Category: 2016

A version of this article was originally published on openSecurity’s monthly Sustainable Security column on 18 November 2014. Every month, a rotating network of experts from Oxford Research Group’s Sustainable Security programme explore pertinent issues of global and regional insecurity.

This article is part of the Remote Control Warfare series, a collaboration with Remote Control, a project of the Network for Social Change hosted by Oxford Research Group.

While the world’s attention has been focused on the US-led military interventions in Iraq and Syria a quieter build-up of military assets has been ongoing along the newer, western front of the War on Terror as the security crises in Libya and northeast Nigeria escalate and the conflict in northern Mali proves to be far from over. In the face of revolutionary change in Burkina Faso, the efforts of outsiders to enforce an authoritarian and exclusionary status quo across the Sahel-Sahara look increasingly fragile and misdirected.

The New Frontier

In early August, coinciding with the restructuring of French military operations in the Sahel and the US-Africa Leaders Summit, Oxford Research Group and the Remote Control Project published a comprehensive assessment of counter-terrorist operations targeting jihadist groups in the Sahel-Sahara region of north-west Africa. That report found extensive and growing evidence of combat, intelligence, surveillance and reconnaissance (ISR), training and equipment, abduction and rendition programmes on this new frontier. While France and the US were easily the most active foreign actors, the UK, Canada, the Netherlands and several other NATO states were also found to be increasingly involved in special forces and ISR operations.

The launch coincided with the onset of air attacks on Islamic State targets, initially by the US in northern Iraq and latterly by a broad coalition of Western and Arab states in Iraq and Syria. In a context of worsening security crises in Libya, Nigeria and northern Mali and Niger since, US and UK ISR activity is increasing, French deployments in Mali have been reinforced, a new configuration of Arab states has provided impetus for foreign intervention in Libya’s civil war and a “black spring” backlash is emerging against the west’s authoritarian allies in the region.

Libya on the frontline

Libya is at the core of the security crisis in the Sahel-Sahara. Since the NATO-led military intervention which overthrew the Qaddafi regime in 2011, Libya has become a security and political vacuum and a major exporter of weapons and insecurity in the region. This has included the return home to the Sahel of hundreds of combatants formerly given refuge or employment by the Libyan state.

Libya’s civil war reignited in May with the launch of “Operation Dignity” by secular forces from eastern Cyrenaica, seeking to wrest control of Benghazi and Tripoli, the two main cities, from Islamist militia. This has been largely a failure. Most diplomatic missions evacuated Libya in late July and Tripoli and its burnt-out international airport fell to militia from Misrata (Libya’s third city) and allied Islamist groups on 23 August. Benghazi has fallen increasingly into the hands of Salafist groups and the nearby city of Derna is run as an Islamic emirate by Ansar al-Shari’a. Much of the rest of Libya is dominated by local tribal leaders or armed factions, beyond any state control.

Indeed, there are now two rival, elected Libyan governments. The one recognised internationally meets in a Tobruk hotel. It controls little beyond this Egyptian border outpost and its electoral mandate was recently invalidated by the Tripoli-based Supreme Court. The revived General National Council in Tripoli governs the capital and north-west and is dominated by an affiliate of the Muslim Brotherhood and other Islamist factions.

Libya has thus become a new frontline in the proxy war between the international proponents and opponents of the brotherhood. Qatar and the United Arab Emirates (UAE) were the two main Arab sponsors of the anti-Qaddafi rebellion and contributed to the air attacks on Qaddafi’s forces. They now find themselves backing different sides in Libya. On 17 and 23 August, days after the Tobruk parliament called for foreign military intervention, Emirati aircraft based in and refuelled from Egypt launched unclaimed attacks on pro-Islamist militia around Tripoli airport.

Despite official denials, it appears that air attacks on Salafist groups in Benghazi in mid-October were launched by Egyptian aircraft. Egypt and the UAE accuse Qatar, the primary sponsor of the brotherhood in Egypt, and Sudan, long ruled by a military affiliate of the brotherhood, of funnelling arms to the various Libyan Islamist militias.

While the US has condemned all post-2011 foreign intervention in Libya, it is likely that it was aware of the movement of UAE aircraft to Egypt, given that fighters presumably left from Al-Dhafra air base in Abu Dhabi, which is shared by US and French squadrons. Emirati refuelling aircraft are based at Al-Minhad in Dubai, where the UK Royal Air Force (RAF) has an expeditionary wing. These aircraft presumably were cleared by Saudi Arabia (another great opponent of the brotherhood) to overfly its territory. The aircraft and weapons used were supplied by the US and/or France.

France stands apart among Western allies in its advocacy of, and preparedness for, renewed military intervention in Libya. Since the fall of Tripoli, its defence minister, Jean-Yves Le Drian, has several times advocated a UN mandate for intervention against Islamist groups in Libya and hinted that France may need to act unilaterally sooner or later. Whereas Egypt is most concerned about Salafist groups in Derna and Benghazi, France is focused on al-Qaida affiliates in south-west Libya. Already this year it has opened bases near the Niger-Libya and Chad-Libya borders and revived ISR operations from its air base at Faya-Largeau in northern Chad.

Northern Mali and Niger

France cares about southern Libya primarily because of its security commitments to Mali, Burkina Faso, Chad and Niger, the latter hosting multi-billion-euro French investments in uranium production. Since France reorganised its forces in the Sahel from the Mali-focused Opération Serval to the pan-Sahel deployments of Opération Barkhane in mid-2014, security in northern Mali has worsened significantly. This relates partly to the decline in French troop numbers there but also to the reorganisation of regional jihadist groups and the deterioration in relations between the Malian state and local armed separatists. Twenty UN peacekeepers from the Multidimensional Integrated Stabilisation Mission in Mali (MINUSMA) have been killed in at least five jihadist attacks in the north of the country since September. In response, France has had to reinforce its deployments in Kidal district, pulling in troops and equipment from its base in Côte d’Ivoire.

On 9 October, French forces under Barkhane mounted their first publicly acknowledged offensive action outside of Mali, attacking a convoy supposedly transporting militants and weapons from Libya through Niger towards the country. Militants apparently moving from north-eastern Mali attacked Nigerien security forces in Ouallam three weeks later, freeing dozens of Islamist prisoners and attacking a refugee camp. Citing increased activity, the huge Algerian military is also reported to have moved thousands of troops to its borders with Niger and Mali since last month.

The US has also sought to extend its own ISR deployment in Niger, announcing in early September that it would be moving its two MQ-9 Reaper unmanned aerial vehicles from Niamey airport, where they have been deployed since early 2013, to Agadez, the main town in the desert north. As with French redeployments in 2014, the objective appears to be to bring more of southern Libya into range of ISR assets.

Humanitarian opportunity

Perhaps least analysed of recent military deployments to west Africa have been those associated ostensibly with humanitarian, rather than security, crises. In late August, following Boko Haram’s seizure of territory and declaration of its own caliphate in northern Nigeria, the RAF deployed a number (three is reported) of Tornado GR4 aircraft from the UK to the French air base in N’Djamena, Chad. This base is also used by US drones.

Unusually, the Ministry of Defence issued almost no comment on this and refuses to disclose how many aircraft were involved, where they operated from or exactly when and why they were deployed. Officially, they were on an ISR mission in support of attempts to locate the more than 200 girls abducted by Boko Haram from a boarding school in Chibok in north-eastern Nigeria in April. All aircraft had officially returned to the UK by 15 October. While the Tornado GR4 is often deployed as a reconnaissance aircraft, it is dual use and its primary role—for example, in Iraq—is as a medium-range strike aircraft.

Also very little reported was the US Marine Corps’ establishment during September of three new “co-operative security locations” in Senegal, Ghana and Gabon, along the west African coast. These are to be bases permanently prepared and supplied, but not necessarily manned, to support US interventions under the Obama administration’s “New Normal” doctrine, which facilitates defence or evacuation of US interests and citizens under (terrorist) attack in any country. While marines and their V-22 Osprey aircraft may continue to be based in Spain, Italy and Djibouti, these new west African bases are specifically launch pads for future US military interventions. US military contractors have been stockpiling aviation fuel at these and many other African airports for several years.

Interestingly, the Senegal facility has been specifically referred to as an “interim staging base”—the usual terminology for a Special Purpose Marine Air-Ground Task Force base—in the context of the US military’s humanitarian mission to control the Ebola epidemic in Liberia. As with previous Obama-era deployments against the Lord’s Resistance Army in and around Uganda and in support of the Chibok abductees, the escalation of a US military presence appears to have been achieved under the cover of humanitarian imperatives and initiatives.

Towards a Black Spring?

All this matters because if there is one thing that we should have learned since 2001 it is that Western military interventions to oppose terrorism on foreign soil do not work: they tend to destroy the “host” country while amplifying the threat to the “far enemy”. And proxy wars between the Arab states so lavishly armed by the US, France, the UK and Russia tend to end in something worse than tears. Neither the “war on terror” nor the “Arab spring” (counter-)revolution has yet run its course.

The political crisis in Burkina Faso, in which the authoritarian president of 27 years, Blaise Compaoré, was overthrown in a popular uprising turned military coup on 31 October, provides ample warning of the toxic relationships Western states are forging in the Sahel-Sahara in the name of counter-terrorism. As in Mali in 2012, the coup leader in Burkina was an ambitious, US-trained officer. French and US special-operations forces will probably retain their semi-secret bases but their political masters have again been embarrassed by their own role as props to the hated old regime.

Protesters in Burkina Faso—a remarkably civil, peaceful, articulate and internationalist society that belies the Sahel’s reputation for isolation—have talked up the precedent of their revolution for a “black spring” that would sweep away the Western-armed and educated tyrants whose misrule blights the south of the Sahara. They have chosen a very different path to the eschatological nihilism of Boko Haram but their hunger for change is similarly derived from generations of stultifying and systematic marginalisation under a corrupt, militarised and foreign-sponsored elite.

Like Tunisia before it, Burkina Faso may be the clear-sighted vanguard that has the self-belief and self-discipline to manage a successful transition from autocracy. It is hard to hold such hope for the supposedly firmer pillars of western Sahel strategy, Chad and Mauritania, which have known almost nothing but rule by armed clans. Nor for Algeria—where the “printemps noir” epithet was coined during a forgotten 2001 Berber uprising—the last of whose mid-century revolutionary leaders yo-yos, paralysed and dying, between Algiers and French clinics.

Sahara bores are wont to remind outsiders that the great desert is a crossroads, not a cul-de-sac, composed far more of enduring rock than shifting sands. The opposite can perhaps be said of the region’s militaries. Viewed within fragile states, military institutions may look rock-strong but they are built on sand and bound to fickle alliances. As in Burkina, it is society that is the bedrock with the power and permanence to anchor a sustainable strategy for peace and stability.

