‘others’ outside the group, and make people less likely to cooperate with members of an out-group.

Brain imaging experiments (fMRI) have also shown that our attitude towards out-groups is affected by what scientists call ‘mirror neurons’, which are linked to our capacity for empathy, which helps us to better understand other peoples intentions, feelings and emotions.

Unfortunately, when we encounter people from groups we perceive as others, the brain often switches off the empathetic neurons and actively resists any emotional connection with the perceived other group. There is also some research from MIT on Israeli/Palestinians and US/Mexican group processes using fMRI scans during group dialogues that suggests it is particularly hard for groups who see themselves as ‘oppressed’ groups to feel any empathy with those they see as having more power than they have.

Mirror neurons also have the effect of increasing emotional contagion so e.g. during a political landscape where fear is high and emotions are strong, there is quite a bit of emotional contagion occurring between individuals, which will drive them to group behaviour that can be contrary to their ‘normal’ characteristics.

Truth is as  we see it

What we see as ‘truth’ is often determined by our innate needs for beliefs and values, our capacity to tolerate uncertainty and fear, and the cultural context in which we live – thus they have often been what is termed  ’groupish’ rather than necessarily true. We often rationalize what our guts tell us rather than care too much about fact checking. The number of would be ISIS recruits who have been caught with a copy of ”Islam for Dummies” and “The Koran for Dummies”  in their rucksacks is legendary. Suggestions that such recruits are conversant with, and committed to Islam, are therefore questionable, suggesting that alternative reasons such as a search for meaning and for a group belonging  in their lives. Once we form our beliefs, we have a tendency to see and find evidence to support them, and ignore evidence that challenges them. When faced with logical contradictions to their very deeply held beliefs, fMRI scans  show that although people may feel negative emotions, there is no actual increase in their reasoning cortex, which becomes quiescent.  Our memories too are also notoriously faulty – they often reframe and edit events so as to create a story that will fit our current situation, conflating the past and present to suggest a story to us that suits what we need to believe today, rather than what is true

So – what does this mean for peacebuilding?

For change to happen, people need to be both emotionally and rationally engaged. As peacebuilders we often fail to understand how little actual sway logical thinking has on the actors concerned, and on their constituencies in the field. Peace agreements fall apart because, although the cognitive skills of those involved have crafted clever political and social compromises, constituents fail to feel they are winning through peace agreements.

Peacebuilding processes need to particularly appeal to traditionalists who are more afraid of change.  For traditionalists, such processes will often involve leaders from trusted faith, community or political leaders who can reassure their constituencies about the advantages of various change measures, and of how such measures can ensure their future security.

We need to find ways of increasing oxytocin levels between conflicting groups at both individual and social levels.  These include factors such as empathetic responses to others family/national crises, and gestures such as gift giving, meal sharing, alcohol, where such is culturally permitted (just a modicum – too much can make us belligerent!) positive physical gestures, expressions of understanding and appreciation, sharing of family stories, group singing, etc. Note that none, or almost none of these are mentioned in the mediator’s guidebooks, but fMRI and hormonal testing indicate that perhaps they should be. Also, given the challenges of achieving empathy as shown by the patterning of mirror neurons, we need to ensure that dialogue processes address, or promise to address, structural societal differences, as little empathy between perceived victims/oppressor groups can be achieved without such promises.

We should not get too hung up on issues of ‘factual’ differences, but should try and see why it is important for some people or groups to hold on to a version of facts that seems incontrovertibly incorrect to ‘experts’.  It may be more helpful to see such beliefs as a need for personal or group safety or congruence, or as a lack of trust in the sources and the filters through which people learn about facts, rather than of a lack of intelligence.

Conclusion

In recognizing the bio-psychological sciences as important, we need to be careful not to turn the spotlight away from structural and societal contexts that are unfair to certain groups: such contexts often bring out our worst bio-psychological feelings rather than our best. We also need to appreciate that much of the research about these processes is very tentative, and many of the mechanisms used to measure such processes are still in their infancy. Finally, and most importantly, there is nothing determinist about what is revealed by fMRI scans. While our genes can predispose us to certain ideas, they are not predestined: brains can be relatively plastic in their nature, and our bio-psychological and genetic tendencies can be altered (somewhat) by our environments.

My hope is that a greater appreciation of how our genetic and physical predispositions, allied to environmental factors, can affect our human behaviour, and can help make our work more effective and sustainable. Building our programs on the realities of our neural legacies, rather than ignoring them, may help us to relate more realistically, and more compassionately to conflicted groups whose behavior is often dictated to, and limited by, human physical processes whose consequences we are only just beginning to understand and appreciate.

