Category: Article

Europeans just cannot seem to get Islam, or more properly, Islamism, out of their heads. This seems to be particularly true of Europeans who have not spent much time in the Islamic world, and whose idea of immersion journalism is to spend an afternoon wandering round an immigrant neighbourhood in the European capital city of their choice with a view to chatting up a few swarthy-looking men over a cup of mint tea.

And even some more serious writers have ended up falling into the same trap over the last few weeks. Take Timothy Garton Ash, for instance, whose reporting of the decline of the Soviet empire in Eastern Europe in the 1980s was exemplary in its combination of in-depth research and first-hand experience. In a series of articles in The Guardian, Garton Ash has been greeting the wave of insurrections sweeping across the Arab world with a wall of worry. In his latest piece, published last week, a visit to the Calle de Tribulete in Madrid plunged him into new depths of anxiety. Despite garnering some half-hearted expressions of ill-defined hope, it was not long before he and his interlocutors were overtaken by the memories of terrorism past. He even managed to run into a young man at a bus stop spouting Wahhabi-inspired anti-semitic conspiracy theories to casual passers-by. Needless to say, the overall effect was far from encouraging.

“Only a fool would fail to recognise that this is a moment of danger, as well as opportunity,” he concludes. “The path forward for Tunisia and Egypt is far less clear than it was for east European countries – and there is no warm, safe house of EU membership beckoning at the end of the road.”

The leitmotiv of Garton Ash’s fears is that the threat of Islamic fundamentalism is real, however it may have been instrumentalised by western democrats and their client dictators, and that the task now falls to Europe to do something to prevent this menace from bring translated into reality. Without our help and guidance, the current upheaval in our Arab neighbours is likely to install regimes more oppressive for their citizens, and more dangerous for us than those which they have replaced.

The problem with this scenario is not just that it depends on a faulty reading of history, one which minimises or ignores the role of the western powers in supporting the rise of Islamism in the first place, and in particular in installing a theocratic regime in Iran in order to ensure ‘stability’ and preempt a genuinely progressive revolution[1]. Even if history did agree with Garton Ash, his argument would still be undermined by the present. For it is entirely contradicted by everything we know about what is happening today in Egypt, the only one of these revolutions so far to have reached a point where, at least provisionally, the balance of power seems to have given the revolutionaries some measure of control.

All the reports we have concur that once this particular Arab street had liberated itself, its first instinct was not to revert to some authoritarian moralistic Golden Age, the mediaeval theme park of Orientalist imagination, but rather to create an entirely new kind of society symbolised by and embodied in the occupation of Tahrir Square. The result, as Yasmine El-Rashidi has described it, was something like a cross between a vernacular religious festival (the kind of joyfully chaotic carnival which textbook Islamists generally cannot stand), and an anarchist commune. A space that was self-organising, self-securing, self-policing, self-recycling, and in which people were constantly devolving power back to one another – devout Muslims to Christians and to ‘godless’ youth[2], has-been and potential leaders to the mass of the people, and soldiers (up to fairly senior officer rank) to civilians.

In other words, absent outside intervention, whether positive or negative, the most likely course of the Arab revolutions now in progress would be to produce creative forms of political organisation and social conviviality which, while rooted in the long histories of their indigenous cultures, and in the more recent civilisational traditions that overlay them, are as unprecedented in the experience of those now living through them as they are unpredictable for external observers.

The problem, then, is not what Europe can do to help them, but how we Europeans can keep our governments safely out of their way, and ensure that our political and financial elites do not try to subvert these movements for their own purposes. (This is a practical problem, and it requires practical solutions – that is, things we can do, not just things we can demand that others do.) The greatest problem facing Egypt today is not the Muslim Brotherhood, or high levels of poverty and illiteracy, but the vicious co-dependency that exists between the upper echelons of the Egyptian army, the Israeli military-political complex and the bi-partisan US establishment, and of which the most obscene symbol is the US armament casings that littered the streets of Cairo after the insurrection’s blackest days[3]

“Friends of the family”

Led by the Egyptians and the Tunisians, the Arab world stands on the brink of inventing forms of democracy and participation that should not only destroy the dominant Orientalist image of the region once and for all, but from which the people of the US and Europe have much to learn, too. What is not clear is whether the leaders of the west, and their paranoid courtiers in the media, are ready to let us benefit from this inspiration.

The good news, however, is that it is probably already too late for them to stop us. The people of the west have already had ample opportunity to see both what real democracy in action looks like over the last month – what it is like, that is, when people take their rights for themselves, rather than voluntarily down-converting them into “privileges” to be granted by a higher authority – and how our so-called democratic leaders react when confronted with this kind of behaviour. From Tony Blair’s description of Mubarak as “a force for good”, to Hillary Clinton’s admission that she and her husband counted the dictator of Egypt and his wife as “friends of the family”, or the revelations that half the French cabinet seems to have been relying on North African tyrants for cut-rate holidays and last-minute travel plans, we have been reminded of something that should have been obvious from the beginning. The attitude of our elected leaders towards the bullies, torturers and thieves who still continue to run a large part of the tragically misnamed “developing world” is not just one of uncomfortable tolerance. These are their friends, their allies, their co-conspirators. Though the ways in which they have risen to power may differ, the culture which that power confers upon them is essentially the same.

The problem with Blair and Clinton is not that they are prepared to compromise their Enlightenment values for the sake of political expediency – in order to protect Israel, to ensure access to cheap energy resources, or to take advantage of a police force that is happy to torture their prisoners for them while they keep their own hands clean. The real problem with ‘our’ leaders is that they have more in common with ‘their’ leaders than they do with the vast majority of the people whom they are widely, if implausibly, supposed to ‘represent’. And that, in the end, is why we need laws: not to govern us, but to restrain them.

Of course, the web of ties which binds together the internally violent and corrupt police states that still run most of the extractive zones of the world economy, and the externally violent and corrupt oligarchies-by-consent which are the ornament (and, increasingly, not much else) of those zones where consumption is the dominant form of oppression, is structural in nature, as well as personal. This is not just about Tony and Hillary sipping drinks by the pool with Hosni and Suzanne. Our governments and corporations sell their armies and police forces “non-lethal” weapons, and then train them in how to use them to create maximum terror among their populations. And we do this, not out of the kindness of our hearts, but precisely so that they can sell us in return their countries’ natural resources at a discount to the rate that would have to be applied if it was recognised that these resources belonged to all the people of that country, collectively and indivisibly, and not just to some tiny tyrannical minority that has managed to grab hold of the levers of former colonial power, and re-purpose them for the post-colonial era.

In this context, David Cameron’s decision to surf the wave of people power by stopping over in Egypt on Monday looks particularly opportunistic, on the part of a man whose government has managed in the space of a few months to authorize sales of tear gas to Bahrain, crowd-control ammunition to Libya, combat helicopters to Algeria and armoured personnel carriers to Saudi Arabia. Wherever we shouldn’t have been selling weapons this winter, we have been doing it. And our role in equipping dictators and their goons seems set to continue this week at the International Defence Exhibition and Conference (IDEX), the largest arms trade exhibition in the Middle East, which opened in Abu Dhabi Sunday. The Middle East remains a ‘priority market’ for the UK industry, supported by UKTI, and one in ten of the exhibitors at IDEX are UK-based companies[4].

Bringing Tahrir to Kensington

One of Garton Ash’s more implausible claims is that Europe has a duty to help the Arab nations determine their path going forwards, because we have a particularly rich experience of achieving successful transitions from dictatorship to democracy. It could equally well be said, however, that our power elites have a particularly rich experience of ensuring that the transition from colonial dependency to independent state in Africa, the Middle East, Latin American and large parts of Asia, turned out entirely compatible with the continuation and intensification of the old colonial circuits of exploitation and oppression.

Indeed, even within Europe itself, our leaders have always tried to ensure that any transition from authoritarianism to democracy, while openly welcomed, was effectively emptied of any real substance. In the process, ‘democracy’ was transformed from the real lived participation of all in the government of everyday life, into a pure spectacle – a system of propaganda that exists principally to make injustice and inequality far more ‘bearable’ than could any explicitly authoritarian regime (as Saroj Giri recently suggested, in the course of comparing the events in Egypt to the situation in India). Seen in this way, the advice of our governments on how to manage the ‘transition’ to democracy is probably something the Arab world will want to do without.

But that does not mean that Europe and the Arab world have nothing to learn from each other. On the contrary. If the revolutions now underway across the region are indeed able to deliver on their promise of reempowering their people, without being subverted by the combined economic and military power of the USA, the EU, Israel and Saudi Arabia, then it may be that the new Arab nations which emerge from this process will need and want to share their experience with us. Indeed, they may see it as vital to their own interests to help us, the people of Europe, retake control over our own economies and our own societies, not simply in order to export their revolution, but as the minimum condition for transforming us into a good neighbour for the rest of the region, rather than the source of chronic instability and insecurity we have been over the past several centuries.

Ongoing protests and actions in places from Madison, Wisconsin, to Central London have already appealed to the Egyptian experience, both explicitly, and symbolically. American public service workers last week brandished Egyptian flags to express their rejection of the state’s attempts to deprive them of their union rights, while British activists have called for a day of action in March to “bring Tahrir Square to Hyde Park”. While the nature of every act of human revolt is specific and, at some level, untranslatable, the energy of empowerment which it releases is by its nature infectious, and transgressive. How long before here, in the West, our own governments’ politically-motivated “austerity” programmes create the conditions in which a thousand Tahrirs can bloom? Looking back to recent events in France and Greece, we may feel that day is perhaps not so far away.

Noam Chomsky recently claimed that what western leaders are really afraid of is not an Islamist takeover in the Arab region, but the emergence of genuinely independent and democratic Arab states which will no longer kow-tow to Washington and do its bidding. That is surely part of the story. But I believe that what they are most afraid of is not just the emergence of democracy in the Arab world. However uncomfortable and embarrassing that may be, they know they can live with it. What they are most afraid of is that, having slept through the last 60 years of democracy, their own citizens/subjects may be about to wake up again to their own power: that, having seen what it is like when a people dictate to their government what it should do for them, rather than the reverse, we might start to take our own rights back, wholesale, rather than waiting for our rulers to grant us them in homeopathic doses – or fob us off with a placebo.

The victory of the revolutionaries of Tahrir Square, however partial and provisional, reminds us that we once started our own revolution, and that we failed to finish it. Maybe this is our time that has come again, too.

[1] See Serge Bricianer, Une étincelle dans la nuit – Sur la révolution iranienne 1978-1979, Ab Irato, Paris, 2002, for an account of how Iranian workers’ movements were sidelined and ultimately defeated in 1979.

[2] See Omar Kamel, “Regarding the Brotherhood…”, for a particularly moving illustration of this phenomenon.

[3] See Pratap Chaterjee, “Egypt’s military-industrial complex”, The Guardian, 4 February 2011.

[4] See “CAAT condemns empty words from Government as arms sale drive continues” and “UK arms sales to Middle East include tear gas and crowd control ammunition to Bahrain and Libya” for more details.

Frederick Bowie is an independent journalist. He has spent many years living and working in the Middle East, and was a regular contributor to Al-Ahram Weekly (Cairo). The original version of this article appeared on openDemocracy. 

In the first study of its kind, researchers have linked a natural global climate cycle to periodic increases in warfare. The arrival of El Niño, which every three to seven years boosts temperatures and cuts rainfall, doubles the risk of civil wars across 90 affected tropical countries, and may help account for a fifth of worldwide conflicts during the past half-century, say the authors.

The paper, written by an interdisciplinary team at Columbia University’s Earth Institute, appears in the current issue of the leading scientific journal Nature.

In recent years, historians and climatologists have built evidence that past societies suffered and fell due in connection with heat or droughts that damaged agriculture and shook governments. This is the first study to make the case for such destabilization in the present day, using statistics to link global weather observations and well-documented outbreaks of violence. The study does not blame specific wars on El Niño, nor does it directly address the issue of long-term climate change. However, it raises potent questions, as many scientists think natural weather cycles will become more extreme with warming climate, and some suggest ongoing chaos in places like Somalia are already being stoked by warming climate.

“The most important thing is that this looks at modern times, and it’s done on a global scale,” said Solomon M. Hsiang, the study’s lead author, a graduate of the Earth Institute’s Ph.D. in sustainable development. “We can speculate that a long-ago Egyptian dynasty was overthrown during a drought. That’s a specific time and place, that may be very different from today, so people might say, ‘OK, we’re immune to that now.’  This study shows a systematic pattern of global climate affecting conflict, and shows it right now.”

The cycle known as the El Niño-Southern Oscillation, or ENSO, is a periodic warming and cooling of the tropical Pacific Ocean. This affects weather patterns across much of Africa, the Mideast, India, southeast Asia, Australia, and the Americas, where half the world’s people live. During the cool, or La Niña, phase, rain may be relatively plentiful in tropical areas; during the warmer El Niño, land temperatures rise, and rainfall declines in most affected places. Interacting with other factors including wind and temperature cycles over the other oceans, El Niño can vary dramatically in power and length. At its most intense, it brings scorching heat and multi-year droughts. (In higher latitudes, effects weaken, disappear or reverse; La Niña conditions earlier this year helped dry the U.S. Southwest and parts of east Africa.)

The scientists tracked ENSO from 1950 to 2004 and correlated it with onsets of civil conflicts that killed more than 25 people in a given year. The data included 175 countries and 234 conflicts, over half of which each caused more than 1,000 battle-related deaths. For nations whose weather is controlled by ENSO, they found that during La Niña, the chance of civil war breaking out was about 3 percent; during El Niño, the chance doubled, to 6 percent. Countries not affected by the cycle remained at 2 percent no matter what. Overall, the team calculated that El Niño may have played a role in 21 percent of civil wars worldwide—and nearly 30 percent in those countries affected by El Niño.

Coauthor Mark Cane, a climate scientist at Columbia’s Lamont-Doherty Earth Observatory, said that the study does not show that weather alone starts wars. “No one should take this to say that climate is our fate. Rather, this is compelling evidence that it has a measurable influence on how much people fight overall,” he said. “It is not the only factor–you have to consider politics, economics, all kinds of other things.” Cane, a climate modeler, was among the first to elucidate the mechanisms of El Niño, showing in the 1980s that its larger swings can be predicted—knowledge now used by organizations around the world to plan agriculture and relief services.

The authors say they do not know exactly why climate feeds conflict. “But if you have social inequality, people are poor, and there are underlying tensions, it seems possible that climate can deliver the knockout punch,” said Hsiang. When crops fail, people may take up a gun simply to make a living, he said. Kyle C. Meng, a sustainable-development Ph.D. candidate and the study’s other author, pointed out that social scientists have shown that individuals often become more aggressive when temperatures rise, but he said that whether that applies to whole societies is only speculative.

Bad weather does appear to tip poorer countries into chaos more easily; rich Australia, for instance, is controlled by ENSO, but has never seen a civil war. On the other side, Hsiang said at least two countries “jump out of the data.” In 1982, a powerful El Niño struck impoverished highland Peru, destroying crops; that year, simmering guerrilla attacks by the revolutionary Shining Path movement turned into a full-scale 20-year civil war that still sputters today. Separately, forces in southern Sudan were already facing off with the domineering north, when intense warfare broke out in the El Niño year of 1963. The insurrection abated, but flared again in 1976, another El Niño year. Then, 1983 saw a major El Niño–and the apocalyptic outbreak of more than 20 years of fighting that killed 2 million people, arguably the world’s bloodiest conflict since World War II. It culminated only this summer, when South Sudan became a separate nation; fighting continues in border areas. Hsiang said some other countries where festering conflicts have tended to blow up during El Niños include El Salvador, the Philippines and Uganda (1972); Angola, Haiti and Myanmar (1991); and Congo, Eritrea, Indonesia and Rwanda (1997).

The idea that environment fuels violence has gained currency in the past decade, with popular books by authors like Jared Diamond, Brian Fagan and Mike Davis. Academic studies have drawn links between droughts and social collapses, including the end of the Persian Gulf’s Akkadian empire (the world’s first superpower), 6,000 years ago; the AD 800-900 fall of Mexico’s Maya civilization; centuries-long cycles of warfare within Chinese dynasties; and recent insurgencies in sub-Saharan Africa. Last year, tree-ring specialists at Lamont-Doherty Earth Observatory published a 1,000-year atlas of El Niño-related droughts; data from this pinpoints droughts coinciding with the downfall of the Angkor civilization of Cambodia around AD 1400, and the later dissolution of kingdoms in China, Vietnam, Myanmar and Thailand.

Some scientists and historians remain unconvinced of connections between climate and violence. “The study fails to improve on our understanding of the causes of armed conflicts, as it makes no attempt to explain the reported association between ENSO cycles and conflict risk,” said Halvard Buhaug, a political scientist with the Peace Research Institute Oslo in Norway who studies the issue. “Correlation without explanation can only lead to speculation.”  Another expert, economist Marshall Burke of the University of California, Berkeley, said the authors gave “very convincing evidence” of a connection. But, he said, the question of how overall climate change might play out remains. “People may respond differently to short-run shocks than they do to longer-run changes in average temperature and precipitation,” he said. He called the study “a useful and illuminating basis for future work.”

The Earth Institute’s Ph.D. in sustainable development program is run jointly with Columbia’s School of International and Public Affairs, and the university’s Graduate School of Arts and Sciences.

Image source: The U.S. National Archives

Article source: The Earth Institute

This article by Foreign Policy in Focus co-director John Feffer powerfully explores three recent and geographically diverse killings in the context of marginalisation. Feffer links the fatal beating of an Iraqi-born American woman in California, the shooting of Trayvon Martin in Florida, and Mohamed Merah’s killing spree in Toulouse to the notion of trespass: “The message behind all three is this: you should not be here, you are not one of us, and your death shall serve as a warning.”

Merah himself was a member of a minority in France that is still yet to fully realise its place in French society, but that is only part of the context in which he operated: his own sense of trespass came from an intolerant ideology shared with a borderless fringe, dictating that Muslims who join the western ‘enemy’ armed forces (or who simply become too western) put themselves beyond the pale in doing so. As such, the concept of trespass is not merely a question of geography but also incorporates trespass of the mind, which is equally deserving of punishment. Feffer notes that the vast majority of Al-Qaeda’s victims are Muslims, a clear example of self-appointed leaders punishing disloyal or failed members of their own group. Other examples of this conception of trespass include honour killings and the 2011 terrorist attack by Anders Behring Breivik, who believed that Norway had betrayed its Christian European roots and so was motivated to punish the young liberal inheritors of that transgressive philosophy.

Three Killings

The note left next to the bloodied body of Shaima Alawadi read “go back to your country, you terrorist.” Alawadi, who died on March 24 after being taken off life support, was an Iraqi-born mother of five living outside of San Diego. Someone had delivered a similar note to the family earlier in the month. It was likely the same person who returned with a tire iron and struck her repeatedly on the head. Alawadi had lived in the United States for 17 years. Several family members reportedly provided cultural training to U.S. soldiers deployed to the Middle East. In a very sad coda, Alawadi is indeed going back to her country – to be buried.

There were no notes that accompanied Trayvon Martin’s death at the end of February. But he was also killed for a perceived trespassing. An African-American teenager, Martin was guilty of “walking while black” as he carried iced tea and Skittles through the Florida community of Sanford. The self-appointed head of the community’s neighborhood watch, George Zimmerman, identified Martin as a threat. Zimmerman didn’t wait for the police to arrive. He chased after the young man and, in circumstances still very murky, shot him dead. Because of the “stand your ground” law that permits shooting in self-defense, the police did not arrest Zimmerman.

In the middle of March, Mohamed Merah went on a killing spree in Toulouse, France that left seven people dead. The victims were a rabbi, three Jewish children, and three French soldiers. Two of the soldiers were Muslim. Merah, who identified with Islamic extremism, specifically targeted Muslim soldiers for being “traitors.” The French-born Merah better fit the profile of a serial killer than a political extremist. But his Muslim victims are an important reminder that ordinary, everyday Muslims, even more so than Jews or Americans, figure as the most potent threats to the worldview promoted by al-Qaeda and its ilk. The overwhelming majority of al-Qaeda and Taliban victims are Muslims.

These murders are, on the face of it, quite different: a hate crime, a serial killing, and an act of vigilantism. But underlying these three tragedies is a notion of violated borders, of trespass. The message behind all three is this: you should not be here, you are not one of us, and your death shall serve as a warning.

Trespass is originally an economic term intimately connected to evolving concepts of public and private space. In the late medieval period in England, wealthy landholders began to fence off common lands to increase the pasturage for their flocks of sheep. This enclosure movement, privatization avant la lettre, created a new class of dispossessed, of those who did not belong. The word “trespass” – to enter private property without permission – comes from this period of late Middle Ages. Fences marked off the newly enclosed property. You could not enter without the permission of the owner or his agents. And scaffolds appeared throughout England to punish those thrown off the land who were forced to steal because they had no other means of subsistence.

In his captivating book The Swerve, Stephen Greenblatt describes how the violence and oppression of this system drove theologian Thomas More to create his famous “utopia” of commonly held property.

“Utopia begins with a searing indictment of England as a land where noblemen, living idly off the labor of others, bleed their tenants white by constantly raising their rents,” Greenblatt writes, “where land enclosures for sheep-raising throw untold thousands of poor people into an existence of starvation or crime, and where the cities are ringed by gibbets on which thieves are hanged by the score without the slightest indication that the draconian punishment deters anyone from committing the same crimes.” Greenblatt cites the statistic of 72,000 thieves hanged during the reign of Henry the VIII, when More was composing his tract.

We too are living at a time of gibbets and enclosures, of death penalties and gated communities, of state violence and privatization. The United States has become a country of wealthy enclaves, neighborhood watches, and charter schools. Widening inequality has directly contributed to the deterioration of any sense of the public good. The drive for minimal government has reduced the capacity of public servants to ensure basic services and security. The erosion of the middle class has not only reduced the tax base, it has weakened political support for programs that aspire to universality. “Ill fares the land,” wrote Oliver Goldsmith in his 1770 poem “The Deserted Village,” “to hast’ning ill a prey/Where wealth accumulates, and men decay.”

Colorado Springs, a sort of anti-Utopia, is a case in point. There, the city council responded to state and federal budget cuts by radically reducing public services. In its place, the city set up an extortion racket. If you want the electricity restored to all the streetlamps in your neighborhood or the Parks Department to take care of your local park, you have to pony up the dollars yourself. Most disturbingly, as a recent This American Life episode on Colorado Springs detailed, residents are willing to pay more money to maintain services in their own little patch of earth than they would have paid in additional taxes to keep the services running for everybody in the city.

Trayvon Martin was killed in a modest gated community in Sanford, Florida, a suburb of Orlando hard hit by the recession. The name of the community, tellingly, is The Retreat. As in Colorado Springs, the residents of Sanford must band together to compensate for what a diminished public sector fails to provide. The Retreaters, who live in townhouses priced around $100,000, have recently been concerned about a rash of burglaries. According to one resident, there had been eight cases in 15 months, and the culprits were mostly African-American males (or so he said). There are no signs at The Retreat that read: No Poor People or No African-Americans or No People Wearing Hoodies. The rules regarding trespass are unstated, shaped by fear and subject to the worst kind of stereotyping. Trayvon Martin was a victim of profiling but also of the insecurity that accompanies the decline of the middle class, an insecurity that especially plagues those of modest means, for they cannot afford all the perquisites of the wealthy. Vigilantism is the byproduct of a failed state. And the austerity measures promoted during our current mean season result in such a failed state.

