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

This article by Esther Kersley, Katherine Tajer and Alberto Muti originally appeared on openDemocracy on 7 November 2014.

Cyber space is a confusing place. As current discussions highlight the possibility of “major” cyber attacks causing a significant loss of life or large scale destruction, it is becoming harder to determine whether these claims are hype or are in fact justified fears. A new report by VERTIC, commissioned by the Remote Control project, offers some clarity on the subject by assessing the major issues in cyber security today to help better inform the debate and assess what threats and challenges cyber issues really do pose to international peace and security.

How much of a threat are cyber attacks?

Cyber attacks have been identified as one of the greatest threats facing developed nations. Indeed, the US is spending $26 billion over the next five years on cyber operations and building a 6,000 strong cyber force by 2016 and the UK has earmarked £650 million over four year to combat cyber threats. This level of investment suggests that states view issues of cyber security as a question of national security. But how much of a threat do cyber attacks pose to national security and how much damage have they caused?

There is a need for caution when assessing the risk posed to national security by cyber threats. Indeed, although states are heavily investing in cyber security, to date, the majority of cyber incidents that have made the news have not directly impacted a state’s sovereignty, or threatened a state’s survival. For that to happen, an attack would have to significantly affect a government’s ability to control its territory, inflict damage to critical infrastructure or, potentially, cause mass casualties.

Nevertheless, some notable instances of cyber attacks have had a significant impact on international relations over the past decades. These are ‘Stuxnet’, the cyber attack targeting Iranian uranium centrifuges (allegedly launched by a combined US-Israeli operation), the ‘Nashi’ attacks on Estonian government and private sector websites and web-based services, and the many instances of cyber-espionage that form the so-called ‘Cool War’ currently taking place between China and the US. Furthermore, cyber attacks have also been used as instruments of war in conjunction with conventional military operations, for example during the Russo-Georgian conflict in 2008 and most significantly during in the Israeli air raid against a nuclear reactor facility in Syria in 2007.

However, to date no attack has led to large scale destruction or fatality, suggesting that the potential for this is unlikely. This is due to the great amounts of technological expertise, material resources and target intelligence required to carry out such an attack. These resources are currently only in the hands of states, that might hesitate in using cyber attacks in such a way, when other means are available. This could of course change, especially if different political actors acquired the necessary means.

What should we be concerned about?

This is not to say we have nothing to be concerned about. Although a large scale cyber attack that inflicts mass casualties is unlikely to occur in the near future, cyber activities can still affect civilian lives in other ways. The hyperbolic language used to describe the potential consequences of cyber attacks, combined with a lack of reliable, concrete information on the real risks posed by cyber threats has contributed to the ‘securitisation’ of the debate around cyber security issues. It is feared that this process will lead to possible dangers being overestimated, and vulnerabilities cast as national security threats of immediate concern. States’ reactions to these perceived risks may cause negative implications on both citizens and international peace and security.

Already we are seeing a potential consequence of securitisation as governments turn to surveillance as a preventative measure against cyber attacks. In addition, the difficulty of attributing cyber attacks, as well as the widespread fear that other countries will constantly engage in cyber espionage, has led some to claim that the ‘cyber realm’ favours the attacker. This, in turn, may lead states to engage in a ‘cyber arms race’, as well as foster a ‘Cool War’ dynamic of continuous attrition and escalation between states. This erosion of trust between states, as well as the diminishing of civil liberties, are two serious concerns with regards to the militarization of cyber space.

Cyber attacks also pose serious transparency and accountability issues due to the above-mentioned technical complexities of cyber attack attributions, as well as the ambiguous relationship between state and non-state actors (in the ‘Nashi’ attack in Estonia for example, the relation between the youth group responsible for the attack and the Russian government remains an ambiguous one).  The lack of legal clarity in this area is also worrying, meaning attackers will often not face consequences for their actions.

The only existing international legislation in the field – the Budapest Convention – solely addresses cybercrime and no further issues (such as military use of cyberspace). The Convention also does not have enough support to provide enforcement of its objectives, has no monitoring regime and has not been signed by Russia or China. Furthermore, an attempt to set out ‘rules’ on the legal implications of cyber war – in The Tallinn Manual – found that the complexities of cyber conflict means there are many instances that do not easily adhere to current legislative standards. The speed of technology evolution further hampers drafting of law and international legislation.

Growth of remote control warfare

The rise in cyber activities cannot be examined in isolation. Its growth is part of a broader trend of warfare increasingly being conducted indirectly, or at a distance. This global trend towards ‘remote control’ warfare has seen an increasing use of drones, special forces, private military and security companies as well as cyber activities and intelligence and surveillance methods by governments in the last decade.

Indeed the global export market for drones is predicted to grow nearly three-fold over the next decade, and a broader range of states are now using drones, including France, Britain, Germany, Italy, Russia, Algeria and Iran. The US has more than doubled the size of its Special Operations Command since 2001, and private military and security companies are playing an increasingly important role in both Afghanistan and Iraq, with over 5, 000 contractors employed in Iraq this year.

The idea of countering threats at a distance, without the use of large military forces, is a relatively attractive proposition as the general public is increasingly hostile to ‘boots on the ground’. However, the concerns highlighted in this latest report with regards to cyber activities are echoed in all ‘remote’ warfare methods as their covert nature means there are serious transparency and accountability vacuums. As well as this, wider negative implications have been identified where these methods are in use, from the detrimental impact of drone strikes in Pakistan to instability caused by special forces and private military companies in Sub-Saharan Africa. The militarisation of cyber space is part of this growing trend and, like these other new methods of warfare, increased transparency and accurate information is essential in order to assess the real impact they are likely to have.

 

Esther Kersley is the Research and Communications Officer for the Remote Control project of the Network for Social Change. The project, hosted by Oxford Research Group and affiliated with its Sustainable Security programme, examines changes in military engagement, in particular the use of drones, special forces, private military and security companies, cyber warfare and surveillance.

Katherine Tajer is a Research Assistant for the Verification Research, Training and Information Centre (VERTIC).

Alberto Muti is a Research Assistant for the Verification Research, Training and Information Centre (VERTIC).

 

Featured image: The command line environment in MS-DOS. Source: Flickr. Available under Creative Commons v2.0.

In January 2016, the government of Honduras and the Organization of American States (OAS) formalized the creation of a new international organ to help fight corruption in this country. The Mission of Support Against Corruption and Impunity in Honduras (MACCIH, in the Spanish acronym) is a welcome step. However, it is very early to estimate whether it will be able to make a positive contribution to solving the daunting challenges facing justice and security in this country.

Honduras experiences what can be called a “perfect storm” of interrelated problems: violence perpetrated by diverse actors (gangs, drug traffickers); human rights abuses, in the context of a steady militarization of public security; impunity; corruption at the highest institutional levels, and widespread poverty and inequality. For years, it has been the most violent country in the world, with an average rate of 90 homicides per 100,000 people according to estimates by the UN Office on Drugs and Crime and the World Bank, which is significantly higher than the international average intentional homicide rate of 6.2 per 100,000 people.

Gangs, Drugs, and Corruption

Honduras, like El Salvador and Guatemala, has a serious problem with gangs. These are territorial groups involved in extortion and other crimes, exerting social control and who are connected to other criminal actors. The prevailing narrative from politicians and the media puts the blame of violence on the gangs, whose members are highly stigmatized as a result. Different governments have adopted iron-first and militarized approaches to deal with them. Casa Alianza, a charity that works and campaigns for the rehabilitation and the defence of street children, has documented that even children become victims of extrajudicial executions, carried out by death squads sometimes linked to the security forces. In January 2016, Casa Alianza denounced a monthly average rate of 81 children victims of extrajudicial executions.

However, the figures of homicides attributable to gangs are highly disputed, and national and international actors diverge in their interpretations about the share of responsibilities for violence. This is a strategic corridor for drug trafficking, and the local markets are growing. According to the OAS, around 70% of homicides are perpetrated by drug cartels involved in wars for the control of routes, sometimes using gang members and youth as sicarios (a Spanish term for hit men). By January 2014, estimates were that 87% of the drug planes heading from South America to North America passed through this country. Transnational groups, especially from Mexico, have established bases here. Then, there are local groups and transportistas (carriers), contracted by the cartels and connected to Honduran political and economic elites, including land owners and mayors.

In 2012, when the news about the gang truce in El Salvador spread throughout Central America, the Honduran gangs explored the possibility of starting a similar process. In May 2013, they delivered their first public statements from jail, announcing that they would stop violence in exchange for a series of demands. This was the first public event of a process accompanied by the Bishop of San Pedro Sula, Rómulo Emiliani, and the Secretary of Multidimensional Security of the OAS, Adam Blackwell.

Dialogue never advanced for many different reasons, including the decentralized nature of the Honduran gangs (that makes it difficult to enforce discipline among the ranks), the lack of political maturity of their leadership, and the weak legitimacy of a government that had emerged from the 2009 coup d’état,. But Bishop Emiliani had warned, from the beginning, that even a successful truce could never emulate the sudden drop of homicides of El Salvador, where the daily rate plummeted from 14 to 5. n Honduras, he warned, the range of actors involved in violence for different purposes is extensive, and the balances of power among them very distinct from those of the neighbour country.