Mari  Fitzduff was the founding Chief Executive of the Northern Ireland Community Relations Council (CRC). The CRC was set up in 1990 to fund and work with government, trade unions, community groups, police and army, paramilitaries, prisoners, businesses and politicians on issues of peacebuilding in N Ireland. Mari has also worked on programs on conflict issues  in the Basque Country, the Caucasus, Sri Lanka, Middle East, Indonesia, Russia, Crimea, Cameroon, Philippines, Peru and Columbia. From 1997-2003, she held a Chair of Conflict Studies at the University of Ulster where she was Director of a United Nations University researching peacebuilding program and practice development around the world. She is Founding Director of the MA professional programs in Conflict Resolution and Coexistence at the Heller School at Brandeis University. Her publications include: (2015) An Introduction to Neuroscience for Peacebuilders, Public Policy for Shared Societies Palgrave MacMillan (2013), Fitzduff, M and Stout, C: (Eds) (2006) The Psychology of Resolving Global Conflicts: From War to Peace. 3 Vols Praegar Press and Fitzduff, M and Church (Eds): (2003) NGO’s at the Table Rowan and Littlefield.  She is just finished editing a political psychology book for Praegar Press on the phenomenon of Trumpism, and why it has been so successful in engaging with so many possible voters.

The Anthropocene denotes a new geological epoch characterized by the unprecedented impact of human activities on the Earth’s ecosystems. While the natural sciences have advanced our understanding of the drivers and processes of global change, the social sciences address the fundamental challenge of governance and politics in the Anthropocene.

On Monday 29 August 2016, the official Working Group on the Anthropocene reported to the International Geological Congress underway in Cape Town and recommended to adopt the Anthropocene as the official term for our contemporary geological epoch. The suggested term Anthropocene denotes the all-encompassing influence of the human species on our planetary systems. The 35 scientists currently serving on the working group have voted 30 to three in favor of formally designating the Anthropocene, with two abstentions. While this suggestion will be reviewed by further commissions – first by the Subcommission on Quaternary Stratigraphy, then International Commission on Stratigraphy and finally the Executive Committee of the International Union of Geological Sciences – it is a strong signal that something extraordinary is going on.

When did the Anthropocene begin?

Geologists of the future might well remember 16 July 1945 as the beginning of the Anthropocene. This day witnessed the explosion of the first nuclear bomb at the White Sands Proving Ground, New Mexico, under the code name ‘Trinity’. The debris from more than 500 above-ground nuclear tests conducted between 1945 and 1963, when the Test Ban Treaty took effect, has created a detectable layer of radioactive elements in sediments all around the planet. However, other potential start dates have been suggested. In their original proposal of the Anthropocene, Crutzen and Stoermer argue for the beginning of the Industrial Revolution in 1750 as an appropriate start date, while others have has suggested an earlier start date around 3000 BC, when agriculture and livestock cultivation intensified and the first centralized political authorities emerged. An intermediary position also exists, for example Lewis and Maslin, who propose the noticeable decline in atmospheric CO2 concentrations between 1570 and 1620 as a good marker for the start of the Anthropocene.

Beyond its symbolic and metaphoric value, these discussions illustrate the radically different nature of current global environmental change. System Earth is rapidly changing, potentially shifting to life-threatening modes of operation. Climate change, biodiversity loss, disruption of the nitrogen and phosphorous cycles, plastic soup in the oceans and men-made chemicals found in (human) embryos, these are the symptoms and most visible signs of the great acceleration and earth system transformation underway. In other words: space ship earth is on a collision course, and the autopilot has been set by its own crew. The Anthropocene hypothesis has become a rallying call for action in the light of scientific evidence that warns against dangerous global environmental change and the ensuing environmental insecurities produced by systemic tipping-points, feedback-loops and emergent properties of complex systems. The Anthropocene hypothesis also highlights specific challenges for governance: how to deal with the apparent urgency of global change while taking into account scientific and normative uncertainties; how to distribute responsibility in a fair and equitable manner; and finally how to embrace complexity as an ontological category of the Anthropocene.

Global governance scholars and the Anthropocene

But how will the field of global governance studies react to the Anthropocene hypothesis? Will scholarship continue down a business-as-usual path, with a disciplinary focus and a narrowly conceived ethical and normative agenda? Or will the field of global governance studies engage in a more radical epistemological and ontological debate? I argue that global environmental governance research is fruitfully challenged by the Anthropocene hypothesis, potentially leading to a reorientation of theory and practice. I see three reasons for this.