Trying to contain a revolution in the Sahel-Sahara is not a long-term option but channelling it may be. Change is coming, one way or another.

Richard Reeve is the Director of Oxford Research Group’s Sustainable Security programme. He has researched African peace and security issues since 2000, including work with ECOWAS, the AU and the Arab League.

Summary

The dramatic recent escalation of rhetoric and military posturing on the Korean peninsula has reawakened suggestions that the United States could use relatively low-yield nuclear weapons in a limited or tactical operation to neutralise North Korea. Indeed, both the idea of nuclear ‘first strike’ and their ‘flexible’ usage on and off the ‘battlefield’ are deeply rooted in historic and current NATO and UK doctrine on nuclear weapons. Given the extraordinarily militarised nature of the inter-Korean border and, increasingly, that between NATO and Russia, the potentially cataclysmic nature of any nuclear exchange must be urgently recalled and avoided at all costs.

Introduction

One of the most common misunderstandings about nuclear weapons in general and Britain’s nuclear weapons in particular is that nuclear strategy is solely about deterring an opponent from attacking you by threatening that opponent with all-out destruction in response. Given the growing risk of a nuclear confrontation over North Korea it is appropriate to point out that this has never been the case. Ever since the start of the nuclear age nuclear weapons have been seen as useable weapons and appropriate in certain circumstances for fighting limited nuclear wars.

As a member of NATO Britain retains the option of using nuclear weapons first and has the means to do so. This briefing is intended to serve as a reminder of this. It will do so by concentrating specifically on British policy, both within NATO and out-of-area, but this applies just as much to the other seven full nuclear powers and, no doubt, to North Korea as well. It applies very much to the United States in particular and its current president, Donal J Trump, who has made it clear that the United States will not allow North Korea to develop the ability to target the continental United States with nuclear weapons.

Early history

When Hiroshima and Nagasaki were destroyed in August 1945 these weapons were seen in air force circles as direct descendants of the mass bombing of cities with conventional weapons using a thousand bombers or more. The raids on Hamburg and Dresden and especially the firestorm raid on Tokyo each killed tens of thousands of people so the perception after Hiroshima and Nagasaki was that the primary difference between conventional and nuclear weapons was one of cities being destroyed by one atom bomb from a single plane rather than five thousand tons of high explosive bombs from many planes. Indeed the US Army Air Corps and the nuclear weapon industry had already set in motion the industrial structures to destroy two Japanese cities every month until surrender.

By 1948 the United States had an arsenal of fifty atom bombs and was already starting to develop the far more powerful thermonuclear weapon or H-bomb. Britain came on the scene rather later. While it first tested a nuclear weapon in 1952, it was not until the late 1950s and early 1960s that it could start deploying its Valiant, Vulcan and Victor strategic bombers in large numbers. These, too, were seen in the context of the British involvement in the area bombing of German cities, but Britain was also an early adherent of the idea of fighting limited nuclear wars, an issue that was seen as particularly relevant in the Middle East and Eastern and South Eastern Asia.

Thus there were nuclear-capable Canberra bombers and nuclear weapons deployed to RAF Akrotiri in Cyprus from 1961 to 1969 to support the Central Treaty Organisation (CENTO), the South West Asian equivalent of NATO. These were replaced by Vulcans until 1975. From the mid-1960s there were regular detachments of V-bombers to RAF Tengah in Singapore and the Royal Navy had nuclear-capable Scimitar and Buccaneer strike aircraft on aircraft carriers such as Eagle, Ark Royal, Centaur and Victorious over a 16-year period from 1962 to 1978.

From the early days of the deployment of nuclear weapons  by states such as the Soviet Union, the United States and Britain there is ample evidence that both military and political leaders accepted the possibility of limited nuclear war. It was expressed in Britain, for example, by the then Minister of Defence, Harold Macmillan, speaking in the House of Commons in 1955:

“…the power of interdiction upon invading columns by nuclear weapons gives a new aspect altogether to strategy, both in the Middle East and the Far East. It affords a breathing space, an interval, a short but perhaps vital opportunity for the assembly, during the battle for air supremacy, of larger conventional forces than can normally be stationed in those areas.” (Hansard, volume 568, column 2182, 2 March 1955).

NATO and nuclear first use

As one of the founder members of NATO, and the second to develop nuclear weapons, Britain was involved in NATO nuclear planning from the very early years of the mid-1950s. In those early years and until the late 1960s, NATO nuclear policy was codified in document MC14/2 known as the “tripwire” policy which planned a massive nuclear response to the initiation of war by the Soviet bloc.

While the United States maintained massively greater nuclear forces, and a wide variety of weapon types, Britain also had a significant arsenal which eventually developed to include an array of strategic and tactical systems. These included the Polaris submarine-launched ballistic missiles, free-fall bombs of variable power and anti-submarine nuclear depth bombs as well as nuclear-capable 155mm and 203mm artillery and Lance short-range nuclear missiles, the last three utilising US nuclear warheads under a dual control system. Thus, for several decades, all three branches of the British Armed Forces focused their operational planning around use of forward-deployed tactical nuclear weapons.

By the latter part of the 1960s the Soviet Union had developed its own array of tactical systems and NATO responded by modifying “tripwire” and developing “flexible response”. This was encoded in MC14/3 of 16 January 1968 and envisaged the limited use of mostly low-yield warheads early in a conflict against Warsaw Pact troops and their immediate logistic support in the belief that they might be “stopped in their tracks”. If that failed, a more general nuclear response might ensue.

Britain was very much part of this move, its nuclear forces were normally committed to NATO and UK personnel played significant roles within the NATO Nuclear Planning Group. This move away from deterrence through massive assured destruction was rarely publicised by the British government, one exception being an exposition of the policy offered to the House of Commons Select Committee on Foreign Affairs two decades after the transition to flexible response:

“The fundamental objective of maintaining the capability for selective sub-strategic use of theatre nuclear weapons is political – to demonstrate in advance that NATO has the capability and will to use nuclear weapons in a deliberate, politically-controlled way with the objective of inducing the aggressor to terminate the aggression and withdraw. The role of TNF [Theatre Nuclear Forces] is not to compensate for any imbalance in conventional forces. The achievement of conventional parity could have very positive consequences for the Alliance’s strategy of deterrence. But it would not, of itself, obviate the need for theatre nuclear forces.”    (Third Report of the House of Commons Select Committee on Foreign Affairs 1987-88, p.35, para. 6.)

What was very little understood at the time in the public domain was that NATO’s flexible response approach was not just the preparedness to use nuclear weapons first in response to a conventional military attack from the Soviet bloc but to do so at an early stage in such a conflict. This was made clear by SACEUR (the Supreme Allied Commander, Europe), General Bernard Rogers, in an interview published in early 1986:

“Before you lose the cohesiveness of the alliance – that is, before you are subject to (conventional Soviet military) penetration on a fairly broad scale – you will request, not you may, but you will request the use of nuclear weapons”. (International Defence Review, February 1986)

NATO’s flexible response policy remains broadly in place to the present day and nuclear planning allows for many different targeting options. This also applies to the United States where such options are constantly updated to allow for changing political situations. In an interesting reflection on relative economic and political strength, Russia also sees nuclear weapons as intrinsically of greater relevance given the low capabilities of its conventional military forces compared with those of the Warsaw Pact at the height of the Cold War.

Britain’s out-of-area operations and nuclear weapons

Since the end of the Second World War the United Kingdom has been one of the most active countries to be involved in overseas wars. The majority of these were wars of the late colonial period, but many others have been more broadly based, from Korea through to former Yugoslavia as well as the more recent and intensive post-9/11 conflicts across the Middle East and North Africa. Throughout all this period the UK has maintained its wide-ranging tactical and strategic nuclear options, even though the size of the arsenals is smaller than thirty years ago.

Two of the most controversial conflicts, the Falklands/Malvinas War of 1982 and the first Gulf War of 1991 have both had a nuclear connection. After Argentina occupied the Falkland Islands in early 1982 the UK government under Margaret Thatcher despatched a substantial naval task force and six days after it left Britain The Observer reported that

“It is almost certainly carrying tactical nuclear naval weapons – atomic depth charges carried by Sea King helicopters and free-fall bombs carried by Harrier jump jets – as part of NATO equipment.” (11 April 1982)

Later reports indicated that many of the weapons from the smaller warships were transferred en route to an auxiliary supply ship, the RFA Resource which proceeded to the South Atlantic with the rest of the fleet but was deployed away from the most intense areas of action during the subsequent war. It is not clear whether this also applied to the nuclear weapons that may have been deployed on the two aircraft carriers, HMS Invincible and Hermes and there were also multiple if unconfirmed reports that the Thatcher government was prepared to deploy a Polaris missile submarine to the mid-Atlantic to bring it within range of Argentina. (Paul Rogers, “Sub-Strategic Trident: A Slow Burning Fuse”, London Defence Papers 34, Brasseys, 1996)

Nine years after that war the UK government committed substantial forces to a US-led multinational military coalition to evict the Iraqi forces that had invaded and occupied Kuwait in August 1990. At the time there was considerable concern that Iraq had a useable arsenal of chemical weapons and a clear indication of UK willingness to use nuclear weapons in response came in an interview with a senior army office attached to the 7^th Armoured Brigade which was leaving for the Gulf. He confirmed that an Iraqi chemical attack on UK forces would be met with a tactical nuclear response. (Observer, 30 September 1990).

Deliberate ambiguity

During the 1990s, after the end of the Cold War, the UK government, under the leadership of the Conservative Prime Minister John Major, scaled down Britain’s nuclear arsenals in a series of unilateral moves, ceasing to deploy dual-control US nuclear artillery and missiles and withdrawing the WE.177 tactical nuclear bombs and depth bombs between 1992 and 1998. US-owned B61 tactical nuclear bombs continued to be deployed at RAF Lakenheath for another decade and still are based in Belgium, Germany, Italy, Netherlands and Turkey under enduring nuclear sharing arrangements with those host countries.

In order to preserve a British “sub-strategic” capability, a low-yield variant of the standard high-yield Trident thermonuclear warhead has since been deployed, although terms such as “tactical Trident” or “Sub-Strategic Trident” are no longer used in government publications. Neither is there any specific reference in official publications to the UK maintaining a policy of potential first-use of nuclear weapons.