It is worth remembering that in the 80s, amidst the wars that ravaged Central America, the Honduran territory was used for drug and arms trafficking with the aim of supporting the US allies in these wars, among them the Contras, who fought against the Sandinista government in Nicaragua. The illicit networks and connections created have survived well after these conflicts ended, including in sectors of the elite and security forces. Interpeace states that this is the country with more denounces of complicity between police members and illegal actors for the commission of crimes.

Militarization as a Response

President Juan Orlando Hernández, who took office in 2014, has followed others by trying to respond to these threats with an iron first strategy of crime suppression. But he has elevated the militarization of law enforcement to new levels. The military is now in charge of most aspects of public security.

The most prominent example is the creation of the Military Police of Public Order (PMOP), which currently has around 3,000 soldiers deployed throughout the country. A special law has been approved to prevent the Attorney General’s Office from investigating and prosecuting their potential abuses. It is the National Council on Defence and Security, under the control of the Armed Forces, who appoints judges and prosecutors for that role. The resources for the PMOP are collected through a security tax and allocated through a classified and ultra-secret budget.

Another emerging actor is FUSINA (Fuerza de Seguridad Interinstitucional), a task force composed of representatives of different security units. Led by the military, and with no formal status as an agency, FUSINA manages various bodies and organs, such as an anti-extortion unit that controls phone intercepts. Added to this is the US-backed Special Comprehensive Government Security Response Unit (TIGRES), a SWAT-style militarized police force.

Militarization takes place in the streets and also in the top-down institutional structures, with more military in charge of security positions, including the Security Ministry that has power over the armed forces and the police. The military also controls the penitentiary system, with soldiers guarding prisons. The trend is worrying in itself and for the lack of transparency and accountability implied. Civil society groups have denounced a trend that might be bringing the country back to the ‘80s, when the military had extended powers and human rights abuses were rampant, and reversing the efforts to advance civilian power during the 90s.

On the other hand, the national police experienced only limited reform in the past and are often accused of corruption and complicity in crime. Recently there have been limited purges of corrupt officers, but the situation could get even worse as they receive less equipment, salaries, and benefits than the PMOP. The priority given to the military threatens the feasibility and viability of a much-needed profound transformation of the police forces.

There have been some successes in the fight against drug trafficking, such as the dismantlement of the leadership of the crime organization Los Valle while Los Cachiros surrendered to US authorities. The head of operations of the Sinaloa Federation, who operated from San Pedro Sula, has also been captured. But efforts to cut the links of powerful elite sectors with narco-trafficking and crime have been far less evident despite the US efforts in this matter. The US Treasury Department has included some of them in their “kingpin list”, including the Rosenthal family, one of the most influential in the country. Jaime Rosenthal, former vice-president and head of an economic conglomerate, has been asked for extradition on charges of money laundering.

Corruption Shocking the Country

In 2015, a corruption scandal shook the country. Members of the President-related Liberal Party diverted more than 335 million dollars from the Institute of Social Security, at least in part to fund the party’s electoral campaign. Citizens protested for months in the streets of Tegucigalpa, the nation’s capital, and other cities against corruption, impunity, and human rights abuses. They claimed for the President resignation and asked for international support to fight corruption, through an initiative similar to the International Commission to Combat Impunity in Guatemala (CICIG), which has achieved significant results including the case against President Otto Pérez Molina on corruption charges.

The Mission Against Corruption and Impunity in Honduras (MACCIH), tasked with “the prevention and fight against corruption and impunity in the country”, is now a reality and could be accompanied by a permanent UN human rights monitoring mission in Honduras. The MACCIH shares some similarities with the CICIG. Both are hybrid agencies, international and domestic, but composed by international civil officers accountable to international organs (the UN, and the OAS). Both are tasked with the fight against corruption and impunity with the hope of bringing justice where the national counterparts cannot for different reasons (pressures, corruption, lack of resources).

The MACCIH is expected to include independent judges and prosecutors to supervise and support their national counterparts, promote a review of the effectiveness of the public security system, create a civil society observatory to evaluate progress and a role for the Justice Studies Centre of the Americas in proposing legislation reform. But their powers will be more limited than those of the CICIG, which can initiate and conduct criminal proceedings against anyone without approval of the national authorities.

The MACCIH can promote transparency and reforms, but much will depend on the political will to follow and implement (instead of resisting) its recommendations and proposals. National and international voices have questioned whether it will have enough power to fight effectively institutional corruption. Honduran elites will probably resist any effort directed at reform and accountability. In April 2015, the investigator that uncovered the ISS corruption scandal received death threats and had to flee the country. And the former head of the National Commission for the Fight Against Drug Trafficking, Alfredo Landaverde, was shot dead days after condemning the links between police and organized crime.

With all those factors in mind, it becomes clear that repressive iron first policies and militarization cannot substitute the fight against illicit networks, corruption and impunity, nor the effort towards institution building, particularly in the rule of law and justice. They have been popular in electoral terms and have received substantial international backing, but are incapable of supressing crime connected to gangs or drug trafficking, and fail to guarantee human security. Furthermore, they do nothing to address corruption at all levels of the state and cut the links between elites and different forms of organized crime. Ivan Briscoe, of the Clingendael Institute, summarized the dynamic as follows: “Informal relationships, money and fear have initiated a vicious cycle of emergency responses, militarization and corruption that only virtuous policies with public backing can replace”. Of course, that will be a long-term endeavor.

Mabel González Bustelo is a Fellow of the Global South Unit for Mediation (BRICS Policy Centre, Brazil) and author of Mediation with non-conventional armed groups? Experiences from Latin America.

International Relations scholars, politicians, religious institutions and religious leaders can no longer debate whether religion is relevant to global or national governance issues and they can no longer afford to ignore the roles and functions of religious identity in many violent and nonviolent conflict areas in the world today. From European to South Asian societies, the headlines are related to the potentially destructive role that religion can play in everyday policy making. Those cases include, but are not limited to, the self-declared Islamic State of Iraq and Syria (ISIS); the civil war in the Central African Republic in which religious identity was thrown into the midst of the political conflict; and the ongoing conflict in Myanmar where religious identity is utilized to justify certain governmental policies.

The issue that practitioners (policy makers, religious institutions and religious leaders) are really struggling to effectively address is how to understand the interreligious dynamics of conflicts and constructively link this to future policies. The response of policy makers in Europe to the ongoing global refugee crisis represents an important case of the need for further linkages between religious leaders and policy makers. Given that the majority of the refugees are Muslims, how are secular European policy makers going to develop an approach to manage or mediate the inherent difference of cultural and religious Islamic ways of living and do so without stereotyping or inciting violence and exclusion towards refuges?  An even more challenging task is facing policy makers in the Muslim world, especially those in the Middle East where religious and sectarian identities have been systematically manipulated to justify political and even inter- and intra-communal violence with brutal effects. Unlike the European reality, in the Middle East, delinking religious identity and institutions from governmental policies and from justifying wars and certain governance frameworks is the primary needed change. In this context, politicians continuously enlist religious leaders in pursuing their own interests.

Despite their problems grasping the issues, there is a growing agreement amongst policy makers and researchers that engaging religious leaders and institutions in peacebuilding on all levels is crucial to bringing the message of tolerance, pluralism and peaceful resolution of conflicts to communities. However, the research on such tools and techniques is still limited. Most studies continue to focus on the theological bases of peace and harmony in different faith groups (See Abu-Nimer’s 2007 book, Unity in Diversity). There are few studies on the mechanism and tools (design, processes, and evaluation of success) of interreligious peacebuilding which will allow policy makers to engage religious leaders and their institutions in a systematic process of mediation, negotiation, or problem solving to respond to a concrete social or political problem. As result of this shortage in experiences, many interreligious peacebuilding activities resort to the traditional and old models of symbolic and ceremonial representation of religious leaders in policy making circles. For example, a prime minster invites Abrahamic faith leaders to bless his/her new policy towards refugees in a certain area. In most cases such blessings take place outside of areas of worship and in the public secular space. The lack of systematic engagement of religious agencies in such peace processes and the instrumentalization of such agencies in a symbolic way only at the end of the process reduces the capacity of religious peacemakers in their own communities.

This approach of limited (time and resources) and symbolic engagement with religious identity (via leaders, symbols, rituals, etc.) has been around for centuries: a ceremonial role but not genuine engagement as a serious stakeholder in the conflict (using the cross or holy books as part of the ceremony to celebrate a peace agreement in a conflict situation like Northern Ireland, Palestine-Israel, Mindanao Philippines, etc.). In fact, a similar approach is taken by those who use religion to justify their war plans and violence in general (such as the use of religion for justification of violence in the wars in Bosnia in the 1990s, conflict in Northern Ireland, etc). The selective and partisan hijacking of certain religious values to explain the need to exclude, discriminate, dehumanize the “different other.” In both cases, there is an instrumentalization of the religious identity but not deep and nuanced engagement.