First, the Anthropocene hypothesis calls into question long-held assumptions about the human-nature dualism and has therefore been associated with the end-of-nature discourse. At the heart of most environmental activism over the last five decades lies the conviction that nature exists independent of human agency and that (supposedly) ‘natural’ states of our planet, such as a stable climate system, should be protected. However, if the nature-human dualism is questioned by the advent of the Anthropocene, what does this mean for popular conceptions of conservation, wilderness and sustainability and for environmental politics more generally? In the words of Paul Wapner: “Nature, then, is not a separate realm, as many environmentalists assume but, because it is always interpreted through cultural lenses, is part and parcel of human affairs.” The challenge for global environmental governance scholarship is to scrutinize human agency as part of a broader ‘earth-system’ perspective.

Second, the notion of the Anthropocene, and the related idea of a unified human force that exerts unprecedented influence on the earth system, challenges governance scholarship in two ways. First, it urges scholars to take a more system-theoretical perspective in order to identify the system-wide drivers of anthropogenic global change and the systemic reactions produced by various social sub-systems. And second, global governance scholarship is urgently needed as a corrective to accounts of the Anthropocene that neglect the fact that human agency is not uniform across the planet, and that contributions to the problem and the distribution of risks and opportunities arising from global environmental change are highly uneven.

Third, the Anthropocene hypothesis propels governance research to the center of attention, as the question becomes: how can we steer towards socio-natural co-evolution and a resulting safe operating space fur human development? As a result, this position opens up opportunities for genuine interdisciplinarity, in which the social sciences in general and global governance scholarship more specifically are not just a ‘junior partner’ of the sciences, but contribute fundamental insights into drivers, solutions and complex feedbacks between agency, unintended consequences and reactions to these.

From scholarship to policies

However, while there are good arguments for adopting the Anthropocene as an official geological epoch and for fruitful engagement from a social sciences and governance perspective, what is less evident is how we will address the challenges associated with the Anthropocene in broader political terms. Governance strategies for the Anthropocene fall roughly into two broad camps: first, a global elitist managerial approach, underpinned by a sense of human ingenuity and epitomized by ever-more vocal calls for geoengineering, an approach that puts some people’s interests before others. Advocates of this vision of the future Anthropocene see potentials rather than threats. On this account, a new glorious epoch is dawning, one of men-made unprecedented progress towards a post-human evolution and eternal future.

The second vision is more humble and less secure about its eventual success: a bottom-up approach based on cultural and political diversity, equity, fairness and a broader eco-centric ethos. A political vision that favors deliberation over efficiency and fairness over effectiveness and is enshrined already (in broad terms) in the internationally agreed Sustainable Development Goals as part of the global development agenda until 2030.

While the Anthropocene as a term might be almost universally accepted, the contestations about its political and normative contours have only just begun. The election of the climate change-denier Donald Trump as the 45^th President of the United States of America does not leave much room for optimism in this respect. In particular his announcement to withdraw from the international climate change negotiations (in one or another form) calls into question some of the modest signs of progress that we could witness recently. This should motivate everyone interested in shaping the Anthropocene to get involved in the necessary and difficult debates about how we want to shape our common future.

Philipp Pattberg is professor of transnational environmental governance and policy at VU Amsterdam, The Netherlands. He specializes in the study of global environmental politics, with a focus on climate change governance, biodiversity, forest and fisheries governance, transnational relations, public-private partnerships, network theory and institutional analysis. Pattberg’s current research scrutinizes institutional complexity, functional overlaps and fragmentation across environmental domains (http://fragmentation.eu/). At VU Amsterdam, Pattberg heads the Department of Environmental Policy Analysis, a team of more than 25 researchers that was evaluated in a 2014 international review as ‘world leading’ and as being ‘one of the highest profile academic research groups involved with sustainability governance from around the world’.

Author’s Note: This article is expanded from a piece originally published on Defence Report on August 3rd.

Russia’s recent bombing of a Syrian base used by UK and US Special Forces exposes the flaws in the UK’s blanket “no comment” approach. The differences in the US and UK responses to the incident reveal that this policy is neither desirable nor standard practice amongst the UK’s allies.

The Wall Street Journal (WSJ) has recently revealed that, in June, a Russian aircraft targeted a garrison in Southeastern Syria which was used by American and British Special Forces in their fight against ISIS. The attack missed 20 British Special Forces by just 24 hours and killed four US-backed rebels.

US and UK reactions to the strike

Much of the subsequent discussion has been on the specifics of the attack and its implications for future intelligence sharing with Russia; however, few have considered massive difference in the US and UK response. Given that the two allies shared use of the base, one may expect both countries to have shared a sense of outrage at the attack. However, their responses have been hugely different.