Shaima Alawadi and her family recently moved from Detroit to the San Diego suburb of El Cajon, home to the second-largest Iraqi community in the country. Alawadi, like so many Iraqis living in El Cajon, took refuge in America from the human rights violations and the subsequent sectarian violence of Iraq. But they also found themselves in a city close to the Mexican border and therefore on the frontlines of the immigration debate in the United States. The economic crisis has produced a spike in anti-immigrant sentiment: “they” are taking “our” jobs; “they” are a burden on “our” city services; “they” are not assimilating into “our” culture. Hate crimes against immigrants have been on the rise. Alawadi was not only an immigrant. She wore a headscarf and so was identifiably Muslim. As such, she was a target for all those who conflate Islam with terrorism. Religious freedom and respect for ethnic diversity are still core American values. But a certain tribalism has crept into American discourse. A tribe of xenophobic Christians is fearful that demographic shifts and economic malaise will undermine their precarious cultural status. A small but growing minority within this tribe will resort to violence to maintain this status.

The politics of immigration, multiculturalism, and Islamophobia take on a very different character in France. In this election year, President Nicolas Sarkozy has tried to steal the fire from an unabashedly xenophobic right wing. He has stated that there are “too many foreigners” in the country. He has strenuously backed the French ban on the hijab. He has gone after halal meat (which has also raised concerns in France’s Jewish community that Kosher food will likewise be stigmatized). What had once been on the margins of French debate is now in the very mainstream. Muslims are somehow under suspicion for challenging a mythical unitary French identity through what they eat, what they wear, and how they pray. Mohamed Merah, meanwhile, believed that some Muslims had become too French and should be punished for their transgression. French Muslims find themselves in an increasingly difficult position. They trespass on French culture if they attempt to retain their identity. Or they trespass in the imaginations of religious extremists if they identify too closely as French — by, for instance, joining the army. If France and the European Union were enjoying an economic uptick, these culture wars would retreat into the background. As it is, Muslims have become a convenient scapegoat.

The European Union was supposed to be a borderless space. But the old dream of an ever more prosperous and economically equitable regional arrangement has come up hard against economic downturn and polarization. The United States was supposed to be a country without the class barriers of feudal Europe. But the old dream of a growing middle class and the relatively stable politics that accompany it cannot survive in the austerity liberalism and anti-government conservatism of the 21st century. When our notion of the common good, of commonwealth, begins to disintegrate, all that is left are tribes defending their turf, standing their ground, enclosing their land.

We are living now in a new world of enclosures. We are building our fences ever higher. We are patrolling our borders with ever more sophisticated weaponry. And we are punishing any and all who trespass. The victims of these recent killings are the collateral damage of these border wars.

To read the original article, click here

Image Source: Lightgraph

In a report published in December 2011, Minority Rights Group International highlights the problems facing minority groups, specifically in an area covering Kenya, Uganda and Jonglei State in South Sudan. Competition over resources has increased the potential for confrontation not only with local dominant ethnic groups, but also with the state and international corporations, thereby increasing the liklihood of different forms of conflict on different levels. Progressive legal protections are often not enforced because of a disconnect at state-level between legislation and law-enforcement, which only exacerbates existing problems caused by long-standing discrimination. Moreover, conflict involving already marginalised people adversely affects the women and children in these groups in particular, which in turn re-impacts on the community because of the traditional roles that women play in family cohesion and as food producers.

Many problems arise not simply because people belonging to minority groups are themselves marginalised, but also their community and governance structures which previously had been successful in mediating conflict such as (in an East African context) cattle raiding. Marginalisation not only discriminates against individuals because of their backgrounds or beliefs but also rides roughshod over communal organisation and mediation, leaving groups unable to adapt to change or protect their interests when threatened by more powerful entities.

Executive Summary, by Laura A. Young and Korir Sing’Oei

In resource-scarce East Africa, minority groups face major challenges over the control of and access to land and other natural resources. Despite national policy regimes that are developing in a positive direction, the reality for minority groups and their neighbouring ethnic groups is that land and natural resources continue to be a major trigger of violence. Minorities find themselves competing with other communities, with the state, and with corporate interests for control of resources upon which they depend for their livelihood, cultural integrity and future development.

As globalization, population explosion, and climate change converge to increase the demand for land, water, forest products and mineral resources within territories inhabited by minorities in East Africa, these groups are forced to find new ways to cope with different types of conflict at once.

This report describes the situation of selected minorities and their neighbouring groups in Kenya, Uganda and South Sudan’s Jonglei State. Each group has unique characteristics, including extreme livelihood challenges, vulnerability to conflict, and ongoing discrimination, which are common across communities and countries. Decades of discrimination against minority groups, often as a result of state policy starting in the colonial era, has rendered minorities in East Africa poorer and with more precarious access to land and natural resources than other communities.

Minorities face such serious challenges for numerous reasons: legal regimes remain unimplemented or result in further discrimination against minority groups; there are existing conflicts between formal and customary laws; population pressures and climate change; lack of coordination in conflict resolution programming and donor support, and non-recognition of indigenous livelihoods by states.

Resource conflicts and discrimination lead to negative consequences for women from these communities in particular, as they face double discrimination because of deeply entrenched patriarchy. Conflicts between formal and customary laws often leave women with limited options to protect their access to land and natural resources. Given the place of women in the social system of most minority groups, in which they are responsible for production of food, denial of access has negative effects on the community overall and specifically on women and children. Women also often bear the brunt of conflicts over natural resources. Security operations to quell violence or evict communities expose women to multiple violations of their rights. Moreover, violence between communities leads to attacks on women and children and directly impacts women’s particular property rights within traditional community structures.

The research for this report reveals that communities often struggle with multiple types of conflict at once: interethnic competition; conflict with the state; and conflict with corporate actors. Each of these types of conflict requires a different method of resolution. The report highlights that communities themselves are initiating the most effective conflict resolution methods when it comes to inter-ethnic violence, most often associated with cattle raiding in pastoralist communities. Effective conflictresolution strategies often draw on customary practices, integrated with modern technological advances. The report highlights that national law and policies often contradict and undermine customary practices. Moreover, current conditions of land scarcity, state intervention and resource extraction are straining or obliterating customary management in many communities.

State-led policy initiatives to resolve conflict between communities and state or corporate actors have not proven successful because of lack of implementation and failure to effectively consult minority communities’ traditional governance structures. Accordingly, many communities, such as the Endorois, have been forced to become legal adversaries of the state, addressing conflict through litigation at the national and regional level.

This report recommends that governments in the regions discussed take urgent action to adopt and implement their national policy directives on land and natural resources. These policies are generally progressive with respect to minority rights and provide a strong basis for supporting the other recommended actions in the report.

Among other key recommendations, this report urges national governments to develop guidelines on what constitutes participatory and effective community consultation around land and natural resource extraction, based on free, prior and informed consent; and recognize the value of indigenous peoples’ knowledge of resource management and of customary practise, especially related to women’s rights to hold and use land.

To read the full report and press release, click here

Image Source: Leonie_x

This Project Briefing from the Overseas Development Institute reports on the findings of a study examining the experience of Nepalese and Bangladeshi migrants in India. This vulnerable group of people face marginalisation on many different levels, having been compelled to emigrate in the first place because of economic hardship; and facing job-, wage-, and housing-insecurity on arrival because of their ambiguous legal status. Fear of disclosure or of being identified by their accents prevents migrants not only from taking a stand against exploitation, but also from forming networks within the host communities, thereby compounding the other forms of insecurity. In addition, migrants are often marginalised on their return home: “There is a common belief that women who Migrate to india engage voluntarily in commercial sex work once there,” while husbands left behind suffer from the stigma surrounding their wives’ supposed profession. The briefing concludes with recommendations for mitigating insecurity experienced by this group, who would otherwise be at permanent risk of violence and exploitation.

Introduction, Fiona Samuels et. al.

There has been a steady flow of people from Nepal and Bangladesh to India in recent decades in search of better work and livelihood opportunities. As they move to and fro, many face harassment, discrimination and violence. Many face these challenges during their journeys – particularly when they cross borders – at their destinations, and when they go home. Their experiences are affected by gender, country of origin and the process of recruitment to migration.

This Project Briefing explores the experiences of these people as they migrate, drawing on findings from a baseline study on their vulnerabilities, particularly to HIV and AIDS, as they move between their communities of origin in Nepal and Bangladesh to India. Although the baseline used quantitative and qualitative approaches, stories of harassment and violence emerge mostly from the qualitative elements. Respondents rarely speak about their own experiences of violence or discrimination, but talk about the experiences and behaviour of others. The term ‘violence’ is used in its broadest sense, ranging from harassment, bribery, threats and name-calling, to discrimination, stigma, exclusion and exploitation, to physical violence including beating, torture and murder, to sexual and gender based violence including sexual exploitation, coercion and rape. After exploring experiences of violence, this briefing concludes with recommendations, many of them already being operationalised in the three countries as a result of findings from this study.

To read the full briefing, click here

Image Source: FriskoDude

What is the real mission in Libya? Not the no-fly zone– that’s a method. So what is the mission? How do we end this thing?

The president said in Santiago yesterday that the military mission isn’t aimed at getting rid of Gaddafi. He said we have other means to do that-sanctions and money freezes and that stuff.

Well, excuse me for being skeptical, Mr. President, but we’ve done all that before and regimes have survived it for years-many years. I remember how many years we had white-ruled Rhodesia under sanctions. When I was over there in the Peace Corps, I went to that country, it meant watching old movies instead of ones currently available in other countries. No, it really didn’t really work all that fast.

Americans don’t like long wars. Are we going to be backing this military campaign in Libya for months or even years-with the French and the Brits and a token Arab force flying overhead while Gaddafi kills his people in alleys and basements below? Are we going to wait for –excuse me — sanctions to work their will?

It doesn’t ring true. We went in there to stop a killer from massacring his people. If he’s set on doing it, he’s got plenty of time now to find ways of doing it — if all we’re doing is running sanctions against him.

So, we need to know more. Perhaps there’s a secret plan out there to overthrow Gaddafi. Are we offering him safe-conduct to Venezuela? Are we giving him a means to end this standoff?

Because if we’re not doing any of this, it promises to be a long war, a standoff, where Gaddafi sacrifices more and more of his people to prolong his own rule, which he needs to prolong if he’s going to prolong his own life.

I hope we have a plan here we’re not talking about, because what we’re seeing makes no sense. We say we want to overthrow Gaddafi again but give him no place to escape. If that’s the nature of this contest, he will fight to the death — as most people would — and that will mean the deaths of countless people who would survive if we had a quicker, smarter plan that promised a quicker, smarter ending to this thing.

I don’t like the looks of this campaign for the simple reason it looks like so many others. In an effort to reduce our footprint, we’re making it a far longer, more bloody journey to where we’re headed in the end.

Chris Mathews is a TV News anchor in the United States.

This article originally appeared on the Huffington Post. 

In today’s era of globalization, the line between critic and hypocrite is increasingly becoming blurred. Single out a problem in a region or country other than one’s own, and risk triggering an immediate, yet understandable, response: Why criticize the problem here, when you face the same one back home?

Such a response is particularly justified in the context of water insecurity, a dilemma that afflicts scores of countries, including the author’s United States. In the parched American West, New Mexico has only ten years worth of drinking water remaining, while Arizona already imports every drop. Less arid areas of the country are increasingly water-stressed as well. Rivers in South Carolina and Massachusetts, lakes in Florida and Georgia, and even the mighty Lake Superior (the world’s largest fresh-water lake) are all running dry. According to the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency, if American water consumption habits continue unchecked, as many as 36 states will face water shortages within the next few years. Also notable is the fact that America’s waterways are choked with pollution, and that nearly twenty million Americans may fall ill each year from contaminated water. Not to mention that more than thirty U.S. states are fighting with their neighbours over water.

Such a narrative is a familiar one, because it also applies to South Asia. However, in South Asia, the narrative is considerably more urgent. The region houses a quarter of the world’s population, yet contains less than 5% of its annual renewable water resources. With the exception of Bhutan and Nepal, South Asia’s per capita water availability falls below the world average. Annual water availability has plummeted by nearly 70% since 1950, and from around 21,000 cubic metres in the 1960s to approximately 8,000 in 2005. If such patterns continue, the region could face ‘widespread water scarcity’ (that is, per capita water availability under 1,000 cubic metres) by 2025. Furthermore, the United Nations, based on a variety of measures – including ecological insecurity, water management problems and resource stress – characterizes two key water basins of South Asia (the Helmand and Indus) as ‘highly vulnerable’.

These findings are not surprising, given that the region suffers from many drivers of water insecurity: high population growth, vulnerability to climate change, arid weather, agriculture dependent economies and political tensions. This is not to say that South Asia is devoid of water security stabilizers; indeed, its various trans-national arrangements, to differing degrees, help the region manage its water constraints and tensions. This paper argues that such arrangements are vital, yet also incapable of safeguarding regional water security on their own. It asserts that more attention to demand-side water management within individual countries is as crucial for South Asian water security as are trans-national water mechanisms.

To understand the importance of trans-boundary water arrangements in South Asia, one must first bear in mind a paradox: the region is poorly integrated, yet linked together by water co-dependencies.

Consider, first, that the World Bank has declared South Asia the world’s least integrated region. According to the Bank, South Asia has the world’s worst railways and road density, while only sub-Saharan Africa has worse electricity and sanitation systems. Predictably, intra-regional trade accounts for just 5% of the region’s total international trade, and less than 2% of gross domestic product. Not surprisingly, South Asia’s regional organization, SAARC, is not nearly as dynamic as regional groupings like the European Union or the Association of South East Asian Nations.

Second, that many of the region’s countries depend on the same rivers – and, by extension, neighbouring upper riparians – for their water supply. India, Bangladesh and Nepal look to the Brahmaputra, while both Pakistan and India are beholden to the rivers of the Indus basin. Bangladesh and Pakistan, both lower riparians, must obtain great majorities of their water resources (91% and 75%, respectively) from beyond their borders.

Conversely, China, while not a geographic entity of South Asia, is an upper riparian for many of the key rivers flowing into South Asia. India is both a lower (in the case of the Brahmaputra) and upper (in the case of the Indus) riparian. This means, hypothetically, that any flow-diverting Chinese activities on the Brahmaputra could alarm India, Nepal and Bangladesh, and in turn trigger Indian flow manipulations on the Indus, with implications downstream for Pakistan. Such a dynamic creates a hydro domino effect: one nation’s water policies can spark a chain reaction throughout the region.

Another notable factor about South Asia’s interconnected water geography is that many major rivers originate in or pass through politically contested or tense areas. The Tibetan plateau – where the mighty flows of the Salween, Brahmaputra, Indus, Sutlej, and other rivers all spring to life, providing water to 1.5 billion people downstream – is controlled by China, and abuts India’s water-rich Arunachal Pradesh state, which China covets and has sparked Sino-Indian tensions. The rivers of the Indus basin, of course, flow through the Kashmir region – an unending source of Pakistan-India tensions. No wonder that many of South Asia’s riparian pairings (India-Pakistan for the Indus, and India-Bangladesh for the Brahmaputra and the Ganges) reflect the region’s most troubled bilateral relationships.

In effect, South Asia’s water relations play out amid a volatile backdrop of shortage, dependency and geopolitical tension.

A nation’s upper riparian status by no means guarantees water security. China, an uber-upper riparian, suffers from a full-blown water crisis. The North China plain – one of the country’s ‘economic and social cores’ generating more than 20% of its grain supply, according to China scholar David Pietz – is frighteningly water-scarce, with a per capita availability of 225 cubic metres per year. India, meanwhile, contains about 20% of the world’s population, but only about 4% of its water. A 2010 Asian Development Bank report projects that the country could suffer from water shortages of as much as 50% by 2030.

Faced with current shortages, policymakers in upper riparian states frequently opt for supply-side solutions. Water generation measures may ease water stress internally, yet they often exacerbate regional tensions. India and China, to generate desperately needed water resources for both agriculture and energy, often resort to dam construction and other large engineering projects. Many of these are run-of-the-river and hence do not prevent flows from continuing downstream. Still, dams are a delicate matter. China’s insistence that its South to North Water Diversion Project will not divert flows from the Brahmaputra is met with skepticism in India. Additionally, even run-of-the-river dams and other hydro projects threaten lower riparians’ water and food security. For example, if India builds all its envisioned hydro projects on the western rivers of the Indus basin, Pakistan’s agriculture could be deprived of up to a month’s worth of river flows – enough to ruin an entire planting season.

Lower riparians also opt for large, supply generating projects. Pakistan’s water resources policy has been dominated by dam building for decades, and the country’s Water and Power Development Authority (WAPDA) plans to construct five dams, three large canals, and five hydropower facilities by 2025. As a lower riparian, these national engineering projects will not impede river flows into downstream countries. However, they upset riparian communities, who risk being displaced. Supply-side efforts also aggravate regional and provincial tensions, which are high in many South Asian countries. The furious debate surrounding Pakistan’s Kalabagh dam, for example, has pitted supporters in Punjab against opponents everywhere else in the country. This internal discontent feeds into the domestic instability that so concerns Pakistan’s neighbours.

In Pakistan, water insecurity also spawns different manifestations of militancy. In recent years, the Pakistani Taliban, aware of Pakistan’s precarious water situation, has attacked the country’s largest earth-filled dam, the fabled Tarbela. More recently, extremists in Punjab have issued violent threats, angrily blaming India for ‘stealing’ Pakistan’s water and vowing aggression against India unless it ceases such ‘theft’. It is perhaps not coincidental that while Pakistan based extremists have been largely absent from the latest uprising in Jammu and Kashmir, they have been increasingly vocal in their accusations of India’s alleged water theft. These extremists regard their India blame game as an expression of nationalism – an attempt to draw attention away from divisive debates within Pakistan about dam construction and toward a unified front on confronting India. Water may well be supplanting Kashmir as the militants’ chief rallying cry.

Another response – more potential than actual, at least at this point – is for desperate citizens to flee to more water-secure nations. According to a Strategic Foresight Group estimate, water scarcity will contribute to the displacement and migration of 50 to 70 million people in India, Bangladesh, Nepal and China by 2050. To be sure, water strain takes a devastating toll on human security inside upper and lower riparian nations alike – as evidenced by the livelihood-shattered Pakistani fishermen along the disappearing Indus plain and the water starved, suicidal Indian farmers in parts of India.

However, migration is a particularly worrisome threat for lower riparians, with the potential not just to uproot millions of people, but also to imperil regional stability. Bangladesh offers a vivid example. As an impoverished, highly populous, lower riparian that depends on other countries for nearly all its water needs, it is deeply vulnerable to Indian or Chinese activity on rivers upstream and to glacial melting in the Himalayas. And as a low-lying nation, it is susceptible to rising sea levels and monsoon flooding. This array of water problems, according to some observers, could hasten mass Bangladeshi migrations into India’s volatile East, with politically explosive implications.

The combustible mix of water vulnerability, geopolitical tensions, and supply-side responses with ripple effects across borders constitutes a recipe for disaster – and figures to become even more explosive in the coming decades as the region’s population growth soars and Himalayan glacial melt accelerates. Several nightmare water-driven scenarios come to mind:

* Indus Basin War. Militants in eastern Pakistan, vowing to avenge India’s ‘theft’ of Pakistan’s water from the Indus basin’s western rivers, launch terror attacks in India. New Delhi dispatches troops to its western flank, and threatens to shut-off western river flows into Pakistan.

* Sino-Indian Water Showdown. China, in response to Indian defen-sive upgrades in and near Arunachal Pradesh, the water-rich northeastern Indian state that Beijing has long claimed, seeks to reclaim a strategic advantage by slowing the flow of the Brahmaputra into India’s Assam state – an impoverished bastion of separatist militancy that is also an important area of agricultural production.

* Environmental Refugee Crisis. As glacial melt in the Himalayas runs its course, river flows slow to a trickle, and lower riparian Bangladesh experiences rampant water scarcity, Bangladeshis migrate en masse to more water secure but politically volatile eastern India – deepening instability in the latter as violent factions target these new arrivals, and long entrenched separatist militants exploit the unrest by launching their own attacks.

These hypothetical scenarios, and the bubbling cauldron of water insecurity and political tensions that makes them impossible to dismiss, crystallize the importance of trans-boundary water arrangements with the ability to manage, if not reduce, the region’s water based tensions.

Numerous trans-boundary rivers in South Asia are governed by treaties. These include the Mahakali (to which India and Nepal are party), the Ganges (involving India and Bangladesh), and the Indus (comprising India and Pakistan). The Mahakali accord is meant to promote the river’s integrated development, though various disagreements have prevented the treaty from being properly implemented. The Ganges agreement is also constrained by several disagreements, particularly over the Farakka Barrage, which Bangladesh believes has reduced downstream flows of the Ganges.

Nonetheless, none of these countries has ever gone to war over water, and the treaties are surely a major reason why.

The Indus Waters Treaty (IWT) allocates the Indus basin’s western rivers to Pakistan, and the eastern rivers to India (India is authorized to draw on the western rivers for agricultural purposes, so long as this use does not involve storage). It deserves particular attention, given that it is repeatedly lauded as a magnificent example of international cooperation and conflict management. Such rhetoric is warranted. The two parties, despite their rocky relations, truly make a commitment to uphold the treaty’s provisions. The IWT emphasizes transparency, particularly in terms of data exchange and notification of plans to undertake hydro projects. Sure enough, in 2010, India allowed Pakistan to inspect several under- construction Indian hydropower projects on the western rivers. The two nations have also agreed to set up a telemetry system to measure river flows.

Additionally, only once in the treaty’s 50 year history have the accord’s mechanisms for dispute resolution been put to the test. This was a period between 2005 and 2007, when a neutral expert (appointed by the World Bank, as per the IWT’s stipulations) weighed in on the concerns of Pakistan about the Baglihar dam, a project being constructed by India on one of the Indus basin’s western rivers. The expert ruled against Pakistan on several technical points – particularly when he stated that a gated spillway was necessary – yet agreed with it on others (such as on the issue of power intake levels). While many on both sides undoubtedly found ways to oppose the outcome, it is undeniable that the dispute was settled peacefully. In June 2010, both governments concurred that the Baglihar dispute had been definitively resolved.

In 2010, Pakistan decided to bring some technical concerns about the Kishanganga dam (a hydro project being constructed by India in Jammu and Kashmir) to an international court of arbitration. While the outcome of this latest case is far from clear, the Baglihar precedent suggests the arbitration process for Kishanganga should be similarly smooth.

Despite its successes, many observers fear the IWT’s increasing vulnerability. This derives in part from the long-standing grievances harboured by both countries about the treaty. Indians believe it curtails the storage rights of Jammu and Kashmir, and hampers the development of hydro projects on the western rivers. Indeed, India’s participation in the treaty is both economically and politically risky – given that the energy-starved nation must forego opportunities to harvest hydroelectric resources, and given the resentment these cautious hydro development policies breed among Kashmiris.