In current interreligious peacebuilding practices there are genuine efforts to move beyond this instrumentalization and bring a more holistic and integrative approach to engage religious leaders and institutions (See the recent 2015 report on CVE). Such trends can be vied in the most recent revisions of the American White House Summit responding to countering violent extremism (CVE) in which a strong call for a community based approach is an integral part of the CVE efforts; the KAICIID campaign, “United Against Violence in the Name of Religion”; Network of Religious and Traditional Peacemakers (launched by Finn Church Aid, Religions for Peace, KAICIID, USIP, OIC, etc.).

The Main Challenges Ahead

In spite of such efforts, there are still number of core challenges and potential pitfalls that face the field of interreligious peacebuilding in its development as a recognized field of researchers and practice, these include the following:

• First, there is the western post Industrial Revolution framework that endorses the cultural assumption (some argue myth) that religion and faith can and should be left outside of public spheres. Thus, bringing faith into academic institutions becomes a major struggle and threatens the foundation of its knowledge generating paradigm. This assumption that dealing with religion and faith is a private matter that ought to be compartmentalized to the Sociology of Religion or Theological Studies has obstructed many international relations and political scientists from systematically exploring the complex relations between religion and peace and war.
• Second is the assumption that conflicts and their causes reside primarily with material resources and not religion (identity or ideology). Such assumptions can lead many researchers and practitioners to dismiss or underestimate the role that religious identity and ideology can play in both triggering and sustaining conflict, as well as peace. There is no doubt that religion plays a complex and to some extent unique role in many conflict dynamics and outcomes. However, many aspects of this role are similar to other identity-based conflicts in which the stakeholder’s identity is deployed in the process of conflict escalation and de-escalation. Ethnicity, culture, race, gender, and sexual orientation are identities that have also been linked to conflict and violence, often through aggressive parties employing dehumanizing framing of an ‘other’, and there are many studies in both social science and the humanities that have explored the links between these identities and conflict and peace (see From Identity-Based Conflict to Identity-Based Cooperation, edited by Jay Rothman; and Ashmore, Jussim and Wilder of Rutgers University’s Department of Psychology’s publication: Social Identity, Intergroup Conflict, and Conflict Reduction).  The study of interreligious peacebuilding can draw on this wealth of research on conflict and identity and develop its own analytical frameworks and practices (R. Scott Appleby addresses religious identity and documents many of these the conflicts in his book, The Ambivalence of the Sacred: Religion Violence and Reconciliation).
• Third, resources and support by professional organizations, donors, religious leaders and institutions are limited due to the above perceptions and biases. Thus many interreligious analysts and practitioners are rarely invited to the table as recognized and credible actor or agency who can contribute to the processes of peace or policy managements.
• The fourth challenge is understanding that religious peacebuilding is not the ultimate solution for all social and political problems in any given society, since religious identity and its manipulation is rarely the main cause of the violence in any conflict situation. In such cases, we should relate to interreligious peacebuilding agencies as serving a complementary role in a wider range of peacebuilding efforts carried out by many other peace agencies (such as media, educators, business sector, civil society, etc.) (See Abu-Nimer)

Conclusion

Despite the above challenges, the field of religious peacebuilding has been growing and gradually recognized by policy makers and donors as an important agency to engage with. Also, it is important to recognize that interreligious peacebuilders have been able to create significant progress in relief, development and aid. Faith based Organizations (FBOs) have illustrated that through interreligious cooperation they can significantly contribute to eradication of malaria in West Africa, provide relief to Tsunami victims in Sri Lanka and Indonesia, and fight hunger and poverty around the world in many local communities; and NIFA, a Nigerian interfaith organization that launched a campaign to eradicate malaria; also see the recent International Partnership on Religion and Sustainable Development (PaRD), a network for linking development and religion, which was launched by the German Federal Ministry for Economic Cooperation and Development.

Nevertheless, the field of interreligious peacebuilding still has a long road ahead in terms of its research and study agenda, especially in producing empirical research that articulates the detailed processes, conditions and dynamics in every conflict and that lead certain communities to be easily mobilized through their religious identities (symbols, rituals, and institutions) to endorse violence or peace.

Mohammed Abu-Nimer is Senior Advisor Interreligious and Intercultural Dialogue Center (KAICIID); and Prof. of Peace and Conflicts Resolution, American University, Washington DC.

by Elizabeth Minor, Researcher at Article 36

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

Later this month, governments will meet in Geneva to discuss lethal autonomous weapons systems. Previous talks – and growing pressure from civil society –  have not yet galvanised governments into action. Meanwhile the development of these so-called “killer robots” is already being considered in military roadmaps. Their prohibition is therefore an increasingly urgent task.

From 13-17 April, governments will meet at the United Nations in Geneva to discuss autonomous weapons – also referred to as killer robots. The week-long meeting will be the second round of multilateral expert discussions on “lethal autonomous weapons systems” to take place within the framework of the United Nations’ Convention on Certain Conventional Weapons (CCW).

Urgent and coordinated international action is needed to prevent the development and use of fully autonomous weapons systems. Such systems would fundamentally challenge the relationship between human beings and the application of violent force, whether in armed conflict or in domestic law enforcement. Once activated and their mission defined, these systems would be able to select targets and carry out attacks on people or objects, without meaningful human control. As states with high-tech militaries such as China, Israel, Russia, South Korea, the UK, and the US continue to invest in aspects of increased autonomy in weapons systems technologies, consideration of this issue is increasingly urgent. Campaigners are calling on states to tackle this issue by developing a treaty that pre-emptively bans these weapons systems before they are put into operation, by which time it may be too late.

The issue

Weapons systems that do not permit the exercise of meaningful human control over individual attacks should be prohibited, due to the insurmountable ethical, humanitarian and legal concerns they raise. The governance of the use of force and the protection of individuals in conflict require control over the use of weapons and accountability and responsibility for their consequences. This principle, rather than any particular piece of technology or format of weapons delivery, is at the heart of the issue of autonomous weapons systems. Some have argued that fully autonomous weapons systems might reduce the risk of conflict or be able to better protect civilians. However, the focus must remain on these systems’ overall implications for the conduct of violence, rather than on a small range of hypothetical possibilities.

Tasks can be given to hardware and software systems. Responsibility for violence cannot. The process of rendering the world ‘machine-sensible’ reduces people to objects. This is an affront to human dignity. Computerised target-object matching such as shape detection, thermal imaging and radiation detection may enable the identification of objects such as military vehicles, though in complex and civilian-populated environments, not necessarily with accuracy. However, assessment of information about these objects and the surrounding environment, including the presence of protected persons such as civilians or wounded combatants, is also essential to uphold the principles that govern the launching of individual attacks under International Humanitarian Law. These are not quantitative rules, but considerations that require deliberative moral reasoning and contextual decision-making. As such, they could not be translated into software code. Based on the principle of humanity, they implicitly require human judgement and control over the process of decision-making in individual attacks.

Other concerns about the development of fully autonomous weapons systems include the dangers of proliferation among state and non-state actors, hacking, and the use of these systems in law enforcement or other situations outside of warfare.

A preemptive ban as a solution

Whilst the Campaign to Stop Killer Robots is calling on states to move with urgency towards negotiations on a treaty to outlaw fully autonomous weapons systems, previous talks in Geneva have not yet galvanised governments into action.

Some states have suggested that existing law is sufficient to tackle this issue. Existing international law, which was developed prior to any consideration of autonomous weapons systems, implicitly assumes that the application of force is governed by humans. This body of international law is now inadequate as a reliable barrier to the development and use of fully autonomous weapons systems. A pre-emptive ban through an international instrument would not only halt any progress on these systems amongst states parties, but would help to stigmatise development by others.

Some states have argued that this issue can be dealt with by conducting individual reviews of their weapons technologies to ensure they continue to uphold current international law. States are already obligated to do this however, and whilst it is important, it will not be sufficient in preventing the development of these systems internationally. A clear legal standard and norm needs to be set, and this is best done through new international treaty law.

A ban based around prohibiting systems that operate without meaningful human control over individual attacks should be the starting point in international discussions among states, and so the elaboration and agreement of the elements of this principle are required as a next step.

International response so far

To date, autonomous weapons have been raised at the Human Rights Council in 2013 and considered by governments in dedicated discussions held at expert meetings of the CCW in 2014. The UN Special Rapporteur on extrajudicial, summary or arbitrary executions, Christof Heyns, called in 2013 for national moratoria to be imposed by all states on the “testing, production, assembly, transfer, acquisition, deployment and use” of these systems, until an internationally agreed framework on their future has been established. The CCW could be a possible venue for developing this, having previously produced a pre-emptive ban on blinding laser weapons. One should note, though, that previous attempts within the CCW to deliver the responses needed to certain weapons systems have occasionally failed, often hampered by operating under the consensus rule and a tendency to defer to military considerations rather than focus on humanitarian or ethical imperatives.