Instead a generic description of the UK nuclear posture appears in successive defence white papers, the 2015 statement being an example:

Only the Prime Minister can authorise the launch of nuclear weapons, which ensures

that political control is maintained at all times. We would use our nuclear weapons only in extreme circumstances of self-defence, including the defence of our NATO Allies. While our resolve and capability to do so if necessary is beyond doubt, we will remain deliberately ambiguous about precisely when, how and at what scale we would contemplate their use, in order not to simplify the calculations of any potential aggressor. (National Security Strategy and Strategic Defence and Security Review 2015, para 4.68, page 34, November 2015)

It should be borne in mind that, while British ambiguity on nuclear first use is echoed by its NATO allies in Washington and Paris, as well as its assumed adversary in Moscow, there is nothing intrinsic about such a posture. China has consistently maintained a policy of no first use and normally stores its warheads separately from its delivery systems to prevent any accidental or malicious usage. India and Pakistan are also formally committed to no first use.

Conclusion

This brief summary of elements of the UK nuclear posture is intended as a reminder that such a posture is far more complex than simply providing a last-ditch deterrence against nuclear attack. Moreover, this applies very much for the United States which has a far wider array of nuclear weapon types and has been at the forefront of NATO nuclear planning, including the first use posture.

Should a conflict arise between the United States and North Korea it is by no means certain that Britain would be involved, given public attitudes within the UK, although a joint RAF/US Air Force/Korean Air Force exercise was held in South Korea late last year for the first time in several decades. Even so, at a time of heightened tensions over North Korea’s nuclear ambitions the concern should be that a crisis could escalate to the use of nuclear weapons, especially with an unpredictable incumbent in the White House.

Given Britain’s propensity for considering the idea of out-of-area nuclear first use and limited nuclear war, one would hope that there is also a full understanding of the considerable dangers of such a posture. If so, what should follow is a determination to do everything possible to advise President Trump against even considering this option in the case of North Korea.

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Image credit: Neil Hinchley. 

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About the Author

Paul Rogers is Global Security Consultant to Oxford Research Group and Professor of Peace Studies at the University of Bradford. His ‘Monthly Global Security Briefings’ are available from our website. His new book Irregular War: ISIS and the New Threats from the Margins will be published by I B Tauris in June 2016. These briefings are circulated free of charge for non-profit use, but please consider making a donation to ORG, if you are able to do so.

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In recent years, the Mexican government has been struggling to deal with a dramatic rise in crime and violence, with state responses largely failing to effectively resolve these problems. But there are some grounds for optimism.  

Over the course of too many years of elevated crime and violence, the Mexican government has been visibly struggling to identify the best possible course to improve public security and a more effective administration of justice. This article examines the magnitude of Mexico’s still ongoing security crisis, as well as the measures that the Mexican government has employed to try to resolve it. Drawing from an ample body of academic and policy research, there are some clear indications of what has not worked, as well as some bright spots for Mexico moving forward.

The State of Play in Mexico

For the past decade, the Justice in Mexico program based at the University of San Diego has studied the proliferation of crime and violence in Mexico, the country that has seen the greatest increase in homicides among all Latin American countries. Notably, following a marked decline in violent crime from the mid-1990s to the mid-2000s, Mexico experienced a dramatic increase in homicides during the five year period from 2007 to 2011, when homicide rates rose threefold nationally, from 8.1 to 24 per 100,000 inhabitants, according to official homicide statistics. (Based on the author’s own elaboration from Mexico’s national statistical clearinghouse, the National Institute of Statistics, Geography, and Information; see here also). The net result during that period alone was a total of nearly 100,000 homicides, and the subsequent four years through 2015 added roughly 90,000 more. Many of these homicides—an estimated 30-40%—bear characteristics frequently associated with the country’s powerful drug cartels and other organized crime groups: use of high caliber weapons, mutilation and dismemberment, execution style killings, publicly displayed bodies, and chilling messages and threats authored by the perpetrators.

While casual observers might assume that Mexico’s violence was widespread and pervasive throughout the country, the phenomenon was highly concentrated in certain regions and localities, primarily in the northern border region and in the country’s Pacific coastal states. In 2007, a Mexican city with more than 100 homicides could easily make it onto the country’s “top ten” list for total homicides; in fact, that same year, only Tijuana—the quintessential Mexican border city—reported more than 200 homicides (206 to be exact). Yet, just two years later, no city among the top ten most violent cities in Mexico had fewer than 200 homicides, and the top five had at least 400 homicides (as illustrated in Figure 1). Indeed, by 2010, arguably the peak of the violence, there were 18 Mexican cities with more than 200 homicides: now Mexico had many “Tijuanas.” Indeed, some of Mexico’s most violent cities—such as Acapulco, Ciudad Juárez, and Nuevo Laredo—saw rates more than triple the national homicide rate.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

In a country unaccustomed to the civil wars and brutal dictatorships that plagued other parts of Latin America in the 20^th century, such an explosion of violence was unexpected and previously unfathomable. The Mexican government’s apparent inability to resolve the problem triggered an international debate on the problems and limits of the Mexican state. A 2008 worst-case assessment by the U.S. Joint Forces Command named Mexico as one of two countries—along with Pakistan—that could suffer a sudden collapse into a “failed state.” Specifically, the report asserted, “In terms of worst-case scenarios for the Joint Force and indeed the world, two large and important states bear consideration for a rapid and sudden collapse: Pakistan and Mexico…”. Pronouncements by U.S. officials—including Secretary of State Hillary Clinton in 2010—asserted that Mexico’s woes were comparable to Colombia’s long-standing problems of domestic insurgency, or even on par with a civil war. Others sensationalized Mexico’s recent violence as a new hybrid threat of “criminal insurgency” or suggested that the power and infiltration of such groups had turned Mexico into a “narcostate” overrun by violence, corruption, and “narco- terrorism.”

The merits of such assertions were quite debatable then and have proved false with time, as they tended to exaggerate and misconstrue Mexico’s current security situation. The methods and organizational forms of Mexican organized crime groups are arguably terrifying and sometimes truly mimic those of terrorists and insurgents. Yet, Mexico’s organized crime groups have shown no ambition to govern or supplant the state. They have no record or evident intention of disrupting the state’s capacity to deliver basic services. Moreover, the Mexican state maintains substantial democratic legitimacy, and has successfully deterred would-be insurgents in recent decades. Lastly, by the various measures used by the Fund for Peace to compile the Fragile States Index (formerly known as the Failed State Index), the health of the Mexican state ranks about average for Latin American countries, and its capacity is far greater than in war-torn countries like Afghanistan, Central African Republic, Iraq, Somalia, Syria, or Yemen.

The Mexican State Response

There is no doubt that Mexico’s recent security crisis presented—and continues to present—a major challenge for the Mexican state, and raises serious questions about its limits and failings. It is true that, like any other individuals who violate the law, the goal of organized crime groups is to minimize the state’s ability to detect, prevent, and/or punish their illicit activities. Yet, unlike other criminal actors, organized crime groups—and particularly drug trafficking organizations—in Mexico have demonstrated a remarkable capacity to secure protection from the state to support and sustain their criminal activities, with corrupt officials on their payrolls at all levels of government. Also, to varying degrees, such groups have at least temporarily attained a stronger presence and degree of control than the government in some limited geographic areas. Moreover, in some places, organized crime groups have capitalized on anti-government sentiments to achieve a degree of popularity or even legitimacy that seriously undermines state capacity. What, then are the sources of Mexico’s recent violence, and why have state responses failed to resolve the problem in a timely manner?

The rise of Mexico’s most powerful organized crime groups—commonly referred to as drug trafficking organizations, or “cartels”—came amid a severe economic crisis in the 1980s. While other industries faltered, illicit drug production and trafficking enjoyed a major boom and substantial impunity, thanks in part to the complicity of government and law enforcement personnel. By the late 1990s, growing problems of crime and violence contributed to a crisis of “public insecurity,” characterized also by a feeling of widespread fear and frustration on the part of the general public due to the inability of the Mexican government to maintain order. Following a major political transition in 2000—the ouster of the PRI, Mexico’s long-time ruling party, from the presidency—the administration of Vicente Fox (2000-06) disrupted the leadership of two of the country’s four main organized crime groups.

This tactic of arresting, extraditing, or otherwise eliminating the top leaders of major criminal organizations has been commonly referred to as the “kingpin” strategy. Fox’s successor, President Felipe Calderón (2006-12), deployed the kingpin strategy vigorously. Calderón and other proponents of the kingpin strategy argued that taking out the top leadership would help to disrupt their operations and convert a national security threat into a more localized public security problem. In some cases, at least, the government succeeded in reducing the functional capacity of some of the country’s major criminal organizations, but the unintended result was the creation of internal power vacuums and incentives for regionally based drug trafficking organizations to clash over turf and expand into rival territories. The subsequent conflicts within and among these groups were responsible for tens of thousands of organized crime-style killings that made up nearly the entire increase in homicides noted above, especially in major drug trafficking production and transit zones.

In December 2012, a new president, Enrique Peña Nieto, took office and restored the PRI to power. His government continued to deploy the kingpin strategy, arresting high-ranking members of the Zeta and Sinaloa cartels. Remarkably, these arrests did not produce the same kind of violent aftershock that occurred under previous administrations, perhaps because of a new equilibrium among organized crime groups (there were few large cartels left standing) or perhaps more effective accommodation strategies (such as negotiations with the leaders next in line to take control of criminal operations). Whatever the reason, during 2013 and 2014, Peña Nieto’s first two full years in office, levels of homicide actually declined by around 8 and 12%, respectively (author’s own calculations from INEGI data. http://www.inegi.org.mx). However, statistics on homicide investigations for 2015 suggest that there was slight increase—about 10%—in the number of homicides nationwide, reversing the modest downward trend and provoking concerns that Mexico’s violence would ramp up again in the coming years. Final figures for 2015 likely to be released by Mexico’s national statistics agency sometime in late summer 2016, but as of mid-2016 there are troubling signs that violence is on the rise. (As this article went to press, INEGI statistics were unavailable for 2015, so the figures referenced here are Mexican law enforcement investigations into homicides tabulated by the Mexican National Public Security System – Sistema Nacional de Seguridad Pública, SNSP).

Conclusion

Looking toward the future, Mexico’s security situation will likely be affected by a number of important international and domestic factors. International factors could also significantly shape Mexico’s prospects. As a growing number of leaders and civic organizations push for the legally regulated production, distribution, and consumption of drugs (including the legalization of marijuana in two U.S. states in November 2012), this shift in discourse and policy could have major implications for Mexican organized crime groups. A loss of illicit revenues will likely reduce the capacity of these organizations to challenge the state, but it will also result in a painful restructuring of black market industries, pushing drug traffickers to increase exports of other drugs (like heroin) and further diversify into other violent criminal activities (e.g., kidnapping, extortion, robbery, etc.). This has already caused an abrupt increase in violence in some states, like Guerrero. In terms of drug policy, there are no quick and easy fixes to the problem of organized crime and violence in Mexico.