The US has very publicly criticised the actions of Russia. After a similar attack in July, “US military and intelligence officials” gave a number of details about the two strikes and argued that it was part of a continued attempt by Russia to pressure the Obama administration into agreeing closer cooperation over the skies of Syria. Many officials, albeit anonymously, also shared their concerns over implications of the strike for the pending intelligence sharing agreements between the two countries. After the attack, Secretary of State John Kerry went to Moscow in a “hastily organized and very secretive” meeting to try to avoid similar incidents from happening again.

In stark contrast, the UK has remained silent. In response, the Ministry of Defence (MOD) simply stated: “We do not comment on Special Forces”. In fact, even as this WSJ article marks the second article in two months documenting the presence of UK Special Forces in Syria the UK Government remains silent and refuses to acknowledge they are operating in the country.

The UK’s “no comment” policy

The MOD’s “long-held policy” of not commenting on Special Forces is well established. This most recent revelation adds to a long list of other incidents where, against mounting evidence, the UK has continued to avoid acknowledging their presence. For example, in March this year, when a story emerged that a British Special Forces Operative had fired on and destroyed an ISIS suicide truck, the response was: “The Ministry of Defence does not comment on Special Forces.” Similarly, in June 2016, when it was reported that British Special Forces are on the front line in Syria in the fight against ISIS, the MOD responded that: “It is our longstanding policy that we don’t comment on Special Forces operation”.

Given the changing nature of these conflicts this approach may no longer be feasible. Special Forces are increasingly sent on long-term deployments to coordinate local forces and take part in combat in conflict zones, rather than the traditional “sharply in, sharply out” approach. For example, reports from Iraq, Libya and Syria indicate that Special Forces are now being used to train, advise and fight alongside local forces. Not only does this mean the presence of Special Forces is more likely to be exposed but it means that the justification of a blanket “no comment” approach – to avoid compromising the mission – are no longer as applicable.

The approaches of the UK’s allies

Moreover, as the US’s public criticisms of Russia reveal, this blanket “no comment” approach is also not standard practice. A recent report by Dr Jon Moran found that a number of the UK’s allies are far more accountable for their use of Special Forces. In the US, for instance, the deployment of Special Forces from the CIA now requires the notice of “the eight leaders of the relevant intelligence committees in Congress” and “JSOC is accountable via the JSOC commander to the Chiefs of Staff and the Secretary of State for Defense or the President”. There is also greater accountability in Australia which, rather than investing the authority to commit forces to military action in one man, shares responsibility among the Cabinet and the National Security committee through a need for “consensus decision-making”. Similarly, in Canada, the decision is taken at the highest political and military levels but Special Forces are accountable to the head of the Canadian Special Operations Forces Command, who in turn is accountable to the Minister of Defence and Prime Minister. Unfortunately, the UK’s no comment policy led Moran to argue that, amongst these allies, “[t]he British government is the most tightlipped of all”.

Remote Control’s recent work also documents a number of instances that the US, Canada and Australia have discussed the deployment of Special Forces. For example in 2015 a US spokesperson announced the deployment of US Special Forces in Syria. He reported the number (50) and their purpose (to strengthen anti-ISIS forces) and defended the decision against accusations of mission creep. Similarly, in November 2015, the then-Australian Prime Minister Tony Abbott announced the deployment of 200 Australian Special Forces “to advise and assist local security forces” in Iraq. The same month, Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau announced the deployment of 69 Canadian Special Forces to undertake a training mission, again, in Iraq. While none of the countries gave a lot of detail, they acknowledged the presence – and number – of Special Forces, defined their mission and allowed some room for discussion and debate around their deployment.

The need for change

The UK’s current policy is not only embarrassing when stories such as this surface but could have negative implications for the quality of UK intervention abroad. First, better accountability and transparency around Special Forces would mean they are used because they are the best solution rather than the easiest solution to a problem. In 2013, a leaked UK Ministry of Defence document argued that one way to continue conducting military operations despite the risk-averse nature of the British public was “investing in greater numbers of [special forces]” – indicating that the danger of the UK prioritising easy above best is real. Second, it is crucial for the success of any security strategy that its effectiveness can be assessed and adjustments made on the basis of that assessment.

The reaction of US scholars, policy makers and journalists in the wake of the recent Russian strike is a case in point. The US’s decision to announce the deployment and the purpose of Special Forces in Syria from the outset, and decision to announce this most recent strike, give these groups a chance to debate its implications for relations with Russia, the US’s operations in Syria more generally and assess whether the US’s stated goals are being met. In contrast, the UK lacks such a debate because most scholars, journalists and policymakers do not know the extent of UK involvement in the country and have not been informed of the mission’s stated purpose. Without the level of discussion possible in countries such as the US, the UK lacks the same sounding board and its policies may suffer as a result.