Promisingly, the need to ensure meaningful human control has already been a prominent feature of the debate at the CCW, with several states recognising the importance of this approach. In upcoming discussions, governments should elaborate their policies for maintaining meaningful human control over existing weapons systems in individual attacks. Such an exchange would advance consideration of how human control can be ensured over future systems. This would in turn help clarify what practices and potential systems must be prohibited and the standards that states must demonstrate that they are meeting in their conduct. Elements to consider could include the need for adequate information to be available to commanders using any weapons system, positive action from a human being in launching individual attacks, and ensuring accountability.

Few states have elaborated any policy on human control over weapons systems. Current US policy on autonomous weapons systems stresses that there should be “appropriate levels of human judgement over the use of force”, but does not define what these should be. The policy leaves the door open for the development of fully autonomous weapons systems, whilst recognising the harm they could cause to civilians. The UK government has stated that it has no intention to develop fully autonomous weapons and that “human control” over any weapons system must be ensured. However, it has not given sufficient elaboration of what exactly this means and how it will be ensured.

States may see different types of operating, supervising or overseeing systems to constitute acceptable control. Agreement between states on the concept of meaningful human control is therefore an important element of international progress on the issue of fully autonomous weapons systems.

Work by states on an international framework should be supported by input from civil society and draw on the views of a range of experts. Ultimately, negotiation processes will determine the definitions of key concepts. If discussions do not advance towards a binding framework within the CCW, a freestanding treaty process may be required, as was the case previously in the processes to outlaw both anti-personnel landmines and cluster munitions.

The upcoming meeting of experts at the CCW in April is unlikely to result in particular concrete actions due to the nature and format of the meeting. It could pave the way for a decision in November that states continue to discuss this issue in 2016 and put it on the agenda for the CCW’s 2016 Review Conference. At that point it could be flagged as a subject on which States Parties should develop a new binding protocol. No clear group to lead this process has yet emerged. So far Cuba, Ecuador, Egypt, the Holy See, and Pakistan have endorsed a pre-emptive ban on autonomous weapons systems. France secured consensus for the CCW mandate in 2013 that established its work on lethal autonomous weapons systems, and Germany will be chairing the upcoming meeting, with the aim of seeking consensus on further consideration of the subject. However, the development of fully autonomous weapons systems is already being considered in military roadmaps. This makes their prohibition an urgent task.

Elizabeth Minor (@elizabethminor3) is a Researcher at Article 36, and was previously Senior Research Officer at Every Casualty, and a Researcher for Iraq Body Count (IBC). 

Featured image: The UK’s Taranis stealth UAV. The Taranis exemplifies the move toward increased autonomy as it aims to strike distant targets “even on other continents”, although humans are currently expected to remain in the loop. Source: Flickr | QinetiQ

The Syrian war is one of the worst political and humanitarian crises since the Second World War and mediation attempts have proven largely fruitless. What are the reasons behind their failure, and what are the prospects for peace in the future?

January 2017 will see new leadership both at the UN and in the US. António Guterres will become the 9th Secretary-General of the United Nations and Donald Trump will take office as the 45th President. These leaders will inherit from their predecessors a problem that ranks among the toughest and most complex in the world today: the Syrian civil war a, conflict that began in 2011 and since then has seen between 312,000 and 470,000 deaths.

Both men have declared Syria a policy priority. Trump has given few specifics beyond a desire to depart from current U.S. policy, whereas Guterres has said that, under his leadership, ending the Syrian civil war will be the UN’s most important task.

Guterres faces tough odds: the catalogue of failed mediation efforts in Syria has by now grown quite long. After the Arab League’s failed attempt in the early phase of the conflict, the UN dispatched to Syria first Kofi Annan and then Lakhdar Brahimi, both of whom fervently tried to broker various ceasefire arrangements, and both of whom returned empty-handed. More recently, the diplomatic initiative has rested with U.S. Secretary of State John Kerry and Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov, who have sought to find a way to collaborate on Syria despite diverging priorities.

In September 2016, this duo managed to negotiate a ceasefire, but, in a rather typical display of how tenuous progress is in Syria, the deal fell apart within days, following an ill-timed accidental American bombardment of Syrian troops in Deir el-Zour and unrelenting combat in Aleppo. In parallel, Staffan de Mistura, the UN’s third envoy since the war began, has continued to probe for breakthroughs, however small and local, to keep a semblance of a process alive, but without substantive progress.

Why Syria is a mediator’s “mission impossible”

There are several reasons why previous mediation has fallen short in Syria. International disunity and distrust in the various mediators are important factors – rebels rejected the most recent UN initiative, a limited humanitarian ceasefire in Aleppo, on the grounds that the UN was “biased” against them. The main explanation, however, lies in the nature of the conflict. Kofi Annan labeled it a mediator’s “mission impossible”: a war fought between many and fractured coalitions, infused with sectarian enmity, and subject to constant meddling from foreign powers.

Academic research sheds light on all of these factors, and why and how they effect peace mediation. First, the higher the number of belligerents, the harder a conflict is to settle. In Syria, where the number of actors is extraordinarily high, it has proven impossible to design a deal that is attractive to a critical mass of parties. This problem has been particularly acute with respect to the opposition, which frequently have fallen to infighting and agree on little beyond the necessity of ousting President Bashar al-Assad.

Second, historical evidence shows that conflicts where belligerents anchor their demands in religious traditions are more intractable than other conflicts. In Syria, religious fault lines have gradually hardened, especially between Sunni and Shia, raising the threshold for peace deals that depend on sectarian co-existence. The widespread presence of jihadists who view the conflict in cosmic, Manichean terms add one further barrier to initiating a process premised on the exchange of concessions.

Third, with the possible exception of the Islamic State, nearly all actors in Syria enjoy the material and diplomatic support of foreign sponsors. Conflicts that attract external interventions tend to be more resistant to mediation, most likely because foreign powers can offset shifts on the battlefield by escalating the influx of weapons and other resources to their preferred client. Further, support from foreign sponsors makes belligerents less dependent on support from the local population, which otherwise can generate social pressure that incents negotiations.

Combined, these factors have created a situation where it has been difficult for mediators to identify a viable power-sharing deal, and even less, generate firm expectations that such a deal could be implemented.

The conflict will end, but how?

Like all wars, the war in Syria will end. The question is how long it will take and the means through which this will be achieved. Logically, the war in Syria can end in three ways: through a military victory, by petering out into a “cold war”, or via a negotiated agreement.

Even though the majority of civil wars end in military victory, most analysts have held the view that this is an unlikely outcome in Syria. Neither side has had the resources to impose, much less maintain, a monopoly on violence in the entirety of the country. However, there are signs that a regime victory has become, if not likely, at least a possibility. The fall of Aleppo to regime troops in December 2016 will free up considerable forces that can be reallocated for tactical offensives in other areas. Continued Russian efforts and a realignment of U.S. priorities in Syria under a Trump Presidency may allow the regime to make further gains.

Another scenario is that the war gradually de-escalates into a “cold war”, with little or no active fighting. In parts of the country, especially the South, this is already the de facto situation, as localized truces and standoffs have produced a state of suspended warfare. A generalization of this scenario, though, is premised on the exhaustion not only of the primary belligerents (e.g., via manpower shortages), but also of their foreign sponsors, which would require significant shifts in both regional and international politics.

The third way the war can end is via a negotiated agreement, either induced via external mediation of the kind discussed above, or emerging from direct negotiations between the parties within Syria. We know from statistical research that a growing number of civil wars end in negotiated agreements, but, in light of the challenges listed above, there is clearly some way to go before that will happen in Syria.

A changing landscape?

As neither of three paths to peace appears imminent, continued war is therefore the only realistic scenario in the short- to mid-term. But there are signs of a changing landscape, both militarily and politically, which may open up avenues to a negotiated agreement, at least in limited forms between the regime and the non-jihadist opposition.

The most important shift, potentially, is the election of Donald Trump as the next U.S. President. While the details of the President-elect’s Syria policy remains opaque, it is likely to include two ingredients: more direct coordination with Russia and stronger military efforts against the Islamic State. With Trump as President, the U.S. may be willing to shift publicly on issues that are currently recognized only implicitly, such as the acceptance of Assad’s staying in power, the failure of train-and-supply efforts, and the Islamist domination within the opposition. The current battery of economic sanctions may also be revisited.

The coming of Trump is therefore likely to favor Damascus, but it could also increase the prospects for substantive negotiations. Historically, when great powers favoring opposing belligerents in a civil war come together, it have tended to favor negotiated outcomes. If Russia, Turkey and the U.S. can maximize their leverage with their respective clients, they could help push them to the negotiation table. But chances are still slim: they have tried before without succeeding and Trump’s Syria policy may alienate the opposition, reducing U.S. leverage.

The fall of Aleppo signifies another important change in the strategic landscape. By capturing the city, regime forces dealt a demoralizing blow to the opposition, while further alienating Western audiences. It remains unlikely that the regime can claw back all lost territory, let alone rule it in a legitimate manner, but the victory in Aleppo may add further leverage to its strategy of seeking local “reconciliation agreements”. Several hundred such local truces have already been struck across the country and, if generalized, may portend a demographic “sorting out” that would leave Syria organized into more or less autonomous zones, akin to the  “cold war” scenario above.