However, there are some reasons for optimism in Mexico. Changing demographic trends (including a declining population of under-educated, underpaid, and underemployed young males) and an improvement of the country’s overall economic situation could facilitate a reduction of various societal ills, including both violent crime and large-scale external migration. At the same time, with the right mix of fiscal and political reforms, Mexico’s rising economic fortunes could also bolster the state’s capacity to respond more effectively to these problems, thanks to investments and reforms in the criminal justice system, as well as public education and social programs to strengthen the social fabric. Fortunately, in recent years, the Mexican government has begun to implement major economic, social and judicial sector reforms that could greatly strengthen both state and societal capacity to reduce the power of violent organized crime groups. The main question is whether these reforms will be rapid and adequate enough to substantially reduce the number of violent deaths in Mexico over the next decade.

Dr. David A. Shirk is graduate director of the Master of Arts in International Relations program at the University of San Diego, director of Justice in Mexico, and a global fellow at the Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars. He is the co-author of Contemporary Mexican Politics, with Emily Edmonds-Poli.

In this talk for the Food Systems Academy, Paul Rogers puts the challenges of transforming food systems in a global, human security context. He argues that food is at the centre of the third great transition humankind has to go through.

Running order:

Part 1. Why 1945?: 0 – 2 minutes 45 seconds

Part 2. Proxy wars to the end of the cold war: 2 min 45 sec – 5 min 42 sec

Part 3. The big issues: 5 min 42 sec – 20 min 45 sec

Part 4.  The third great transition: 20 min 45 sec – 28 min 49 sec

Part 5 – Looking ahead: 28 min 49 sec – end

Paul Rogers is professor in the department of peace studies at Bradford University and Global Security Consultant at Oxford Research Group.  He is the author of numerous books including Why We’re Losing the War on Terror (Polity, 2007), and Losing Control: Global Security in the 21st Century (Pluto Press, 3rd edition, 2010). He is on twitter at: @ProfPRogers 

The Food Systems Academy is an open educational resource aiming to transform our food systems. This video can also be viewed on their website.

Featured Image: U.S. Army Huey helicopter spraying Agent Orange over Vietnamese agricultural land (Originally from U.S. Army Operations in Vietnam R.W. Trewyn, Ph.D. , (11) Huey Defoliation National Archives: 111-CC-59948, originally found in Box 1 Folder 9 of Admiral Elmo R. Zumwalt, Jr. Collection: Agent Orange Subject Files. – Item Number: VA042084; via Wikipedia)

South Sudan, the world’s newest country, currently risks slipping into a violent malaise. The crisis in South Sudan highlights very clearly some of the key problems surrounding the practical implementation of the Responsibility to Protect. 

Five years after seceding from Sudan, South Sudan is about to collapse into its second civil war since 2013. Marauding bands of informally constituted ethnic groups contribute to a climate of vigilantism.  UN diplomats debate the utility of an arms embargo in a state awash in arms.  The threat is meant to leverage Juba’s permission to allow a four thousand peacekeeper regional protection force into the country.  But Juba’s complaint about its exclusion from negotiations, contributes to a climate of distrust about the international community and its intentions. The crisis represents a serious challenge for the Responsibility to Protect (R2P) doctrine and the international community to forestall a humanitarian disaster that is well underway.

The Responsibility to Protect

A 2001 report by the International Commission on Intervention and State Sovereignty introduced the idea of R2P, creating a new international norm that made the formerly autonomous allowances of absolute sovereignty contingent on each state’s responsibility to protect its population from genocide, war crimes, crimes against humanity, and ethnic cleansing.  Its controversial pillar two seized the international community with subject matter jurisdiction to intervene as the residual stop-gap agency to prevent internal abuse when states were incapable or unwilling to do the same.  Two other pillars addressed a responsibility to prevent (addressing root causes of catastrophe) and a responsibility to rebuild (to assist with reconstruction and reconciliation).

The development of the norm has been controversial and it has been reworked, principally along lines of nurturing states to live up to their internal responsibilities and tethering it to actions of the UN Security Council.  But its proactive charge of intervention has also been embraced by scholars and norm entrepreneurs as a progressive development. In its 2007 judgment in the Prevention and Punishment of Genocide Case, the International Court of Justice (ICJ) supported the duty of states to prevent atrocity beyond their borders if they have the capacity to influence persons likely to commit such acts; the ICJ acknowledged that this obligation extended beyond the competent organs of the UN.  The International Law Commission’s 2001 Draft Articles on State Responsibility provided that states cooperate to end through lawful means serious and systematic breaches of peremptory norms.  R2P’s normative development indicates that the idea of a collective responsibility to protect now informs the legalect of international courts and tribunals, suggesting a growing receptivity to and maturation of the doctrine.

R2P, Africa and South Sudan

Africa was the first region where the R2P was meant to be applied.  It grew out of the idea of responsible sovereignty, first articulated by Francis Deng and others in 1996.  Responsible sovereignty suggested benefits to cooperation among states.  These benefits went beyond the avoidance of international conflict or the mere ‘tending to’ of sovereign fences.  Responsible sovereignty suggested sovereignty could imply joint action and joint benefits.  It grew into the idea of R2P.

Nowhere has R2Ps reception been stronger than in Africa, having been well received by the African Union, the Economic Community of West African States, (ECOWAS), the Southern African Development Community (SADC), and a litany of African elites, including South Africa’s Thabo Mbeki, Nigeria’s Olusegun Obasanjo, Tanzania’s Salim Ahmed Salim, South Sudan’s Francis Deng, Ghana’s former UN Secretary-General Kofi Anan, and Algeria’s Mohamed Sahnoun.  Cases within the African context indicated its time had come: The UN Security Council validated ECOWAS’ interventions in Liberia (1990/92) and Sierra Leone (1997), offering praise in the face of its own inaction to these humanitarian crises.  R2P received the unanimous support of one hundred and seventy Heads of State in two provisions of the 2005 UN World Summit final document, presaging the incorporation of the doctrine by the African Union in its 2005 Ezulwini Consensus report.

But nowhere has its implementation been more problematic than in the world’s newest country, South Sudan.  Sudan, and now South Sudan, have been beset by internecine violence over the last sixty years.  South Sudan teetered on implosion almost immediately after achieving statehood in July 2011.  South Sudan devolved into civil war in December 2013, when its President Salva Kiir Mayardit accused former Vice President Riek Machar of plotting against the regime.  An improbable rapprochement, fortified by an internationally mediated agreement, was signed in August 2015, resulting in Machar’s much delayed return to the capital, Juba in April 2016, and the formation of a most tenuous unity government, which collapsed in July in a wave of bloodshed and atrocity in Juba.  Kiir has now rejected a US proposal to insert the four thousand peacekeepers, claiming it is an attempt to turn South Sudan into a UN protectorate.

Kiir and Machar’s mutual distrust until the most recent violence in July was outweighed only by a common need for more money to support their factions and a mutual interest in avoiding a personal accounting of atrocities allegedly committed by their respective factions.  Interpreted alternatively as an explanation or a threat to the international community, the two allegedly wrote on the Op Ed page of the New York Times in June 2016 that any disciplinary justice meted out “even under international law” would destabilize unity efforts.  Translation:  If you try to bring us to justice, we will bring back war.  They invoked the name of the international community, calling on it to back their non-punitive plan for a mediated reconciliation.   Four days after publication, the New York Times appended an Editor’s Note to the South Sudan leaders’ world-wide call for reconciliation; Machar had disavowed the Op Ed piece, claiming his views had been fabricated. But not completely.  One month later, he and Kiir brought back bloodshed.

The episode highlights the complexities facing South Sudan.  If the international community is to facilitate a solution to the ongoing crisis, only cosmetically concealed by an unravelling claim of unity, the fundamental normative problem of R2P must be addressed:  where in the international community does R2P reside?

Transmuting the international community’s abstract but coercive cause of action to prevent domestic abuse into something other than high-minded rhetoric requires either a fully functioning UN Security Council or another agency with the legitimacy and authority to pierce sovereignty’s veil.  The UN Charter system created a jus ad bellum regime that placed monopoly power over all uses and threats of force (except in cases of self-defense) in the hands of the Security Council.  But that authority is often addled by inaction due to the veto-wielding interests of the big powers, exposing the fundamental weakness of the UN system and provoking the elusive international legal and political pursuit for a better or supplementary normative solution.

Internationalists have wrestled with the poor choice between supporting the legality of the Charter system, which often stood silent in the face of atrocity, or supporting the legitimacy of humanitarian intervention, which only problematized consideration of hidden agendas pertaining to regime change, remedial secession, and self-determination.  Establishing the international community as the ex ante entity vested with such a remedial power came as something of a surprise, and, after fifteen years of ontological development, remains in dispute.  In theoretical terms, R2P marked a return to and modern expression of Christian Wolff’s eighteenth century Republican idea of the civitas maxima (a ‘grand republic’ of nations), the meta-expression of community virtue that upholds the common good, secures the pluralistic interests of the state, and protects the solidarist interests of humanity by presenting a means to prevent internal atrocity.  But even Wolff, who had no understanding of the modern state system as we know it, thought it could not function without a rector.

Kiir and Machar embrace this much of Wolff’s eighteenth century mindset; they view the international community as a rhetorical trope that lacks a headmaster; they invoke its name to lend a fictive air of moral authority to their pieties on reconciliation, when they do not employ it as blackmail.  Much of the doctrinal disarray surrounding R2P’s non-appearance in South Sudan conforms to an uncertainty about the international community itself:  Is it an unwitting continuation of the mission civilisatrice – the persistently failed and resented attempt to make sub-Saharan Africa more European; does it embrace or dismiss African notions of community, which present a humanistic understanding different than contractarian models of liberal institutionalism (Ubuntu); is it an updated form of colonialism?  Perhaps it is an expression of Carl Schmitt’s Political Theology (1922), allowing its claimants the power to decide on the exceptions to legal rules.  Schmitt was wary of the keepers of humanity’s interests.  Paraphrasing Proudhon, he wrote:  whoever invokes humanity’s name wants to cheat.  Kiir and Machar would doubtless agree.

Equally problematic has been locating the international community’s headmaster amid South Sudan’s turmoil.  Does the international community fundamentally reduce to a sanctions policy orchestrated by the US and its allies?  Should it claim a regional identity in the form of mediations sponsored by the Intergovernmental Authority for Development (IGAD) or IGAD-Plus (an amalgam of states associated with the African Union Peace and Security Council), or non-African agencies of the EU, the so-called Troika (US, UK, and Norway), or perhaps China?

