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The United States needs a new national security narrative, agreed a diverse panel of high-level discussants last week during a new Wilson Center initiative, “The National Conversation at the Woodrow Wilson Center.” Hosted by new Wilson Center President and CEO, Jane Harman, and moderated by The New York Times’ Thomas Friedman, the inaugural event was based on a white paper by two active military officers writing under the pseudonym “Mr. Y” (echoing George Kennan’s “X” article). In “A National Strategic Narrative,” Captain Wayne Porter (USN) and Colonel Mark Mykleby (USMC) argue that the United States needs to move away from an outmoded 20th century model of containment, deterrence, and control towards a “strategy of sustainability.” 

Anne-Marie Slaughter of Princeton University, who wrote the white paper’s preface, summarized it for the panel, which included Brent Scowcroft, national security adviser to President Ford and President H.W. Bush; Representative Keith Ellison (D-Minn.); Steve Clemons, founder of the American Strategy Program at the New America Foundation; and Robert Kagan, senior fellow for foreign policy at the Brookings Institution.

Framing a 21st Century Vision

We can no longer expect to control events, but we can influence them, Slaughter said. “In an interconnected world, the United States should be the strongest competitor and the greatest source of credible influence – the nation that is most able to influence what happens in the international sphere – while standing for security, prosperity, and justice at home and abroad.”

“My generation has had our whole foreign policy world defined as national security,” said Slaughter, “but ‘national security’ only entered the national lexicon in the late 1940s; it was a way of combining defense and foreign affairs, in the context of a post-World War II rising Soviet Union.”

As opposed to a strategy document, their intention, write Porter and Mykleby, was to create a narrative through which to frame U.S. national policy decisions and discussions well into this century.

“America emerged from the Twentieth Century as the most powerful nation on earth,” the “Mr. Y” authors write. “But we failed to recognize that dominance, like fossil fuel, is not a sustainable source of energy.”

It is time for America to re-focus our national interests and principles through a long lens on the global environment of tomorrow. It is time to move beyond a strategy of containment to a strategy of sustainment (sustainability); from an emphasis on power and control to an emphasis on strength and influence; from a defensive posture of exclusion, to a proactive posture of engagement. We must recognize that security means more than defense, and sustaining security requires adaptation and evolution, the leverage of converging interests and interdependencies. 

Prosperity and Security a Matter of Sustainability

The “Mr. Y” paper is similar in some respects to other strategic documents that have promoted a more holistic understanding of security, such as the State Department’s Quadrennial Diplomacy and Development Review, which was partially authored by Slaughter during her time in State’s Policy Planning Office. But there’s a markedly heavy focus on economics and moving beyond the “national security” framework in Porter and Mykleby’s white paper. They outline three “sustainable” investment priorities:

1) Human capital: refocus on education, health, and social infrastructure;
2) Sustainable security: use a more holistic, whole-of-government approach to security; essentially, expand the roles of civilian agencies and promote stability as much as ensuring defense; and,
3) Natural resources: invest in long-range, sustainable management of natural resources, in the context of expanding global demand (via population growth and consumption).

“These issues have come in and out of the security debates since the end of the Cold War, but they have not been incorporated well into a single national security narrative,” Geoff Dabelko, director of the Wilson Center’s Environmental Change and Security Program, told The New Security Beat. “This piece is a positive step toward achieving a coherent and inclusive national security narrative for the United States.”

To provide a “blueprint” for this transition, Porter and Mykleby call for the drafting of a “National Prosperity and Security Act” to replace the national security framework laid by the National Security Act of 1947 (NSA 47) and followed by subsequent NSAs.

A New Geostrategic Model?

The panel unanimously praised the white paper’s intentions, if not its exact method of analysis and proposed solutions. All agreed that globalization and technology have helped create a more interconnected and complex world than current foreign policy and national security institutions are designed to deal with. Scowcroft called the 20th century “the epitome of the nation-state system” and said he expects an erosion of nation-state power, especially in light of integrated challenges like climate change and global health.