For its part, the UN is likely to continue its valiant search for solutions, small and large. If the new UN Secretary General is to deliver on his promise to prioritize a peaceful solution in Syria, he needs to find a way to capitalize on the expected rapprochement between Russia and the U.S. His man in the field, envoy de Mistura has signaled that he concurs with the military fight against the Islamic State but that a military strategy needs to be accompanied by “political devolution” in Syria. This indicates that the UN is considering an arrangement styled on Bosnia or Iraq – essentially power-sharing along sectarian lines – for Syria. Even if the UN manages to leverage the U.S. and Russia behind such a plan, however, it currently appears unlikely that the opposition would give up on its demands for regime change, and that Damascus, smelling military victory, would seriously consider it.

Magnus Lundgren is a postdoctoral research fellow at Stockholm University, Sweden. His research focuses on conflict resolution in civil wars and on decision-making in international organizations such as the UN. His most recent publications include ”Which international organizations can settle civil wars” and ”Mediation in Syria: Initiatives, strategies, and obstacles, 2011-2016”. He is the co-founder of the Multilateral Negotiation Project, a non-profit that seeks to enable better global negotiation processes. He can be followed on Twitter @magnusllundgre

by Shazad Ali and Chris Abbott

Strikes by unmanned combat air vehicles, or armed drones, have become the tactic of choice in US counterterrorism efforts in Yemen, Somalia and Pakistan. But lack of transparency, dubious effectiveness, civilian casualties and negative consequences for US national security means that Washington needs to re-evaluate its approach.

It is the controversy over drone strikes in northwest Pakistan that has bought the issue to public attention. Leaving aside the wider issue of the extrajudicial nature of these killings and the questions over the legality of repeatedly breaching Pakistani airspace, it is the level of civilian casualties that is prompting the most concern.

In a 23 May 2013 national security speech, President Barack Obama asserted that only terrorists are targeted by drones and that ‘there must be near-certainty that no civilians will be killed or injured’ before any strike is taken. However, independent reports contradict his claims.

From 2004 to date, there have been 376 known US drone strikes in Pakistan. According to the UK-based Bureau of Investigative Journalism (BIJ), 407 to 926 civilians, including 168 to 200 children, have been killed in these strikes. According to a leaked Pakistani government report cited by the BIJ, at least 147 of 746 people killed in the 75 drone strikes in Pakistan between 2006 and 2009 were civilians. Of those killed, about 94 were children.

Controversial tactics

The high level of civilian casualties is attributable to two key elements of the US drone strike programme: double-tap strikes and signature strikes.

Double-tap strikes use follow up strikes to deliberately target rescuers and first responders who are coming to the aid of those injured in an initial strike. The UN special rapporteur on extrajudicial executions, Christof Heyns, and the UN special rapporteur on counterterrorism and human rights, Ben Emmerson, have described the use of double-tap strikes as a possible war crime. Ironically, terrorists in Pakistan are now using their own version of the double-tap strike to target law enforcement personnel in cities such as Karachi: an initial low-intensity blast is used to draw in the emergency services, who are then targeted in a second much larger explosion.

Signature strikes target individuals based on predetermined ‘signatures’ of behaviour that US intelligence links to militant activity. In other words, people are targeted merely on the basis of their behaviour patterns. This is different to personality strikes, which use intelligence to target specific terror suspects. In a June 2013 report that cited classified documents, NBC News revealed that one in four people killed in drone strikes in Pakistan between 3 September 2010 and 30 October 2011 were classified as ‘other militants’ by CIA. This means the CIA were unable to determine the affiliation, if any, of those killed.

Intelligence failures

However, even those strikes directed by intelligence are fallible. Such strikes rely on a mixture of signals intelligence and human intelligence from assets on the ground in Pakistan. The local CIA operatives are notoriously unreliable sources of intelligence.

The doubts over the accuracy of US intelligence have some credence, as there are several cases in which a militant was reported killed in a drone strike only to be declared dead again following a later strike.

For example, the alleged al-Qaeda leader in Pakistan, Ilyas Kashmiri, was reportedly killed in a drone strike in January 2009 and then again in September 2009, though he gave an interview to a Pakistani journalist the next month. Civilians are known to have been harmed in these unsuccessful attacks. In the January attack, 14-year-old Fahim Quershi lost an eye and suffered multiple injuries. In the September 2009 attack, 15-year-old Sadaullah Wazir lost his both legs and an eye. Three of his relatives died in the same attack. Kashmiri was again declared dead in July 2011, which is also contested.

The United States has indeed managed to kill many militants in drone strikes in Pakistan, but these have been mostly low-level targets. According to a September 2012 study by Stanford Law School and New York University’s School of Law, only 2% of militant casualties in drone strikes between 2004 and 2012 were high-value targets.

Justification

There is an important question over congressional oversight of US drone strikes. The Obama administration has refused to provide legal justification of drone strikes to the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence despite several requests, according to committee chair Senator Dianne Feinstein. This has created an accountability vacuum and is a significant hurdle in congressional debate on the use of drones.

Following the 9/11 attacks, the US Congress gave the president sweeping powers through the Authorisation to Use Military Force (AUMF). It allows the president to:

‘use all necessary and appropriate force against those nations, organisations, or persons he determines planned, authorised, committed, or aided the terrorist attacks that occurred on September 11, 2001, or harboured such organisations or persons.’

In that context, drone strikes against al-Qaeda and the Afghan Taliban are authorised under US law. But it is hard to justify under the AUMF attacks in Pakistan against organisations not involved in 9/11, such as the Tehrik-i-Taliban Pakistan and the Haqqani network – notwithstanding the transnational nature of and blurred boundaries between some of these groups.

It is also difficult to justify such attacks under the right to self-defence, which cannot be applied prospectively without limit. Nor does it warrant the repeated violations of Pakistan’s airspace, as Pakistan has not been shown to be responsible for any attacks against US interests. According to a leaked US diplomatic cable, Pakistan had, at one point, consented to drone strikes but it is not known whether Washington continues the strikes with Islamabad’s tacit agreement. Publicly, the Pakistani government has denounced the drone strikes, saying they are illegal and a violation of their country’s sovereignty. In September 2013, Pakistani Prime Minister Nawaz Sharif told the UN General Assembly that US drone strikes violated his country’s borders and were detrimental to Pakistani counterterrorism efforts. But, in reality, Pakistan has at times been deliberately ambiguous on the issue and the complex nature of civil-military relations in Pakistan and the known links between the ISI and various militant networks make things more complicated.

Unintended consequences

Whatever the legal status of the US drone strike programme in Pakistan, it is clear that it risks several unintended consequences. The United States might have made a prudent military choice in using armed drones rather the special forces for counterterrorism strikes in Pakistan. But the use of drones has backfired in a strategic sense and resulted in serious ‘blowback’.

Chief among these is the radicalising impact US drone strikes are having in Pakistan. Repeated strikes are stoking anti-American sentiments and are a propaganda and recruitment gift to the extremist groups. Pakistan is being destabilised, as the strikes are undermining chances of peace talks between the state and Taliban groups. There are now increasing numbers of terrorist attacks against the Pakistani government by Taliban militants who believe Islamabad has failed to maintain the country’s sovereignty. Furthermore, the United States may be risking further attacks in its own backyard along the lines of the failed 2010 Times Square attack by Pakistani-born US citizen Faisal Shahzad.

Drone strikes in Pakistan may also be complicating the US withdrawal from Afghanistan, as they have resulted in attacks on US forces. The 2009 Camp Chapman attack is a case in point. The al-Qaeda and Tehrik-i-Taliban Pakistan suicide attack used a double agent to target CIA personnel and contractors inside Forward Operating Base Chapman who were responsible for providing intelligence for drone strikes against targets in Pakistan. The attack on the base in Khost province was in revenge for the deaths of three al-Qaeda and Pakistani Taliban leaders who were killed in US drone strikes.

The use of drones by the US has increased the danger of proliferation. Seventy six countries are known to have unmanned aerial vehicles, with approximately 20 countries possessing armed drones (though estimates vary widely). The United States has lowered the threshold for the use of lethal force and pushed back the limits of counterterrorism efforts to include the targeted killing of its enemies abroad. In doing so, they have set a dangerous precedent – one that could easily be followed by other countries. In a September 2013 study, Open Briefing identified 29 different models of armed drone in use with China, India, Iran, Israel, Russia and Turkey – each of which have external security concerns that could justify drones strikes under doctrine modelled on the US approach.

Time for change

The use of double-tap and signature strikes must be ended, as they result in unjustifiably high numbers of civilian casualties. They are the most controversial elements within the already controversial US drone strike. Beyond that, it is time to begin winding in Washington’s unchecked ability to target individuals around the world without due process. Central to this is the revocation of the post-9/11 Authorisation to Use Military Force. For 12 years this has allowed the spread of US military and intelligence operations around the world without accountability and transparency. These operations are increasingly straying from targeting those who ‘planned, authorised, committed, or aided the terrorist attacks that occurred on September 11, 2001’ to simply targeting suspected militants, regardless of their links to al-Qaeda or the Taliban.