An Emergent Dark Side

South Sudan’s misery teaches us something about the emergent dark side of R2P.  It reveals a heteronomous will of a fragmented international community, which, in South Sudan’s case finds expression in a variety of cross-cutting alliances.  Tensions exist within IGAD, certainly between Uganda and Sudan and possibly due to reports of Eritrean and Sudanese military support of South Sudanese opposition forces.  These tensions diminish IGAD’s mediation efforts and reputation as an honest broker.  Key sectors of South Sudan’s limited civil society (specifically Church leaders) are overlooked; an array of venues and sponsors compete for influence, contributing to complaints of forum-shopping, which allow Kiir and Machar to play components of the international community against each other.  The center of this unity government in South Sudan has not held; war is around the corner and famine is spreading.

Conclusion

Locating R2P within the international community would be daunting enough were questions of its authorization or operationalization in South Sudan settled matters of fact; but its non-appearance in the continuing misery of the country suggests the doctrine, fifteen years in the making, is neither thickly representative of historical process nor thinly embodied as an aspiration.  R2P, in the context of South Sudan, turns the international community into an ethical referent, a conceptual archetype that satisfies saints and sinners alike.

Christopher Rossi has a Ph.D. in international relations from The Johns Hopkins University School of Advanced International Studies and an LL.M in public international law from the University of London.  He lectures on international law and relations at the University of Iowa College of Law.

Africa is often presented as a war-ridden continent, but this depiction is becoming outdated. In the 21^st century, the amount of warfare in Africa has declined dramatically, and today most Africans are more secure than ever.

“Africa” and “conflict” are words all too often linked in Western minds. From Cold War proxy wars, to what Robert Kaplan saw as “the coming anarchy”  in the 1990s, to Boko Haram massacres today, news from Africa may seem dominated by never-ending conflict. That image is out of date. In 2002 Tony Blair was justified in describing the state of Africa as a “scar on the conscience of humanity”, but in the years since there has been an underappreciated success story in Africa. The amount of warfare in Africa has declined dramatically, and today most Africans are more secure than ever. Troubled areas remain, unfortunately, but the larger picture of receding conflict has implications for how we think about African security needs. Outside actors can help reinforce positive external and internal trends that mitigate conflict, can avoid creating new conflict zones like Libya or South Sudan, and should recognize emerging human security needs that are becoming relatively more important as armed conflict declines.

Africa’s waning wars

Quietly over the last 15 years, many African wars did end, to paraphrase Scott Strauss. Lingering Cold War struggles like the Angolan civil war burned out. West African nations including Liberia and Sierra Leone ceased being playgrounds for warlords and regained their status as functional, if weak, states. Eastern Congo is still violent, but far less so than during the 1990s “African World War”. Overall, 21^st century Africa has seen more wars end or abate than ignite.

The trend towards peace in Africa can be seen by using various datasets on armed conflict (for more on data sources, tabulation, and trend analysis, see Burbach and Fettweis 2014). The Center for Systemic Peace (CSP), for example, tracks conflicts from 1946 to the present, scoring each for the intensity of its societal impact. Figure 1 shows the yearly sum of conflict intensity assessed by CSP, for both Africa and the rest of the world. The end of the Cold War brought peace to much of the world, but African conflicts increased in the 1990s. States like Somalia and Sierra Leone collapsed into warlordism, for example. Central Africa was hit by the Rwanda genocide and bloody chaos in Eastern Congo, killing one to five million people.  At least three-fourths of the world’s total war deaths in the late 1990s took place in Africa (Burbach and Fettweis 2014, Figure 4).

After the year 2000, the tide of war receded. Africa’s total conflict intensity as measured by CSP fell by approximately half. A similar pattern is shown by the Uppsala Conflict Data Project. Using somewhat different definitions, the Uppsala data shows that the number of conflicts in Africa resulting in 1,000 or more “battle deaths” per year declined from an average of 12 in the late 1990s to an average of 3.5 from 2010-2013. Some decades-long wars ended with formal peace accords, as with Angola in 2002; elsewhere, states gradually gained the upper hand on armed disorder. Given the unfortunate rise of warfare in the Middle East, Africa is no longer the most violent region of the world.

The decline of warfare in Africa is even more dramatic in terms of individual risks. Africa’s population is growing rapidly, up 150% since 1980. Declining conflict despite a much larger population means the mortality risk from war has fallen substantially. An average of 32 people per 100,000 population were killed per year in the 1980s and 45 per 100,000 in the 1990s. In 2013, though the rate was only 8 per 100,000 (Burbach & Fettweis 2014, Figure 5). World Health Organization data shows an astonishing 95% decline in African conflict deaths from 2000 to 2012. In the 1980s, warfare killed more Africans than vehicle accidents. Today, perhaps three to six times as many Africans die in road crashes than from conflict. Many more Africans are harmed by crime or domestic violence than by warfare. Africa is still afflicted by more conflict than most ofthe world and the suffering of those involved is very real. Nevertheless, a greater proportion of Africans live free of war today than ever in the post-independence period.

Celebrating African peace may seem premature given the civil war in South Sudan or the ravages of Boko Haram. Conflict has increased since 2011, but the level of armed conflict still remains lower than any time from 1970 – 2000. The most tragic development is the civil war in South Sudan, which the U.N. estimated had killed 50,000 as of spring 2016. Fortunately, South Sudan’s case is nearly unique: a newly created nation, devoid of physical or administrative infrastructure, with ethnically divided, soon-to-be-unemployed armed factions eyeing the lucrative oil revenues awaiting whomever could seize power. As academic panelists noted in 2011 – two years before the civil war –  predictors of conflict were flashing red in South Sudan. Few African countries contain such a combustible mix of problems anymore.

Accounting for the decline

There are several factors behind the ebbing of conflict in Africa. One important change is the geopolitical environment. During the Cold War, the U.S. and the Soviets armed and funded rival factions in civil wars, allowing bloody wars to fester for decades in countries like Angola, Mozambique, and Ethiopia. Then, 1990s Africa fell into turmoil as superpower-sponsored regimes collapsed. A disinterested world mostly left Africa to its fate, but continued trade in weapons and resources with warlords. In the last decade, however, the U.S., Europe, and China have all become more active in diplomacy, security assistance, and peacekeeping. The US and China are together pressing the South Sudanese factions to stop fighting, rather than choosing sides. The world has become somewhat less willing to sell arms or purchase minerals that directly fuel conflicts, admittedly with a long way to go.

Africans themselves deserve great credit for ending the wars that plagued their continent.  Economic growth, improvements in governance, and greater space for peaceful political participation have all made state failure and internal conflict less likely. As Paul Collier among others has noted, civil wars tend to create vicious cycles that spread insecurity to whole regions. Many regions of Africa have climbed out of the conflict trap; political, security, and economic improvements are reinforcing each other. The nations of Africa increasingly work together through the institutions of the African Union to head off or resolve conflict, and to deploy peacekeepers to conflict zones. Needs still outpace available resources, but that cooperation is a marked change from 20^th century Africa.

A peaceful future?

Whether the trend towards peace continues depends foremost on Africa’s leaders, but external actors can encourage positive trends in African security. Most directly, partners can help the AU and its member nations improve peacekeeping and conflict resolution capabilities. Likewise, the world should continue arms embargoes against combatants and regulating trade in valuable resources where exploitation appears to be a key ingredient of protracted conflict. Ongoing encouragement and incentives for democratization and governmental reform are helpful. Western countries should consider, however, that broad efforts like anticorruption programs are probably more helpful than International Criminal Court indictments of individual leaders, which can generate nationalist backlash.

The world should especially try not to create new ground for conflict. Libya and South Sudan are Africa’s worst conflict zones today. Both were birthed through Western action – the removal by force of the Qaddafi regime, and diplomatically sponsoring South Sudan’s independence from Khartoum. While the moral cases were sound, both countries were left with non-existent governments, antagonistic armed factions, and grossly inadequate provision for disarming, demobilizing, and re-integrating fighters. American and European governments focused more on freeing people from hated regimes than on answering – let alone resourcing – the “what next?” question. Chaos followed, just as many African governments had warned at the time.

From a humanitarian perspective, advocates should consider whether other challenges in Africa deserve relatively more attention. For example, Fearon and Hoeffler suggest that domestic violence against women and children now imposes larger human costs than warfare, and also that domestic violence can be reduced more cost-effectively than armed conflict. The ballooning toll of vehicle accident deaths in Africa may represent an opportunity for international technical or educational assistance to pay off with many saved lives. Beyond road safety, Africa is rapidly urbanizing.  Western visions of menacing rebels waving AK-47s in the bush privilege the exotic, but most Africans confront more prosaic threats to health and safety. The human security challenges Africans confront are increasingly those of city-dwellers:  crime, sanitation and utilities, safe and reliable transport, etc. Better policing, regularized urban housing, and expansion of infrastructure in megacities like Lagos and Kinshasa ought to be top priorities.

Conclusion

Sixteen years ago The Economist magazine suggested Africa was a “hopeless continent”. Lately The Economist has been bullish on Africa, citing the decline in warfare as a key reason for the continent’s improving business prospects. With remarkable speed, in the 21^st century African conflict declined and safety improved, a hugely positive change in the welfare of Africans. Africa’s international friends should ensure their priorities respond to contemporary human security challenges, not ghosts of the past – and certainly they should avoid making things worse. Recognition of Africa’s progress itself would be a boon:  the continent’s increasingly out-of-date image as an undifferentiated war-torn anarchy retards investment and engagement from overseas. The tragedies of the moment deserve action, but we should not overlook that there is also much good news out of Africa.

David T. Burbach is an Associate Professor of National Security Affairs at the Naval War College in Newport, RI.   Dr. Burbach received a Ph.D in Political Science from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, and has expertise in African security, defense planning, and U.S. foreign policy.   The views expressed in this article are personal and do not represent official positions of the U.S. Navy.

Closing Europe’s borders and politicizing the attempt to admit refugees at a time when the growing humanitarian crisis poses mounting human rights challenges to the international community is fundamentally wrongheaded. These approaches only strengthen the hand of Islamic State.

While violent extremism, terrorism, and civil wars have drawn the most attention, coming to grips with the refugee crisis—emanating mainly from Syria’s civil war, but also more generally from the Middle East and North Africa’s political environment (MENA) in the aftermath of the 2011 Arab uprisings—has never been more essential. The Syrian crisis has propelled a wave of migrants to the neighboring countries of Jordan, Lebanon, Iraq, and Turkey. The Syrian refugee population stands at approximately 4.7 million, of whom 1.7 million live in Lebanon and Jordan and even more in Turkey. It is estimated that Turkey now hosts the world’s largest community of displaced Syrians.