Kagan disagreed, saying he’s less convinced that the nation-state is fading away. “If anything, I would say since the 1990s, the nation-state has made a kind of comeback,” he said, adding that the paper lacks “a description of how the world works, in the sense of ‘do we still believe in a core realist point that power interaction among nation states is still important?’” In that sense, he said, “I’m not at all convinced we’ve left either the 20th century or the 19th century, in terms of some fundamental issues having to do with power.”

“I think there are three things that really are new,” said Slaughter. “The first [is the] super-empowered individual…the ability of individuals to do things that only states could.” We saw that with 9/11, with individuals attacking a nation, and we’re seeing that with communications as well, she said. “I can tell you, Twitter and the State Department’s reporting system, they’re pretty comparable and Twitter’s probably ahead, in terms of how much information you can get.”

Second, there is a “whole other dimension of power that simply did not exist before and that is how connected you are,” Slaughter said. “The person who is the most connected has the most power, because they’re the person who can mobilize, like Wael Ghonim in Egypt.”

Third, there are a greater number of responsible stakeholders. “What President Obama keeps telling other nations is ‘you want to be a great power? It’s not enough to have a big economy and a big army and a big territory, you have to take responsibility for enforcing the norms of a global order,’” Slaughter said. Qatar’s willingness to participate in the international community’s intervention in Libya, she said, was in part an example of a country responding to that challenge and stepping up into a role it had not previously played.

These new dimensions to power and security don’t entirely replace the old model but do make it more complex. “It’s on top of what was,” Slaughter said, and “we have to adapt to it.”

 

 This article originally appeared on The New Security Beat. 

The devastating drought that affected large areas of Kenya in 2009 and the upsurge in inter-community violence in the north of the country highlighted an apparent connection between climate change and conflict. However, the evidence-base for this connection is limited and it is therefore imperative to analyse how these factors interact in reality rather than to make assumptions.

This report is based on the findings of research carried out in two community wildlife conservancies in northern Kenya in 2009. It illustrates how climate change is affecting the distribution and prevalence of natural resources in Kenya but makes clear that this is not the only factor contributing to resource scarcity.

It emphasises that competition for natural resources is a key driver of conflict, but also that it interacts with a range of other factors, and that violence is not inevitable. The research finds that local governance mechanisms, especially natural resource management, are crucial in determining whether competition over scarce resources will turn into violent conflict.

Based on the research findings, the report makes a series of practical policy recommendations targeted at relevant Kenyan Government Ministries and other stakeholders. The recommendations focus on conflict-sensitising Kenya’s climate change response strategy, as well as related policies concerned with natural resource management, peacebuilding and security.

 

The full report is available here.

The 2010 Joint Operating Environment report, recently released by the U.S. Joint Forces Command, rightly recognizes climate change as one of 10 trends “most likely to impact the Joint Force.” The JOE is a periodic planning document created by USJFCOM, the military command responsible for developing ideas to better integrate and coordinate the work of our nation’s individual armed services. The report does not have the stature of the Defense Department’s Quadrennial Defense Review, but it does serve as “an intellectual foundation” for future force development. It is therefore heartening to see the report draw attention to this serious and understudied national security concern. Yet in this case the old aphorism isn’t quite true: well begun isn’t nearly half done.

Including climate security issues is important, but the new report does not reflect the Defense Department’s own progress in mapping out the national security consequences of climate change since the last JOE was released in 2008. This is serious cause for concern for an issue as potentially wide-ranging as climate security that will push our military beyond traditional operations and familiars notions of national security, and DOD should have a consistent strategy to move forward in this 21st century operating environment.

The Defense Department’s Quadrennial Defense Review acknowledged for the first time this year that climate change is an “accelerant of instability.” This essentially means that planning for climate security challenges requires understanding and anticipating a wide spectrum of the second- and third-order effects of climate change. For example, a climate event will likely not cause conflict in itself, but it might worsen food shortages, drive people to migrate internally or internationally, and consequently exacerbate existing conflicts or political instability. This idea is already accepted wisdom in the United Kingdom. As Rear Admiral Neil Morisetti, the U.K.’s climate and energy security envoy noted in a recent op-ed with U.S. Deputy Assistant Secretary of Defense Amanda Dory, “climate change will amplify the impact of some of the world’s most difficult and common challenges.”