Pakistan, meanwhile, resents its inherent vulnerability as the lower riparian (even though the IWT allots it 80% of the total Indus basin river flow). For many in Pakistan, the country with the lowest per capita water availability in Asia, entrusting its water security to its deeply mistrusted neighbour is profoundly unsettling.

Furthermore, worries about population growth and climate change effects (particularly the melting of Himalayan glaciers) are fuelling calls for a revised treaty that takes such trends into account. There are also recommendations that the treaty be expanded, so that it includes the other two Indus basin riparians, China and Afghanistan. Those advocating this latter view argue that a four-party treaty would reduce the possibilities of region-wide conflict, and promote basin-wide ecological sustainability.

Some experts contend that the ‘dividing the resources’ mentality of the IWT is no longer tenable, and that Pakistan and India should move toward a more cooperative ‘share the resources’ paradigm. Ahmad Rafay Alam, one of the most eloquent articulator of this view from the Pakistan side, argues that the two nations should determine ‘whether it is in the economic, social or political interest of both riparians to cooperate on water, rather than be antagonistic over it.’ For example, instead of railing against Indian run-of-the-river dam projects on the western rivers, power-starved Pakistan should consider buying the electricity they generate – a more affordable investment than buying power from pricier indigenous gas-powered rental power projects.

This paradigm can be applied to a broader geographic area as well. Bhutan and Nepal are blessed with ample hydroelectric potential; India could therefore invest in energy resources in these countries just as Pakistan could in India.

Some experts make more modest suggestions about improving trans-national water arrangements. They believe that regional water security is best attained not by changing the architecture or philosophy of regional water agreements, but instead by strengthening mechanisms for cooperation and transparency within existing arrangements. In other words, instead of crafting a new IWT, the parties should make even greater commitments to respect the treaty’s current provisions on transparency.

A core component of this viewpoint is the need for more data sharing on river flows, hydro project plans, and glacial melting. This emphasis on transparency is a chief feature of U.S. government policy on trans-national water arrangements. Policymakers in Washington, when describing South Asian water arrangements, repeatedly underscore the same terms: good communication, data sharing and joint management.

Some modest steps have already been taken along these lines. As mentioned above, India and Pakistan recently agreed to several information sharing measures. Additionally, China and India have agreed to share data on glacial melt. Still, much more can be done, and it is here that the international community can play a key role. International academic conferences and other forums facilitating the exchange of information about water constitute one way to boost water transparency. Technology sharing is another avenue.

The United States, for example, can share its new METRIC system – a new water measurement tool developed by academic researchers that has already helped resolve a fight over water in the Arkansas river, and could similarly be deployed in the Indus basin. Similarly, America could provide satellite data that document water availability. It is sometimes observed that there are no international water treaties or other global mechanisms to promote water cooperation. The international community’s participation in water data sharing exercises, in South Asia and elsewhere, can serve as a modest corrective.

Champions of trans-boundary water transparency argue that by fostering greater data sharing, riparians’ mutual suspicions can be reduced, paving the way for greater water cooperation. It is important to note, however, that greater water transparency can easily backfire, and even undermine riparian relations. As one study concludes, revelations of ‘inequitable Indian water stewardship on Indus tributaries’ could exacerbate the volatility of India-Pakistan relations. One might then argue that nations with delicate relations may in certain cases be better served by not revealing inflammatory water data, and should instead maintain opacity.

This raises a critical point: Advocating for more trans-boundary water openness, pushing for ‘resource sharing’ paradigms, and proposing more inclusive treaties all presuppose a level of political cooperation that may not exist in South Asia. After all, it is easy to propose the formation of a new Himalayan Rivers Commission to govern water management in this sub-region, as was done in 2010. However, it would be much more difficult to implement such an arrangement, which would necessitate the close cooperation of nations harbouring major trust deficits toward each other.

So the question invariably arises: How can South Asia’s trans-national water arrangements be enhanced in such a troubled political environment? One answer is to look within, and to muster better efforts to improve internal water governance. This is because sounder water management inside countries can create a more favourable political climate for the pursuit and achievement of lasting external water cooperation. Better internal water management can serve as a catalyst for effective regional water governance.

It is common to attribute water problems exclusively to politics. It is often said that India-Pakistan water tensions are just one facet of a long troubled bilateral relationship. Similarly, one frequently hears that India-China disagreements over water are rooted in the larger competition between the two rising powers for influence over South Asian territory and resources. And India’s water disagreements with Bangladesh and Nepal too are said to be part of a long history of poor political relations.

Such views are accurate, yet incomplete. After all, across the United States and Australia, regions and states bicker over river water allocations – yet these tensions have little to do with politics. Neither Colorado and Kansas in the United States, nor Victoria and Queensland in Australia, are at risk of going to war; they simply disagree about how to properly divide up river flows. As such, their squabbles demonstrate an inability to efficiently manage existing water resources. In South Asia, where the availability of water resources is more precarious, this poor water governance is a chief cause of water insecurity.

In South Asia, water insecurity is not solely a function of resource shortages. To be sure, much of it is running low on water. However, excluding some arid portions of the region, very little of South Asia is actually water-scarce. The resource is precious, yet present. South Asia’s water problems are very much rooted in the wasteful and inefficient management of the region’s available water supplies.

Pakistan is arguably the worst culprit. Water infrastructure and transmission systems – the canals and pipes that have helped make the Indus river system the world’s largest contiguous irrigated area – are literally falling apart because they have not been properly maintained. As a result, millions of gallons of water are lost to leakage every day. In urban areas, wastewater treatment facilities are nearly non-existent – hence the country’s great cities are notorious for fetid surface water resources that sicken and kill hundreds of thousands every year.

Meanwhile, Islamabad offers few incentives to the population to use water saving technology. The lack of subsidies for drip irrigation, for example, compels farmers to use traditional, water wasting flood irrigation. Furthermore, the government has made little effort to diversify crop production. This is unfortunate, given that Pakistan’s most intensively produced crops – and those that fetch the greatest profits for small farmers – are also the most water guzzling.

Then there are the structural factors that exacerbate Pakistan’s water mismanagement. Thanks to the nation’s feudal land setup, a small landed elite owns most rural land, while the majority of the rural population is landless. In a country with few water laws or rights, land ownership determines water access. As a result, most of Pakistan’s rural population struggles to obtain water. In theory, mechanisms such as warabandi – the colonial-era water distribution system meant to ensure farmers equal access to irrigation water – and provincial level water arbiters such as the Indus River System Authority (IRSA) are meant to compensate for such inequalities. In reality, they fail miserably. Warabandi is exploited by politically connected large farmers, while IRSA is rarely taken seriously, and its edicts about provincial river flow allocations are routinely ignored.

Given this gloomy domestic water situation in Pakistan, it is clear why not only militants, but also the country’s government, have chosen to externalize blame over the border. After all, bringing attention to its dysfunctional domestic water management would essentially be an acknowledgment that Islamabad is to blame for its water crisis. While Islamabad is much less prone to blame India than it was several years ago (in fact, in 2010, Pakistan’s minister for water and power acknowledged that India rarely prevents river water from flowing into Pakistan), it rarely admits that the country’s water problems are largely internally rooted.

Pakistan is not the only poor water manager in South Asia; India’s water governance is similarly troubled. India is home to ‘dilapidated’ pipes and pumping stations that cause more than one-third of New Delhi’s fresh water (and at least 40% of most Indian cities’ total water resources) to be lost to leakage. The Yamuna river is choked with ‘faecal bacteria’, and this sewage has increased ‘thousands of times’ over the last decade. Water intensive rice and wheat crops are championed by the government through price guarantees to farmers. And per capita storage availability – the sine qua non for dam efficiency – has plummeted in recent years to levels found in Africa’s poorest nations.

Poor internal water management has grave implications for public health, food security and the environment. Sometimes the effects can be catastrophic. Consider this summer’s flooding in Pakistan. If the country’s water infrastructure had been sturdier and better maintained, raging rivers would have been better contained and the damage wrought by the deluge may not have been as extensive.

Perhaps the most disturbing implication is the strain on groundwater resources. With poor internal water management regimes causing surface water to be wasted, lost or contaminated across the region, South Asians are increasingly digging deeper – literally – to alleviate their water insecurity.

In the context of agriculture – by far, the sector that consumes the most water across South Asia – the increasing inefficiency of highly subsidized, state-run irrigation systems have driven farmers to mine groundwater, which they have more control over and is more readily available. Even back in 2000, nearly 70% of Bangladesh’s irrigation, and more than 50% of India’s, was served by groundwater resources.

Yet groundwater depletion goes beyond the agricultural sector. According to the World Bank, India is the world’s most voracious consumer of groundwater. This heavy consumption is reflected in a 2009 study by several U.S. scientists, which found that groundwater levels fell by about four centimetres per year between 2002 and 2008 across three states in northwestern India – including the breadbasket of Punjab. These areas could conceivably exhaust their entire groundwater supply within the next few decades.

Pakistan, too, is increasingly groundwater-reliant. Lahore – the country’s second-largest city – is completely dependent on it for drinking water needs, and groundwater tables have fallen by as much as sixty-five feet in some areas of the metropolis. Worse, wastewater is now infiltrating the city’s groundwater, choking it with arsenic.

Groundwater – once a pristine, untapped resource – is now being extracted intensively throughout South Asia. In effect, with this onslaught on South Asia’s groundwater, the last bastion of regional water security has been breached. And as groundwater becomes increasingly short and scarce, South Asia may be compelled to return to rapidly dwindling surface water resources and to compete ferociously for the ultra-precious supply that remains – a terrifying prospect, and particularly for lower riparians.

Faced with domestic water problems, and mistaking mismanagement for shortages (or intentionally cloaking mismanagement in the guise of shortages), governments succumb to their supply-side fancies, and construct more dams and reservoirs. Such actions, as noted earlier, fan provincial tensions, and, in the case of upper riparians, anger downstream neighbours. Herein lies the troubling link between poor water management at home and trans-national water cooperation: the former prompts governments to take actions that threaten the latter.

Whether such actions outweigh the risks of imperilling trans-national water cooperation is debatable. This is because many supply-side coping strategies are neither efficient nor sustainable. One of Pakistan’s top water experts, Simi Kamal, has calculated that the quantity of water projected to be generated by the nation’s under-construction Diamer-Basha dam pales in comparison to the amount that would be freed up simply by repairing and maintaining Pakistan’s leaky canal system. Additionally, Pakistan’s dams, like India’s, are rapidly losing storage capacity.

Such considerations give way to another unsettling reality: So long as internal water management remains poor, the benefits accruing from deeper regional water cooperation will be strictly political; from a water resources standpoint, little will improve. Take the case of Pakistan. Assume, for a moment, that increased cooperation enables Pakistan to succeed in getting India to release more water downstream. What would be the result? Many Pakistanis would argue that their water problems would be solved: parched farmland saved, children’s thirst quenched, and lost water livelihoods restored.

In reality, however, none of this would happen. Instead, more water would mean more inefficiency: More water lost to leaky canals and pipes, wasted in irrigation, showered on water-guzzling crops, and contaminated by urban waste. Indeed, if nothing is done to improve internal water governance, allowing more water to gush into Pakistan would simply intensify the country’s water crisis.

South Asian nations need to focus more on demand-side solutions to domestic water problems. These include water conserving technologies, crop diversification, better investments in infrastructure maintenance and wastewater treatment, and a stronger embrace of rainwater harvesting (a conservation method that has already caught on quite strongly in parts of the region). Such policies are less expensive, and potentially more efficient, than traditional supply-side water engineering projects like large dams. Some encouraging signs are emerging from India, where there has been some debate about the merits of emphasizing sugar-bean cultivation over that of sugarcane, which is notoriously water wasting. There has also been discussion about embracing water saving mechanisms such as the direct seeding of rice.

If such demand-side management policies are implemented successfully, South Asian nations would become more judicious in their use of existing water resources, and therefore less threatened in the short-term by the spectre of scarcity. Upper riparians would, presumably, be less likely to initiate new hydro-generation projects that upset their downstream neighbours. Lower riparians, meanwhile, would have less incentive (and fewer grounds) to stoke tensions with their upstream neighbours by accusing them of water theft. As a result, trans-national water arrangements would be threatened less, and the calmer political climate would enable riparians to make more substantive progress on the data sharing and transparency essential for better South Asian water security. None of this, it should be noted, would necessitate drawing up new treaties or other water agreements.

To be sure, new demographic and environmental realities may well call into question the continued relevance of decades-old trans-national water arrangements. Still, these mechanisms need not stop functioning simply because of the presence of factors not at play fifty years ago. One study of the Baglihar dam case observes that the issue was ‘addressed bearing in mind the technical standards for hydropower plants as they have developed in the first decade of the 21st century, and not as perceived and thought of in the 1950s when the [IWT] was negotiated.’ A precedent has effectively been set for new conditions to be taken into account when interpreting the existing treaty, without needing to incorporate such conditions into an altogether new or revised treaty.

This is just one more reason for South Asian nations to redouble their efforts to ameliorate internal water management. Trans-national water arrangements can also stand to improve, yet they are not in desperate need of reform and revision. Rather, it is the water governance of the region’s individual countries that so urgently needs to be fixed. In effect, South Asian water policies must adopt a new approach – one that, in the words of noted water expert Ramaswamy R. Iyer, embraces the ‘responsible, harmonious, just, and wise use of water.’ With population growth and climate change continuing apace, the stakes have never been higher, and the costs of inaction never starker.

Article Source: Seminar

Image Source: hceebee

The eighth Review Conference of the 1968 Non-Proliferation Treaty (NPT) will get under way at the United Nations in New York next week.  Scheduled to run for a month, the Conference brings together top diplomats from 189 countries and over 2000 representatives of civil society to debate a range of issues relating to nuclear disarmament, security and preventing the further spread of nuclear weapons and the fissile materials that make them.

When the Conference ends on 28th May, the outcome could be an agreed document containing substantive commitments to reduce reliance on nuclear weapons and move decisively towards their elimination, as was adopted in 2000.  Alternatively, the Conference might fail, as happened in 2005, or achieve something in between. The stakes are high, and despite some shared objectives the gulf between the objectives, intentions and expectations of the nuclear-weapon states and the majority of non-nuclear countries – especially the developing states – is still quite wide.  On past experience, how the Conference addresses the nuclear programmes in the Middle East – Israel’s as well as Iran’s – may play a critical role in whether or not the outcome is successful.  Israel, like India and Pakistan, stayed outside the NPT and developed its own nuclear arsenal, to the enduring anger of its neighbours.  In 1995, it was necessary for the NPT Conference to adopt a resolution calling for negotiations on a zone free of nuclear and other weapons of mass destruction in the Middle East. Without such a resolution, the Arab States had made clear that they would not vote for the treaty – which at that time had a 25 year time limit – to be extended indefinitely.  In 2010, the League of Arab States, backed by over 110 Non-Aligned governments under Egypt’s leadership, have made clear that they want the Review Conference to take more action to implement the 1995 Resolution on the Middle East. Others, particularly the United States, are wary of putting too much pressure on Israel, which maintains the utmost secrecy about its nuclear weapons and policies.

President Obama’s initiatives have given renewed impetus to calls for deeper cuts in the existing nuclear arsenals and more comprehensive progress on nuclear disarmament. This year, for the first time, a majority of NPT parties will be calling for the objective of a nuclear weapons convention to be put on the negotiating agenda.  While recognising that such a comprehensive treaty to ban nuclear weapons will take time to achieve, there is renewed determination to make this possible, bringing nuclear weapons into line with biological  and chemical  weapons, both of which have been banned under comprehensive multilateral conventions.

Just before the Conference starts there is intense speculation about the role the United States intends to play, following President Obama’s initiatives of hosting a special session of the UN Security Council to discuss nuclear weapons issues last September, inviting the leaders of 46 countries to a Nuclear Summit in Washington this April, and his signing a new strategic arms reduction treaty with President Medvedev of Russia in April –  New-START. The US Nuclear Posture Review, which was finally published in April – six months after it was first expected – gave mixed messages about US intentions. On the one hand, the Obama administration made clear their desire to reduce the role of nuclear weapons, promising not to use US nuclear weapons against non-nuclear weapon states that are NPT members and deemed to be fully complying with their obligations. However, the policy continued to assert the relevance of nuclear deterrence and left open a “narrow range of contingencies” – including attacks with conventional, biological or chemical weapons – in which the United States would be prepared to use nuclear weapons “in extreme circumstances”. Though the signing of the New-START agreement with Russia is very widely welcomed and there is considerable goodwill towards President Obama among NPT states, there are concerns that the US has still not ratified the Comprehensive Nuclear Test Ban Treaty (CTBT), despite the indispensable link between this treaty and the support of many states for indefinite extension of the NPT in 1995.

The NPT was negotiated in the 1960s soon after the 1962 Cuban Missile Crisis nearly turned the cold war into a nuclear war.  The shock of this propelled the key governments to the negotiating table. Though many countries wanted nuclear weapons to be abolished at that time, the political conditions made that impossible.  Instead, they agreed on a non-proliferation approach to halt the further spread of nuclear weapons.  This history is critical to understanding many of the treaty-related conflicts that are likely to unfold during the Review Conference.

Unlike previous kinds of treaties, which imposed restraints or prohibitions on all states equally, the NPT had to acknowledge that five countries had already become “nuclear-weapon states”. The core obligations therefore were that these five – Britain, China, France, the Soviet Union (now Russia) and the United States – were prohibited from transferring nuclear materials, control over nuclear weapons or know-how for nuclear weapons purposes and that they should “pursue negotiations in good faith” on nuclear disarmament. All other countries could only join the NPT as “non-nuclear weapon states”. They accepted obligations not to receive nuclear materials or know-how for nuclear weapons purposes and not to seek to develop any nuclear armaments. Along with this, the non-nuclear weapons countries agreed that the International Atomic Energy Agency would be able to inspect “safeguard” any of their civilian nuclear facilities to ensure that no materials were being diverted for weapons programmes. As an incentive to non-nuclear-weapon states to join the treaty, it was explicitly promised that they would not be prevented from developing civilian nuclear programmes; more than that, they were offered assistance to develop non-military nuclear reactors and programmes.  After the entry into force of the NPT there were further developments to strengthen the regime, including export controls imposed by suppliers of uranium and other nuclear products, nuclear-weapon-free zones – now covering the whole of Africa, Latin America and the Caribbean, the South Pacific, South-East Asia and five countries in Central Asia.

I have covered every NPT meeting since 1994, and this one appears too close to call.  It would be a major problem for the credibility of the non-proliferation regime – and especially for the nuclear-weapon states – if the 2010 Conference were to collapse without agreement.  The fact that the 2005 Review Conference ended acrimoniously, having failed to agree on any substantive issue had less direct impact on the non-proliferation regime than some had anticipated, because it was predictable in view of the intransigent position of the Bush administration and refusal by a number of countries to adopt something much weaker than had already been agreed in 2000.  Iran and Egypt were also seen to have contributed to the 2005 deadlock, but they were clearly not the cause.

Expectations for the 2010 Review Conference are very different, not least because of the positive measures undertaken by President Obama. Yet these could still be swamped by the regional rivalries of the Middle East or if some of the other nuclear-weapon states refuse to reaffirm commitments made in 2000 that are still a long way from being fulfilled.  At the preparatory meeting held in 2009, France and Russia were digging their heels in over some of the disarmament proposals being put forward, while China was quietly anxious about what more transparency and accountability on disarmament matters might entail. If solid agreements on nuclear disarmament and the Middle East are on the table by the fourth week then that would be sufficient incentive for significant governments to exert pressure on potential spoilers. But that might not be the case if not enough is being offered in negotiations.

In this regard, a particularly wild card is whether the Security Council, currently chaired by Japan, will push ahead with a new sanctions resolution against Iran, as some politicians in the United States and elsewhere are demanding.  If so, then all bets for a positive NPT outcome will be off. Not only would such a sanctions resolution make Iran more likely to disrupt and block agreements in the NPT Conference, but it would also make it more difficult for other members of the Non-Aligned group of states to exert friendly persuasion on Iran to engage more constructively and not hold up agreements supported by the rest of the Non-Aligned countries.  The next four weeks will be critical for nuclear non-proliferation and security.

Source: OpenDemocracy

About the Author: Rebecca Johnson is Director of the Acronym Institute for Disarmament Diplomacy and a former senior advisor to the International WMD Blix Commission (2004-06)

Image source: ricardo.martins

The summer of 2010 saw the third-lowest amount and extent of Arctic sea ice ever recorded. For the third year in a row both the Northwest Passage between Greenland and Alaska and the Northern Sea Route between Norway and Kamchatka were ice-free – something that had not happened before 2008 in recorded history. As the physical state of the High North is changing, so too is the diplomatic environment.

The changing North

On 19 September 2010, sea ice covered 4.6 million km² of the 14.1m km² Arctic Ocean. This was 2.1m km², or 31%, below the average summer minimum during the last two decades of the twentieth century. It was the third-lowest extent, after 2007 and 2008, since consistent records began. Eight of the ten lowest minimums have been experienced in the last ten years. Change is also visible in winter ice cover: the maximum extent in March 2010 was 4% below the 1979–2000 average of 15.8m km², an area greater than the Arctic Ocean itself, since many areas outside the Arctic also freeze. The extent of ice cover is not the only story. The total volume of ice is also showing a downward trend, in both summer and winter. This is because the proportion of multi-year to newly formed ice is also declining. Since older ice tends to be thicker, this changing proportion means the total amount of summer ice in the Arctic is declining faster than the area it covers.

Some observers have taken comfort in the fact that ice extent increased year-on-year in both 2008 and 2009, with 2010 levels still above those of 2007 and 2008. But this was in part because the record low of 4.1m km² in 2007 was an anomaly, falling well below the long-term trend. Other observers worried that the 2007 melt was a harbinger of disaster – that a tipping point had been passed and that accelerating warming might lead to a seasonally ice-free Arctic in as little as ten years. But the figures for 2010 closely reflect the long-term trend. Both the optimists and the pessimists appear to have been wrong.

However, this long-term trend is worse – in the context of global climate change – than projected even five years ago. Only the most extreme of the projections included in the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change’s (IPCC) 2007 Assessment Report showed an ice-free Arctic by the end of the twenty-first century. Yet the trend with regard to actual observations falls outside the range projected by the IPCC models (see chart). A simple linear extrapolation of the current trend would imply some seasonally ice-free years in the Arctic by the 2040s, while an accelerating trend that better fits the data suggests a date of 2030. Recent model-based projections that take into account the latest data give dates ranging from around 2040 to 2080, with most expert opinion inclining towards the earlier end of the range.

The full article can be found at IISS

Image source: IISS

“We, alongside this growing consensus of research institutes, analysts, and security agencies on both sides of the Atlantic, think of climate change as a risk multiplier; as something that will amplify existing social, political, and resource stressors,” said Janani Vivekananda of International Alert, speaking at the Wilson Center on May 10.