Defeating the Islamic State in Iraq and Syria (ISIS, also known as ISIL and by its Arabic acronym as Da’esh), while at the same time fulfilling the Responsibility to Protect (R2P) in the Syrian situation, has presented a complex challenge to the international community. The growing threat of ISIS as shown in attacks in Paris (2015) and Brussels (2016), magnified by the increased threat of individual terrorists—the so-called “lone wolves” in San Bernardino, the United States—has stemmed a wave of nationalist, right-wing alarm, reinforcing a general concern about the influx of immigrants and asylum seekers, while underlining the shift from a regional to the international nature of both threat and risk. These security issues have also illustrated the willingness of great powers to support military reactions to ISIS in order to stem the atrocities perpetrated by this group, while putting the departure of the Assad regime on the back burner—at least for now. For all intents and purposes, ISIS poses a much greater threat to Europe than does the current regime in Damascus.

An Unavoidable Tradeoff

Confronting and dismantling ISIS need not be achieved by stigmatizing refugees and subjecting them to religious litmus tests. Closing Europe’s porous borders and politicizing the admission of refugees at a time when the growing humanitarian crisis poses mounting human rights challenges to the international community is fundamentally misguided. After all, fortifying European borders, while effective in the short term, strengthens the hands of ISIS and other terrorist groups that portray such policies and practices largely in terms of apocalyptic visions and arcane Islamic prophecies of great battles against Western imperialists.

Defeating ISIS requires strategic endurance and long-term prudent political decision-making involving internal and external actors in the MENA region. While doing so, it is important to avoid the enemy’s repressive, atavistic, and brutal methods, eschewing certain tactics that could potentially play into ISIS’s hands. It is important to bear in mind that the tactics that terrorist groups like ISIS employ pose mostly political and ideological challenges to the West and that the real fight will be in defeating and destroying the claims and values that these groups assert.  In the end, defeating ISIS requires that its demonic ideology and tactics be confronted and exposed.

Preventing further refugee crises in the future requires that fighting ISIS be at least temporarily prioritized over the overthrow of the Assad regime.  Seeking a political solution in conjunction with harnessing a multipronged strategy may in fact be among the most effective tools and processes of dealing with current humanitarian crises that the world faces. The possibility of working with the Russians and the Iranians in order to seek a political solution in Syria also raises questions about whether this tradeoff is justified. If the intent is to defeat ISIS, al-Qaeda, and the Levant Conquest Front (formerly known as al-Nusra Front), then this tradeoff is inevitable even as it buttresses the Assad regime in Syria for the foreseeable future. This solution is not problem-free or without significant challenges, however.

Competing Views

While the military actions against ISIS are warranted and can be coordinated by both inside and outside actors, the nature of such military missions and their consequences are also subject to further debate and negotiations. The inclusion of Russia and Iran, allies of Assad, in the fight against ISIS raises concerns that their stated goal of curbing ISIS is merely a pretext to prolonging Assad’s rule. Likewise, Turkish participation in air strikes in northern Syria in the war against ISIS has raised the possibility that Ankara will target the Kurds, who have successfully fought against ISIS since the beginning of the conflagration. Turkey’s interest in settling political scores with the Kurds, an interest that it believes is vital to its security, imperils whatever impartiality one might have hoped for in a fight solely against ISIS.

The massive movement of migrants and refugees to Europe, coupled with the ISIS-led attacks on soft targets in Europe, has created a new urgency among Western leaders to fully confront this new global threat and seriously contemplate the possibility of cooperating with Russia in a coordinated effort. Compromises must at times be made when a multifaceted campaign that includes both countering ISIS and precipitating the removal of the Assad regime is waged. The collapse of the Assad regime would create a significant security void that ISIS and other terrorist groups could easily exploit.

There is no denying the fact that the Paris, Brussels, and San Bernardino terrorist attacks have heightened the securitization of the refugee threats, as the Islamic State has been using the wave of the migrant influx to infiltrate Europe and North America. The number of terrorists hiding among the refugees is small. ISIS has exploited the flood of refugees to smuggle jihadis into Europe by distributing fake passports in Greek refugee camps to allow its terrorists to travel within Europe. On April 22, 2016, The Washington Post reported that more than three dozen suspected militants who had posed as migrants have been arrested or died while planning or carrying out acts of terrorism.  They included at least seven individuals who were directly linked to the bloody attacks in Paris and Brussels.

But even a few of these will be highlighted by conservative circles in all Western countries to call for the repatriation or active policing of refugee communities.  Donald Trump Jr.’s notorious analogy between refugees and poisoned Skittles is a case in point. Conservatives rank the issue of terrorism much higher than do liberals in the West, the latter agreeing that one cannot stop all terrorism and that the chances of being caught in a terrorist attack are still quite small. Vigilance and the exclusion of possible threats by governments, however, is prioritized over the compassionate acceptance of refugees.

The Flaws of the Current Refugee Regime

The issue remains to be discussed within the core conception of the mandate of the United Nation High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR). Remaining at the center of the global refugee regime, UNHCR faces new challenges. Today, for example, most refugees tend to flee from violence and flagrant human rights violations—not necessarily from the threat of persecution, which is a key requirement according to the 1951 Refugee Convention.

This has resulted in confusion and lack of clarity regarding who qualifies for refugee status and what are the rights to which all refugees are entitled— issues left up entirely to states to interpret. To compound matters further, in the case of Syrian refugee crisis, the neighboring countries of Lebanon, Jordan, and Iraq have never ratified the 1951 Refugee Convention. Now, more than ever, a robust and comprehensive discussion about the future of refugees, whose numbers will only increase with the worsening effects of climate change, is not only timely but necessary, given the tumultuous nature of international politics.

It is important to bear in mind that refugees can be a destabilizing factor, especially when displaced, alienated, and bitter persons among them are recruited into armed extremist factions. Many studies have shown that the absence of a protective and enabling environment is likely to render more young people vulnerable to racist ideologies and movements and ease the process of their recruitment into the ranks of radical groups like the Islamic State or al-Qaeda. The traditional method of relying on purely humanitarian remedies has proven counterproductive in the face of new influxes of refugees. There is a need for a new thinking that envisions relief and humanitarian aid as fundamentally linked to the granting of work permits to the refugees. To dwell solely on the conventional method of humanitarian aid, and to ignore the importance of wage-earning employment for the refugees, is to wear blinders.

Shifting Focus from Protection to Empowerment

The focus of the 1951 refugee protection regime should shift to new ways of dealing with displaced persons that take into account the self-interested reasoning of host countries and the concerns of their citizens regarding competition over jobs. This shift will help to eliminate risks to refugees’ personal security by reducing human smuggling and trafficking by land and sea. Some experts, such as Alexander Betts and Paul Collier, have offered solutions along the line of creating “spaces of opportunity” for the refugees through “special economic zones” that provide jobs, training, and education.

Helping refugees, I would argue, should begin with technical education and vocational training, coupled with a strategy focused on creating jobs immediately in economic zones from which both host societies and displaced Syrians can benefit. The need to work is inseparable from human security and thus crucial to preserving human dignity. The refugees’ right to legal employment makes good ethical and logical sense. Designing, for example, a vocational skills training program tailored to the needs of women refugees can significantly reduce the incidence of sexual trafficking and abuse. These projects offer a more plausible solution in the long term, not only because they will develop transferable skills that refugees can use in their countries of origin upon return, but also because they create monetary disincentives for refugees to emigrate to Europe in the first place.

Dr. Mahmood Monshipouri is a professor of international relations at San Francisco State University and he is also a visiting professor at UC-Berkeley, teaching Middle Eastern Politics, and editor, most recently, of Information Politics, Protests, and Human Rights in the Digital Age (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2016).  For more on the perspectives provided here, see Mahmood Monshipouri, Claude Welch Jr., and Khashayar Nikazmrad, “Protecting Human Rights in the Era of Uncertainty: How Not to Lose the War against ISIS,” Journal of Human Rights Online version, July 28, 2016, available at <http://www.tandfonline.com/doi/pdf/10.1080/14754835.2016.1205477>.

One of the negative aspects of China’s increasing engagement with African states is the spread of small arms and/or light weapons especially in conflict zones and were opposition is violently suppressed. These weapons have undoubtably contributed to the enhancement of closer ties between China and authoritarian regimes and served as an instrument for consolidating its presence in the continent.

China has developed an extensive presence in Africa through infrastructure such as airports, roads, hospitals,  convention centers,  media investment, agricultural  and health education, among many other  activities that seemingly put China in a good light.  At the same time many of China’s seemingly worthwhile activities by have not consolidated its ties to the African political elite and incumbent regimes as much as its arms sales to authoritarian regimes have.  Its positive contributions in the continent have been offset by the lure of the benefits that are associated with arms sales to African states despite their negative consequences in growing African states.

Chinese small arms have been implicated in ethnic violence and war crimes in Sudan, South Sudan and the Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC) among others.  They have also been instrumental in the suppression of democratic progress in Zimbabwe, and at the same time expanding its influence and political economic ties with the authoritarian regime of President Robert Mugabe. China’s worldview which puts social and economic rights over individual liberties and political rights is often quick to supply weapons to authoritarian African states because it does not make human rights observance a condition for arms sales to any country. Incumbent African regimes that face severe threats to their survival are therefore quick to turn to China as a source of arms supply in the struggle to preserve their power.

Apart from the lure of profits for China’s arms sales to Africa, there is also the added benefit of China finding employment opportunities for its skilled Chinese citizens. This contributes to spreading its technical and personnel   influence in the continent. At times, an arms supply relationship also involves establishing an arms factory in a recipient state that requires the expertise of skilled Chinese scientists, engineers, and industrial managers. Such a relationship for China leads to a long term business and security relationship with the African country. This is one reason why China’s influence in Sudan is so strong. However, what happens is that weapons that are sold by China or produced by China in Africa end up fueling and feeding the conflicts in countries such as the DRC, Sudan, South Sudan, and the Central African Republic, among others.  Regime survival or incumbent regime power consolidation efforts fuel arms transfers in South Sudan and Burundi. Chinese arms are often implicated in these conflicts because of China’s aggressive arms sales strategy w is based on the following:

• A “catch all” customers strategy that has established an arms transfer or military relationship with several large  African states such as Egypt, Nigeria, Ethiopia, Zimbabwe, and South Africa, as well as smaller states like the Republic of Congo, Equatorial Guinea, Eritrea,  Burundi, and Sierra Leone, among others;
• A favorable  financing strategy especially for African countries that cannot afford to buy sophisticated weapons and  afford to pay the market price for small or light weapons; and
• China’s use of frequent and aggressive small arms marketing of its and more sophisticated military hardware at annual arms exhibits in various states within the continent. The wide array of Chinese arms enables China to sell weapons to both rich authoritarian African states as well as poorer smaller ones. The Chinese policy of placing no human rights or democracy conditions on arms sales as well its overall policy of non-interference in the politics of African states translates into the availability and affordability of Chinese arms in many African states.