Yet the 2010 JOE climate section appears to be just an elaboration of the ideas outlined in the 2008 report—in some cases whole sentences were transferred verbatim. The 2010 report recognizes climate change as a threat because of “global warming and its potential to cause natural disasters and other harmful phenomena such as rising sea levels.” And it notes several potential consequences of the changing climate, including resource competition in new areas as arctic ice recedes, pressure on coastal populations as saltwater threatens fresh water supplies, and the potential for natural disasters to overwhelm already weak states. But it overlooks the essential recognition of climate change as an accelerant of instability, or threat multiplier.

This designation is important because it would demand than the JOE offer a broader vision for how climate change will interact with a wide variety of security trends, as well as examine how climate-induced challenges may influence and build on each other. This missing perspective is particularly evident in the case of two issues, pandemic disease and migration.

The Center for Naval Analyses called in 2007 for the next QDR to “examine the capabilities of the U.S. military to respond to the consequences of climate change, in particular, preparedness for natural disasters from extreme weather events, pandemic disease events, and other related missions.” And the New York Academy of Sciences last month held a symposium to examine “emerging infectious diseases in response to climate change.” Yet the JOE report misses this key causal connection. Unlike the QDR, it addresses infectious diseases and pandemics entirely in isolation of its discussion of climate security challenges.

The JOE report also seems to miss the depth of the connection between migration and climate change. It acknowledges that coastal populations are growing quickly and that “local population pressures will increase as people move away from inundated areas and settle farther up-country,” but the section on climate change misses the essence of why these movements should influence the way we structure our armed forces.

The demographics section gets the idea right: migrations, particularly those in already troubled areas, not only cause population pressures, but can “disrupt patterns of culture, politics, and economics and in most cases carry with them the potential of further dislocations and troubles.” Some estimates predict that the world will see 200 million climate migrants by 2050 in places like Northwest Africa, Bangladesh and India, and China—areas that the Center for American Progress will explore in a series of upcoming reports on climate security issues. But the rest of the report misses the extent of this connection.

It will be increasingly important as the Pentagon continues its work on climate security issues for reports such as the QDR and JOE to consistently reflect the latest thinking on the issue within the Defense Department. Such consistency and clear messaging are particularly important because DOD cannot and should not handle climate security policy alone. The State Department and the U.S. Agency for International Development will have leading roles to play in managing and mitigating the effects of climate change, and DOD should speak with one voice in this vital interagency conversation. Our armed forces will be better prepared to deal with the security implications of climate change in the future if they can institutionalize meaningful, clearly defined cooperation with interagency partners now.

In a radio interview for the BBC, Dr Sara Pantuliano of the Overseas Development Institute highlights a tribal conflict in Jonglei State that has grown particularly violent. The conflict between the Murle and Luo-Nuer groups has traditionally centred on cattle-raiding (cattle being a vital element of the region’s economy for centuries), but recently it has taken on the character of a ‘military assault’ along ethnic lines. Dr Pantuliano attributes this change to both the sheer number of weapons flooding the region, and to the anonymity and consequent remoteness of modern warfare. Compounding these factors is the diminished status of chiefs and elders and the effectiveness of the traditional checks and balances that they enforce, compromised as they have been by the protracted civil wars of the past.

This case is symptomatic of the general lack of security in South Sudan, which is overwhelming the small UN security presence put in place after independence last summer. It is therefore extremely important that the causes of insecurity are targeted because the symptoms are already causing serious damage in this young country.

 

BBC Radio4 Today Programme, 03 January 2012

Tens of thousands of South Sudanese people are fleeing from their homes, after inter-ethnic clashes around the town of Pibor.

The United Nations is warning villagers to run for their lives ahead of advancing fighters from a rival tribe.

Parthrsary Rajendran, head of mission for Medecins Sans Frontieres in South Sudan, speaks on the phone from the capital Juba.

Dr Sara Pantuliano, Sudan analyst at the Overseas Development Institute, says that this is part of a “long-standing conflict” in the region.