Vivekananda, a senior climate policy officer with International Alert’s Peacebuilding Program, was joined by co-presenter Jeffrey Stark, the director of research and studies at the Foundation for Environmental Security and Sustainability (FESS), and discussant Cynthia Brady, senior conflict advisor with USAID’s Office of Conflict Management and Mitigation, to discuss the complex connections between climate change, conflict, stability, and governance. 

A Multi-Layered Problem

Climate change and stability represent a “double-headed problem,” said Vivekananda. Climate change, while never the only cause of conflict, can increase its risk in certain contexts. At the same time, “states which are affected by conflict will already have weakened social, economic, and political resilience, which will mean that these states and their governments will find it difficult to address the impacts of climate change on the lives of these communities,” she said.

“In fragile states, the particular challenge is adapting the way we respond to climate change, bearing in mind the specific challenges of operating in a fragile context,” said Vivekananda. Ill-informed intervention programs run the risk of doing more harm than good, she said. 

For example, Vivekananda said an agrarian village she visited in Nepal was suffering from an acute water shortage and tried adapting by switching from rice to corn, which is a less water-intensive crop. However, this initiative failed because the villagers lacked the necessary technical knowledge and coordination to make their efforts successful in the long term, and in the short term this effort actually further reduced water supplies and exacerbated deforestation.

“Local responses will only be able to go so far without national-level coordination,” Vivekananda said. What is needed is a “harmony” between so-called “top-down” and “bottom-up” initiatives. “Adapting to these challenges means adapting development assistance,” she said. 

“What we’re finding is that the qualities that help a community, or a society, or in fact a government be resilient to climate change are in fact very similar qualities to that which makes a community able to deal with conflict issues without resorting to violence,” said Vivekananda.

No Simple, Surgical Solutions

“The impacts of environmental change and management of natural resources are always embedded in a powerful web of social, economic, political, cultural, and historical factors,” said Stark. “We shouldn’t expect simple, surgical solutions to climate change challenges,” he said.

Uganda and Ethiopia, for example, both have rich pastoralist traditions that are threatened by climate change. Increasing temperatures, drought, infrequent but intense rains, hail, and changes in seasonal patterns are threatening pasture lands and livelihoods.

At the same time, pastoralists are confronting the effects of a rapidly growing population, expanding cultivation, forced migration, shrinking traditional grazing lands, anti-pastoralist attitudes, and ethnic tensions. As a result, “any intervention in relation to climate adaptation – whether for water, or food, or alternative livelihoods – has to be fully understood and explicitly acknowledged as mutually beneficial by all sides,” Stark said. “If it is seen in any way to be favoring one group or another it will just cause conflict, so it is a very difficult and delicate situation.”

Yet, the challenges of climate change, said Stark, can be used “as a way to involve people who feel marginalized, empower their participation…and at the same time address some of the drivers of conflict that exist in the country.”

Case Studies: Addressing the “Missing Middle”

When doing climate change work in fragile states, “you have to think about your do-no-harm parameters,” said Brady. “Where are the opportunities to get additional sustainable development benefit and additional stabilization benefit out of reducing climate change vulnerability?”

More in-depth case studies, such as the work funded by USAID and conducted by FESS in Uganda and Ethiopia, are needed to help fill the “missing middle” between broad, international climate change efforts – like those at the United Nations – and the community level, Brady said. 

The information generated from these case studies is being eagerly awaited by USAID’s partners in the Departments of State, Defense, and Treasury, said Brady. “We are all hopeful that there will be some really significant common lessons learned, and that at a minimum, we may draw some common understanding about what climate-sensitive parameters in fragile states might mean.”

Image source: aheavens

Article source: The New Security Beat

While the public debate about resource conflicts focuses on the risk of supply disruptions for developed countries, the potentially more risky types of resource conflict are usually ignored. As part of a two-year research project on behalf of the German Federal Environment Agency, adelphi and the Wuppertal Institute for Climate, Energy, and Environment have analyzed the risks of international conflict linked to natural resources in a series of reports titled Beyond Supply Risks – The Conflict Potential of Natural Resources.

Resource extraction, transportation, and processing can create considerable crises and increase the risk of conflicts in producing and transit countries. This phenomenon – widely referred to as the “resource curse” – impacts consuming countries only if it leads to shortages and higher prices. However, in the producing and transit countries it can have much wider destabilizing effects – from increasing corruption to large-scale violent conflict. In addition, the extraction, processing, and transportation of resources often create serious environmental risks. Overexploitation, pollution, and the degradation of ecosystems often directly affect the livelihoods of local communities, which can increase the potential for conflict.

The eight reports that comprise Beyond Supply Risks explore plausible scenarios over the next two decades, focusing on four case studies: copper and cobalt in the Democratic Republic of Congo; theNabucco natural gas pipeline project across Southern Europe and Turkey; lithium in Bolivia; and rare earth minerals in China.

Lithium in Bolivia

Bolivia possesses the world’s largest known lithium deposits, a potentially important resource for the development of electric vehicles. While the development of Bolivia’s lithium reserves could provide major economic benefits for one of the poorest countries in Latin America, our analysis identifies two main potential risks of conflict.

First, the environmental consequences of developing industrial-scale lithium production might have negative effects on the livelihoods of the local population. The local population in the lithium-rich department of Potosí has shown that it is capable of organizing itself effectively in defense of its interests, and past resource conflicts have turned violent, making a conflict-sensitive approach all the more important. 

Second, the Bolivian economy is largely dependent on natural resources, and consequently is susceptible to price shocks. At present, this risk is primarily associated with natural gas. But lithium production, if developed, might be subject to the same dynamics, which could potentially destabilize the political system. 

For consuming countries, these conflicts threaten supplies of lithium only if local protests or broader destabilization were produce bottlenecks in the supply chain.

Rare Earths and China

Like lithium, rare earths are likewise essential for some new technologies. China’s well publicized monopoly on 97 percent of the global production spurred a heated debate on the security of supply of strategic minerals. While our case study identifies supply risks for consuming countries, it also outlines some of the conflict risks China might face internally.

First, local populations could protest against the severe ecological impact of rare earth mining and production. In addition, conflicts might arise if those who profit from economic development (entrepreneurs or regional power-holders) undermine the traditional centralized party structures and expand their own influence.

International conflicts over access to Chinese rare earth resources, while they dominate the headlines, do not appear to be the dominant risk. Instead, internal political tensions could result in a weakened China that is not able to exploit its monopoly position for foreign policy gains. Or the government could enter into multilateral agreements and thus avoid a confrontational approach towards consumer nations.

Ultimately, the actual rate of diffusion of environmental technologies and the development of new technologies remain the key factors in determining whether relative shortages in global supply of rare earths will in fact occur. If industrialized nations and emerging economies commit to the same technologies to attain climate policy goals, international resource governance and coordinated promotion of (environmental) technology will also play a role in preventing conflict and crisis over rare earths.

The Way Forward

The series concludes with five recommendations to mitigate the risks of future resource conflicts:

• Introduce systematic policy impact assessments to understand how policy goals and strategies, especially in regard to climate and environmental policy, interact with resource conflict risks.
• Increase the transparency of raw material markets and value creation chains to prevent extreme fluctuations in prices and improve information on markets, origins, and individual players.
• Improve the coherence of raw material policy by linking raw material policies with security, environmental, and development policies.
• Demand and promote corporate social responsibility along the whole value chain.
• Increase environmental and social sustainability as a means of strengthening crisis and conflict prevention by systematically taking into account social and conflict-related aspects in the resource sector.

However, none of these strategies alone would be capable of mitigating all the risks of future resource conflicts. But together they represent a methodology that, with intense coordination among the key players, could make a far-reaching contribution to reducing risk and preventing international conflict over the long term.

The individual reports from the project can be downloaded here:

• Conflict Risks (GERMAN only)
• Supply and demand (GERMAN only)
• Case Study: Nabucco Pipeline (GERMAN only)
• Case Study: Congo
• Case Study: Bolivia
• Case Study: China
• Conflict Resolution Strategies (GERMAN only)
• Summary and Recommendations

Lukas Ruettinger is a project manager for adelphi, mainly focusing on the fields of conflict analysis and peacebuilding as well as resources and governance. Moira Feil is a senior project manager for adelphi and has participated in more than 30 projects with various partners and clients on natural resource links to crises, conflicts and peacebuilding, and corporate responsibility.

Sources: Government Accounting Office.

Article source: The New Security Beat

Image source: Olmovich

Thousands of negotiators, activists and lobbyists have descended on Copenhagen for two weeks to attempt to seal a global deal on climate change. Issues on the negotiating table include how much wealthy polluters like the US put towards financing measures to help people in poorer countries cope with the impacts they are already experiencing, and how the rich states will share their low carbon technology with poor states so that the unindustrialised world can still develop without relying on fossil fuels.

But as the negotiations unfold, one very real issue unlikely to be given much discussion space is the heightened risk of violent conflict. Factors linking climate change and the potential for conflict include a number of powerful threats to human security, such as water scarcity, land degradation, decreased food production. The risk will be greatest in poor, badly governed countries, many of which have a history of armed conflict. International Alert’s report ‘A Climate of Conflict’ estimates that just under three billion people live in 46 conflict-affected countries, where climate change could create a high risk of violent conflict, and a further in two billion people living in an additional 56 countries face a high risk of instability as a result of climate change.

Attention to the security implications of climate change is slowly increasing among politicians and strategists in the developed world, yet climate change negotiators are largely silent on the matter. Specialists in climate change are not generally well informed about it and, although development specialists universally agree that the poorest will be worst hit by climate change, they have not resolved how to deal with the issue of fragile states in climate negotiations.

It is essential to address this issue, but necessary to do so carefully. The potential conflict implications are among the most compelling arguments for rich states to take action against climate change. But there are three notes of warning.

First, there is the risk of over-stating the conflict dimension in an attempt to persuade a sceptical, even disaffected or merely ill-informed public to support cuts in carbon emissions. Fuelling fears that climate change will generate threats like terrorism and mass immigration* will lead to oversimplified and inaccurate perceptions of the security angle. In the political debate, exaggerated positions will inevitably be vulnerable.

Secondly, securitising the issue runs the risk of a damaging response that overlooks cost-effective and sustainable options in favour of high cost and probably ineffective military ones. The point here is that policy responses must be based on a thorough understanding of not only the reality of the conflict risk but also of how it is shaped. Effects of climate change such as more frequent natural disasters, long-term water shortages and food insecurity could combine with other factors and lead to violent conflict. The reason why this can happen lies in the context of poverty, weak governance, political marginalisation and corruption. These factors limit the capacity to adapt to climate change and simultaneously drive conflict. Policy responses need to look not only at the immediate risk of violence, for example by reforming the security sector, and not only at the specific environmental impacts, for example by taking steps to reduce the risk of disaster, but also at the broader context of failures of governance.

Thirdly, climate negotiators have not paid attention to fragile states and conflict risks. Most negotiators are climate and legal experts whose remits do not extend beyond the talks. They have neither incentive nor expertise for taking account of the complex web of that links climate, conflict, governance and development.

Nonetheless, to be effective, the global agreement must make it possible to address these linkages. This means taking the discussion beyond the question of how to raise climate funds for adaptation and mitigation, into thinking about how to spend and what governance and institutional changes are needed so spending can be effective.

Policies for adaptation have to respond to the political and social realities in which they are intended, or they will not work. Climate change impacts are linked to conflict, development, government, human rights, trade and the world economy. The problems are interlinked and so the responses must be interlinked.

International Alert’s latest report ‘Climate Change, Conflict and Fragility’ recommends that adaptation strategies should be more conflict-sensitive. Water management in water stressed countries for example should be decided by understanding the systems of power and equity. This must involve the poorest and most marginalised, and avoid pitting groups against each other.

Likewise, peace-building needed to be climate-proofed by paying attention to the availability of resources for livelihoods such as agriculture – which could be under pressure because of climate change – for returning ex-combatants or people displaced by conflict.  For example, in Liberia, which is in the process of recovery from war, many ex-combatants are returning to villages hoping to make a living from agriculture. But climate scientists predict that crop yields in parts of West Africa could halve by 2020. The prospect arises of returned fighters becoming resentful unemployed farmers, and thus potential recruits, with their combat experience, in a new conflict.

The efforts of rich countries to shift to a low-carbon economy must be peace-friendly and supportive of development. We don’t want a repeat of the hasty actions in 2007/8 that saw the diversion of food crops and land use to biofuel production playing a role in pushing food prices up, causing conflict in over 30 countries.

Getting the negotiators in Copenhagen to understand these interlinkages will mean there’s a good chance that responses to climate change could yield a double dividend: increasing resilience to climate change and to violent conflict. Failure to take account of the linkages though could result in the millions or billions of dollars of new funding actually becoming part of the problem.

*For example, see the US public education campaign on climate change, September 2009 http://www.secureamericanfuture.org/

Janani Vivekananda is Senior Climate Policy Adviser on climate change and security at International Alert, the London-based peacebuilding organisation. She co-authored Alert’s latest report Climate Change, Conflict and Fragility, and A Climate of Conflict: The links between climate change, peace and war, published by International Alert in 2007.

This article addresses how systems of capital that underpin the present world structure perpetuate both global insecurity and endemic poverty. By upholding the practice of global arms sales, violence is endorsed by state and non-state actors continuing this inequity. Alternatives to the dominant security paradigm nevertheless exist.

Poverty is violence, an enjoined condition sustained by capital and yet paradoxically ignored by it. Capital is possessed and dispensed by the various capitalist constructs that currently function and while the 2008 global recession revealed many variables within these constructs as extremely suspect, they nevertheless remain, guaranteeing continued wealth for elite powers. The poor in turn exist insecure, in need and in want. As little action is offered against these inequitable systems, state or global – governments seem more intent on short-tem economic ‘Band-aids’ the focus being save OUR souls – the poor linger, trapped in violence, deprived of voice and rights.

Essayists such as Peter Singer and Thomas Pogge have highlighted the factors that constitute much of the global systemic inequity of capital, although one remains particularly pervasive, that of the global sale of armaments. The possession and deployment of arms by governments, militia groups and organized crime perpetuate inequality, poverty and violence; with a gun there is no reason or inquiry, the means displays the message. Arms and the man, in reference to the title of this piece, defend their capital interests and so uphold suffering. A sobering statistic emerges from the Commission of Human Security: The United Nation’s Security Council, responsible ‘for the maintenance of international peace and security’ (www.un.org) has (with the exclusion of China) four permanent members – France, the Russian Federation, the United Kingdom and the United States – who together sell 78% of global exports of conventional weapons  (Figures taken from Commission of Human Security Final Report, 2003:134).  Germany, although not a permanent member of the Security Council, is another major contributor and is responsible for another 5% of conventional weapon sales. It is estimated that about two-thirds of these exports go to developing countries (ibid.). The question as I have suggested in previous articles following the peace education theorist Betty Reardon is what kind of ‘security’ are the permanent members of this council purporting to deal in and who is this security really for?  

In peace theory, conflict is inevitable but when handled constructively conflict is a force for positive change. Both Gandhi and Martin Luther King Jr. practiced methods of non-violence and constructive activism, which resulted in effective change and the people of the Philippines, adopted similar successful methods in their overthrow of the Marcus dictatorship. Violence however, the default of state security, seldom achieves anything other than more violence, what counts here is control and fear. The semantically loaded term terrorism has become the early 21^st century’s global mantra for continued armament-as-security spending. Capital thus spent and accrued denies resources for social justice programs such as the UN’s Millennium Development Goals. Regarding terrorism the sociologist Zygmunt Bauman notes that young people in deprived areas become potential targets for extremism [1], Jean Paul Sartre also comments that it is not their violence but ours (the ‘haves’) that oppresses and to the poor it is “the last refuge of their humanity” [2]. Bauman and Sartre’s writings are separated by forty-five years but they detail the same systematic insecurities that sustain poverty and violence, a lack of resources such as education and a systemic disregard for humanity by capital forces.

Democratic governments, wary of their standing in the next election rarely activate radical policies to address inequity. After all why would they? Democratic regimes are in most cases so closely linked to elites and private business in order to ensure their own re-election that status-quo policies tend to dominate over radical changes by default; what’s theirs is theirs, why share? If this sounds simplistic it is meant to be. The economist Ha-Joon Chang reiterates the point that free market policies are not there to make poor countries richer. He further identifies the complex financial instruments that brought down economies in 2008[3]. Ha-Joon Chang recommends banning these financial instruments as products dangerous to society, which is fine, but other systems continue, namely the socialization that validates greed and competition for resources and rewards players with gleaming cars and kitchens. And in case this appears solely as the advertising campaign for western capitalism I believe that Kim Jung-il has a pretty nice place and a sweet ride; tending to support the adage of William Pitt, the Elder that unlimited power is apt to corrupt the minds of those who possess it no matter the flavour of the ideology.  

So are there alternatives to the violence of poverty so sustained by the inequities and violence of capital? Realists and pragmatists would say no, this is how it is – social Darwinism. It’s unlikely that Darwin would approve of that term but appropriating other’s resources and ideas for one’s own needs tends to be a realist trait and realist colonizers powered by arms have rarely suffered the indignities of colonization, although it must be said that Japan fared rather well after the Second World War, at least up to 1990. Realism merely (merely?) reiterates tired falsehoods however, we return to the question of inequitable systemic violence and who is interested in acting against it.  The answer can be surprising. On a flight to Japan A US soldier who had served two terms of duty in Iraq told me in conversation that many US soldiers felt angered by the US government’s misappropriation of capital in Iraq and with a certain amount of pride recounted how he and others of the US military had worked in deprived areas of the South to build hospitals and relief housing. Soldiers of course simply bear the brunt of policy. They are placed in exceptional circumstances by the judgments of other humans – predominantly guided by capital interests – and those soldiers not morally driven (and yes even soldiers share this trait, my father being one of them) can contravene all manner of international laws and human rights.  The philosopher William James posits in The Moral Equivalent of War[4] that the “fatalistic view of war-function… is nonsense” and instead argues for a channeling of the military for solely “constructive interests” – the relief work mentioned above. James echoes H.G. Wells who also saw the military purpose as one of “service and cooperation and of infinitely more honorable emulations.” The question of addressing the enduring links between capital, poverty and violence remains a systemic one.

If like the soldier above many more hold the capacity for humanism then this capacity needs to be imparted into positive action. The aforementioned peace educator Betty Reardon writes, “citizens both female and male are taking it upon themselves of monitoring governments own compliance with laws and fulfillment of policies as an active demonstration of the responsibility of democratic citizenship.” These actions remind governments of their obligations, “urging them to make needed changes before it becomes necessary to embark on measures of organized dissent and/or undertake non-violent resistance”[5]. Rights-driven frameworks are a mainstay of peace education and human rights organizations. They present substance to challenge both state and non-state actors who seek to utilize violence through arms as a means to control and prevail. Existing systems of capital uphold the two deeply iniquitous problems of poverty and violence ensuring their continuance. Social responsibility lies with each of us and it is our duty as responsible citizens therefore to redress these iniquities guided by powerful means such as peace education, to exist without greed and to live as one as wise as Gandhi suggested, in a world separated from the burden of violence and unequal capital in a world we want to see.

Last week’s discussion at the U.N. Security Council on the security implications of climate change was an important step in the right direction. This is only the second time that the subject, which may turn out to be the defining issue for global security in the 21st century, has made it onto the agenda of the U.N. body charged with maintaining international peace and security. The discussion’s importance is limited, however, since the real path to addressing the security implications of climate change lies outside the council. The special session, initiated by Germany, focused specifically on the council’s role in preventing climate-induced conflict over increasingly scarce food, water and arable land. The solution to these conflicts, however, can only be found in reducing carbon emissions — including by scaling up the deployment of renewable energy technologies and increasing energy efficiency measures — and not in responding to climate crises once they have occurred.     

The physical effects of a warming climate are now widely regarded as, in the words of theU.K. National Security Strategy document, “risk multipliers.”  Everyone from the U.S. National Intelligence Council to the Royal Society has highlighted the link between the consequences of higher global temperatures and human insecurity.

Read the full article here. You will need a subscription to WPR to read the full article; if you are not subscribed already then you can get a free trial subscription here.

Image source: United Nations Photo

Most of the international attention on Iran in the second half of 2009 focused on the political turmoil following the presidential election of 12 June. The discussion of Iran’s nuclear capabilities and plans receded from the foreground, though it continued behind the scenes among all the states and international agencies involved. The signs are that, whatever the outcome of the domestic confrontation between the Mahmoud Ahmadinejad regime and the opposition, the coming months will see a sharpening of tension over the nuclear issue. This raises the question of whether there will be a military assault on Iran’s nuclear facilities – most likely by Israel, since there is little likelihood that the Barack Obama administration would countenance direct United States military action against Iran – in an attempt to stop the country from acquiring a nuclear weapon (see “Iran, Israel, America: the nuclear gamble”, 2 October 2009).

In current circumstances, any unexpected or dramatic incident is likely to be read in terms of its bearing on the complex interplay over the nuclear question of Iran, Israel and the United States.  The assassination by a remote-controlled bomb of the Iranian quantum-physicist (and opposition supporter) Massoud Ali Mohammadi on 12 January 2010 is one such. The Iranian government immediately attributed Dr Mohammadi’s killing to the United States and Israel, working in collaboration with internal dissidents.  

Tehran’s accusation against its main adversaries is as predictable as Washington’s denial of any involvement in the murder. While the truth of this event remains to be established, what can be said is that on a larger diplomatic front the United States has little to gain from any rupture in relations with Tehran. The rhetoric in Washington from conservative sources and supporters of Israel may be as strong as ever, and is more than matched by the propaganda of the Ahmadinejad government; but in reality the US and Iran actually have overlapping interests. Both have reason, albeit for different reasons, to oppose al-Qaida and the Taliban (with Iran recalling the deaths of Iranian diplomats at the Taliban’s hands in 1998); and the US government is well aware of the potential for Iran to make things very difficult for it in Iraq.

The deep state

Two pieces of evidence, however, suggest that events involving Israel may make the delicate Tehran/Washington relationship even harder to sustain. The first is that sources close to the Israeli government confirm and are clear that training and other preparations continue for possible military action against Iran. This is not to say that an attack is imminent, or indeed inevitable: just that the option is, and will remain, readily available.

The Binyamin Netanyahu government has been careful to moderate its public pronouncements about Iran; but its repeated statements that Iran is Israel’s primary security concern – far outweighing Hamas, Hizbollah and certainly the Palestinians on the West Bank – are far more than rhetoric. Some nuclear analysts in the United States believe that Washington could come to terms with a nuclear-armed Iran, should that be Tehran’s ultimate aim; for Israel, such an outcome is simply not acceptable.

The second piece of evidence enters here, namely a range of reports suggesting that Iran has gone much further than previously believed in protecting its nuclear facilities.  The reports centre on news of a new nuclear plant being constructed inside a mountain near the holy city of Qom (see William J. Broad, “Iran Shielding Its Nuclear Efforts in Maze of Tunnels”, New York Times, 6 January 2010).

The argument is being made that the Qom development – news of which follows Iran’s admission in September 2009 that it is building a uranium-enrichment plant inside a mountain near Qom – is just one of many of this type; that a programme of systematic protection of sensitive sites has been operating for several years; and that these are sufficiently robust to greatly diminish the likely success of any air-strikes.  The reports do not explicitly claim that the diverse sites are clearly linked to a nuclear-weapons (as distinct from a civil nuclear-power) programme, but the implication is that they are, and that they’re intended as a form of deterrence.