Russia’s recent strike points to the flaws in the UK’s continued “no comment” policy. When Special Forces rarely stay secret in a country, and fewer of the UK’s allies take the same blanket “no comment” approach, we should be asking why the UK continues to.

Abigail Watson is Research Officer at Remote Control Project. Abigail holds an MA (with Distinction) in Contemporary European Studies, with a trans-Atlantic track, from the University of Bath and a BA in Politics from the University of York. Abigail writes on issues such as the new challenges to international humanitarian law and Britain’s foreign, security and defence policy.

February marked the 25^th anniversary of the Gulf War’s end. The intensity and magnitude of the allied coalition’s offensive, followed by the systematic destruction of Kuwaiti oil wells by retreating Iraqi troops, led to an unprecedented environmental disaster. Yet within two months, and in a first for international armed conflict, a post-war claims and remediation mechanism ─ the United Nations Compensation Commission (UNCC) ─ was in place. Its aim was to not only help neighbouring states recover from the personal and financial losses inflicted during the war, but also to help repair the environmental damage caused. With protection for the environment in armed conflict under increasing scrutiny, it seems useful to re-examine how this mechanism worked.

Following the conflict, there was an expectation that reparations were due to neighbouring countries and Iraq’s oil revenues offered a ready source of finance. The UNCC was established and mandated to: “…process claims and pay compensation for losses and damage suffered as a direct result of Iraq’s unlawful invasion and occupation of Kuwait”. The 2.69 million claims it processed were categorised according to claimant and type of compensation sought. These ranged from individuals’ personal injury, deaths and financial losses, to costs incurred to neighbouring countries in housing refugees, to damage to businesses and governmental property. Last but not least, was the “F4” sub-category for “Environmental damage and depletion of natural resources”.

Using expert panels, the UNCC assessed 170 F4 claims from 12 States (Australia, Canada, Germany, Iran, Jordan, Kuwait, the Netherlands, Saudi Arabia, Syria, Turkey, UK and USA) and awarded US$5,261m ─ just 6.2% of that claimed ─ to 10 States in five instalments over as many years: the Dutch and Turkish claims were unsuccessful. Oversight of payments was strict, with regular reporting to establish that funds were used as specified. All payments have now been completed, although some projects will run until at least 2020.

Environmental Damage on a Massive Scale

The recognition of the F4 claims for remediation and restoration was unquestionably due to the highly visible environmental damage the conflict caused. Aside from the unexploded ordnance covering 3,500km², the footprint of the 700,000 allied troops, and the effect of millions of Iraqi, Kuwaiti and other refugees relocating to Jordan, Iran, Turkey and Syria; Kuwait and its neighbours suffered from the unique impact of the calculated use of oil as a weapon of war.

More than 700 oil wells were blown up, with most igniting, burning 6m barrels per day for nearly ten months. Damaged oil wells spewed crude oil, forming lakes covering at least 50km². Fallout from dispersing smoke plumes created a thick deposit known as tarcrete over 1,000km² of Kuwait’s deserts. Meanwhile, 11m barrels of crude oil from storage units, sabotaged pipelines and oil tankers spilled into the Persian Gulf, damaging 800km of coastline. The impact of the oil on air and land quality, terrestrial and marine habitats and biodiversity was immediate, severe and long-lasting, damaging natural resources and threatening human health.

Putting a Price on the Environment

Placing a financial value on the environment is no easier than defining what the environment is. As they counted the cost, affected countries submitting UNCC claims were clear that economic, social, public health and biodiversity concerns were all linked to environmental quality. States not only wanted to reinstate pre-war environmental conditions in heavily polluted areas, they also wanted to address the damage to land and natural resources, and the footprints of the military and refugees. Concerned about the health implications for their populations from pollution, they also sought acknowledgment of the risks, and funds for health monitoring.

The difficulty in assessing the monetary value of the damage was evident throughout the process. Both Iraq and the UNCC demanded that claims be supported by precise estimates, detailed costs and clear scientific evidence. The difficulties this presented, in the absence of an agreed framework to quantify damage, and debates over the quantity and quality of evidence, led to 94% of claims being dismissed.

The bulk of the claims from Jordan, Iran, Kuwait and Saudi Arabia related to either oil spills or damage from oil well fires. Because of the visibility and immediacy of the damage, and the necessity for data gathering, monitoring and assessment claims were often upheld and remediation claims, which were reviewed later in the process, were considered favourably. Nevertheless the remediation costs, area calculations and baseline comparisons of pre-war environmental conditions were still debated and individually re-negotiated by the UNCC’s experts.