Washington can address the democratic deficit inherent in its drone programme by moving responsibility for it from the CIA to the usual chain of command within the US Department of Defense. There must also be proper congressional and judicial oversight of the drone programme, with monitoring by Congress’s intelligence and armed services select committees, in order to remove absolute executive power for the targeted killings.

For its part, Pakistan can retract any tacit approval of US drone strikes and be unequivocal in its opposition to further strikes. This will allow the United Nations and key US allies to use whatever influence they have to press the United States to enact the much needed changes to its drone programme.

Shazad Ali is a contributing analyst at Open Briefing. He is a journalist in Pakistan and pursuing a PhD in European Studies at the University of Karachi. He has been the assistant editor of the Vienna-based journal Perspectives on Terrorism and now serves as a member of its editorial board.

Chris Abbott is the founder and executive director of Open Briefing. He is an Honorary Visiting Research Fellow in the School of Social and International Studies at the University of Bradford and the former deputy director of Oxford Research Group. http://www.openbriefing.org

Featured image: MQ-1 Predator on patrol  Source: Air Force Reserve Command

Image: An MQ-9 Reaper takes off on a mission from Afghanistan. Source: Wikimedia

With nearly 870 million people chronically undernourished, and progress towards the Hunger Millennium Development Goal ebbing since 2008, feeding the world will continue to be a major global challenge. The limitations of arable land availability, water accessibility, and humanity’s increasing population trajectory further compound the problem. Addressing the challenges to global food security while ensuring the sustainability of the planet will require changes to the way we interact with agriculture and a clear understanding of the driving factors behind it.

Food and Energy Price Volatility

The industrialisation of agriculture over the last five decades has contributed to massive gains in productivity, but it has also made food increasingly susceptible to energy supply and price fluctuations. Energy in the form of oil and gas is needed to run industrial farm equipment and to ship food around the world. Fertilizers, the driving factor behind most yield increases, are intimately tied to energy and therefore price volatility. Nitrogen fertilizers are particularly significant and are created through a process that combines natural gas and inert nitrogen from the atmosphere in a high-energy reaction to create ammonia. Fertilizer production is estimated to account for more than 50 per cent of total energy use in commercial agriculture (Woods, et al 2010). While shale gas has had a significant impact on the US natural gas market, globally, energy prices are expected to rise in the long term and become increasingly volatile, as shown by the graph to the right. Fertilizer costs will follow a similar trend, leading to variability in cost and availability. This can be especially difficult for small farmers in developing countries, whose resilience to price fluctuations is low.

Locking Ourselves In to Volatility

Natural means of increasing agricultural yields are possible through recycling manures and planting crops that add nutrients to the soil. However, barring a radical change in agricultural practices, globally we are locked into chemical fertilizer use, especially nitrogen fertilizers in the short and medium term. Approximately 45 per cent of the world’s food supply is grown using chemical fertilizers, and that number is growing. Meat consumption, which requires large amounts of grain for animal feed, is on the rise. Consumption of animal protein in Europe and the United states together is double the world average (FAO 2006), and is expected to grow 10 per cent between 2005 and 2030. However, demand in developing countries for animal proteins is projected to increase 60 per cent in the same period (Reay 2011). Pressure from biofuel legislation in Europe and the United States puts further pressure on land and drives up global food prices.

Global land deals have increased dramatically in the last ten years, with an area of land eight times the size of the UK sold off globally in that time (Geary 2012). In addition to causing landlessness and poverty for local communities, the land is often used to grow large areas of single-species crops such as soy or eucalyptus, which use industrial agricultural methods requiring a high amount of chemical fertilizer, thus increasing dependence on global energy markets and locking new land into fertilizer dependence. Furthermore, nutrients and pesticides can make their way into local water supplies, degrading the environment upon which local communities depend. For example, water contamination from agricultural runoff can force communities to buy bottled or trucked water at higher prices, reducing their resilience to price fluctuations even further.

Fertilizer as a Means of Reducing Poverty

But fertilizers are not evil. Increasing yields (either through better access to fertilizers or implementing natural yield improvement practices) can greatly impact poverty and inequality. There are many regions of the world in which more nutrients are urgently needed in order to ensure the land is not degraded. When fertilizer is introduced to degraded soils, it can have enormous trickle down effects for poverty reduction, health, and education. In the early stages of development, when a country is primarily agrarian, the most consistently effective methods to reduce poverty and improve equality involve the agriculture sector, particularly through methods that raise small farm productivity (Berry 2010, Deininger and Byerlee 2011). For example, a recent review of coffee grower data from Mexico and Peru, published in the World Development journal, found that increasing yields are most important for growers (Barham and Weber 2011).

Nitrogen: The Missing Link

So where does that leave us? The very thing that reduces poverty and hunger through increasing yields can cause insecurity through energy price volatility. Add increasing pressure from consumption choices, land degradation, population pressure and climate change and we have a situation of increasing food insecurity globally.

There is no silver bullet answer to this conundrum. However, the solution will likely be a combination of improving the efficiency of chemical fertilizer use and increasing the productivity and adoption of natural methods. Cross-cutting all of these solutions is the main driver of yields: nitrogen. Phosphorous and potash are also important elements of fertilizer, but nitrogen is the nutrient needed in the largest quantities. Just as a basic knowledge of how CO₂ impacts climate change is important for developing solutions to the problem, so is knowledge of nitrogen important for developing solutions to food security.

Nitrogen is critical for all plants and animals to grow. Some plants build it naturally into the soil through a symbiotic process between bacteria and their roots called ‘biological nitrogen fixation’ (beans and clover, for example), but the majority comes from chemical fertilizers and as a by-product of burning fossil fuels.

For those that remember the nitrogen cycle from science class, we know that 78.1% of the atmosphere is inert nitrogen (N₂). In the 20^th century, we developed a way to convert this inert, atmospheric nitrogen into a form of nitrogen accessible to plants and animals (known as “reactive nitrogen”). This has enabled food production to roughly keep pace with the explosion of population growth over the last fifty years. Whether through fertilizers or biological fixation, nitrogen will play a key role in meeting the food needs of the future.

When there is not enough nitrogen in the soil, loss of soil productivity and degradation occur. Because it is small farmers that often lack access to nitrogen, their yields decline year over year, reducing their annual income and thus exacerbating inequality within the global food system. This pushes them further into poverty, and in many cases can force them to purchase food when they cannot grow enough. Degraded land forces them to go in search of new, more fertile land, breaking apart families and communities.

However, the solution is not as easy as simply adding more nitrogen in areas where there is not enough. Too much nitrogen can cause serious problems for human health and the environment. While nitrogen is required by plants in order to grow, there is a limit to how much any plant can use. Beyond this “critical load”, nutrients that cannot be absorbed by plants will leach into the water and air. Once in the environment, nitrogen can change forms over an extremely long life (average of 120 years) and detrimentally affect many different systems before finally becoming denitrified back into atmosphere. Nitrogen exacerbates climate change, depletes the ozone layer and drives biodiversity loss. It causes low-oxygen zones in water systems that weaken or kill fish and marine habitats (known as eutrophication or hypoxia). Reactive nitrogen can also be very detrimental to human health through air and water contamination. It is a major contributor to smog, which is estimated to take six months off the life expectancy of over half the population in Europe (Sutton et al 2011). It is even worse in areas like China, where the density of air particulates have registered at twice the level considered “dangerous” in metropolitan centres like Beijing. Ingesting high levels of water-borne nitrates has been associated with cancer, diabetes and adverse reproductive outcomes (Ward et al. 2005).

The graph below shows nitrogen fertilizer application globally. In the red areas of the graph, many of the main water bodies suffer the detrimental effects of too much nitrogen, and the people that live in those areas suffer as a result of nitrogen pollution. Many of the green areas could benefit from more nitrogen to increase soil productivity.

The key is balance. On the one hand, improving the efficiency of fertilizer use will maintain crop yields while protecting the ecosystems humans and animals depend upon. On the other hand, developing biological nitrogen fixation methods or pro-poor fertilizer programmes to increase yields for small farmers will improve their situation economically and strengthen their resilience to price shocks and weather events. In both cases, proper nitrogen management will be a crucial part of solving our global hunger crisis while ensuring sustainability for future generations.

Lisa Dittmar is the CEO and founder of NitrogenWise,  a website that brings together research and straightforward communication to explain the complexities of nitrogen in a meaningful and relevant way.

Citations

Barham, B. L., & Weber, J. G. (2011). The Economic Sustainability of Certified Coffee: Recent Evidence from Mexico and Peru. World Development, 1269-1279.

Berry, A. (2010). What type of global governance would best lower world poverty and inequality? In J. Clapp, & R. Wilkinson, Global Governance, Poverty and Inequality (pp. 46-68). London: Routledge.

Deininger, K., & Byerlee, D. (2011). Rising global interest in farmland. Washington DC: World Bank. Retrieved November 30, 2012, from http://siteresources.worldbank.org/INTARD/Resources/ESW_Sept7_final_final.pdf

FAO. (2006). Livestock Report 2006. Rome: Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations.