It is impossible to verify these reports. What can be said is that Iran has huge experience in tunnel-engineering, not least in carving road-and-rail routes through mountainous terrain, as well as the construction of subway-systems in three cities (Tehran, Isfahan and Shiraz).  Some of the world’s leading tunnelling-contractors, including Germany’s Herrenknecht, have offices in Tehran. President Ahmadinejad himself, a transport engineer by profession, was in 1998 a co-founder of the Iranian Tunnelling Association.

Iran has, therefore, the capability to protect sensitive facilities and there is a fair amount of evidence that it has done so. Any kind of nuclear development is seen in the country as a powerful symbol of modernity (and is to that extent popular); and the risk of an attack on nuclear facilities, even if they are not weapons-related, makes protection a high priority for the authorities.

Indeed, if as is probable Iran did embark on a scheme some years ago to develop a major civil-nuclear programme that could also give it the potential to “break out” into nuclear weapons, then its thinking from the start would have been that an Israeli military assault was at some point likely.  From that early point it would have made eminent sense to focus intense efforts on extremely strong protection of selected facilities; indeed it would be a sign of political and technical incompetence not to have done so.

It is still feasible that Iran is not actually engaged in developing nuclear weapons but is determined to maintain that option. Merely to do this in a survivable way, however, would require sophisticated levels of protection. The latter would be far better provided by tunnelling into mountains than digging deep holes and covering facilities with substantial layers of concrete, earth and rock. The latter option would leave facilities vulnerable to attack by the 2.3-tonne GBU-28 “bunker-busting” bomb available to the Israelis; whereas such a weapon would have little if any effect on deep tunnels other than to wreck entrances (and even this risk can easily be countered by dummy entrances and other technical tricks).

The US air force has for some years funded the development of a far more powerful system, the 13.6-tonne GBU-57A/B Massive Ordnance Penetrator (MOP). The first of these are due to be deployed later this year, though there are no indications whatsoever that they will be made available to the Israelis (see “MOPping Up: The USA’s 30,000 Pound Bomb”, Defense Industry Daily, 22 December 2009). In any event, if Iran has created deeply buried facilities within mountains, even the GBU-57 would have little effect.

The hard choice

The logic of the foregoing is that even if Iran has not yet decided to divert into a nuclear-weapons programme, there is a strong risk of an Israeli attack – but that Iran’s leadership will be confident that a raid would leave important parts of any programme intact. Moreover, Iran’s elite could respond to an attack from the middle-east’s only nuclear-weapons power by withdrawing from the non-proliferation treaty; mobilising the people around a unifying cause; portraying the country as a regional leader against aggression; and “really” going all-out for nuclear weapons.  The result would be yet more assaults by Israel in subsequent months, with complex political effects across the region in which (for example) the reaction of Arab elites and Arab citizens would be very different.

The long-term consequences of any Israeli operation against Iranian nuclear targets are unpredictable, but probable among them is serious regional instability. Yet where the dominant security paradigm remains fixated on Iran’s nuclear potential, this would not be enough to stop Israel. 

The United States clearly recognises this fact, and the Barack Obama administration – unlike its predecessor – well understands how damaging a war would be. The watchwords of the Washington’s dealings with Tehran in coming months will continue to be caution and patience. It is far less certain that the US president has any serious control over Israel’s plans and calculations. For that reason alone, a crisis remains likely some time in 2010.

Last week saw the start of yet another armed anti-government revolt in South Sudan’s Jonglei state.  Reportedly led by Murle militia leader Major General David Yau Yau, there are now fears that the revolt will escalate as a result of longstanding local grievances with the army of South Sudan, the Sudan People’s Liberation Army (SPLA).

The unrest comes as a result of a widely criticised government-led civilian disarmament campaign in Jonglei state – so-called ‘Operation Restore Peace’ – which was launched after violent clashes between Lou Nuer and Murle communities in January. Carried out by the SPLA, with an additional 15,000 soldiers and 5,000 members of the South Sudan Police Service, the campaign has been condemned by the United Nations Mission in South Sudan and groups such as Human Rights Watch for alleged human rights violations including killings; allegations of torture, simulated drowning and beatings; rape and attempted rape; and abductions. On October 3rd, Amnesty International issued a press statement calling on the government to take immediate action to end these reported human rights violations, launching a new report ‘Lethal Disarmament’ which highlights abuses in Pibor County of Jonglei State.

Not for the first time, the Government of South Sudan’s  civilian disarmament initiative has failed to improve security in South Sudan. In 2006, as described by the Human Security Baseline Assessment at Small Arms Survey, the SPLA’s forcible civilian disarmament operation in northern Jonglei State succeeded in collecting 3,000 weapons from the local community. However, as a result of the campaign’s focus on the Lou Nuer community and martial and poorly planned approach, as well as a lack of subsequent security guarantees for the community, heavy fighting ensued and more than 1,600 people were killed.

In 2008, Interim President  of Southern Sudan, Salva Kiir issued a decree to start a six month disarmament period across the country. Conducted by the SPLA, the aim of the operation was to get all civilians to surrender their weapons in a peaceful manner, although ‘appropriate force’ could be used. However, as operational logistics were not outlined after the decree, a lack of centralised strategy resulted in various outcomes and in many places, an increased sense of insecurity. For example, in Lakes State local police had their weapons confiscated and weapons searches became violent as reportedly drunken soldiers stole from people’s homes.

Thus far, civilian disarmament operations in South Sudan have done little to increase long term security. After decades of war, small arms and light weapons are notoriously rife in the young country, but attempts to solve this problem by confiscating these weapons does little to deal with the root causes of insecurity and communities’ need for self-protection.  Small Arms Survey estimates that prior to the interim separation of Sudan and South Sudan after the Comprehensive Peace Agreement in 2005, there were between 1.9 and 3.2 million small arms in circulation, with about two-thirds of these in civilian hands.  While these weapons come from a number of sources – including the SPLA during the Second Civil War – it is also important to understand why civilians feel they must arm themselves.

South Sudan’s severe underdevelopment, lack of infrastructure – with only 300km of paved road  – seasonal floods, and subsequent lack of service provision and security capacity, means that there is a considerable absence of established security services across the country.  Persistent, and often deadly, cattle raiding and escalating inter-communal armed conflict between groups such as the Lou Nuer and Murle in Jonglei State leave individuals and communities to seek ways to protect themselves and their property. Subsequently, informal community security structures are common; ranging from community initiatives to groups such as the Lou Nuer’s ‘White Army’, which was originally formed to protect cattle and now constitutes a major threat to Murle communities in Jonglei. In effect, the Government’s inability to ensure security at the community level means that groups are forced to take matters into their own hands, often challenging the state’s right to a monopoly of violence because of a lack of confidence in its ability to provide adequate protection.

In current approaches to civilian disarmament, communities are often left in a ‘security vacuum’, without the means to protect themselves from immediate security threats but without any guarantees that even short term immediate security assistance will be provided.  This state of vulnerability in turn leads to community backlashes, rapid re-arming or attempts not to turn weapons in.

As stated in a report by Saferworld in February 2012, ‘on its own, civilian disarmament does virtually nothing to address the factors fuelling demand and supply of these weapons, which requires a much more complex and long-term strategy.’  Reducing and managing the proliferation of civilian use of small arms and light weapons will require the Government of South Sudan to create a holistic strategy that addresses the demand for weapons as well as their supply. As has been proven in efforts until now, addressing the single issue of weapons supply without dealing with the underlying need for guns undermines attempts to decrease proliferation of small arms and light weapons. A government strategy would necessarily address structural issues, including the state’s capacity to provide professional security services that can be relied upon for protection, such that communities feel safe from immediate threats.

In no small measure, this will involve degrees of security sector reform, particularly with focused training on civilian interaction and ethnic impartiality in operations if the army is to be used for future operations. As the latest Amnesty report demands, the Government must ‘provide security forces carrying out civilian disarmament with the necessary training and resources to enable them to have a clear understanding of how to carry out disarmament in accordance with international human rights standards’. This must also include measures to address the structural issues facilitating civilian arms possession, including sales of weapons to civilians by government security forces because of lack of pay and porous regional borders that allow illicit trade. Such augmentation of basic infrastructure and security capacity in South Sudan will take years, and so attempts to reduce proliferation must also include measures to address immediate security threats, in addition to tackling longer term structural, capacity and training issues. 

Civilian disarmament campaigns in South Sudan currently attempt to tackle one of the many symptoms of the country’s militarised post-war society. Instead, these campaigns must be seen as one aspect of an overarching and sustainable disarmament and security sector reform strategy that must be undertaken long term, while ensuring that the immediate security of communities is safeguarded and that their need for weapons to protect themselves is adequately addressed and reduced. 

Image Source: ENOUGH Project

 A gap continues to exist between the international community’s rhetoric about conflict prevention and its responsibility to protect people from severe human rights violations. The record of human misery caused by violent conflict is testimony to the chronic lack of political will to respond collectively to new and emerging threats to peace. The ineffectiveness of many global efforts at preventive diplomacy is evidence that traditional diplomatic approaches, including the use of force, simply may not work.

Article source: East West Institute

Image source: AfghanistanMatters

Over the next few decades, the increasing demand for resources and the pressures of climate change are going to force some rapid and potentially difficult decisions on the role of energy in the global economy. While many governments are now taking seriously the need to think about ‘energy security’ few have engaged with the full set of questions raised about current energy policies by the need to move to a low-carbon economy in the first half of this century.

A useful exercise has been undertaken by the Institute for the Future in terms of exploring a number of scenarious that could come to characterise our political, social and economic systems depending on the energy choices we make today.

The Reinventing Energy Futures: Four Visions Map developed by the Institute is “an invitation to explore four corners of possibility for the future of energy. It is a tool to make connections across a broad array of action domains where control over our resources will play out. In the difficult to forecast field of energy futures, where data and projection models often clash and expertise runs deep and narrow, this map is a way to frame new actions.”

While the document’s design aesthetic may not be everyone’s cup of tea (as if sustainablesecurity.org is a thing of style and beauty!) the issues raised and the way the different visions are mapped out makes for interesting reading and challenges us to think carefully about where future energy demand fits in our attempts at achieving a sustainable security today.  

The Reinventing Energy Futures: Four Visions Map can be accessed here.

 Image source: Ulleskelf. 

Above all, the UK government’s new Strategic Defence and Security Review (SDSR) confirms the intention to retain and then replace the UK’s nuclear weapons, though the final decision has been put off until 2016.[1] David Cameron thus confirmed to parliament that he will be ‘steaming through’ with the decision on the initial design phase for replacing Trident this year.[2] The SDSR also announces warhead reductions and so-called ‘value for money’ measures, packaged to make Britain appear as if it were a ‘responsible’ nuclear state, contributing to ‘multilateral disarmament’ whilst reducing costs for the taxpayer.[3] Such mythmaking must be resisted. Firstly, because Trident can never be ‘value for money’ as it is has no value- military or otherwise- yet currently costs over £2 billion a year to run, whilst at least £700 million will be spent over the next five years on its replacement.[4] Trident thus not only takes money away from education- at a time when universities are facing 40% cuts to their teaching budgets and the NHS- expected to find £20 billion in savings by 2014, but makes the world a far more dangerous place.[5]

The only way the UK can act responsibly as a nuclear weapon state is by realising its legally-binding obligations to scrap all its nuclear weapons and begin negotiations on a global abolition treaty, as required by the nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty (NPT). States without nuclear weapons argue that unless states with nuclear weapons- such as the UK- continue to resist their commitments under the NPT and put off making serious advances towards the total elimination of their arsenals, nuclear weapons will, inevitably, spread. Brazilian diplomat Orlando Ribeiro therefore points out that reductions in the number of nuclear weapons alone will ‘not lead to disarmament because qualitative arms races will continue’.[6] Look, for instance, at how the UK spends billions on construction programmes at AWEs Aldermaston and Burghfield, enabling the testing, design and construction of a successor warhead.[7]

In order to explain why the UK continues to cling on to Trident- a Cold War relic with no military utility- which wastes billions in a time of austerity, we must consider Trident’s political significance within the US-NATO military alliance. This will enable us to evaluate the potential for the UK to move away from the failed policies of yesteryear and towards a foreign policy based on disarmament, diplomacy and sustainable security.

What’s stopping the UK from disarming?

Baroness Shirley Williams, a Lib Dem peer, enthusiastically welcomed the SDSR, arguing that the UK ‘is now leading the nuclear powers (P5) towards disarmament, essential to a more secure and less dangerous world’.[8] The first half of this statement is surely an exaggeration- designed to develop a feel-good-factor about the UK taking such limited measures whilst vindicating Lib Dem policy. Still, by casting disarmament and diplomacy- not military prowess- as a means by which the UK can act responsibly and show leadership, Williams indicates a potential new global role for Britain.

This is especially relevant now given that, according to the new National Security Strategy, the UK faces ‘no major state threat at present and no existential threat to our security, freedom or prosperity.’[9] Furthermore, the UK’s armed forces are apparently no longer capable, following SDSR defence cuts, of launching overseas missions on the scale of Afghanistan or Iraq.[10] So the Lib Dems, who have a good track record of opposing Trident and supporting a Nuclear Weapons Convention (NWC) – a global treaty which would ban nuclear weapons permanently and ensure their elimination- should be encouraged to continue speaking out.

However, the idea that Britain, given its current military and political alliances, could ‘lead’ on disarmament is persuasively questioned by George Monbiot. In an article reflecting on the government’s addiction to nuclear weapons, Monbiot argues that the one force that could finally ‘kill’ Trident is the US. For only once the US has begun to dismantle its (over 9,600) nuclear weapons and ‘ordered’ the UK to follow suit would such disarmament occur.[11] Recalcitrant parliamentary and public opinion in the UK (54% of whom now want to scrap Trident) thus ‘counts for nothing’.[12] One could also add world public opinion into this formulation, given that a global abolition treaty has the support of two-thirds of all governments and members of the public everywhere.[13]

US intransigence in the face of repeated international calls to disarm was exemplified by remarks made by Assistant Secretary of State for Arms Control, Verification and Compliance Rose Gottemoeller’s October speech to the UN’s First Committee on Disarmament. Gottemoeller referred to the idea of beginning negotiations on a NWC now as ‘an impractical leap’.[14] Moreover, whilst Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton profess to want a world without nuclear weapons, they state that ‘this may not be achieved in our lifetime or successive lifetimes’.[15]

Yet, in a June House of Lords debate, Baroness Williams correctly drew attention to the fact that, at the 2010 NPT Review Conference, ‘the great bulk of non-nuclear powers decided to press for a nuclear weapons convention to abolish nuclear weapons completely by 2025’. In response, a Conservative spokesperson echoed the US position in stating that ‘a whole series of things need to be done before one comes to the happy situation where the nuclear world is disarmed and a convention could then get full support. If we try to rush to a convention first of all, we might end up delaying the detailed work that is needed on the path to get there’.[16] The baleful logic expressed here can be summarised as- ‘we can only negotiate a treaty prohibiting nuclear weapons once they’ve been eliminated’. Following the final document of the 2010 NPT, which recognised the importance of an NWC as endorsed in the UN Secretary General’s five-point plan for disarmament, one might have hoped that nuclear weapon states would have taken their responsibilities to the international community- and international law- more seriously.[17]

Perhaps one reason why the US and UK seem incapable of doing so, is that, whilst some in elite circles may genuinely believe nuclear disarmament to be desirable, its realisation is incompatible with another, much more deeply entrenched idea within the psyche of the powerful- an idea repeated by Hillary Clinton in a September speech to the Council on Foreign Relations- that the ‘United States can, must, and will lead in this new century’.[18] Thus behind Obama’s surface rhetoric of ‘change’, conventional Western thinking is still based on narrow, exclusive security concerns- the US ‘control paradigm’.[19] So, as Tariq Ali observes, whilst Obama is perceived as a break with the depredations of the Bush administration ‘only the mood music has changed’.[20]

A subservient or independent foreign policy?

Baroness Williams is a member of the Top Level Group of Parliamentarians for nuclear Non-Proliferation and Disarmament, which also contains several former defence ministers.[21] The Top Level Group believes that UK and European statespersons can have an impact internationally, by persuading US Senators that they should ratify treaties such as the Comprehensive Test Ban Treaty (CTBT) – which the UK and France ratified in 1998- as part of a step-by-step approach to disarmament. At present, however, getting even common sense legislation such as the bilateral US-Russian Strategic Arms Reduction Treaty (START) – seen as the necessary precursor to CTBT ratification- through the Senate is a painfully slow process, producing conservative and even retrograde agreements.

Any residual ambition the Obama administration had of accelerating disarmament has thus been stymied by reactionary vested interests keen to hamper the Democrats before the November mid-term elections and ensure investment and jobs in their constituencies’ military-industrial complexes (some of which are Democratic) are preserved. This has led to Obama’s recent call for $80 billion to upgrade the US’s nuclear arms complex (described as the largest funding request since the Cold War) and the planned investment, over the next decade, of ‘well over $100 billion in nuclear delivery systems’.[22]

In this ultra-partisan atmosphere, any voices of sanity to counteract the bullying and obstruction of the far-right are welcome. The Top Level Group thus employs political common sense (relevant to its incrementalist logic) by turning their diplomatic skills to face the US Congress. Their strategy appears to be based on the idea that even small moves in the US nuclear weapons posture- from longstanding recidivism to glacial disarmament- will enable the UK to act. Witness, for example, the speed with which Foreign Secretary William Hague fell into line following the US announcing its 2010 Nuclear Posture Review. Hague revealed for the first time the size of the UK’s nuclear arsenal whilst, in the SDSR, the UK gave an assurance that it ‘will not use or threaten to use nuclear weapons against non-nuclear weapons states parties to the NPT’.[23]

Yet, as Peter Burt points out, because the assurance ‘would not apply to any state in material breach of those non-proliferation obligations’ this ‘potentially leaves out states such as North Korea and Iran’. As with the US’s own new declaratory posture, this assurance may be revoked ‘if future threats or proliferation of nuclear weapons make it necessary to do so’. [24] For Zia Mian, the crucial question- applicable to both the US and UK- is therefore, who determines whether a non-nuclear weapon state is in compliance with its obligations or not? Judging by the US’s responses to such questions, Mian concludes that the answer to this question is ‘the US alone’, whilst reserving itself the right to enforce its decision militarily, in total violation of the UN Charter.[25]

This understanding of the US-UK power dynamic- the infamously one-sided ‘special relationship’- is an unquestioned, and perhaps unquestionable, fact of life for many MPs. Former defence minister Eric Joyce, reflecting on Ed Miliband’s position on Trident replacement at Labour’s annual conference, thus argued that Britain currently has no independent foreign policy and is simply locked into ‘US electoral cycles’.[26] Similarly, former Secretary of State for Defence Des Browne has commented that members of the Western alliance will only taken action on nuclear weapons when the US has told them what to do.[27] The British elite are quite aware of the damage being done by such servility, but tend to only venture honest appraisals when talking to themselves. Thus Douglas Hurd, the former Foreign Secretary, giving evidence in 2009 to the Foreign Affairs Committee, argued that Tony Blair’s ‘subservience’ to the US over Iraq ran against British national interests.[28]

Hurd’s description here chimes with Mark Curtis’s analysis that rather than being a ‘poodle’ the UK has become ‘willingly subservient’ and now freely chooses to support US actions. Curtis argues that a change occurred under Tony Blair, whereby Britain became ‘in its major foreign policies’ largely a ‘US client state while its military has become an effective US proxy force’.[29] With regards to Trident it has been conclusively demonstrated that the UK’s nuclear weapons absolutely depend on continued US technical and political support so that, in Blair’s own words, it is ‘inconceivable we would use our nuclear deterrent alone, without the US’.[30]

The debate preceding the publication of the SDSR sheds some light on how British servility is playing out regarding Trident replacement. In September, a leaked letter from Defence Secretary Liam Fox to David Cameron expressed grave concerns over the cuts facing the UK military budget, expected to be around 10-20%. The eventual reduction was a mere 8%- so that Britain still has the fourth largest defence budget in the world.[31] Just days after the MoD leak, Fox reported back from a meeting with US Defense Secretary Robert Gates that ‘Britain would keep the deterrent and other capabilities valued by Washington’. Gates was also reported as saying that the US wanted Britain to keep its deterrent as it did not want ‘sole responsibility’ for providing a nuclear umbrella to NATO countries.[32] Fox used all his cunning to make this helpful US opinion known as pressure was building on the MoD from the public and civil society to include Trident in the SDSR and from the Treasury to make deep cuts to its budget. Following this, Hillary Clinton herself waded in on the argument, stating that the US was ‘worried’ about the UK’s planned defence cuts- primarily because it appeared that defence spending could fall below NATO’s required standard of 2% of GDP.[33]

Who’s in favour of disarming NATO?

If we are to understand why senior US politicians feel so compelled to pronounce on the internal budgetary affairs of a foreign country, it is therefore imperative that we turn to the politics of NATO. NATO is presently preparing its new, ultra-secretive, strategic concept. German representatives are pushing for nuclear disarmament to be given a prominent place in the final document. Germany is currently home to an estimated 20 NATO nukes, with the rest of NATO’s European 180 B-61 thermonuclear-gravity bombs based in Belgium, Italy, the Netherlands and Turkey.[34] According to a 2006 opinion poll, almost 70% of people in European countries that currently host US nuclear weapons want a Europe free of nuclear weapons.[35] The New York Times reports that Germany’s call for disarmament has not gone down well in Paris, which opposes NATO ‘having any role or influence in disarmament issues, fearing that it could undermine France’s sovereignty’.[36]

Britain- whose own NATO/US nuclear weapons were silently withdrawn between 1996 and 2008 has, meanwhile, declined to comment on the matter.[37] Fascinatingly, at the same time as Berlin has been trying to extricate itself from the nuclear balance of terror (for example, by retiring its Tornado fighter jets, and instead deploying the Eurofighter, which can’t carry B-61s) it is reported that Paris and London have begun serious discussions about sharing nuclear submarine patrols and testing facilities.[38] The need to consider such moves on the part of France, and more particularly the UK, is clearly more pressing now given the parlous state of their finances, whilst circumventing CTBT obligations. By sharing the burden of having to constantly deploy nuclear submarines at sea, the old enemies will save on the costs of building and maintenance.

Perhaps more importantly, Germany’s disarmament initiatives will be resisted and the US- who enjoys the additional international legitimacy that is conferred by its allies remaining nuclear-armed- will be appeased. The famous phrase, attributed to Lord Ismay, NATO’s first Secretary General, that the alliance was founded to ‘keep the Russians out, the Germans down, and the Americans in’ remains salient. These days, of course, China is also handy for justifying NATO expansion and, if we listen to our Prime Minister, Trident replacement.[39]

In his first speech as Labour leader, Ed Miliband disavowed the invasion of Iraq (but not the NATO-led occupation of Afghanistan) and spoke of how ‘this generation wants to change our foreign policy so that it’s always based on values, not just alliances’.[40] Trident’s cost to the British people is clear- £100 billion over its lifetime- its value, at a time of massive and ‘regressive’ public spending cuts, is also clear.[41] Trident should therefore be the first cut made by this government. The problem is that those in power who do value Trident, value it because they value highly the US-led NATO alliance. If Ed Miliband, or any other British leader, acted as if Britain were a sovereign nation in its foreign policy and scrapped Trident, the UK’s role as the ‘spear-carrier for pax Americana’ would immediately be called into question.[42] But by scrapping Trident and supporting a Nuclear Weapons Convention, the UK would find a new role as a leader for disarmament and diplomacy, helping to create new international political constituencies alongside the 130 nations who want a global abolition treaty, and a more secure and equitable world, now.