Claims for the degradation of natural resources such as groundwater, and the loss or damage of habitats due to population displacement proved less successful. This was partly due to the difficulties in quantifying the harm caused, and the uncertainty in assessing refugee numbers and their collective behaviour. The few non-regional States’ claims related to technical and expert services provided to Kuwait and its neighbours; these were just as hotly debated as other claims.

Claims linking the oil fires to human health risks considered the financial impact of long-term health problems and the additional deaths expected due to inhalation of the fires’ toxic fumes. However, due to the difficulty in meeting the evidentiary standard requiring harms to be the “the direct result of the invasion and occupation” these proved unsuccessful. Health monitoring and assessment projects were awarded funds, although the expert panels contested the methodologies and models they used to assess exposure, morbidity and mortality in Kuwait and Iran. Similarly, other claims relating to the impact of airborne particulates on land and heritage sites, including virtually all Syrian claims under “Transport and Dispersion of Air Pollution”, were also unsuccessful.

Post-war Remediation and Restoration are Still Incomplete

Although capping the oil wells took only nine months, damage has proved long-lasting. The varied composition of soils caused different contamination problems. Wet oil, dry oil and solid tarcrete remained depending on absorption levels, length and severity of exposure. Oil spills covered coastlines and invaded mudflats, killing wildlife and transforming habitats. Remediation was highly specialised, often complicated by weather and the saline conditions, and necessitated preliminary monitoring and assessment work. The technologies and remediation techniques used varied, including chemical oxidation, soil washing, tilling in mudflats, soil excavation, transportation, landfills and thermal treatment.

The necessary assessments slowed the claims process; Kuwait was still processing and awarding tender applications in 2013. Often, delays led to natural environmental changes in habitats, for example the colonisation of coastlines by algal mats, preventing their return to pre-war conditions. Such changes led to questions over what constituted successful remediation for these degraded and altered habitats, especially when remediation had not been initiated by the affected States prior to claims being filed – for instance Saudi Arabia’s duty to prevent and mitigate environmental damage was examined.

Recognising the long-term and technical nature of environmental remediation work, the UNCC mandated further monitoring until 2013 through the Follow-up Programme for Environmental Awards – now completed and wound up. Some national projects are still underway, relating to ordnance removal, the damage and stresses caused by refugee settlements and military camps and health monitoring. Other long-term works, including irrigation improvements, livestock management, soil improvements, re-vegetation, marine reserves, saltmarsh clear-up, wildlife re-introduction and protection continue in Iran, Jordan, Kuwait and Saudi Arabia.

Learning from the UNCC

That the UNCC process included the F4 environmental damage category at all was a step in the right direction, setting a precedent and demonstrating the importance of post-conflict environmental restoration. Although influenced by well-established peacetime environmental norms, the UNCC claims and awards process had limitations. But could its lessons be developed for environmental restoration after future conflicts?

One starting point would be to develop a common legal definition of the environment, derived from environmental and humanitarian principles. This could be used to help frame the necessity of preventing harm, and ensuring environmental restoration. Complementing this with a common framework for damage assessment could accelerate recovery and reduce harm by avoiding further damage resulting from delays in remediation. The framework would need to be developed as part of a post-conflict environmental mechanism, with claims and operations processed through an independent institution with a clear mandate.

To be successful, monitoring and clean-up operations should neither be dependent on the affected State’s finances, nor limited to post-conflict reparations. Ideally an international fund would be established and made available, not only to support public and environmental health monitoring throughout the conflict cycle, but also to ensure that urgent remediation and clean-up operations begin quickly.

Another lesson from the UNCC is that it is essential to go beyond the purely financial implications of damage and loss. A more comprehensive approach would also consider the direct and indirect consequences of environmental damage, linking environmental health with humanitarian protection, promoting ongoing health monitoring and re-instating post-war environmental governance.

Most of the UNCC decision-making process was not public, when instead it should have been accessible and transparent. “Non-claimant states, civil society and the media had no access at all. The panel’s proceedings were not open to public scrutiny”[1]. Today such opacity would run counter to the principles of the Aarhus Convention on access to information and participation in environmental decision-making, and act as a barrier to external scrutiny.

In spite of the UNCC, and the precedent that it set, the fact that 25 years on the environmental legacy of the Gulf War has still not been fully addressed is a stark reminder of the long-term impact that wartime environmental damage can have. Armed conflict not only degrades the natural environment and damages human health, it also harms environmental governance. While the UNCC model may not be applicable to all conflicts, its lessons highlight serious limitations in how the international community currently responds to the environmental consequences of conflict: limitations that must be addressed in the growing debate on strengthening the protection of the environment from the impact and legacy of armed conflict.