Geary, K. (2012). Our Land, Our Lives: Time out on the global land rush. Oxford: Oxfam. Retrieved November 2, 2012, from http://www.oxfam.org/sites/www.oxfam.org/files/bn-land-lives-freeze-041012-en_1.pdf

Reay, D. S. (2011). Societal choice and communicating the European nitrogen challenge. In M. Sutton, The European Nitrogen Assessment (pp. 585-602). Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Sutton, M. (2011). Too much of a good thing. Nature, 472, 159-161

Ward, M. (2005). Workgroup report: Drinking-water nitrate and health-recent findings and research needs. Environmental Health Perspectives, 113, 1607-1614

Woods, J., Williams, A., Hughes, J. K., Black, M., & Murphy, R. (2010). Energy and the food system. Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society B, 2991-3006

Front page image source: Organic Fertiliser for sugar cane – Shell

This concluding part of a two-part article series continues the discussion on the UK’s naval nuclear power programme and its potential impact on Britain’s energy policy. Read part 1 here.

In Part 1, we described the intensity of UK commitments to new civil nuclear power and why this is so hard to fully explain. The proposed 16GWe of new nuclear capacity is a difficult policy to justify based on economics, energy security and conventional approaches to understanding innovation and technological transitions. There are serious problems with the UK nuclear power programme, including significant delays, rising costs, and uncertainty surrounding essential foreign investment. The UK government’s own figures show renewables, including onshore wind and solar, to be cheaper than nuclear. As the prospects of resolving underperforming nuclear plans get ever more distant and unlikely, increasingly favourable renewable projects remain ever more threatened by cut-backs. This has led to serious problems in that sector. Taken at face value, these patterns are very difficult to explain.

What drives these counter-intuitive trends? Many factors will be at play, but, as discussed in Part 1, there is a particular major driver that remains almost entirely unexamined in analysis of UK energy policy. This concerns the pressure to sustain UK nuclear submarine infrastructures by maintaining  more general national reservoirs of specialist nuclear expertise, education, training, skills, production, design and regulatory capacities.

Could these pressures to maintain capabilities, perceived to be necessary for the country’s naval nuclear propulsion programme, be influencing the intensity of UK commitments to new civil nuclear power? We now examine a crucial period in UK civil nuclear policy during which concerns around defence-related nuclear skills came to the fore shortly after a key policy moment when, for the first time since 1955, UK policy was considering an energy trajectory that did not include new nuclear.

2003–2006: the unexplained nuclear ‘U-turn’

For a brief period between 2003 and 2006, nuclear energy seemed to fall out of high-level favour in the UK. The nuclear firm, British Energy was bailed out and brought back into state control in 2002 and nuclear privatisation was widely recognised to have failed. The UK civil nuclear industry was dogged by scandals and cases of costs overrunning. . Meanwhile, New Labour’s earlier efforts to democratise decision-making helped free one initially minor policy initiative from the shackles of bureaucratic inertia and industrial interests. For the first time, nuclear energy strategy escaped the domain of the dedicated ministry.

Approaching energy policy by the indirect route of “resources”, the new Performance and Innovation Unit (PIU) – reporting directly to the Cabinet Office – was charged with undertaking an extensive reappraisal. This marked a significant departure from the traditional practice where energy policy assessments were closely guarded by the relevant ministry. The PIU review was staffed entirely by civil servants, with half of the review team comprised of leading independent energy analysts recruited from outside government. Freed from the incumbent pressures which constrained earlier UK energy reviews, the 2002 PIU study found that unresolved nuclear waste and economic problems meant that the UK should move towards a more decentralised electricity grid based around renewables and energy efficiency. The February 2003 White Paper Our energy future: Creating a low carbon economy upheld these recommendations. While it did not entirely rule out future investment in nuclear energy, it did find nuclear power to be economically and environmentally “unattractive” for Britain.

What came next was one of the most abrupt policy turnarounds in UK history. For reasons never officially declared, Prime Minister Tony Blair launched another energy review in November 2005. This second review was not conducted in a transparent and independent way like the PIU process. Instead, it was undertaken by a few partially identified individuals inside the Cabinet Office under the leadership of Blair’s close personal associate, John Birt. According to nuclear advocate Simon Taylor, this involved a select group that most other civil servants in the Cabinet Office did not know even existed, working “in secret” to “re-examine” the case for nuclear energy. Managed by the former Atomic Energy Authority, the consultative part of this exercise was much shallower and shorter than before. Amid other widespread criticism, Greenpeace successfully took the Government to the High Court, where this second review was declared “unlawful” and “deeply flawed”. Yet Blair’s reaction was that this court ruling would “not affect policy at all”. With a further round of consultation, again alienating NGOs, the January 2008 White Paper Meeting the Energy Challenge duly announced a British ‘nuclear renaissance’.

Among those questioning these events was the Parliamentary Environmental Audit Committee, which in March 2006 asked (without receiving an official answer) why a second energy review was deemed necessary so soon after such a comprehensive predecessor. Four months later, the House of Commons Trade and Industry Select Committee branded the second review a “rubber stamping” exercise designed to give legitimacy to a pre-ordained decision rather than being an ‘open’ consultation.

It still remains unexplained what (or even who) could have driven this rethink. It is in this light that nuclear expert Steve Thomas has highlighted the ambiguities around exactly what ‘the UK nuclear lobby’ consists of.  With the UK civil nuclear engineering industry so weak and historically unsuccessful (as discussed in part 1), it is unclear where in this languishing domestic sector sufficient political-economic capital might have accumulated to force such an unprecedented and poorly justified national policy turnaround.

Investment and skills concerns around the UK’s Naval Nuclear Propulsion Programme

This is where the  imperatives around national submarine capabilities comes into play. It is in exactly this same critical juncture between 2003 and 2006 that an unprecedented intensification can be observed in concerns around the UK’s nuclear submarine capability. Significant problems emerged with the construction of British ‘Astute’ class of submarines. Policies related to nuclear submarines were unveiled in rapid succession – with the December 2003 Defence Review White Paper followed by the December 2006 White Paper on the Future of the UK’s nuclear deterrent, leading up to the ‘initial gate’ House of Commons vote to proceed with a replacement to the nuclear-powered Vanguard-class ballistic missile submarines in March 2007. Inconveniently, it was just prior to this marked intensification of activity on the military side, that civil nuclear power was officially acknowledged to be “unattractive”.

One notable development emerging at the beginning of this period was an intense lobbying campaign started in March 2004. The well-funded Keep Our Future Afloat Campaign (KOFAC) emanated from the Barrow shipyards, BAE Systems’ construction site for all UK submarines. Trade unions, local councils, county councils and KOFAC relentlessly targeted politicians, party conferences and governmental consultations. Closely connected with KOFAC and lobbying in support of the submarine industry at this time was then MP for Barrow-in-Furness and close ally of Tony Blair, John Hutton, also one of the most significant supporters of civil nuclear power. KOFAC’s lobbying campaign was recognised by parliamentarians as being “one of the most effective” ever seen.  Focusing resolutely on how to protect UK nuclear submarine manufacturing interests, KOFAC highlighted the importance of supporting integrated civil and defence-related nuclear capabilities. For its part, BAE Systems was also evidently busy in other ways behind the scenes – positioning itself (rather extraordinarily) in a memorandum of understanding of 2006 with the ailing US civil reactor vendor Westinghouse to extend its own military submarine focus to a role in civil nuclear supply chains.

Although internal government reactions to this pressure were invisible, the public response was strikingly accommodating. In 2005, the MoD funded the RAND Corporation to conduct an in-depth two-volume report: “The United Kingdom’s Nuclear Submarine Industrial Base”. The report endorsed crucial links between key skills and capabilities relevant both to submarine and civil nuclear industries. A series of Select Committee consultations and reports ensued, with influential stakeholders in the nuclear submarine supply chain raising many concerns. Lead submarine nuclear propulsion contractors, Rolls Royce, claimed that the depletion of nuclear skills in the civil sector would “reduce the support network available to the military programmes”. The Royal Academy of Engineering noted that “the skills required in the design, build, operation and disposal of Naval Nuclear Propulsion Plant … are in short supply and increasingly expensive… Overall, the decline of the civil nuclear programme has forced the military nuclear programme, and in particular the nuclear submarine programme, to develop and fund its own expertise and personnel in order to remain operational”.

Recognising that “links between the civil and naval sector need to be encouraged” , a key witness to a 2008 Parliamentary Innovation and Skills Select Committee inquiry noted: “The UK is not now in the position of having financial or personnel resources to develop both programmes in isolation”. In a rare acknowledgement of this relationship from the civil energy side, a detailed low-key Government consultancy report later amplified the same message: “the naval and civil reactor industries are often viewed as separate and to some extent unrelated from a government policy perspective. However, the timeline of the UK nuclear industry has clear interactions between the two, particularly from a supply chain development point of view.”  It was apparently in this crucial period 2003-2006 that this longstanding but under-appreciated industrial dependency between military and civil nuclear sectors finally commanded intense – albeit undeclared – attention at the highest political levels.