The bloody footprints of China’s arm sales in Africa

It is not therefore surprising that arms from China have been implicated in the Ethiopian-Eritrean conflict in which China is known to have supplied arms to both sides in the conflict. It is also well documented that Chinese weapons were used in Sudan’s suppression of rebels in Darfur following a revolt in 2003 which led to a genocide against the region’s people.  It is alleged that the light weapons used in the massacres in eastern DRC were of Chinese origin. There, children as young as 11 years old were given weapons  by warlord Thomas Lubanga, and forced to participate in interethnic killings in the early 2000s. Furthermore, Chinese trained Congolese troops have been implicated on several occasions in ethnic killings of innocent civilians in the eastern DRC.  Similarly, in 2009 Chinese-trained Guinean Commando units were responsible for the killings of about 150 people during a protest against authoritarian and undemocratic rule in the country.

According to the Stockholm International Peace Research Institute ( SIPRI) report of 2010, China was found to be the foremost exporter of arms to Africa. The Chinese Type 56 which is China’s version of the Russian Kalashnikov (AK47) assault rifle is much easier to use as a light weapon.  The argument could be made that in spite of China’s claim that it does not interfere in the internal affairs of other countries, the fact that it supplies weapons to warring factions within a sovereign nation is itself inherently interventionist by nature. Such interference produces consequences such as gross human rights violations, murder, rapes, tortures, and extra-judicial killings. China’s arms sales to Africa attract negative attention especially because they are made available to states like Sudan and Zimbabwe and the DRC, known for blatant human rights violations in Africa. This often means that China is reaping the profits of selling weapons to both incumbent regimes and rebel groups. The general outcome is the consolidation and expansion of its ties and presence in the continent.

Looking forward: an unsustainable arrangement

China’s propensity to spread small arms and light weapons (SALW) among African states will end up undermining whatever positive perception it has generated in the continent as well as taint its goals to support sustainable development and contribute to the national development goals of individual African states.  In particular,  it will cast doubt on its  willingness to support Millenium Development Goals, and other specific  development goals in the continent such as the Program for Infrastructure Development in Africa and similar such programs.

So far, China’s military to military ties with African states has been a source of frustration for the United Nations.While it China contributes to peacekeeping efforts  in the continent, the United Nations does not know details of its military engagement, or specific  military ties,  with the countries in which its peacekeepers  are deployed such has the DRC, South Sudan, Liberia, Mali, among others. In other words, the expanding military ties with African states, and perhaps the access by rebels to Chinese arms are factors that are likely to undermine UN peacekeeping functions of disarmament of ex-combatants. It is difficult to know whether Chinese arms complement or undermine the efforts to enhance security in fragile African states. It is a question of whether China is willing to ensure that its military ties with countries of concern such as the DRC, Sudan, South Sudan, and Zimbabwe, complement peacekeeping activities there or help to promote peace, stability, democracy and development.

Human rights organizations have often called attention to the destabilizing role that Chinese arms play in conflict zones in Africa. China so far seems determined to support and forge closer ties with authoritarian regimes in their goals of power consolidation, oppression of the opposition. China on the other hand is preoccupied with spreading its influence, consolidating its ties and deepening its engagement with every African state regardless of whether it is democratic or authoritarian. Accordingly, Chinese SALWs are supplied to both national armies in Africa as well as to rebel groups in the DRC, Chad and Uganda, and now the warring factions in South Sudan.

China’s supply of arms to both rebels and national armies is often a violation of embargoes as well as a blatant case of economic self-interested behavior. The glimmer of hope in all this is that China has at times bowed to international pressure to cease supplying weapons in areas of gross human rights violations such as was the case with Darfur. But overall China still gives priority to concern over sovereignty and often defers  to incumbent regimes such that human rights  observance and non-proliferation of SALWs  are relegated a secondary role in China’s foreign policy rights towards Africa states.

Earl Conteh-Morgan is Professor of International Studies in the School of Interdisciplinary Global Studies at the University of South Florida, Tampa, Florida. He is currently working on a book-length manuscript on Sino-African relations from a Political Economy Approach.

Whether the UN Security Council should address climate change is a highly politicized issue. But a more fundamental question has been lost in this debate—what exactly could the Council do about climate change?

Given growing concerns about the links between climate change, instability and conflict, it is no surprise that the issue has spilled over into the UN Security Council. Since 2007, the Council has conducted two formal and several informal (“Arria-formula”) sessions on the topic. Bringing the climate issue into the Council has been contentious: proponents, including several European member-states, small island developing states, and other vulnerable developing countries, have sought to use the Council’s agenda-setting power and inject a sense of urgency into global climate politics, particularly at moments when global progress on climate action seems stalled.

Opponents have raised a range of concerns, including longstanding objections to the Council’s composition and procedures; fears of stretching the Council’s mandate beyond recognition, such that anything could be regarded as a security issue; and concerns about negatively impacting the “legitimate” forum for climate discussions, the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC) and the Paris Agreement. These objections almost blocked a 2011 thematic debate on the issue, leading the Obama administration to rebuke reluctant Council members for “dereliction of duty”. Only informal sessions have been held since then. At the most recent, in May of this year, several member-states urged that the Council revisit the issue in formal session.

Too often lost in such political maneuvering is a fundamental question: what might the Council actually do on climate, peace and global security? Surveying the record, one finds a range of different ideas that have been floated by academics, advocates, and some individual member-states. These include relatively modest add-ons, such as keeping the Council apprised of how climate change affects current peacekeeping operations or developing better early-warning capabilities. Bolder roles have also been floated: engaging the Council in proactive, preventive diplomacy on emergent challenges such as competition for Arctic resources or water in international river basins, or even creating a climate analogue to the Responsibility to Protect. There have also been calls to inject the Council into complex political challenges for which no obvious institutional home exists within the UN system, such as the existential plight facing several small-island states and the challenge of climate-driven displacement and refugees.

There are real questions about whether the Council, as currently constituted, can play such roles productively. One basic challenge is how the Council manages information. Conceptually, early warning fits well with current Council efforts around issues such as famine and human rights emergencies. But in practice, past efforts to extend the gaze of early warning into new issue areas, such as conflict-related sexual violence, have met with opposition, narrow framing, and poor follow-through. There are also many practical challenges yet to be resolved, including how to effectively incorporate environmental variables into conflict-assessment tools, or even deciding which variables matter and by what mechanisms they operate. For an early-warning mechanism to have foreseen the role of drought in the Syrian conflict (a causal role about which there remains no consensus among scholars), it would have had to be able to see not just rainfall or run-off data, but also the water-policy choices of the Syrian regime and the impacts of declining rural subsidies on smallholder farmers.

Challenges facing the Security Council on climate change

Even the seemingly straightforward exercise of informing the Council about aspects of climate change directly relevant to its ongoing activities around peacekeeping and fragile states has been challenging. The contentious 2011 session yielded a compromise that called on the Secretary-General to use his reporting function to keep the Council apprised about relevant “contextual information” on climate-conflict links. A review my colleagues and I conducted of 446 subsequent Secretary-General reports to the Council (through January 2016) found only 12 references linking climate change to some aspect of conflict or security (with 11 focused on Africa). Most of the content was highly generalized, noting general contextual trends such as urbanization, land tenure conflicts, or farmer-pastoralist tensions that might bear a climate signature. Even the handful of instances of specific reporting lacked the fine-grained subnational and temporal detail necessary for it to be of any operational or decision-making use. Climate-related references were also highly sporadic, with only one in 2012 and none in 2013.

A second challenge resides in the Council’s largely reactive nature (when it can agree to react at all). Conflict prevention falls squarely within the Council’s mandate, and the high monetary cost of peacekeeping operations creates a strong incentive for prevention. The concept notes circulated by Council chairs for the 2007 and 2011 thematic debates (the UK and Germany, respectively) stressed conflict prevention as a key rationale for conflict engagement on climate. But for interstate preventive diplomacy, such as might be needed in shared river basins, the Secretary-General’s office has generally been a more effective tool than the Council. And on intrastate conflict, the Council has historically been reluctant to take preventive action. Efforts beginning in 2016 to implement a ‘horizon scan’ briefing from the Secretariat, focused on instability and emergent conflict, revealed the great reluctance of many member-states to appear on the Council agenda as ‘fragile’.

A third problem is the tricky challenge of managing the political division of labor with the UNFCCC. Proponents of Council climate action have used past debates to try to jump-start sluggish climate diplomacy, even as opponents have warned about encroachment on or perturbation of the institutionalized process of global climate negotiations. Initial optimism around the Paris Agreement cooled such polarization, but was blunted by the Trump administration’s recent withdrawal from the accord. The deeper problem is that the Paris process seems to be half-heartedly engaging some of the critical challenges that would most resonate within the Council: blocking space for the Council while failing to really address the issues. On the looming problem of sea-level rise and the existential threat to small-island nations, the Paris Agreement’s provisions on loss and damage explicitly created an opening to address several relevant challenges, including early warning, emergency preparedness, slow-onset events, risk management, and the resilience of communities, livelihoods, and ecosystems (Article 8.4). This may limit political space for the Council on the issue of small-island statelessness, even as the weakness of the UNFCCC process on “liability and compensation” makes it a poor vehicle for serious movement on the problem. A similar dynamic of blunting political momentum through half-hearted response may be shaping up on climate-induced displacement; the UNFCCC’s 21^st Conference of the Parties authorized a task force to develop recommendations on how to address the issue, scheduled to make a preliminary report in 2018.

What can be done?

Given such challenges, it may be that the relevant question is not “What climate role for the Council?” but rather “How can climate be part of the process of transforming the Council into a more effective body for sustainable security?” A first step in that direction would be to improve the Secretary-General’s reporting function, as agreed to during the 2011 debate. The most useful information for the Council is probably neither localized crisis briefings nor long-range climate-change scenarios, but rather regional-scale, medium-term assessments. Working on those spatial and temporal scales is most likely to yield forward-looking initiatives that can be supported by those member-states that find themselves most directly affected or vulnerable, as in the case of the Integrated Strategy for the Sahel. The strategy stressed building long-term resilience as one of its three pillars, along with inclusive governance and managing cross-border threats. A Security Council briefing in this context, on links among climate trends, migration, and conflict across the region, was well-received for both its specificity and the backing it had from member states in the region.