Laurence Menhinick is a research assistant with the Toxic Remnants of War Project, which studies the humanitarian and environmental impact of conflict pollution. The Project is a founding member of the Toxic Remnants of War Network, which advocates for a greater standard of environmental protection in armed conflict: @TRWNetwork. The author thanks Prof. Cymie Payne for her clarifications for this article.

[1] De Silva, A. L. M. (2014), Conflict Related Environmental Claims – A Critical Analysis of the UN Compensation Commission, Faculty of Law, University of Sydney, Australia p70 http://ses.library.usyd.edu.au/handle/2123/10426

Drones continue to play important roles in conflicts around the world. In Africa, drones have been tested for civilian projects, but they have been largely absent from miltary operations. But will this always be the case?

With the enormous role drones have started playing in conflict areas around the world, it would not be unreasonable to think that, by now, African skies would be buzzing with them. There are many drones being tested for civilian projects in Africa, but for military purposes they are largely absent. Rather than being drones developed in Africa, these eyes in the skies can be traced back to French or American origin, with the occasional imported Chinese drone buzzing by. Why is this? Time for a short assessment on the state of drones in Africa and the challenges that lie ahead for local development and use of military drones.

Doing Good

Large parts of Africa are signified by vast distances and large swaths of difficult terrain combined with a lack of infrastructure. No wonder, then, that drones, with their ability to glide in a straight line over the jungles, hills, rivers and deserts for hours on end, have been considered part of a solution to many of Africa’s problems.

And they have solved some problems. Drones keep an eye out above herds of elephants and rhino’s in order to stop poaching, they help farmers tend their crops, and they deliver blood and medicine to remote hospitals. Even Facebook is using drones to bring internet to dark spots in Sub-Saharan Africa. So what about military purposes?

Security in Numbers

Africa’s security problems are heavily influenced by the aforementioned geographic factors. Securing remote villages is an incredibly difficult task. International crime organizations, guerilla movements, and terrorist groups can all cross the long porous borders that many African countries have, only to disappear in enormous areas of seemingly impassable terrain. For security too, the surveillance capabilities of drones can be very beneficial to African states. This idea is supported by UN peacekeeping chief Hervé Ladsous, who expanded the use of drones to peacekeeping missions throughout Africa after testing them above the rainforests of the Democratic Republic of Congo.

But aside from the UN, a few African states have taken control of their own drone deployment. Using the US Department of Defense categories, which separates drones according to their performance and capabilities, we can summarize the state of drones in Africa as follows:

• Not one country on the African continent uses drones that have medium altitude, long distance capability, such as the Reaper or Predator drone.

• Currently, 14 of 54 African states have used so called ‘Tactical’ drones, meaning drones that have low altitude and low endurance. These are mostly used for intelligence, surveillance and reconnaissance, such as the Scan Eagle.

• Algeria, Tunisia, Egypt, Ethiopia and South Africa have claimed that they are now developing their own drones. South Africa is the only African country with a significant history of developing and deploying them.

• Egypt, Nigeria and South Africa now have drones with lethal capability, while more states seek to acquire them. Egypt and Nigeria bought these from China, South Africa developed an armed version of its Seeker 400 line.

For security, then, the use of drones is expanding too, but overall, drone acquisitions remain relatively limited. It might be tempting to explain this lack of wide-spread drone use by pointing to the idea of a cash strapped African government, but the real reason lies with the way in which the money is being spent.

African Ways

Military budgets throughout Africa have been expanded significantly in the past eleven years, only to be interrupted by low oil prices. According to SIPRI, Chad and Uganda recently invested in Russian MiG fighter jets, Ethiopia purchased 200 Ukrainian T-72 tanks, and Somalia and Nigeria invested in tanks, planes, armored vehicles and fighter jets. Interestingly enough, investments in military drone systems are largely absent, even though these systems are providing a growing tactical advantage for modern armed forces. Armed drones have seen a particular use in intrastate conflict as their loitering and intelligence capabilities enable forces to effectively monitor areas for insurgents. This choice for conventional weapons can be explained in part by the different solutions African governments have for conflicts, compared to the West.

According to Prof. Ralph Rotte of the Aachen University, conventional weapons are favored over drones because they are better suited to the ways African governments fight civil wars. Western warfare is usually done by destroying the enemy while winning the ‘hearts and minds’ of the local population. This occurs less often in African civil wars, where military forces focus on outmaneuvering and disrupting each other in order to sap morale and willpower, only to incorporate the exhausted enemy in a system of patronage. This kind of low-intensity fighting does not require the destruction of troops or long-loitering surveillance capability through highly advanced technology. Hence, drones have taken a backseat in military spending in favor of small arms and conventional weaponry.