(by Tim Street, Coordinator, ICAN-UK, with thanks to Alicia Dressman)

About the author: Tim Street is Coordinator with ICAN-UK

Image source: Duncan~

The post-Rio +20 discussion has focused a great deal on trade-offs between the global environment and the global economy. This sort of thinking obscures the extent to which global trends like increasing competition over scarce resources not only threatens both national and human security but actually threatens long-term economic stability as well. In an interview for the Woodrow Wilson Center, explorer and a co-founder of Earth Eco International, Alexandra Cousteau explains how this relates to the global use of water.

The New Security Beat blog, a project of the Woodrow Wilson Center which emphasises the connections between population, health and environment policies for global security, have picked up on the importance of this issue at a time of continuing global economic crisis. The false trade-off between environmental sustainability and economic recovery was reflected in the Rio+20 talks. While the talks produced a laudable outcome document on “The Future We Want” which calls for “integrated and sustainable management of natural resources and ecosystems that supports, inter alia, economic, social and human development” very little of substance on the most pressing environmental and development issues emerged from the meeting. The talks were by and large overshadowed by economic crises in Europe and elsewhere with the predictable result that short-term and competitive impulses outweighed long-term and strategic discussions.

Alexandra Cousteau’s interview highlights that a healthy economy is dependent upon sustainable approaches to resources such as fresh water supplies. One of the key reasons for this is that increased competition over water creates insecurity of many different kinds (sometimes with the potential for conflict) – and this is never good news for growth and development.

The full New Security Beat article with an excerpt from Alexandra Cousteau’s interview is available here.

Image source: Oxfam International.

In her seminal 1987 text, Bananas, Beaches and Bases, Cynthia Enloe directs the reader’s attention to the realm of international politics and asks the question “where are the women?”. One might reasonably be expected to answer – they are everywhere. From the political economy, in which women comprise 80% of the global factory workforce and unpaid female domestic labour is estimated to contribute up to 35% of global

GDP, to modern warfare, a theatre wherein the majority of victims are women, gender is centrally implicated in the machinations of the international system. The emergence of critical theory and the encroachment of feminist scholarship into the mainstream International Relations (IR) discourse, along with the ratification of resolution 1325 by the United Nations Security Council in 2000, have gone some way toward highlighting the position of women within the international security framework. And yet, the theoretical perspectives which dominate security studies, specifically realism and neo-realism, have been accused of approaching the study of IR “through a male eye and apprehended by a male sensibility”, neglecting the gender variable. Indeed, out of five thousand articles in the top five security journals, fewer than forty addressed gender issues as an independent theme.

It is the opinion of the author that traditional approaches to security have underestimated, or ignored the role played by gender in international relations. As a result, the existence of gender based hierarchies has been obscured, marginalising the unique security concerns of women.

The narrative will be divided into two constituent parts. Firstly, it will examine the gendered dimensions of states and the state system relating this to the exclusion of women from the domestic and international security discourse. Section two will look at the way in which this impacts on women’s experience of security and insecurity, with reference in particular to violence and conflict.

Read the full article here.

Image source: jrseles

Governments around the world must be prepared for mass migrations caused by rising global temperatures or face the possibility of calamitous results, say University of Florida scientists on a research team reporting in the Oct. 28 edition of Science.

If global temperatures increase by only a few of degrees by 2100, as predicted by the U.N. Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, people around the world will be forced to migrate. But transplanting populations from one location to another is a complicated proposition that has left millions of people impoverished in recent years. The researchers say that a word of caution is in order and that governments should take care to understand the ramifications of forced migration.

A consortium of 12 scientists from around the world, including two UF researchers, gathered last year at the Rockefeller Foundation’s Bellagio Center to review 50 years of research related to population resettlement following natural disasters or the installation of infrastructure development projects such as dams and pipelines. The group determined that resettlement efforts in the past have left communities in ruin, and that policy makers need to use lessons from the past to protect people who are forced to relocate because of climate change.

“The effects of climate change are likely to be experienced by as many people as disasters,” UF anthropologist Anthony Oliver-Smith said. “More people than ever may be moving in response to intense storms, increased flooding and drought that makes living untenable in their current location.”

Article Source: University of Florida. “Governments must plan for migration in response to climate change, researchers say.” ScienceDaily, 27 Oct. 2011. Web. 1 Nov. 2011.

“Sometimes the problem is simply a lack of regard for the people ostensibly in the way of progress,” said Oliver-Smith, an emeritus professor who has researched issues surrounding forced migration for more than 30 years. But resettlements frequently fail because the complexity of the task is underestimated. “Transplanting a population and its culture from one location to another is a complex process — as complicated as brain surgery,” he said.

“It’s going to be a matter of planning ahead now,” said Burt Singer, a courtesy faculty member at the UF Emerging Pathogens Institute who worked with the research group. He too has studied issues related to population resettlement for decades.

Singer said that regulatory efforts promoted by the International Finance Corporation, the corporate lending arm of the World Bank, are helping to ensure the well-being of resettled communities in some cases. But as more people are relocated — especially very poor people with no resources — financing resettlement operations in the wake of a changing climate could become a real challenge.

Planning and paying for resettlement is only part of the challenge, Oliver-Smith said. “You need informed, capable decision makers to carry out these plans,” he said. A lack of training and information can derail the best-laid plans. He said the World Bank increasingly turns to anthropologists to help them evaluate projects and outcomes of resettlement.

“It is a moral imperative,” Oliver-Smith said. Also, a simple cost-benefit analysis shows that doing resettlement poorly adds to costs in the future. Wasted resources and the costs of malnutrition, declining health, infant and elder mortality, and the destruction of families and social networks should be included in the total cost of a failed resettlement, he said.

Oliver-Smith said the cautionary tales of past failures yield valuable lessons for future policy makers, namely because they point out many of the potential pitfalls than can beset resettlement projects. But they also underscore the fact that there is a heavy price paid by resettled people, even in the best-case scenarios.

In the coming years, he said, many projects such as hydroelectric dams and biofuel plantations will be proposed in the name of climate change, but moving people to accommodate these projects may not be the simple solution that policy makers sometimes assume.

A clear-eyed review of the true costs of forced migration could alert governments to the complexities and risks of resettlement.

“If brain surgeons had the sort of success rate that we have had with resettling populations, very few people would opt for brain surgery,” he said.

Article Source: University of Florida. “Governments must plan for migration in response to climate change, researchers say.” ScienceDaily, 27 Oct. 2011. Web. 1 Nov. 2011.

In a small village along the waters of Lake Turkana in northwestern Kenya, two fishermen were murdered last month as they were putting out their nets.

A cascade of retaliatory violence between the Kenyan Turkana and Ethiopian Daasanach (sometimes called Merille) has led to the deaths of at least four Ethiopians and 20 Kenyans ethnic groups, though some Kenyan government officials place the toll as high as 69, according to the Kenya-based Daily Nation. Though the fighting has been localized, it has put pressure on both nations to deal with strife between nomadic groups who are competing for diminishing resources.

Both groups are traditionally pastoral nomads living within the Elemi Triangle—a once disputed area between Kenya, Sudan, and Ethiopia—which has dry pastureland, historically used by both the Turkana and the Daasanach, as well as the Didinga, Toposa, and Inyangatom (also called the Dong’iro) communities.

The Turkana live in northwestern Kenya, making up 2.5 percent of the national population, or close to a million people, according to the 2009 Kenyan census. The Daasanach primarily reside in southern Ethiopia and make up less than 1 percent of the national population, or around 50,000. More recently, the Daasanach have lost significant portions of their lands and animals—in part due to climate change—and have become more agropastoral in nature.

Citing Joseph Nanok, Kenya’s forestry assistant minister, the Daily Nation reported that the traditional border between the Turkana and Daasanach people was located at the Omo River Delta, which flows into Kenya’s Lake Turkana from Ethiopia. This border, however, has been moving south due to receding waters.

According to The Christian Science Monitor, the Daasanach have begun increasingly cultivating the land and fishing the waters of the River Omo-Lake Turkana Delta, where they compete with the Kenyan Turkana people for both land and water resources.

Thus, not surprisingly, the recent attacks coincide with the settlement of an estimated 900 armed militia and 2,500 Ethiopian civilians on Kenyan territory around Lake Turkana. The Kenyan government has made claims that these illegal immigrants have taken control of 10 Kenyan villages and has vowed to send them back to Ethiopia, according to the Daily Nation.

Though this appears to be a territorial dispute, it can be, at least partially, attributed to the sharing of stressed water resources.

“Water exacerbates current tensions,” Aaron Wolf—a leading researcher on global water conflict and resolution and a professor at Oregon State University—told Circle of Blue. “It is very hard to separate a water conflict from a land conflict from an economic conflict, because water is tied to everything we do.”

Wolf’s research team conducted a five-year study about the causes of water conflicts and concluded that there are two major factors that play a role:

• The rate of change within a water basin. Scarcity, economic growth, and population growth can all affect the availability of water resources.
• The institutional capacity of the region; what Wolf calls “the human systems built to mitigate the change.”

It is also important to define a conflict, since people’s interests frequently conflict, while violence is much more rare, Wolf added.

“If someone builds a dam and negotiates with all of the people affected, there probably won’t be a conflict,” Wolf said. “Conflict occurs if there is sudden, rapid change [to the water resource] and an absence of institutional capacity…As you drop in scale, the likelihood of violence increases. Whereas two countries will rarely go to war over water, you see tribal violence quite often, or two farmers who will shoot at each other.”

However, Wolf stressed that, although water can be a source for tension, it can also be the catalyst for creative, peaceful solutions.

“Water brings focus on settings that are stressful, but that same focus is used to create treaties and negotiations—even between people who don’t like each other very much,” he said. “There is a rich history of stakeholders coming together. When countries do anything about water, cooperation outnumbers conflict two to one.”

For more information on water conflicts across the globe, see the Pacific Institute’s Water Conflict Chronology database.

Image source: Aocrane

Article source: Circle of Blue

The link between volatility in financial markets and volatility in energy prices is poorly understood. Nevertheless, it is possible to understand certain aspects of the relationship between the two. First, we know that as cheap and easy access to conventional fossil fuel supplies diminishes due to rapidly rising demand in the majority world, the process of extracting resources from remaining reserves (or ‘provinces’) is prone to what the Industry Taskforce on Peak Oil and Energy Security has called ‘peaky behaviour’. The so-called peaky behaviour of lesser-known provinces is erratic and naturally less predictable than the usual behaviour of known provinces. This matters a lot in the case of oil extraction, as price stability in oil markets is predicated on understanding and making informed guesses about the rate at which oil can be brought to market.

As access to predictable supply declines and new sources are sought offshore in the deep seas, among Arctic ice or onshore in untapped kerogen rock, the ability of retailers and speculators to understand the oil market is hindered by an added layer of uncertainty. Experimenting with new methods of extracting oil lacks a historical track record, which normally provides a more stable framework for making sound decisions about supply and demand management – decisions which oil companies, traders and regulators are usually adept at making. Industry professionals must now cope with attempts to acquire a more nuanced understanding of the impact which erratic rates of extraction can have on oil markets. They must also cope indirectly with volatility in consumer demand for oil-based products.

Financing an oil shock?
Volatility in financial markets, due to unsustainable lending practices and the rise in use of exotic trading instruments, affects consumer demand for everyday products, particularly in oil-importing nations such as the United States and Britain. Because oil is the lifeblood of the modern industrial economy on which all businesses in the supply chain depend, when oil prices increase, so too do the prices of mainstay consumer goods. In the West, we are dependent on our thriving oil-driven economies, where the transport of goods and services are very closely linked to oil prices. So when global oil prices rise or fall, foreign and domestic businesses transfer the added costs downstream to consumers who feel the impact. Or, in cases where the added expense cannot be borne by consumers, businesses may either attempt to reduce wages or absorb the price shocks internally, which can lead to downsizing and layoffs. When the prices of consumer goods increase, we also use more of our income to pay for oil-derived products, and as a result our spending on other goods and services declines. This means that demand for many types of non-essential goods and services drops, including holiday travel, dining out, new cars, computers and more expensive homes. These impacts have a compound effect on prospects for a speedy economic recovery, making it more difficult for growth to be restored post-crisis and threatening longer-term stability.

Betting on volatility
It may be a coincidence that at the height of the most recent stock market crash in July 2008, oil prices skyrocketed to $147 dollars per barrel. However, it wouldn’t seem so on the basis of an article in the Guardian published one month earlier, in which billionaire hedge fund manager George Soros , predicted that the price of oil had become a bubble that could trigger a stock market crash. On 3 June, Soros informed the US Senate commerce committee that oil had been ‘pushed to its $135 a barrel mark’ – at that time a record high – by a ‘new wave of speculators’. Soros claimed that the doubling in the price of oil from 2006-08 was partly due to investment institutions, such as pension funds, channelling money into indexes that link to the cost of crude. Soros proceeded to warn the committee that, “there could be very serious consequences for global stock markets if the institutions suddenly began betting on a fall in the oil price.” Finally, he compared the speculative pressures being forced by institutional investors on oil prices in 2008 with the stock market crash of 1987, which was partly caused by a sudden rush of money into portfolio insurance – which institutions used to hedge themselves against a fall in share prices. According to Soros, institutional investors have been engaged in propping up one side of the market so as to give them sufficient weight to unbalance it if so decided. “If the trend were reversed and the institutions as a group headed for the exit as they did in 1987 there would be a crash”, he said.

A more recent example of energy market manipulation on a regional scale is that of Barclays’ involvement in manipulating California power markets. The U.S. Federal Energy Regulatory Commission has recently proposed a total $470 million fine on Barclays for its actions – the largest ever by the agency – revealed partly on the basis of communications by four traders at Barclays’ West Coast power desk. The trading activity allegedly took place over two years from late 2006, in which the team exchanged messages explaining how they would ‘crap on’ prices in one market in order to profit in another. The traders stand accused of having wilfully manipulated energy prices, i.e. ‘driving up or down physical power prices to make money with their financial swap positions’. Their actions, if proven true, may have resulted in losses for other traders amounting to $139 million, netting Barclays gains upwards of $34.9 million.

Unsustainable finance and the threat to energy security?
The critical importance of predictable access to reliable energy supplies to meet electricity and fuel demand have been well documented in previous articles published by SustainableSecurity.org contributors. Economic recession, while potentially offsetting oil demand, could stand to make diminishing supplies last longer, buying time for other alternative clean energy sources to comprise a wider portion of overall generation. But economic recession also has another more subtle impact on energy production – it rattles investor confidence in innovative technologies that might otherwise stand to make oil-dependent economies more energy secure. Currently, a hot debate is raging in the UK and US on the future of conventional oil and gas, as well as nuclear energy, in curbing global demand for fossil fuels. This added uncertainty deters renewable energy investments while forecasts for economic recovery remain dismal. General volatility in financial markets, fuelled by irresponsible lending and trading practices, has an effect on oil prices as well, which further stifles economic growth. While the complexity of global markets demands wider investigation into the causes and effects of finance in relation to oil prices, evidence of market manipulation is unsettling. A sustainable and secure future, where a wider energy mix has been developed to meet rising demand, will no doubt require a more sustainable financial system which can service the real needs of citizens.

Phillip Bruner is Founder of the Green Investment Forum and a guest lecturer in global political economy at the University of Edinburgh
 

Image source: Heatingoil

Amongst the online flurry of activity and debate over the Invisible Children video campaign to make the Ugandan war criminal Joseph Kony ‘famous’ in 2012, Al Jazeera have published an interesting op-ed piece on the dangers of the Kony 2012 campaign adding to the growing militarisation of Uganda.

It is written by Adam Branch who is a senior research fellow at the Makerere Institute of Social Research, Uganda, and an Assistant Professor of Political Science at San Diego State University. Branch argues that the campaign is “not about Uganda, but about America. Uganda is largely just the stage for a debate over the meaning of political activism in the US today.” While this may be true, in itself it is not necessarily a reason be concerned about the effect of the viral video and associated campaign. In principle, positive change can still come about from a social movement regardless of its aims and deep motives (however unlikely this is). The problem that Branch identifies with Kony 2012 is that it is “being used by those in the US government who seek to militarise Africa, to send more and more weapons and military aid, and to bolster the power of states who are US allies.” He argues that “The hunt for Joseph Kony is the perfect excuse for this strategy – how often does the US government find millions of young Americans pleading that they intervene militarily in a place rich in oil and other resources? The US government would be pursuing this militarisation with or without Invisible Children – Kony 2012 just makes it a little easier.”

While all the other issues that have been raised about the campaign (eg. its lack of effect ‘on the ground’ in addressing the reasons and drivers of conflict in Uganda, the hypocrisy of a US citizen-led campaign to bring someone to justice at the International Criminal Court when the US itself still refuses to ratify the Rome Statute etc.) are no doubt important, perhaps it is the issue of militarisation that is least understood but most dangerous over the long-term.

The article suggests a number of ways that people can more effectively engage on this issue so that “in our desire to ameliorate suffering, we must not be complicit in making it worse.”

The full article is available here

Image source: debobhappy

There were many positives in Barrack Obama’s speech to the United Nations on the 24th September. The US President outlined the importance of the UN as an institution and more importantly its function as a forum through which the nations of the world can collectively address shared problems. He reaffirmed America’s commitment to an “era of engagement based on mutual interest and mutual respect” and to seeking “the goal of a world without nuclear weapons”.

However… 

As Joshua Keating points out on his Foreign Policy blog, “it seems telling that President Obama ended his first major address on climate change not with a stirring call to action, but by urging pragmatism and compromise”. Obama’s assertion that “if we are flexible and pragmatic; if we can resolve to work tirelessly in common effort, then we will achieve our common purpose” will certainly ring alarm bells regarding the nature of a US climate bill which may not be comprehensive enough to inspire the required outcome at Copenhagen. For although Obama is correct that nations must address problems collectively, he is equally correct in highlighting the existence of, ” hope that real change is possible and the hope that America will be a leader in bringing about such change.”

The following article from the Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars highlights the uncertainty attached to predicting the effects of climate change. Focusing on the phenomena of glacial lakes in Nepal and Peru, it begins to explore the extreme complexity that characterises the relationship between climate change and other drivers of instability, as well as what is required to manage the risk with the help of local communities.

The article is frank in acknowledging that there is still much that we do not know about glacial lakes and outburst flooding, a knowledge gap that has discouraged risk management; but it concludes that uncertainty is no reason not to take sensible action now, because perfect information could well arrive too late.

Glacial Lake Outburst Floods: “The Threat from Above” – Lessons from Peru to Nepal

By Kate Diamond

“We have never experienced so many potentially dangerous lakes in such a short period of time,” said Alton Byers of The Mountain Institute during a roundtable discussion on glacial melt, glacial lakes, and downstream consequences at the Wilson Center on October 26. “There have always been glacial lake outburst floods,” said Byers. What has changed is how quickly these lakes now grow. “Suddenly, you wake up in the morning, and now there are hundreds and hundreds of these lakes above you – the threat from above,” he said.

Nepal’s Fastest Growing Glacial Lake

The Imja Glacier in Nepal has been receding since the 1960s which has made Imja Lake the fastest growing lake in the country, if not the entire Hindu Kush Himalayas, said Byers in a short film produced by The Mountain Institute (TMI) about the group’s recent expedition to the region (watch below). The lake is now “more than a square kilometer in size, has more than 35 million cubic meters of water, and continues to grow at an alarming 35 meters per year,” he said.

The lake’s terminal moraine – the buildup of glacial debris that acts as a retaining wall holding the lake waters back – is all that keeps Imja from flooding the valley below, home to a number of Sherpa communities and the starting point for many climbers scaling Mount Everest.

When these moraines break, the result is a glacial lake outburst flood (or GLOF). And “these aren’t floods in the normal sense,” said Campbell. “These are floods that carry boulders the size of houses,” because of all the debris that gets lodged in glaciers.

Critical Need for Research

It is tempting to say that what is happening at Imja Lake is representative of the thousands of glacial lakes believed to exist throughout the Himalayas, but the fact is that “at this point in time, we don’t really know that much about these lakes,” or how to control them, said Byers.

Glacial melting “is an extraordinarily complicated story,” said ClimateWire’s Lisa Friedman, who joined the Imja expedition for part of the trip. There is no “clear understanding yet of how fast glaciers are melting, of where they’re melting, of whether greenhouse gases or black carbon soot is primarily responsible.”

There is considerable disagreement over how many glacial lakes are even in the Himalayas, TMI Executive Director Andrew Taber added, simply because of how prohibitively remote their locations often are. Byers explained that it can take as many as 10 days, plus semi-technical climbing, to reach these places, and even then some glaciers still aren’t accessible. The Siachen Glacier, for instance, has the distinction of being the world’s highest battleground (India and Pakistan have had troops stationed on the glacier since 1984).

And yet understanding what is happening not just at Imja, but throughout the Himalayas, has continental implications. Himalayan glaciers feed nine of Asia’s largest rivers: the Yellow, Yangtze, Mekong, Salween, Indus, Ganges, Brahmaputra, Syr Darya, and Amu Darya. Those rivers, in turn, feed some of Asia’s largest population centers. The sheer number of people who depend on these rivers mean that even minor changes in glaciers’ sizes can have exponentially huge impacts downstream.

Adapting Lessons Learned from Peru

The Mountain Institute’s expedition was aimed at bringing lessons learned about managing glacial change from Peru to Nepal. Peru is home to 70 percent of the world’s tropical glaciers, but those glaciers are melting so quickly that some have predicted within 15 years, they could disappear entirely.

Peru has been working to mitigate the threat of glacial melt since 1941, when a GLOF killed thousands and devastated the capital of Ancash, said César Portocarrero of the Peruvian National Water Authority (also a member of the expedition to Imja). At first, risk management meant simply diverting water from glacial lakes to lower the risk of GLOFs. Over time, though, and with community input, that strategy has expanded to include more comprehensive resource management, so that water being diverted from lakes can be captured and put to use downstream.

Just as Peru’s mitigation work is a reflection of local needs, finding a long-term solution for Imja Lake will depend on local involvement. “When you think about science, and when you think about change, there’s something to be said for more demand driven approaches,” Taber said. “Working with local people…is more likely to lead to solutions and answers that will actually be picked up.”

And yet, Byers said, local people have often been marginalized in research on glacial melt in the Himalayas. “There’s been 30 years of research on this and other lakes and yet no researcher has ever involved them in their research, and they had no idea what the results were,” he said. The TMI expedition made a point of incorporating local residents throughout the process.