Conflict is a “fact of life” between these two social groups, she adds, but the cattle wars have now become more like “military assaults” as the authority of the elders and chiefs has diminished as a result of the “massive proliferation” of weapons in the region.

To hear the interview, click here

 

Article Source: BBC

Image Source: Oxfam International

Climate change is already increasing the frequency and  intensity of natural hazards, and the numbers of natural disasters reported and people affected are rising. Although it is clear that natural disasters are one of the principal causes of forced displacement, data on disaster-related displacement has not been consistently collected and analysed. The lack of reliable baseline data on disaster-related forced displacement has prevented adequate evaluation of the scale of the phenomenon and the patterns of displacement. It also makes it difficult to extrapolate potential human mobility based on existing climate change models or scenarios, or to develop realistic assessments to be taken into account in climate
change adaptation policy formation.

This study looks at natural disasters and forced displacement in the context of climate change. It has two aims: firstly, to provide an estimate of forced displacement related to disasters in 2008, specifically climate-related disasters; and secondly, to propose a methodology that could be applied to monitor disaster-related displacement on an ongoing basis. The study uses existing data sets on the impacts of natural disasters in 2008, crossreferences various sources, and individually investigates a number of events to estimate the numbers of persons displaced by disasters in 2008.

The findings show that at least 36 million people were displaced by sudden-onset natural disasters in 2008. Of those, over 20 million were displaced by sudden-onset climate-related disasters. As a reference, the total population of people living in forced displacement due to conflict, including IDPs and refugees, was 42 million in 2008, with 4.6 million having been newly internally displaced during the year. It is likely that many more are displaced due to the other climate change-related drivers, including slow-onset disasters, such as drought and sea level rise; however the study does not present an estimate of their number.

The methodology proposed in this study could be applied with relatively limited additional resources to monitor disaster-related displacement on an ongoing basis. Monitoring of disaster-related displacement could be significantly enhanced through additional steps to collect data on the duration of displacement, returns, local integration and relocation and the needs of displaced populations.

The full report can be downloaded here.

A new report by the U.S. Naval Forces Naval Studies Board about the implications of climate change for the US Navy finds that “many changes are already under way in regions around the world, such as in the Arctic, and call for action by U.S. naval leadership in response.”

The report and its findings and recommendations are organized around six discussion areas—all presented within the context of a changing climate: 

1. Disputes of boundaries and exclusive economic zones as a result of new maritime transits and competition of new resources;

2. Strains on naval capabilities—given continuing first responder missions, and the opening of new international and territorial waters;

3. Vulnerabilities to naval coastal installations due to sea-level rise and increased storm surges;

4. Demands for establishing greater U.S., allied, and/or international maritime partnerships;

5. Impacts on the technical underpinnings that enable, in part, naval force capabilities, particularly those that operate and train in the Arctic; and

6. Investments for additional research and development that have implications for future naval operations and capabilities and might not be met by other groups pursuing climate-related research.

One of the most interesting findings of the report is that “The ability of U.S. naval forces to carry out their missions would be assisted if the United States were to ratify UNCLOS.” According to the report:

The committee has studied the implications of the failure of the United States to ratify the 1982 United Nations Convention on the Law of the Sea (UNCLOS) from the standpoint of potential impacts on national security in the context of a changing climate. As climate change affords increased access to the Arctic, it is envisioned that there will be new opportunities for natural resource exploration and recovery, as well as increased ship traffic of all kinds, and with that a need for broadened naval partnership and cooperation, and a framework for settling potential disputes and conflicts.

The report is available from the National Academies Press website.

This paper seeks to bring out the relevance of human security in pastoral areas of Mandera triangle and the relationships and contradictions that exist between it and national security. The “Mandera Triangle” encompasses a tri-border region of Ethiopia, Somalia, and Kenya that exemplifies, in a microcosm, both a complex and a chronic humanitarian crisis that transcends national boundaries. The resident Somali pastoral population is highly vulnerable to periodic droughts and floods; high levels of poverty; long-term disruption to the traditional systems of livelihood; ongoing inter-clan conflicts and border tensions between states. Human security can be said to have two main aspects. It means, first, safety from such chronic threats as hunger, disease and repression. And second, it means protection from sudden and hurtful disruptions in the patterns of daily life – whether in homes, in jobs or in communities.