Even in the few cases where African countries have tried to employ drones, a lack of maintenance, and limited institutional capability for intelligence sharing have grounded the few drones they had. This restricts the capability African states have in terms of tracking and identifying the locations of terrorist organizations such as Boko Haram, AQIM, ISIS and Al-Shabaab, which subsequently impacts the fight against these terror groups.

No wonder, then, that Western states have stepped in the counter-insurgency vacuum with their own drones. France now operates drones from Chad, Nigeria and Mali, and the United States (US) flies them from 14 locations throughout Africa, while in the process of constructing a drone base with a 100$ million dollar price-tag in Niger. But the Western drone-monopoly will likely not be a permanent fixture of Africa.

Drone Troubles

Despite the shamble state of African drones, it is only a matter of time before they do become widespread and used effectively by African governments. As mentioned previously, five African nations are already developing their own. Several others, such as Algeria, are looking to acquire armed drones from China.

Interest in using drones in Africa is growing, and the US has recently adopted a joint-statement together with 40 other countries on drone-exports, which will smooth the export of drone-technology. Even if Washington demands high regard for human rights from the countries that seek to acquire armed drones, Beijing won’t. Proliferation, then, either via import or local development, is bound to continue.

That drones still have a future in Africa is exemplified by Nigeria as well, which, after having its Israeli drones grounded by corruption, and its Chinese drone crashing while carrying missiles, finally committed a successful drone-strike on Boko Haram.

With the advent of African drones, the flaws of drones will also become a risk to security in Africa. The US has set dangerous precedents with its seemingly unlimited, obscure extra-judicial executions. In fact, UN Special Rapporteur Christof Heyns has warned that US drone strikes are undoing 50 years of international law. African states might be tempted to follow Washington’s lead, sending drones to neighboring states to stop those groups that abuse porous borders, without risking the lives of their own military forces. In turn, this cross-border activity might exacerbate conflict between states. Sounds farfetched? Just a few weeks ago India attacked terrorists in Pakistan-occupied Kashmir, with the help of a drone. This surgical strike worsened the already poor relationship between the two countries.

Though current advanced strike-capable drones are reliant on a complex technological infrastructure, including satellites, and thus limit the number of States able to use them, other developments in the defense industry are focused on making smaller tactical drones capable for either armed use, or use them as loitering munitions that turn into kamikaze drones. These types of drones are more accessible for States that do not rely on high-tech networks to deploy them.

It’s also not difficult to imagine what armed drones can do in the hands of oppressive governments. If Barack Obama can take out people without due process, there is no reason why the likes of Omar al-Bashir or Robert Mugabe cannot do the same to their political opponents under the guise of “security”.

Then there is the question of whether drone-strikes can bring long-term security. New evidence suggests that more innocent civilians are being killed by drone strikes, and that communities are getting traumatized en masse. This might actually lead to an increase in militancy and terrorist activity, and thus only exacerbate the problem. African governments will have to be able to avoid the trap of drones as an ‘easy solution’, in order for drones to become a positive addition to stability and security.

Drone Danger Ahead

Drone development and imports are set to rise across Africa. With time, and through cooperation with the West and China, African military forces might develop the necessary technical know-how, organization and doctrine to deploy drones effectively. Because of the drone’s unique features, they might contribute greatly to security and stability across Africa.

But there is also an incredible risk of escalating conflict if drones are used wrongly. The low threshold for use of force that armed drones bring, combined with the cross-border nature of criminal and terrorist organizations in Africa, can pit countries against each other if drones are used recklessly in each other’s territory. Drones might also appeal to African states that seek to eliminate rebels or dissidents, without full realization that drone strikes can actually worsen a conflict both internally and with neighboring states.

The current use of drone strikes by the West sets the precedent for future abuse by African governments. The recent Joint Declaration on use and export of armed drones contains too many caveats, and the only African countries to sign it were Nigeria, Malawi, South Africa and the Seychelles. China was not a signatory to this declaration, even though it is the largest exporter of armed drones to Africa. Therefore, it’s imperative that the West becomes transparent about its use of drones, and that it (re-)establishes judicial norms and boundaries through which states can hold each other accountable. Stronger export control regimes, that include China, will be essential too. This will be necessary to prevent drone-chaos that we might otherwise see unfold in Africa in the near-future.

Foeke Postma works for PAX, a Dutch peace organization, focusing on the subject of drones and the proliferation thereof. He holds a MSc degree in Conflict Analysis & Conflict Resolution from George Mason University, and a MA degree in Conflict Analysis & Mediterranean Security from the University of Malta.