Acting in Spite of Uncertainty

Portocarrero said that convincing people of the need for risk management can be difficult. “Around the world, it seems that people don’t want to work in risk management because we don’t have tangible results,” said Portocarrero. And when risk is mired in uncertainty – as it is in the Himalayas – getting people to invest in risk management becomes even harder.

Portocarrero warned it might take a decade or more for people downstream to realize Imja and other glacial lakes pose a big enough danger and galvanize into action. “But the big question is,” he added, “are we going to wait 10 years to see the real danger?”

Sherri Goodman, who led the CNA Military Advisory Board during its 2007 report on national security and climate change, said action can’t wait for perfect information.

“Climate change is a threat multiplier for instability in fragile regions of the world,” said Goodman. Considering those stakes, uncertainty “can’t stop you from making smart decisions based on today’s information for adaptation.”

Article Source: New Security Beat

Image Source: Oxfam International

Are countries poor because they are violent or violent because they are poor?

Yesterday it was Afghanistan and Congo. Today it is Côte d’Ivoire and Libya. Violence, it seems, is always with us, like poverty. And that might seem all there is to be said: violence is bad, it is worse in poor countries and it makes them poorer.

But this year’s World Development Report, the flagship publication of the World Bank, suggests there is a lot more to say. Violence, the authors argue, is not just one cause of poverty among many: it is becoming the primary cause. Countries that are prey to violence are often trapped in it. Those that are not are escaping poverty. This has profound implications both for poor countries trying to pull themselves together and for rich ones trying to help.

Many think that development is mainly hampered by what is known as a “poverty trap”. Farmers do not buy fertiliser even though they know it will produce a better harvest. If there is no road, they reason, their bumper crop will just rot in the field. The way out of such a trap is to build a road. And if poor countries cannot build it themselves, rich donors should step in.

Yet the World Development Report suggests that the main constraint on development these days may not be a poverty trap but a violence trap. Peaceful countries are managing to escape poverty—which is becoming concentrated in countries riven by civil war, ethnic conflict and organised crime. Violence and bad government prevent them from escaping the trap.

Read the full article here.

Image source: B.R.Q.

Australia has recently begun to remilitarize in contrast to global trends of cuts in spending. As geopolitics shift from the Atlantic to the Pacific and the rise of China dominates concerns over the balance of global power, Australian investment in the military – and the navy in particular – shows a change in attitude towards security in the region.  However, as the following article from Foreign Policy in Focus demonstrates, China has not reacted positively to the change in gear in military development nor to Australian intentions to reopen uranium sales to India. Moreover, a 2009 White Paper refers to potential Australian aspirations “…to have greater strategic influence beyond our immediate neighborhood”. While an escalation of regional tensions is not inevitable, cooperation in the western Pacific region may be under threat.

Derek Bolton, 7 December 2011

In the realm of geopolitics, Australia has often been the overlooked continent – a benign haven for rowdy cricket fans and sunburned tourists resting safely under a U.S. security umbrella.

However, recent transformations in the international system, notably the rise of China and an economic slump in the West, are rapidly ushering in a new age in Australian foreign policy. Slowly the sleeping continent has awoken to the din of machinery in uranium mines, shipbuilders in dry docks, and the arrival of a new contingent of U.S. Marines – the latter only the most recent indication of a re-posturing of the country’s foreign policy against perceived Chinese expansionism.

Force 2030

In 2009, Australia’s Ministry of Defense issued a White Paper entitled “Defending Australia in the Asia-Pacific Century: Force 2030,” which outlines an aggressive plan for Australian military expansion. Although economic woes have induced talk of military cutbacks in the United States and much of Western Europe, Australia’s own initiatives have run counter to this trend. “The 2009 White Paper was developed in the midst of a global recession,” notes the document’s preface. “The Government has demonstrated the premium it puts on our national security by not allowing the financial impact of the global recession on its budget to affect its commitment to our Defense needs.” Hinting at an expansionist current, it adds, “The more Australia aspires to have greater strategic influence beyond our immediate neighborhood…the greater level of spending on defense we need to be prepared to undertake.”

The White Paper says that the government will introduce a “comprehensive set of reforms that will fundamentally overhaul the entire Defense enterprise, producing efficiency and creating savings of about 20 billion.” However, reforms should in no way be interpreted as cuts — a sentiment reinforced by the planned expansion of Australian defense capabilities, with a particular emphasis on naval warfare.

Indeed, the document promises “a significant focus on enhancing our maritime capabilities. By the mid-2030s, we will have a heavier and more potent maritime force.” This will include 12 new submarines, three destroyers equipped with SM-6 long-range anti-aircraft missiles, eight new frigates, and Landing Helicopter Dock (LHD) amphibious ships.

China

Australia has done little to hide the motivations behind this current mobilization. Outlining the rationale behind the formation of the White Paper, the authors write, “Changes in the distribution of global power have become obvious in the past decades. China’s rise in economic, political and military terms has become more evident. Pronounced military modernization in the Asia-Pacific region is having significant implications for our strategic outlook.”

They add, “China is likely to be able to continue to afford its foreshadowed core military modernizations. Over the long term, this could affect the strategic reach and global postures of the major powers. Reflecting on the possibility of U.S. military cutbacks, the report assesses that “Any future that might see a potential contraction of US strategic presence in the Asia-Pacific region, with a requirement for its allies and friends to do more in their own regions, would adversely affect Australian interests, regional stability and global security.”

Given Australia’s qualms over Chinese expansion in the region and fear of possible abandonment by the United States, the recent deployment of U.S. forces to the continent should come as little surprise, for it addresses concerns dating back to 2009.

Alliances 2030

Australia has similarly undertaken new initiatives on the diplomatic front with equal fervor. Possibly the most significant move has been Australia’s outreach to India, a longtime regional rival of China. The recent announcement by Prime Minister Julia Gillard that she will reopen uranium sales to India is a prime example, part of the new “trilateral security pact” that has been in the works between Australia, India, and the United States.

Although Chinese diplomats have remained cool toward the security pact, elements within the People’s Liberation Army have voiced their strong opposition to the Australian moves. General Geng voiced grave concern in response to the pact, noting, “This is not in keeping with the tide of the era of peace, development and cooperation and does not help to enhance mutual trust and cooperation between countries in the region, and could ultimately harm the common interests of all concerned.” Geng went on to comment that the notion of U.S. and Australian officials seeking to advance “integrated air and sea combat” amounted to “trumpeting confrontation and sacrificing others’ security for the sake of one’s own security.” Australian Foreign Minister Kevin Rudd has responded in the face of such condemnation, “We are not going to have our national security policy dictated by any other external power. That’s a sovereign matter for Australia.”

So far Sino-Australian exchanges have remained strictly verbal, and not all signs point to confrontation. “Exercise Co-operation Spirit,” a recent joint Chinese-Australian military exercise focused on earthquake disaster response, shows that the two countries have remained generally cordial despite increasing tensions. However, given renewed U.S. initiatives in East Asia in conjunction with Australia’s apparent ambitions to curb Chinese expansion, such joint cooperation may be short-lived.
 

Article Source: Foreign Policy in Focus

Image Source: Australian Defence Force

 After decades on the periphery, climate change has made its way onto the national security stage. Yet, while the worlds of science, policy, and defense are awakening to the threats of rising sea levels, stronger storms, and record temperatures, debate continues over the means and extent of adaptation and mitigation programs. In a world of possibilities, how to decide which paddle to use to navigate uncertain waters?

A report from E3G titled, Degrees of Risk: Defining a Risk Management Framework for Climate Security, contends that a more rigorous risk management approach is needed to deal with the security implications of climate change, and cues should be taken from the risk management approach of the national security community. Risk management, while not a “panacea” for divisive climate change politics, “provides a way to frame these debates around a careful consideration of all the available information.”

The report calls for a three-tier, “ABC” framework for international planning:

1) Aim to stay below 2°C (3.6°F) of warming
2) Build and budget assuming 3-4°C (5.4-7.2°F) of warming
3) Contingency plan for 5-7°C (9-12.6°F) of warming

Authors Nick Mabey, Jay Gulledge, Bernard Finel, and Katherine Silverthorne write, “Absolutes are a rarity in national security and decisions are generally a matter of managing and balancing various forms of risk.” Climate change adaptation and mitigation, they say, is no different. “There are multiple levels of uncertainty involved in addressing and planning for climate change…such as how much global temperatures will rise, what the impact of more rapid regional climate change will be, and how effective countries will be in agreeing to and implementing adaptation and emissions reduction plans?”

The security community “need[s] to go out and tell leaders that they will not be able to guarantee security in a world where we don’t control climate change, and that controlling climate change means radical changes – not just more incremental progress,” argued Mabey, the Founding Director and Chief Executive of E3G, in a video interview with ECSP in May 2009.

Preparing for the effects of climate change is certainly a daunting task given the complexity and scope of the system – the entire planet. It is therefore important to gather as much information as possible and to “look in the dark spaces” of our knowledge gap. 

But, “uncertainty per se cannot be a barrier to action,” write Mabey et al. “Uncertainty doesn’t mean we know nothing, just that we do not know precisely what the future may hold. Risk management is both an art and a science. It depends on using the best data possible, but also being aware of what we do not know and cannot know.”

Article source: The New Security Beat

Image source: Pondspider

Ian Shields writes exclusively for sustainablesecurity.org:

Aviation has come a long way in the century or so since the Wright brothers first flew, and there can be no doubt that it has brought some great benefits: bringing people closer together, allowing (through travel) individuals to experience other places and other cultures, and permitting a greater degree of freedom. The militaries have, after a rather slow start, grasped the opportunities that airpower now represents, and no major military power would seriously consider going to war without airpower and, ideally, mastery of the airspace over their own ground forces. Furthermore, there have been many scientific advances that have benefited mankind in general whose origins were in advances in military aviation, invariably forged in the crucible of war.  Moreover, military airpower can contribute to humanitarian missions as witnessed following the floods in Pakistan, while with more precise weapons fewer civilian casualties are sustained due to aerial bombing: compare present-day Afghanistan with WWII Dresden.

But this article is not an ethical debate about the efficacy of military airpower, it is a look at the impact that military airpower has on the environment now, and what steps need to be taken to minimise that impact. I say “minimise” because there has to be a degree of realism here: Plato said that only the dead have seen the end of war: I will assume that military aviation is here to say and it is impact reduction that we should seek rather than an unrealistic desire to end the military use of the air completely.

The impact of the civil airline industry on the environment is well documented, but what is less well considered is the impact of the military sector. This article will identify three key areas where military aviation has a major impact on the environment, and suggest mitigation policies for each: hydro-carbon use, ground contamination and noise.

Unsurprisingly, by far and away the greatest environmental impact that military aviation has is the use of hydro-carbons.  Military aircraft, for reasons of speed, power and response, utilise rapid-response, high power output engines for their attack and air defence aircraft.  While this gives the necessary performance, environmental considerations are low on the priority list when designing new jet engines, the polar opposite from the civilian airline market where the cost-factor has driven up fuel efficiency.  In America, the United States Air Force accounts for some 1% of the total hydro-carbon use across the country: it is, simply, a gas-guzzler.  It is unlikely that environmental, or even cost, pressures will significantly reduce the carbon footprint while military requirements will continue to demand the immediate thrust response that in turn will require the type of engines presently in use and in development.  However, the military requirement is not unchanging and a spin-off from two particular changes will be a reduction in hydro-carbon use.  The first is increasing use of simulation for flying training on the grounds of cost, efficiency and safety; note that environmental concerns are placed firmly in the second-order effects bracket.  The second, and more subtle change, is the increased use of unmanned or remotely-piloted air vehicles.  This move, on the grounds of greater endurance and lower risk to the operator, has resulted in smaller and lighter vehicles since there is no requirement for the bulky and heavy life-support equipment needed to sustain on-board aircrew.  Furthermore, with no risk to the operating crew, the platforms themselves do not have been as responsive, and engines are generally configured more for endurance than immediate response, resulting in lower hydro-carbon use (1).  For both of these changes, then, while reducing fuel use will be a benefit it will not be an intentional goal: military requirements will continue to predominate and those seeking to reduce the environmental impact of military aviation will need to be mindful of the military imperative.

The other two concerns, though real, have far less environmental impact than hydro-carbon use.  Ground contamination falls into two categories: first, and far from unique to military aviation, is the damage done to the soil at airbases: pollution from leaked aviation fuel, oils and hydraulic fluid used to service the aircraft, de-icing fluid used on aircraft and on runways, all leech into the local water courses and contaminate the environment.  Of course, this happens on civilian airfields too, but at military bases there is the added issue of ammunition and high explosives.  Although Britain’s Royal Air Force has disposed of its stock of nuclear weapons, one wonders what the radiation levels are like at the former storage sites, especially for the early and very crude weapons.  However, there is good news here: as with other airports, environmental standards at today’s military air bases are high and increasing: the loss of Crown Immunity and raising awareness of standards are reducing such pollution markedly.  Furthermore, and praise where praise is due, the UK’s Ministry of Defence has a generally good record for cleaning up sites when they vacate them. Nevertheless, aviation requires the use of some potentially very harmful chemicals and with the rise in use of carbon-fibre (excellent in aircraft as it is strong, light and flexible; really dangerous due to the carcinogenic properties of the material if broken by, say, an accident or hostile fire) new problems are likely to be encountered.  Present legislation goes a long way to minimise this form of environmental damage, but we cannot afford to be complacent.  Second, spent ammunition, as well as the destruction it causes with its initial effect (think the effects of the Dambusters Raid of WW II) there has been marked ground contamination from used ammunition in the past.  Again, this article is not about the ethics of military airpower, but in terms of environmental impact it is good to note that Depleted Uranium is no longer used as ammunition by the RAF.  However, destruction from the air is achieved almost exclusively through kinetic effect, and it is only recently that consideration has been given both to the environmental after-effects of destruction, and to the environmental impact of the chosen weapon system.  These moves are in the right direction, and are to be welcomed, but there remains a long way to go.

My final area of concern is with noise pollution.  While the civilian sector has invested a great deal of money in making jet engines quieter (and, of course, more fuel efficient to reduce operating costs) the same cannot be said for the engines in jet fighters and attack aircraft.  The military requirements from their engines are, as intimated earlier, different from a civilian airliner, with the need for immense thrust at any moment (achieved by the use of “after-burners”: the pumping of aviation fuel into the rear of the engine where it is ignited by the hot gases) which achieves the goal, but not only burns considerably more fuel but creates a great deal of noise.  Anyone who has ever attended an airshow where military jets are performing will understand!  The noise issue is further evident with the large, and defensible, amount of training the military pilots undertake.  Back in the 1980s low-flying jets, practicing evading enemy radar systems were a common feature of the more open space across the UK, and the source of many, many complaints for noise.  While that has reduced due to a reduced requirement to low fly and a decrease in overall military jet numbers, the increasing use of night-vision devices with the need to practice night low-flying has brought a different noise disturbance.  Furthermore, it is primarily in the helicopter and transport fleets that this increase has risen, with the inhabitants of those areas frequented by such aircraft subject to considerable night-time disturbance.  While all is done within reason to decrease the disturbance, and the military has a fair point in claiming that it must practice, much more could and should be done to reduce further the level of noise contamination.  Again, more investment in simulation would enable much more of this training to be undertaken synthetically; while live flying training will always be required, particularly in military aviation where the unexpected is more common than in the civilian sector, and while military simulators do not represent sufficient fidelity (due to under-investment), this problem is one that has a reasonable solution that should be pursued with greater vigour.

As an adjunct to this consideration of air power, man’s attempts to reach higher, above the atmosphere and into space, continue apace with ever more countries keen to have at least their own satellites, if not launch capability.  There is no near-term likelihood of an alternative to the massive hydro-carbon use for launch: as the military – and civilian – use of space continues, the environmental bill for overcoming earth’s gravity will continue to be significant: an interesting point for the future.

To conclude. Military aviation has a marked impact on the environment.  It is unlikely that ecological pressures alone will change the military mindset, although they can help to shape it.  There are some benefits accruing from changes in behaviour (albeit that the changes are driven by military necessity), and increased simulation in particular is having a beneficial effect.  Nevertheless, military aviation will continue to be environmentally unfriendly and efforts to reinforce good behaviour will have to continue.  But why should the military start to take its impact, particularly its use of hydro-carbons and the subsequent carbon output, seriously?  Ask any serious military man or woman about the experience of fighting, conflict, war (or whichever synonym you care to name) and they will emphatically state that they wish it could cease.  No sensible person who has experienced conflict would wish to repeat it, and all militaries wish to see a more secure world.  It is therefore ironic that carbon-generation, in which military aviation in particular excels, is clearly linked to climate change, and climate change itself threatens security and the global peace.  In seeking to deter or resolve conflict, it is possible that military aviators and aviatrix are inadvertently creating an even greater problem for the future than the ones they are presently seeking to resolve(2).

(1) As an aside and outwith the main thrust of this article, there are marked human security concerns about the increased use of unmanned vehicles that have yet to be fully explored (see, for example,

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/laura-colarusso/military-drones-and-the-e_b_278195.html

(2) The UK MoD’s own Development, Concepts and Doctrine Centre has identified the security threat that climate change represents.  See the DCDC’s Global Strategic Trends Out To 2040 (and in particular pages 21 and 106):

http://www.mod.uk/NR/rdonlyres/38651ACB-D9A9-4494-98AA-1C86433BB673/0/gst4_update9_Feb10.pdf

About the author: Ian Shields is a retired, senior Air Force Officer and now a respected commentator on Defence and security matters, particularly with relation to Air and Space Power. He holds an MA from KCL, and MPhil from Cambridge and is presently undertaking a PhD in International Studies, also at Cambridge. He can be contacted via his web-site, www.ian-shields.co.uk

Image source: chanelcoco872

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As Libya’s protesters-turned-rebels fight a series of hard battles with forces loyal to Muammar Qaddafi, the United States — and the much of the world — struggles to find a meaningful response to the conflict. U.S. lawmakers have proposed such aggressive options as enforcing a no-fly zone over Libya or arming anti-Qaddafi rebels, both of which the White House has kept on the table. Critics of these plans argue that they risk involving the U.S. in another military engagement. But there’s another option that the U.S. could consider, one that might give anti-Qaddafi rebels crucial help while avoiding the messy complications of direct involvement: Send food.

Food shortages in eastern Libya, the largest rebel-controlled area, have reached dire levels. Fighting has left food stocks depleted and food supply chains in shambles. Around Benghazi, food prices have reportedly risen by 50 to 75 percent. Due to its poor suitability for agriculture, Libya imports the majority of its food, which has become largely impossible since fighting broke out. The United Nations-run World Food Program is attempting to alleviate the food shortage, but so far with little success. Last Thursday, a ship that the World Food Program had chartered to carry 1,000 tons of flour to Benghazi, the provisional capitol of the rebel leadership, abandoned the trip after reports of attacks by pro-Qaddafi aircraft in the area. As food runs out and the conflict drags on, eastern Libya’s food crisis will only get worse. Qaddafi appears willing to use the shortage as a weapon against the rebels, reportedly blocking food from reaching the besieged rebel-held town of Zawiya.

It still appears unlikely that Qaddafi will step down on his own accord. If the rebels are to free Libya, it will probably mean taking Tripoli by force and toppling Qaddafi outright. Currently, rebels in eastern Libya are mustering an army — mostly raw recruits and seized weapons — which they may use to do just that. But Benghazi is just over 1,000 km, about 630 miles, from Tripoli. Defeating Gadaffi would require this irregular force to travel hundreds of miles across the Mediterranean coast, all the while supplying itself through what would likely be a series of battles along the Gulf of Sidra, Sirte, and then in Tripoli itself.

Warfare has changed much since Napoleon’s Grande Armée marched across Europe, but one of the Little Corporal’s maxims is just as true in Libya today as it was near Waterloo two centuries ago: armies march on their stomachs. The anti-Qaddafi rebels are no different. The push to Tripoli would require consistent access to — amongst other things — food supplies. While having adequate food alone would not be sufficient to take the capitol (they also need war materials, training, and transportation), it is an absolute necessity. And, right now, the rebels don’t have enough. But we do.

The United States has the capacity and infrastructure to supply rebel-controlled eastern Libya with substantial amounts of food aid. These shipments could be transported directly into the rebel center of Benghazi, a major seaport with more than adequate facilities. The food aid would not only alleviate the emerging humanitarian crisis in eastern Libya — an important effort in itself — it would help the rebel cause. The shipments would boost the morale of rebel fighters and, more important, provide the supplies necessary to feed the newly formed army during any push towards Tripoli.

The U.S. may be unable or unwilling to supply Libya’s rebels with everything they need to topple Qaddafi — since protests began in Libya and before that in Egypt, President Obama has made clear that the grassroots Arab uprisings must remain grassroots and Arab, rather than being co-opted by the U.S. But we can supply food. Supplying Benghazi with food aid is a viable and meaningful policy option short of risking the military entanglement Obama appears determined to avoid. Whether or not Libya’s revolution is ours to fight, it could well be ours to feed.

Image source: B.R.Q.

This article first appeared on The Atlantic.

“Sustainable security – A briefing for Friends“, has been co-produced by peace and security think tank the Oxford Research Group (ORG), Northern Friends Peace Board (NFPB) and Quaker Peace & Social Witness (QPSW) in order to stimulate discussion, reflection and action among Quakers.

Sustainable security is a paradigm that recognises we must work to tackle the causes of insecurity, not respond to it with attempts to control, often by military means. It is about curing the disease, rather than fighting the symptoms. The briefing identifies the major trends likely to cause large scale loss of life and security over the coming decades as:

• marginalisation of the majority world (the global South);
• climate change;
• competition over resources;
• global militarisation.

With respect to environmental limits, the briefing says the following;

The earth, which is abundant in natural and material resources, has been used to fulfil
the desires (some essential, some not) of the population that lives on it. Many of the
resources which have been exploited, such as fossil fuels, cannot be replaced; the extraction of others places habitats and ecosystems in danger; others produce damaging pollutants when used.

The treatment of the natural world by humankind has contributed towards the two
related major trends that are likely to drive insecurity in the coming decades: climate
change and competition over natural resources.

Climate change is high on the international political agenda. The likely and actual physical effects of these processes are well documented; the earth will be changed. Climate change will also have dramatic social and economic impacts. For example: a loss of, or damage to, infrastructure, shifts in disease patterns (e.g. spread of diseases like malaria and dengue fever, as the mosquitoes that transmit the infection are able to inhabit new locations because of changing temperatures), human crises as a result of more frequent extreme weather events such floods, water scarcity, and the mass displacement of peoples as some regions become uninhabitable. These trends could produce serious security consequences.

A closely related driver of insecurity is competition over resources. The planet is more heavily populated than ever, and today some populations are already consuming far more than their share of the planet’s resources. As population growth continues, there will be greater scarcity of resources including food, water and energy, particularly if consumption patterns also increase. Once major demographic changes and the effects of climate change are factored in, greater competition for such resources should be expected. This will have local and global effects, as those nations rich in natural resources become subject to competition between local populations and international corporations who wish to buy their resources for sale in other parts of the world.