A second step would be to challenge countries seeking a seat on the Council to articulate a specific vision of how the Council should move forward on the issue. Several aspirants for an elected seat have raised the issue in recent campaigns, but the question is also pertinent for those countries aspiring to a permanent seat on an expanded, reformed Council—notably, Japan, Germany, Brazil, and India. How, precisely, do they see the climate issue in relation to the Council’s mandate, with particular reference to preventive diplomacy, disaster vulnerability and displacement?

Finally, while it may seem challenging in the current political moment, a symbolic gesture from the five permanent members (P5) would acknowledge member-states’ multiple roles across the UN system. Done properly, this could help legitimize an active (but not overreaching) Council role as part of a system-wide response. During the 2011 debate, Nigeria noted the P5’s dual role: “Seated around the table are those who could encourage developed countries to implement their commitments to reducing emissions and supporting developing countries with the requisite technological and financial assistance to address climate change effectively.” Imagine the legitimizing value that would have resulted if the US-China climate deal of 2014 had identified conflict prevention as part of its rationale for cutting emissions. Going forward, such commitments could be incorporated into the Nationally Determined Contributions that states offer under the Paris Agreement, and as action on the Sustainable Development Goals.

The purpose of such measures is to begin to use climate engagements as a vehicle to transform the Council—into a body that is more capable of legitimate action, more proactive in peacebuilding and conflict prevention, and better able to take the long view of risks and responses.

Ken Conca is a Professor of International Relations at American University in Washington, DC. His most recent book is An Unfinished Foundation: The United Nations and Global Environmental Governance (Oxford University Press). A more detailed version of the arguments here may be found there, and also in Ken Conca, Joe Thwaites, and Goueun Lee, “Climate Change and the UN Security Council: Bully Pulpit or Bull in a China Shop?” Global Environmental Politics 17/2: 1-20. Conca has been a member of the Scientific Steering Committee on Global Environmental Change and Human Security (GECHS) and is a founding member of the UN Environment Programme’s Expert Advisory Group on Conflict and Peacebuilding. He is, with collaborator Geoffrey Dabelko, the 2017 recipient of the Al-Moumin Environmental Peacebuilding Award.

Introduction

The international community is currently underperforming when it comes to integrating the environment into matters of peace and security. Climate change and contemporary armed conflicts are forcing a re-evaluation of this at times complex relationship but in general, the environment remains under-prioritised – as evidenced by its absence from Goal 16 of the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs). But could the process towards the SDGs as a whole finally encourage greater consideration of the environment throughout the conflict cycle – as both a question of state security, and human security?

Goal 16 of the SDGs seeks to promote peaceful and inclusive societies for sustainable development, provide access to justice for all and build effective, accountable and inclusive institutions at all levels. Like many other investigations before and since, a 2011 study by the World Bank clearly showed that conflict and insecurity hamper sustainable development. It would, therefore, have been unusual for peace and security not to be included in the SDGs. Russia nevertheless objected to their inclusion on the grounds that it would introduce an “artificial politicization” and that “…peace-building, rule of law and human rights have their own well-established intergovernmental processes”. For their part, NGOs were adamant that the SDGs, like peace itself, required the attainment and assurance of fundamental human rights. They would receive a major endorsement when Ban Ki-moon’s High-Level Panel of Eminent Persons made “peace and effective, open and accountable institutions for all” one of their five key objectives for the SDGs.

Whither the environment?

Interpreted loosely, the targets comprising SDG 16 could relate reasonably well to some of the environmental dimensions of armed conflicts. However, the performance indicators currently being developed by a UN committee will introduce a level of specificity that could preclude this. A proposal that governments must record all conflict-related deaths is welcome, but what of ill health or lost livelihoods caused by conflict pollution or wartime environmental degradation? Similarly, the environment is absent from any indicator for the promotion of the rule of law and access to justice – for example, on land rights or resource management. For natural resources in conflict settings, the only directly relevant draft indicator is the requirement on governments to improve the recording of illicit financial flows.

On participatory rights, which are crucial elements of environmental human rights, the indicators simply require States to record the diversity of individuals in public institutions, rather than empowering communities to participate in environmental decision-making. Meanwhile, the goal of ensuring access to information – be it environmental or otherwise, will only be tested by measuring the rates of detention and arbitrary killings of media representatives and human rights defenders. Of environmental rights defenders, there is no mention.

Does this matter?

Naturally, some may argue that the environment is dealt with by the other SDGs, such as those dealing with terrestrial and marine ecosystems, chemicals or health. Yet here again, few of the proposed indicators under these SDGs relate specifically to armed conflict. But it is the environment’s absence from SDG 16 which is perhaps most symptomatic of the low priority afforded to the environment in matters of peace and security. This is a troubling oversight as UNEP has found that at least 40 per cent of all violent conflicts in the last 60 years have been linked to natural resources, resources that are set to be further degraded by climate change and increasingly intense natural disasters. During the development of the SDGs, this led UNEP to argue that the sound stewardship of “…resources, including access to information, inclusive decision-making, equitable benefit sharing, and rule of law are essential to mitigate these risks and help create resilient and peaceful societies.”

Is there a reason for the environment’s apparent exclusion from SDG 16? Reviewing the recommendations from many of the leading human rights and development NGOs that advocated for the inclusion of a strong SDG on peace and security, it’s clear that its environmental dimensions were low on their agendas; whereas for the environmental NGOs, attention was largely focused elsewhere – on marine life, forests or conservation. This siloing was unfortunate because current crises continue to highlight the importance of integrating the environment more fully into our thinking about the causes and consequences of conflicts.

Lessons from Syria on the environment and security

The Syrian crisis is a clear demonstration of why we must better integrate the environment into peace and security policy-making and practice. When researchers argued that climate change and an ensuing drought had played a role in creating the instability that led to the conflict in the run up to the Paris COP21 climate talks last year, the world’s media took note. For some, Syria was merely the latest stage in a process to securitise climate change, and in so doing help create a compelling state-centric narrative for global action. This was a process initiated by military think-tanks and which has now seen climate change defined as a “threat multiplier” – rather than a direct cause of conflict in and of itself. Meanwhile those opposed to the securitisation of climate change argue that this framing risks overwhelming humanitarian priorities such as adaptation, mitigation, resilience and justice for affected communities.

The attempt to link climate change with the Syrian conflict, as earlier with the conflict in Darfur, elicited a backlash from some climate scientists, particularly when public figures like Al Gore and Prince Charles promoted the idea. Opponents argued that the studies were speculative, that the data were incomplete and that the political context of the urgency behind the Paris deal was skewing interpretations. The scientific jury remains out, with some arguing that the link between climate and conflict is clear, others that it is yet to be conclusively proven based on the historical record. Studies have shown that the region has suffered a drought more intense than could be expected by natural variation alone but the data linking this to the outbreak of the conflict are less clear. Beyond the specifics of the Syrian conflict, it is inescapable that climate change is happening and that the effects that are predicted have the potential to negatively influence the socio-political conditions in affected countries. Therefore in all likelihood, climate change will interfere with the objectives set out in SDG 16.

Human displacement and migration allow the consequences of environmental problems associated with conflicts, climatic change and variability to be transmitted locally and regionally. This can translate into environmental consequences for neighbouring countries, as well as political instability for governments far removed conflict-affected areas. This is a pattern of connectivity that seems likely to become ever more apparent as climate change intensifies; as UNEP’s Disasters and Conflict Coordinator Oli Brown recently observed: “When you look to the root causes of migration, more often than not environmental change or mismanagement is in there somewhere.”

For Jordan and Lebanon, rapid urbanisation, fragile and resource-scarce ecosystems and huge refugee populations are combining to create environmental risks that threaten stability. As its population has surged in the wake of the Syrian conflict, Jordan has seen rapid increases in illegal timber collection, overgrazing and wildlife poaching. Levels of air pollution from vehicle and industrial emissions have risen and its waste management sector has been stretched by growing levels of hazardous waste. The government has made tackling these issues a priority so as to minimise threats to public health and environmental quality and defuse community grievances.

Within Syria, the precise extent of the damage to the resources upon which the civilian population depends for life and livelihoods is yet to be fully assessed, although early indications show that the environmental degradation caused by the conflict has been significant. When coupled with the pollution caused by the widespread destruction of urban and industrial areas, the collapse of environmental management and services and the future health and economic inequalities this will create, it seems inevitable that environmental quality and access to resources will strongly influence Syria’s chances of recovery and its eventual transition into a peaceful and inclusive society.

The jury may still be out on the precise role that climate change played in Syria but it seems impossible to exclude it as a risk factor for future conflicts. Climate aside, it’s clear that displacement and the direct environmental damage caused by the conflict within Syria will have repercussions for the goals and spirit of SDG 16. These are not problems unique to the Syrian conflict and serve to underscore the importance of the environmental dimensions not only of peace and security but also of sustainable development itself.

Sustainable development: not just a set of targets

That the proposed SDG 16 indicators risk failing to specifically address many of the environmental dimensions of armed conflicts and insecurity, be they on resource management, migration, human rights or environmental degradation, is unfortunate. All the more so because for many countries it will be conflicts that invariably present the greatest challenge to them achieving the SDGs.

But the true value of the SDGs is unlikely to be found in their rigid targets or indicators. Their greatest strength could instead be as a framework through which to understand and communicate the interconnectedness of all these themes. The path towards the SDGs should therefore encourage governments and civil society to more fully consider the role that the environment plays throughout the conflict cycle – from trigger to victim – and how the consequences of environmental change care little for national borders.

In this respect, while the SDG indicators may lack the precision necessary to fully articulate the environmental dimensions of peace and security, as a process the SDGs should serve to encourage the long-overdue mainstreaming of the environment in this field. However, because of the low prioritisation afforded to the environment across many sectors, but particularly in peace and security, there will inevitably be a temptation to present the environment as part of a traditional state-centric security threat, rather than a question of human security. While this could help increase visibility and engagement in the short-term, as with the securitisation of climate change, it could also risk ignoring the needs of the communities and individuals who bear the brunt of the environmental causes and consequences of conflicts.

Doug Weir manages the Toxic Remnants of War Project, part of a global coalition of NGOs advocating for a greater standard of environmental and civilian protection before, during and after armed conflict. The project is on Twitter: @detoxconflict