Violence in the Mandera triangle is often viewed narrowly as a symptom of inter-tribal conflict over cattle and other common property resources. This line of thinking is questionable given that an important issue in understanding insecurity among pastoralist groups is their distant and often oppositional relationship to the state. As with other peripheral groups, pastoralists in the region have suffered systematic marginalization by central authorities and have a history of rejecting the authority of the state, which they view as threatening to their distinct nomadic way of life. Pastoralist violence must therefore be situated, in terms of these forces of mutual opposition and exclusion as well as the struggle for control of resources. Ultimately, pastoralists do not partake in the nation’s so-called ‘public goods’. They are often denied government services and since formal legal and police services are usually nonexistent in pastoralist communities, the state seldom plays a role in guaranteeing their security. When they do become an object of state interest and intervention, it often involves forced settlement and other coercive efforts which only strengthens their resolve to remain apart.

Until rather recently there was a pronounced “blame the victim” approach in discussions about the pastoralists. The searing images from the famines of the 1970s and 1980s, much of it from the Sahel, reinforced the notion that the pastoralist was largely responsible for these immense difficulties. This understanding spurred much inappropriate development that is only now beginning to be fully understood and reassessed. The human security dimensions of the pastoralist plight are now more clearly understood as being attributable to a combination of population growth, immigration, conflict and specific government policies. Yet if we are to move beyond blaming the pastoralists, neither will simply victimising them suffice.

An adequate conceptualization of human security for Mandera triangle states and other states in Africa should ‘link human security with human development’. Economic development will have to be at the top of the institutional agenda, since development and security are ‘two sides of the same coin’. Non-state actors do not have the power to bring about large-scale development or to resolve the new security threats alone, without any state assistance. In the final analysis, studies of internationalized pastoral conflicts in Mandera triangle suggest that interest in these conflicts is justified on a number of practical grounds which have been summarized by Peter Wanyande as follows:

“First is that the conflicts are very costly to the governments and the peoples of the region as a whole and the individual countries in which they occur. The costs are in terms of loss of human life and property and the destruction of public infrastructure. Hundreds of thousands of people have been killed in many of the countries in which the conflicts occur. Many others have also suffered and continue to suffer untold psychological trauma associated with conflicts. Second, these conflicts drain the scarce resources available to the affected countries. Once conflicts occur, scarce resources are inevitably diverted to the purchase of military equipment at the expense of socio-economic development. This is not to mention the fact that the conflicts disrupt normal economic activities such as agriculture and trade. Third, the conflicts and violence they generate in any one country creates insecurity and related problems far beyond the countries in which they originate. Conflicts in the region have also caused diplomatic tensions between neighbouring countries in the region. Fifth, most of these conflicts have resulted in large numbers of refugees and displaced persons.”

This implies that states in the region must invest a substantial effort in trying to understand, and abandon the current relative indifference to, the complex interconnections between regional political instability, poverty and lawlessness.

Image source: TURKAIRO

The UK parliament’s development committee begins its inquiry into UK aid to India next week with a question mark over the future of UK aid to a country where there are 450 million poor people – a third of the world’s poor -living below US$1.25/day. In fact, 8 Indian states alone have more poor people than the 26 poorest African countries combined.

This is emotional territory – on both the UK and India side – during Cameron’s autumn 2010 visit sparks flew with the Indian finance minister calling UK aid ($700m) ‘peanuts’ in an angry response to the suggestion that the UK might end aid to India.

An Indian official’s memo leaked to the BBC largely concurred with the ‘who do you guys think you are?’ line.

It might be that the Indians got mad because DFID signaled it wanted to direct more aid to individual states rather than the central government. More recently the idea of an emerging power, that is a foreign aid donor itself, accepting aid has raised substantial debate within India itself.

DFID’s Secretary of State, Andrew Mitchell is said to be open to discussion either way but was persuaded so far by Cameron that the UK can’t be seen to be cutting aid to a country that British people think is a poor country even if it isn’t.