Resource-conflict is already an issue: many anti-war activists cited oil as a cause behind the invasion of Iraq (central to the Persian Gulf, an oil-rich region) in 2003; water access is an ongoing source of tension between Syria, Lebanon, Jordan and Israel and the occupied Palestinian territories around the River Jordan basin; and in the same region, there are differences in how much water Israeli settlers and Palestinian inhabitants of the West Bank are able to access. The final example will relate in future also to climate change, as the Middle East is highly likely to suffer increased occurrences of drought. Competition will make some existing conflicts worse, and produce new struggles.

These two related environmental crises will disproportionately affect the poor, and further entrench marginalisation. The Climate Justice movement has been prominent in describing the injustice of this situation: it is the poorest that have contributed least to the greenhouse gas emissions that are catalysing climate change, yet they will suffer most because of it.

Read the whole briefing here.

The above illustrates the normative underpinnings of QCEA’s sustainable energy security programme, and may help people understand why Quakers, with a strong tradition in working for peace, justice and equality, are working on issues related to sustainability, and indeed, energy security. It is precisely because the issues of climate change and increased competition over resources, including energy, have such strong implications for peace, justice and equality, that they cannot be ignored. The political importance of energy (and more broadly, resource) security, at European level, is a strong driver of traditional, militaristic security concepts – where “our” security increases the insecurity of others. It is this concept that the Quaker Council for European Affairs, by emphasising sustainable energy security – a sustainability that recognises both environmental and social sustainability not just within Europe, but in the wider world – urges against.

Article source: Quaker Council for European Affairs

Image source: kretyen

Respected security analyst and author Michael Klare’s new book ‘The Race for What’s Left’ discusses the growing competition for resources across the globe driven by the depletion of fossil fuels, minerals, water and arable land. Klare argues that the full extent of the political, economic and security implications of this trend are yet to be fully understood in mainstream political circles. The alternative to this, Klare contends, is a coming race to adapt to a resource and climate-constrained world which can offer a way out of war, widespread starvation and environmental catastrophe.

The book argues that the current scramble for the world’s resources and the new “assault on resource frontiers” is qualitatively different to the historical exploitation of undeveloped territories in years gone by. The analysis presented shows that “never have we seen the same combination of factors that confronts us today: a lack of unexplored resource preserves beyond those now being used for development; the sudden emergence of rapacious new consumers; technical and environmental limitations on the exploitation of new deposits; and the devastating effects of climate change.”

One of the most interesting findings of the book is that “for all the importance and forthcoming scarcity of oil, gas, and vital minerals, perhaps the fiercest resource struggle in the coming decades will involve food and the land it is gown on.”  Klare describes the trend towards global ‘land grabs’ led by the governments of China, India, South Korea, and the Persian Gulf countries across parts of Africa, Central and Southeast Asia and even Russia. The relationship between this trend and the marginalisation of dispossessed and angry populations is likely to be a key driver of violence. The book states that “Land ownership has always been a source of conflict in the countryside, especially where notions of customary land rights collide with formal decrees handed down by distant, often suspect government bureaucracies; when the official new owners are foreigners who appear completely oblivious to the historic claims and customs of the people they are displacing, the hostility will be far greater still.”

Klare is explicit in the stakes here: “The race we are on today is the last of its kind that we are likely to undertake” and this book provides a devastating critique of ‘business as usual’ thinking in times of intense global insecurity.

More information on the book (including a sample chapter) is available here and a recent review on the Huffington Post is available here. An interesting video has also been released where the author explains a number of the issues raised in the book which can be seen here.   

Image source: thelGl  
 

The global distribution of intrastate conflicts is not what it used to be. During the latter half of the 20th century, the states with the most youthful populations – a median age of 25.0 years or less – were consistently the most at risk of being engaged in a civil war or in an internal conflict, where either ethnic or religious factors, or both, came into play (an ethnoreligious conflict). However, the tight relationship between demography and intrastate conflict has loosened over the past decade. Ethnoreligious conflicts have gradually, though noticeably, increased among a group of states with a median age greater than 25.0 years, including Thailand, Turkey, Sri Lanka, Indonesia, and Russia.  The salient feature of these intrastate conflicts has been an armed struggle featuring a minority group that is age-structurally more youthful than the majority populace. The difference in age-structural maturity reflects a gap in fertility between the minority and majority, either in the present or in the recent past.  

Most social scientists are likely to explain a minority-majority gap in median age and fertility as the product of history and culture, an artifact of income differences, and/or the result of discriminatory policies or inadequate protections on the part of the state. While political demographers recognize these as contributing factors, they also argue that the political volatility and rapid population growth that are associated with youthful minorities are central features in a dynamic relationship known as the demographic security dilemma.

The demographic security dilemma, first described by Christian Leuprecht, arises when a state permits or promotes the political, economic, and social marginalization of an ethnoreligious minority. The more states marginalize a dissonant minority, turn a blind eye to a minority’s exclusion from mainstream social and economic participation, or allow minorities to exclude themselves, the wider the majority-minority fertility gap and the more rapidly those youthful minorities grow as a proportion of the state’s population. Minority youth bulges naturally lead to political tensions. Notably, minority-state tensions do not naturally emerge out of the opposite circumstance: when the majority is youthful and the ethnoreligious minority is not.

What can governments do to prevent the minority-majority fertility gap? Make sure that health, family planning, and educational programs are extended equitably to minorities. An absence of proactive policies to bring youthful communities into the economic, social, and political mainstream tends to strengthen radical and traditionalist religious political organizations, which often take advantage by filling in gaps in local services and governance. Typically, they restrict girls’ access to education, thwart women’s attempts to gain social and economic autonomy, restrict speech, and campaign against modernization and secularization.

How can foreign affairs analysts forecast risks associated with youthful minorities? That’s easier said than done. Due to restrictions associated with ethnic and religious data collection and the political sensitivities surrounding conclusions drawn from these data, relatively few countries currently provide public access to data that are disaggregated by ethnic and religious affiliation. For now, analysts attempting to estimate qualities of a minority’s age structure must approximate from related measures, such as estimates of minority birth and death rates, fertility rates, and school attendance. Rather than being accessible from a central source, these are published in scattered government reports and in the international demographic and public health literature.

Despite ongoing high fertility across sub-Saharan Africa and the Arabian Peninsula, UN demographers foresee a world in the not-too-distant future that will be dominated by states with populations near or below replacement-level fertility (just above two children per woman). In that future, analysts can expect the ethnoreligious composition of many states to be extremely sensitive to minority-majority fertility gaps.

However, understanding the implications of minority demographic trends could hinge on the ability of researchers to gain access to sub-national ethnoreligious data. For this to happen, some governments will have to overturn laws that currently prohibit identification by ethnicity or religion, while data collectors will need to promote conditions that encourage survey participants to self-identify their ethnic and religious affiliations anonymously, and without fear.

Article Source: The Stimson Center

Image Source: CharlesFred

On 25th August Alex Evans presented a paper on scarcity issues – water, food, energy, land and climate security, to staff from the UN Department of Political Affairs as part of a three day session on security threats organised by the Geneva Centre for Security Policy. 

Alex’s paper highlights the interconnected nature of scarcity issues and the need for the multilateral system to mitigate scarcity trends collectively.

It goes on to highlight seven key agendas requiring focus:

1) Improved surveillance and early warning

2) Mitigation of unsustainable population growth

3) Increased focus on agriculture – especially smallholder agriculture

4) Social protection systems and safety nets

5) Increased natural resource governance

6) Conflict prevention

7) Upgrade emergency response capacity 

For more details on each of these issues you can read Alex’s excellent paper here.

Alex Evans is a Non-Resident Fellow at the Center on International Cooperation (CIC) at New York University. This article originally appeared on Global Dashboard. 

‘By 2050, the global population is expected to peak at 9 billion. In an environment already constrained and changed by human activities, we can expect greater scarcity of three resources vital to the maintenance of both the economic order as it now stands, and the preservation of human life in general: energy, water and food. At current population levels, demand for some key resources is already unsustainable. As the number of people on the planet – and the number of people living “affluent” lifestyles – increases, and the effects of climate change are factored in, greater competition over resources is highly probable – affecting individuals, communities and states.’

This paper is the first in a series of four papers written as part of the Sustainable Security and the Global South project, one each covering four likely drivers of insecurity over coming decades: competition over resources, climate change, marginalisaiton of the majority world and global militarisation.

Each paper is the result of long-term collaboration between ORG and partners across the ‘Global South’. This collaborative network – made up of activists, analysts and academics from a range of think tanks, civil society organisation and research institutes – have recommended background reading, provided expert review and written illuminating case studies commission for each paper.

See the full article here.

Image source: Maks Karochkin

Unlike economic policy, national security is rarely influenced by popular decisions taken in the public domain. While citizen-led movements in Western democracies may help to encourage or discourage a particular military intervention or diplomatic alliance, the actual coordination of efforts to mitigate major security threats rests with top tier generals, qualified analysts and skilled specialists. The public may elect leaders who will, by popular mandate, appoint experts to govern domestic and/or foreign intelligence organisations. But the actual responsibility over national security lies far beyond the public sphere, situated centrally, in the upper echelons of government. Centralised management of national security decision-making reflects the realities of a global system whereby rogue nations issue warnings by testing ‘low-intensity’ nuclear weapons, extremists pledge to murder innocent civilians en masse, cyber attackers plot to expose state secrets and organised criminals smuggle large volumes of deadly weapons into the hands of drug czars and tribal warlords. It is a system bedevilled by deadly, chaotic forces. Only experienced individuals at the highest levels of government are qualified to deal with these deadly forces and to take calculated measures designed to protect the innocent. However, even with the best and brightest at the helm, ‘success’ is not always guaranteed. Threat multipliers in the form of climate destabilisation and volatility in financial markets are further complicating matters so that the challenges of understanding and mitigating security threats in the 21st century are perhaps more daunting than they have ever been in modern history. 

At the start of a century characterised by constrained resources, rapid population rises and the collapse of oppressive regimes – some home to high-yielding oil provinces – the need to gain access to sensitive information and the capability to process and manage sensitive information flows is of paramount importance for decision-makers whose job it is to maximise the safety of citizens. So too, is the availability of predictable fossil fuel supplies and the capacity to manage conventional supply chains, essential for ensuring the smooth functioning of day-to-day telecommunications and transportation systems. At least, for now and irrespective of whether or not they are aware of it, citizens in Western economies demand acute regularity in the functioning of electrical grids and cost effective fuel supplies for manufacturing, importing and delivering basic goods. Affordable energy keeps commerce afloat and allows for a minimal standard of living without which, most people and especially people with investment capital, would either relocate or protest. Ideally, in societies organised on the basis of industrial capitalism (which nearly all are), telecommunications and transport systems will not merely function predictably, but will prosper and grow. Attracting foreign investment and foreign companies from abroad depends on creating a stable environment for businesses to operate. 

Steady access to affordable energy supplies also enables advanced economies to thrive by facilitating an environment in which livelihoods are not stifled by a lack of lighting, heating, refrigeration, medical equipment, clean water and sanitation. These fundamental energy and infrastructure services, once they become readily available and cost competitive, create the conditions from which innovations and new products like the Internet and renewables technologies can emerge. It could therefore be argued, that like a seed to a tree, green shoots stem from brown roots. Is it any wonder why most countries are moving rapidly ahead with business as usual? Without growth, trade and industry stagnate, inflation can rise, so too can food prices and when that happens – as we’ve witnessed in the Arab Spring – populations can revolt. Industrial growth, in a global capitalist system that is overwhelmingly dependent on oil and gas, must continue or the global economy will collapse. Alternatively, an energy transition, where fossil fuels are gradually phased out or replaced by renewable sources may be on the horizon. But whether or not a global energy system fuelled by renewables will yield economic growth on par with that of the 20th century will largely depend on the prudence of heads of state and industry in managing the transition. Meanwhile, global carbon emissions have risen by even more than previously thought, according to new a recent article published by the Guardian.

Jeremy Rifkin, senior adviser to many European heads of state, including the European Commission has put forth a vision for a ‘Third Industrial Revolution (TIR)’ which aims to integrate smart communications technologies with distributed, renewable energy resources into an ‘energy Internet’. This energy Internet, according to Rifkin, constitutes an essential paradigm shift, which will spell an end to the old embedded top-down hierarchies of centralised governance, which the Second Industrial Revolution produced. The old top-down method of organising fossil-fuelled energy and telecommunications networks will be replaced by a new way of laterally organising renewable-fuelled energy and transnational information communication networks. The TIR has gained popular support throughout Europe at various governance scales, legitimising Rifkin’s recommendations for a complete overhaul of existing infrastructure and services delivery systems. This overhaul consists of 5 pillars: 

• Shifting to Renewable Energy
• Converting Buildings into Power Plants 
• Hydrogen and Other Energy Storage Technology
• Smart Grid Technology
• Plug in, Electric, Hybrid, and Fuel Cell based Transportation 

Rifkin’s optimism is a refreshing break from many of the dire forecasts we’re accustomed to hearing. His solutions-oriented approach, is aligned closely with those of some of the world’s leading industrialists as evidenced by their involvement in the TIR Global CEO Business Roundtable – a committee of TIR supporters who gather informally to discuss how to strategically implement Rifkin’s vision. At the same time, there is a missing element to Rifkin’s thesis. If national security is deeply concerned with ensuring a steady stream of access to conventional energy sources and requires a high degree of central control over sensitive information in order to mitigate 21st century threats, then Rifkin’s TIR vision, which advocates a decentralised, renewable ‘energy Internet’ leaves open the question of security as it relates to the realities of a fossil fuel industry-dependent global economy. What’s more, there is evidence that while the TIR vision has widespread support amongst heads of state and industry, governments everywhere are going to great lengths to secure access to diminishing fossil fuel reserves. A recent post by SustainableSecurity.org, ‘The Security Implications of the Current Resource Scramble,’ draws attention to the work of Michael Klare, which provides several cases in point. Klare is Defense Correspondent for The Nation magazine and has published, among other works, a book titled The Race for What’s Left, in which he outlines in great detail the efforts of the world’s most powerful nation-states, pursuing access to increasingly scarce, yet fundamental resources. This work lies in stark contrast to Rifkin’s bestseller, The Third Industrial Revolution, which paints a much rosier picture. Klare’s analysis presents us with a possible future in which governments continue to work closely with industry to protect their populations from fundamental supply shortfalls for many of the good reasons outlined above.

The transition away from a centralised global economy built around conventional energy sources to a decentralised global economy mostly fuelled by renewable resources is one we must make for the sake of our children’s futures and that of our planet. Rifkin has outlined a game plan for smoothing the transition in a way and on a scale which powerful government decision-makers and industry leaders can support. But there needs to be another parallel conversation on what the TIR vision means for the future of national security. If, as Rifkin argues, the historical development of telecommunications, infrastructure and energy systems are interwoven, then a move to make one sustainable overhaul in one of these sectors must be reflected in both the other two sectors. Rifkin’s plan acknowledges this fact, but leaves open the question of security. If national security is at present, deeply concerned with preserving access to conventional energy, then how would national security for a decentralised renewable energy Internet be managed? Who would manage it? And what role, if any, could the public play in helping to alleviate some of the burdens of 21st century threat mitigation? 

Phillip Bruner is Founder of the Green Investment Forum and a guest lecturer in global political economy at the University of Edinburgh

Image source: Truthout

I wrote a blog a few weeks ago on climate and security, following the discussion at the UN Security Council sponsored by the German Presidency.  Last Friday I took part in a related workshop and thought I would return to theme briefly with one comment and one message.

Comment – At the event, the AU representative raised a legitimate question – why, when the AU sees southern Africa as a model of peace on the continent, do consultants supported by developed countries focus on the threat of climate induced instability and insecurity? Are we simply using the climate issue as a stick to beat the region again because we have a different view of governance and a more pessimistic take on the region’s political direction?

 No.  I underlined the many challenges the region was already tackling – from building sustainable growth into their economies, through creating jobs to improving health and education services. And on top of that, governments are already managing elements of climate stress today, both within countries and increasingly through co-operation at the regional level.

What the scientific modelling makes clear is that if global temerepature continues to rise unabated, it will place significant additional stress on ALL economies, but that the emerging economies on this continent will be among the first to take real strain.  Unchecked climate change will make the poorest even more vulnerable, with related food and water stress and climate migration.   It will raise tension levels over access to diminishing resources, particularly water.

Climate change is therefore a threat mutliplier, and governments must be alive to the potential it has to disrupt sustainable growth and stability and exacerbate tensions within and between countries.  The Hadley Centre brought out an interactive 4-degree map to demonstrate where the threats come from – I commend this to people who wonder what I am writing about.

Now the message – the story around climate change can be relentlessly pessimistic, so I ended the workshop on two positive notes.  First is that there are strong examples of improving regional co-operation, for example on regional water management.  And second  that there is a way to avoid the more extreme climate security threats – a legally binding international framework for reducing global emissions and keeping average temperature rise under 2 degrees.

So rather than dismiss the climate security argument, I encourage Africa to be open-minded about the real threat climate change poses to human and national security.  And then use this as a strong argument for all major emitters to come to the negotiating table with more ambition.

John L Smith – Head, Climate Change Team

Article source: FCO Climate change team blog

Image source: climatesafety

 Swimming Upstream to Sustainable Security

“Extremist violence and terrorist attacks are often the final, murderous manifestations of a long process rooted in helplessness, humiliation and hatred. Therefore, any comprehensive approach has to also address the upstream factors, the conditions that help fuel violent extremism.”  These words come, not from a left-leaning NGO, but from the mouth of John Brennan, a long-serving CIA officer, who is now President Obama’s senior advisor on counter-terrorism.   They come in a major address given last month at the Centre for Strategic and International Studies, a highly ‘establishment-linked’ Washington think-tank.

These sentiments mark a huge shift in rhetoric and focus from the mindset of the post-9/11 Bush administration. For a spokesperson of the President to suggest that the USA is “committed to using every element of our national power to address the underlying causes and conditions that fuel so many national security threats, including violent extremism. We will take a multidimensional, multi-departmental, multinational approach” seems a million miles from George Bush’s assertion that, “You’re either with us or against us in the fight against terror.” However, sentiment alone is not enough. New thinking requires new kinds of action on the international stage, and concrete signs of such action are few and far between.

Since 9/11 we  have seen year on year increases in military budgets, yet the dominant US-led project funded by these increases has yielded few unambiguous security gains. Despite US troops now beginning to withdraw from Iraq, the violence that has cost the lives of at least 100,000 Iraqi civilians continues; truck bombs and mortars killed 95 people on one day alone in August this year. General Stanley McChrystal, the top US Commander in Afghanistan, last week submitted a review to US and NATO commanders in which he outlined grave concerns about the failure of current strategy there.  The resurgence of the ‘Taliban’ is likely to lead to a separate request that the US administration consider allocating extra troops. For the time being, the focus is not on achieving long-term security, but rather on avoiding immediate and humiliating defeat.
 
The war on terror has created over 4 million refugees and resulted in the detention of over 120,000 people without trial, some for more than 6 years.  Despite this, the threat of terrorism is no doubt still real; al-Qaeda’s remaining leadership, which has most likely moved across the border from Afghanistan to Pakistan, still wields influence. The Somali al-Shabaab has perhaps come under the sway of such influence and lawless Somalia represents a potential future launching point for terrorist attacks. Although previous attempts to tackle the problem may have prevented terrorist attacks in the short-term, little has been done to eliminate the long-term threat.
 
It is being increasingly realised that to effectively tackle the security problems the world faces,  resources must be diverted away from military spending towards diplomacy and development to address the conditions that ferment radicalisation amongst the marginalised. But the specific details of how this should best be done are still some way from being articulated, let alone turned into workable policies.   The global financial crisis has meant that military budgets are now under greater scrutiny. In the UK, following the 2010 general election, the new government will hold a defence spending review. The review will provide a key opportunity to reconsider costly projects such as the replacement of trident and the building of two new Royal Navy aircraft carriers. But without clear and compelling alternatives, closely articulated in detail as well as commanding strong public support, governments may squander such opportunities and adopt a “business as usual” approach, tinkering at the margins rather than adopting a fundamentally new approach.   The disappointingly status-quo oriented governmental responses to the global banking crisis of 2008 shows what the default response is likely to be unless there is compelling and persistent encouragement to “step outside the box”.

One task is to demonstrate in necessary detail that diverting money from defence towards diplomacy and development will be cost effective in the long run.  It needs to be established beyond any reasonable doubt that responses that attempt to control the symptoms of insecurity have proved more expensive than responses that address the root causes. For instance, in the 15 years from 1990 to 2005 conflict had an economic cost to Africa’s development of $284billion. As the IANSA, Oxfam, and Saferworld report that identified this figure states: “If this money was not lost due to armed conflict, it could solve the problems of HIV and AIDS in Africa, or it could address Africa’s needs in education, clean water and sanitation, and prevent tuberculosis and malaria.” Whilst widening social divisions, poverty and injustice exist; radical groups are always likely to find recruits amongst the marginalised.

Even with increased resources, such issues cannot be tackled by one state alone, however powerful. Approaches to development must be collaborative. The often-uncoordinated actions of aid agencies and donor countries have at times proved counterproductive. For this reason, another task facing the world is to work out how to productively strengthen the capacity of regional and international organisations. More detailed attention needs to be given to showing how organisations such as the UN can better facilitate co-ordinated efforts of nation states to address the social, economic, and political problems that breed insecurity. Likewise, we need to examine closely how organisations such as the AU and ASEAN can be strengthened to address particular regional issues such as the absence of arms control architecture in the Asian region.

Climate change and competition over resources represent further key challenges to global security. As with marginalisation, there is an increasing realisation that these issues can only be tackled collaboratively.  It has now been broadly accepted that the Climate Conference in Copenhagen must result in an agreement from developed countries to reduce carbon emissions by 80% by 2050, and that strong targets are agreed in the short to mid-term (40% by 2020 from a 1990 base). But even these will not be sufficient unless developing countries likewise commit to ambitious reductions in carbon emissions. Is there yet sufficient clarity about how they will be given the appropriate support to do so by their more developed counterparts? 

We face multiple resource crises, of food, water, and energy.  The International Energy Agency has suggested that oil supplies are likely to peak as early 2020 and an ‘oil-crunch’ is likely to occur this decade.  Competition over resources may escalate and become more aggressive.  To avoid early resource conflict, ambitious proposals such as Professor John Matthews’ bio-pact need to be developed and promoted within the international system so that robust and credible solutions are to hand as the situation becomes more critical.

If we are to avoid future global disaster on an epic scale, then the step change in security thinking that has already begun must result in the adoption of sustainable security policies that encompass the principles of collective, human and just security.  Left to follow their own momentum, governments are unlikely to fully embrace sustainable security.  When seen primarily through the lens of national interest, sustainable security concepts will tend to be appropriated (and diluted) as means to sustain the status quo and existing power relations.   If sustainable security is to become an end, with the security of humanity in its totality as the goal then community groups, faith groups, NGOs, and many other elements of civil society (including journalists) must coordinate their efforts to promote such policies. John Brenner’s call for security policies to “swim upstream” is admirable, but unless this call propels us far beyond national interest, the rapid current of realpolitik is likely to dump us all far downstream.  We hope that this new website will provide a focus for swimming strongly and persistently upstream.