Donors have a somewhat tangled logic on middle income countries (MICs):

1. The mission of donors is poverty reduction

2. 72% of the poor live in MICs

3. Donors are withdrawing from MICs, where the poor live

4. Oops…

Currently, India receives about $2bn of aid/year from donors and the UK makes up about a third of this. Since 1998, India has received more UK overseas aid than any other country. Further DFID works in 27 MICs and spends about a third of bilateral programming in MICs in 2008/9. In contrast, almost a half of EU ODA is to MICS.

The paradox is India, like many other countries was ‘graduated’ out of ‘poor country’ status by the World Bank in 2009 to middle income status (more than $1000 per person per year) but is still home to a third of the world’s poor or 450 million people. India is still IDA (World Bank) eligible but will likely graduate three years from now.

Of course this is a good news story of India getting richer but with an underside. Recent research suggests the level of inequality in India is at ‘Latin American type levels’ but the capacity for redistribution by taxation is limited as it would mean prohibitively high levels of taxation.

So sound like these’s still a case for UK aid?

The debate on UK aid to India is polarised but clear enough –

The case against UK aid to India is based on the large resources of the central government in India and that UK aid is small compared to: $300bn forex reserves; the Indian space programme and nuclear programme and India’s own aid programme estimated at at least $550m+.

Of course Pakistan also has a nuclear programme but no one in the suggesting cutting aid to Pakistan that is also now a middle income country and home to perhaps up 90 million poor people…

The case for continued UK aid to India is those 450 million poor people, most of whom live in India’s poor states in a decentralised system where some Indian states have been compared to fragile states in Africa.  Also the poor in India are lower caste, tribes, etc and so very marginalised – not just a bit poor but very poor. Which makes reducing poverty much harder due to entrenched marginalization.

UK aid currently focuses on national-led level poverty programmes and 4 ‘focus states’ – Andhra Pradesh, West Bengal, Orissa and Madhya Pradesh. Of course only one of these is on the BIMARU (in hindi, sick) states group that are often thought to be the poorest states in India. By conventional reckoning Andhra Pradesh wouldn’t be poor, and West Bengal, while not poor, has certainly had some economic hard times as of late. The other two, most people would count as poor states.

If UK aid was ended there is no guarentee that the poorest states would be ‘topped’ up central government. Central allocations to states are based on the “Gadgil formula” which the Indian central Planning Commission uses to determine the allocation of central funds to the states. This is how it goes – feel free to correct fiscal experts if I’ve got this wrong – allocations are largely (60%) based on population size, with the rest accounted for by income per capita, tax collection, irrigation and power projects and ‘special problems’. There are also transfers under centrally sponsored and central sector schemes and a third category of transfer that is known as the ad hoc transfer and is non-formulaic. In short, remove aid from the poorest states and there is no guarantee of a top up.

What could DFID and donors do differently?

i. Focus on poor people, not poor countries

If the focus of aid is poor people not poor countries then the low income/middle income country way of looking at the world needs a rethink. DFID could switch its aid allocation metrics to fit DFID’s mission – ie from poor countries (low or middle income countries) to poor people. The new Oxford University and UN multidimensional poverty index (MPI) measure might be one alternative tool. But there are many others.

ii. Think beyond traditional aid

Maybe aid is no longer about money transfers with MICs. There is the ‘do no harm’ agenda – designing favourable and coherent development policies on remittances and migration, trade preferences, climate negotiations and climate financing, as well as tax havens – and a case for making aid increasingly about global public goods (and the importance of MICs support to these) and multilateralism, especially in middle-income countries and where aid might be channelled through the United Nations Children’s Fund, for example, or a new global fund for cash transfers to households as a direct poverty and redistributive measure.

OR maybe MICs may not want traditional aid at all.

iii. See equity and shared prosperity as a global and donor concern not just a domestic issue

More equitable countries reduce poverty faster, and stubborn asset, gender or identity inequality (ie caste systems) might begin to explain persistent poverty amid wealth in MICs. This entails some thinking on what aid is for and it’s role perhaps in supporting political voice of the poor and marginalized in policy processes. Any attempt to discuss inequality will be viewed as an infringement on political sovereignty but is domestic inequality solely a domestic issue if it hinders the effectiveness of aid? And it’s not just UN agencies such as UNICEF talking about equity even the IMF thinks inequality is now real concern as it slows down poverty reduction.

What is more of a mystery is why India accepts aid that amounts to 0.1-0.2% of GNI. Could it be:

Path dependency – it’s always happened so why stop now?

Or foreign policy relationship maintenance – why rock the boat?

Or is it that aid is doing good in the poorer states so why stop even if the central government could fund it?

Or something else?

And a final thought, after India, what about aid to Ghana?  Which is due to graduate to middle income status next year…

This article originally appeared on Global Dashboard. 

If You Use Drones You Must Confirm and Report Who They Killed, Says Legal Team

International lawyers have identified an existing but previously unacknowledged requirement in law for those who use or authorise the use of drone strikes to record and announce who has been killed and injured in each attack.

A new report, ‘Drone Attacks, International Law, and the Recording of Civilian Casualties of Armed Conflict’, is published on 23 June 2011 by London-based think tank Oxford Research Group (ORG).

Speaking at the Geneva Centre for Security Policy, Dr Susan Breau, the report’s lead author and Professor of International Law at Flinders University, said:

It is high time to implement a global casualty recording mechanism which includes civilians so that finally every casualty of every conflict is identified. The law requires it, and drones provide no exemption from that requirement.

THE REPORT’S KEY FINDINGS

• There is a legal requirement to identify all casualties that result from any drone use, under any and all circumstances.
• The universal human right which specifies that no-one be “arbitrarily” deprived of his or her life depends upon the identity of the deceased being established, as do reparations or compensation for possible wrongful killing, injury and other offences.
• The responsibility to properly record casualties is a requirement that extends to states who authorise or agree the use of drones, as well as those who launch and control them, but the legal (as well as moral) duty falls most heavily on the latter.
• There is a legal requirement to bury the dead according to the rites of the religion to which they belonged, and this may not be in mass or unmarked graves. The site of burial must be recorded, particularly in the event that further investigation is required.
• A particular characteristic of drone attacks is that efforts to disinter and identify the remains of the deceased may be daunting, as with any high explosive attacks on persons. However, this difficulty in no way absolves parties such as those above from their responsibility to identify all the casualties of drone attacks.
• Another characteristic of drone attacks is that as isolated strikes, rather than part of raging battles, there is no need to delay until the cessation of hostilities before taking measures to search for, collect and evacuate the dead.

PAKISTAN, YEMEN, AND BEYOND

The report also provides a set of specific recommendations addressing the current situation in Pakistan and Yemen, where the issue of drone strikes by the United States and the recording of their casualties is of real and practical urgency. According to the report, while legal duties fall upon all the parties mentioned, it is the United States (as the launcher and controller of drones) which has least justification to shirk its responsibilities.

The implications of these findings go well beyond the particularities of these weapons, these countries, and these specific uses. The legal obligations enshrined as they are in international humanitarian law, international human rights law, and domestic law, are binding on all parties at all times in relation to any form of violent killing or injury by any party.

Elaborating on the report’s implications, Dr Breau said:

States, individually and collectively, need to plan how to work towards conformance with these substantial bodies of law. Members of civil society, particularly those that seek the welfare of the victims of conflict, have a new opportunity to press states towards fulfilling their obligations under law.

This is not asking for the impossible. The killing of Osama Bin Laden suggests the lengths to which states will go to confirm their targets when they believe this to be in their own interest. Had the political stakes in avoiding mistaken or disputed identity not been so high, Bin Laden (and whoever else was in his home) would almost certainly have been typical candidates for a drone attack.

Commenting on the report, Paul Rogers, ORG’s Consultant on Global Security and Professor at Bradford University Peace Studies Department, said:

Armed drones are fast becoming the weapons of choice by the United States and its allies in South Asia and the Middle East, yet their use raises major questions about legality which have been very largely ignored. A key and salutary finding of this report is that drone users cannot escape a legal responsibility to expose the human consequences of their attacks. This hugely important and detailed analysis addresses some of the most significant issues involved and deserves the widest coverage, not least in military, legal and political circles.

Article source: Oxford Research Group

Image source: Official U.S. Navy Imagery

China is experiencing one of the worst droughts in 60 years experts say, in part a consequence of the Asian giant’s insatiable appetite for energy and water resources that are needed to sustain economic growth and newly accustomed standards of living. Beijing appears to be working to alleviate these conditions, spending more than a billion dollars on agricultural subsidies and farming irrigation to counter food shortages, deploying weather modification teams that cloud seed the atmosphere to generate precipitation (despite potential consequences from this and other geoengineering activities) and “moving heaven and Earth” to divert water from the south to bring it north to Beijing. But one thing Beijing should do is look for opportunities to cooperate with regional partners to help the country deal with its water woes. And with the Obama administration increasingly elevating water issues in bilateral relations with key partners around the world, Washington could use this as an opportunity to strengthen ties with Beijing.

Last month, Circle of Blue reported on the cascading effect that China’s energy demand is having on water scarcity. “Underlying China’s new standing in the world is an increasingly fierce competition between energy and water that threatens to upend China’s progress,” Circle of Blue’s Keith Schneider wrote. As Schneider pointed out, China’s history is fraught with challenges stemming from scarce fresh water resources, writing that it is nothing new for a state where “80 percent of the rainfall and snowmelt occurs in the south, while just 20 percent of the moisture occurs in the mostly desert regions of the north and west.” But what is different, Schneider noted, is the expanding industrial sector that consumes 70 percent of the nation’s water, and the need for the government to tap into its coal reserves in the north in order to feed this growth. The problem is that mining coal and coal-fired power plants themselves are water-intensive, and according to government officials, “there is not enough water to mine, process, and consume those [coal] reserves, and still develop the modern cities and manufacturing centers that China envisions for the region.”

In January, Schneider published a related story arguing that, with the United States experiencing similar challenges related to what he refers to as energy demand and water scarcity choke points, the United States and China have an opportunity to share technologies and policies that could help mitigate these challenges.

Indeed, natural resources should play a more integrated role in our diplomatic relations with Beijing. The United States already cooperates with China on a range of energy security and environmental sustainability initiatives, but these initiatives could be more evenly integrated into our diplomatic relations and given greater and more sustained attention at the senior levels of policymaking. Meanwhile, water scarcity is an area that is ripe for more robust cooperation between Washington and Beijing. Secretary of State Hillary Clinton has acknowledged the potential for water and related issues to foster greater collaboration with international partners. “In the United States,” she told an audience last March, “water represents one of the great diplomatic and development opportunities of our time.”

Of course, there are many hurdles to greater engagement on these issues, especially on the energy side where concerns regarding intellectual property may chill potential cooperation. Nevertheless, high level engagement around natural resource challenges, including on energy demand and water scarcity, could help pull these issues from the periphery and signal that these challenges merit greater attention from Washington and Beijing in foreign policy discussions, fostering a greater sense of urgency while expanding opportunities for further collaboration. Framing these issues as foreign policy and security challenges– given that the actions by one state can have consequences for regional neighbors, especially with transboundary water resources– would be a tremendous leap forward in integrating natural resources into broader foreign policy considerations rather than treating them as environmental issues that might not otherwise make it on to the radar of senior foreign policymakers. And efforts such as these should extend beyond just the United States and China. In fact, natural resources should be given greater attention in multilateral discussions with other regional actors, including Japan, as well as integrated into high level ministerial meetings at ASEAN and APEC.

It won’t be easy to integrate natural resources into higher level foreign policy discussions, given the range of seemingly more pressing foreign policy, security, and economic challenges that plague the United States, China and other states around the region, including a nuclear North Korea and a still fragile global economy. Nevertheless, pulling these issues front and center will not only help give them the attention they deserve, but offer additional avenues to strengthen bilateral and multilateral relationship in Asia, perhaps even helping tip the U.S.-China relationship more towards long-term cooperation than competition.

This article originally appeared on the Center for a New American Security website.