It is remarkable that these patterns were so obvious to see on the military side of UK policy making, but so virtually invisible on the energy side. Yet this selective discretion is hardly surprising. There are strong incentives to keep these kinds of links as invisible as possible. As the National Audit Office has ominously noted of the costs of Trident: “[o]ne assumption of the future deterrent programme is that the United Kingdom submarine industry will be sustainable and that the costs of supporting it will not fall directly on the future deterrent programme.” Acknowledging this – and reflecting implied industrial practice in the military sector – a seconded BAE Systems Submarine Solutions employee writing in a 2007 report for the Royal United Services Institute, discussed the desirability and difficulty of absorbing or ‘masking’ costs of submarine construction in ostensibly civilian supply chains.   Connections between civil and military nuclear infrastructures are also sensitive internationally, with serious tensions surrounding global nuclear proliferation regimes. This is why one Parliamentary witness emphasised that civil-military nuclear links must be “carefully managed to avoid the perception that they are one and the same”.

It was arguably for such reasons that the UK Government response to the nuclear policy crisis of 2003-2006 was so fast and energetic – with the reasons well acknowledged on the defence side, but virtually invisible on the energy side. Corresponding with the unprecedented U-turn on civil nuclear power was an equally unprecedented intensification in efforts to preserve nuclear skills for the military sector. In 2006, a key suppliers group was set up by BAE Systems involving firms in both military and civil nuclear supply chains. The following year the Department of Trade and Industry expanded the National Nuclear Laboratory (NNL) and established a new National Nuclear Skills Academy.

Since then, the UK Government has gone on to reserve key parts of the HPC contracts for Rolls Royce. BAE Systems has consolidated its interest in civil nuclear construction as well as defence. A huge programme of publicly-funded research has been announced in small modular civil power reactors to build on Rolls Royce’s experience with submarines. And most recently – against a backdrop of massive overcapacity among global nuclear power vendors in what is evidently one of the most economically perilous of sectors – Roll Royce has announced an especially remarkable initiative. Notwithstanding strong pressures for international integration in this overcrowded sector – and a national history in this field of sustained industrial failure – Rolls Royce is now seeking to lead an entirely new industrial consortium branded as distinctively British and dedicated to an untested submarine-derived civil power reactor design. Despite the acknowledged incentives for concealment, these clear linkages between submarine and civil nuclear reactor construction interests provide a key missing link to decipher the otherwise unexplained abrupt reversal in UK nuclear power policy in 2006.

Submerged drivers of UK energy policy?

So, what is the role of UK military nuclear commitments in driving a national low-carbon energy strategy that is manifestly more costly and less effective than it otherwise could be? The complexity and secrecy in this field inevitably makes it difficult to be definite. Nevertheless, the wealth of official documentation on the military side and the remarkable conjunction of events around and beyond the period 2003-2006 do seem to present a plausible case. The UK Government’s commitments to military nuclear capabilities do seem to be a significant (albeit undeclared) factor in civil energy strategies, and of industrial policy more generally.

There are broader questions here over what the military influences on wider British Government policy say about the current state of the UK’s democratic system. It is not necessary to invoke simplistic “conspiracies”. Just as iron filings line up in magnetic fields, so these kinds of institutional pressures can – without any single controlling actor – instil exactly these kinds of patterns. If massive UK civil infrastructure investments really are being shaped to the degree implied by these kinds of perceived military imperatives, then the most important issue is why they are almost completely absent from any kind of discussion or scrutiny – let alone accountability – either in energy policy literatures, or in wider political and media debates. If these institutional forces are as powerful and concealed as they seem, then very serious questions are posed for the health of British democracy in general.

Phil Johnstone is Research Fellow at the Science Policy Research Unit (SPRU),  the University of Sussex. His current research is focussed on disruptive innovation in the energy systems of Denmark, the UK and Germany. Previously Phil worked on the Discontinuity in Technological Systems (DiscGo) project and is a member of the Sussex Energy Group (SEG). 

Andy Stirling is a professor in SPRU and co-directs the STEPS Centre at Sussex University. An interdisciplinary researcher with a background in natural and social science, he has served on many EU and UK advisory bodies on issues of around science policy and emerging technologies.

Today’s younger generations of Palestinians desperately need to become more engaged in community peacebuilding activities to end the division of Palestinian society.

The engagement of the younger generation in civil society work to promote peacebuilding concepts and practices at both grassroots and political levels is necessary for restoring order and security in societies divided by conflict and violence. This is particularly true of Gaza in Palestine where the inhabitants live in an environment where there is violence, extreme poverty and a lack of freedom.

Palestinian youth and civil society face many challenges related to the harsh circumstances imposed by a lack of peace, security and economic development since the failure of the so called ‘Peace Process’ in 2000 between the Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO) and Israel. There have, however, been a variety of projects and programmes installed to raise youth awareness and the importance of civil society values and practices to achieve human rights, peacebuilding and good governance that help bring hope to a young generation, despite some of the local cynicism.

Cynicism towards youth

I always remember the cynical questions raised by many Palestinian citizens while engaging in civil society activities at different levels: “What kind of civil society under occupation are you talking about?” “How will civil society promote and advocate the values of peacebuilding under a territory experiencing foreign occupation?” There are still some Palestinian intellectuals, leaders and activists who do not believe in education for peacebuilding in a country under occupation, but they believe strongly in community peacebuilding to restore the order and security of their own society, after years of division and the failure of the ‘peace process’.

They also go beyond just cynicism and move into absolute pessimism and defeatism by asking: “How can empowering youth in peacebuilding be effective, while they still suffer from the violence under Israeli occupation and a lack of freedom?” “How will civil society organisations promote and persuade youth to become engaged in activities while an overwhelming majority are poor, jobless and losing hope in the future?”

An example is often raised that during the last five years, several young people committed suicide in the Gaza Strip, owing to the harsh economic and social circumstances. This society, however, has little experience of suicide, as it is known for its spirit of religious education and social solidarity, which have always prevailed and are considered to be the highest in the region.

Cynics believe that talking about the empowerment of youth involvement in peacebuilding activities in Gaza is a matter of ‘idealism’ and ‘luxury’, a waste of resources and time because they see such pursuits as being only achievable through  concurrently obtaining freedom and national independence in a viable Palestinian state. Cynics often point out that there were many peacebuilding activities implemented in the Green Line between 1995 and 2000.

Many Palestinian citizens from the various health, NGOs and environmental sector participated at capacity building development courses inside the Green Line. They enjoyed education, trips and nice food, but not sustained peace or security, as the main cause of the problems, the need to establish of a Palestinian state, had not yet been solved. These activities passed without any glimpse of hope or peace after the failure of the ‘peace process’ that led to the breakout of various cycles of violence including the latest war in the Gaza Strip in the summer of 2014 and changed both the context and style of life, after massive destruction.

Life Style

The Palestinian people are used to the daily life style of suffering and the absence of human security; they lost their top priority of securing their own basic human, needs during the failure of the 2000 ‘peace process’ and the collective punishment policies exercised by the occupation. They have lost their own economic, food, health, environmental, personal, community, political and human security. In 1994, the UNDP defined human security, which is achieved when people can exercise their choices safely and freely, and when they can be relatively confident that the opportunities they have today will not be entirely lost tomorrow.

The Gazan people cannot plan their own day without any interruption, owing to the circumstances imposed by a lack of electricity, pollution and a devastated economy. As Mohammed Srour, a field researcher at a human rights organisation in Gaza says

“The Palestinian people now busy with their own daily affairs, living without electricity and facing the entire closure on the strip and the invasion of pollution of their environment and beaches, owing to the lack of electricity. The citizens have no place to go in Gaza to escape the heat of the summer because of the lack of electricity. The sewage flows into the sea as the pumps and wasting stations do not work without electricity. The beaches are fully polluted and people cannot enjoy swimming in the sea to escape from the extreme heat any more in most coastal areas”.

Gaza’s economy has actually been virtually stagnant for the past ten years, with an average annual real GDP growth rate over the decade not exceeding 1.44%, while Gaza’s population has grown by 38.4% over the same period.

Today’s younger generations of Palestinians desperately need to become more engaged in community peacebuilding activities to end the division of Palestinian society. But the dire circumstances have deepened the wounds of Gazan society and made the life of the younger generation almost unbearable and impossible. Consequently, many young Palestinians have decided to leave rather than stay and help build peace.

The Brain Drain of Palestinian Youth

Many young minds have already left Palestine to find a new environment and hope. More than 21 young people who attempted to find their way to Europe lost their lives in the Mediterranean in 2014 when one of their boats was wrecked and their fate is still unknown to this day. However, the rest of the youth who could not leave after the full closure of the tunnels between the Gaza Strip and Egypt spend their time navigating social media and the internet.

They enjoy their chats which help them escape from the harsh politics and economic realities, attempting to watch any developments posted by other fellows or friends online. Facebook, in particular, is considered their own ideal ‘city’ of information and it is a way of ‘killing the time’, as many young people are always informing me when I have a conversation with them. They have lost hope in local politicians, political groups, the international community and civil society organisations in helping them to change their circumstances. There are many who accuse these actors of lying, trading off and using the suffering of the Gazans to increase their power, wealth and business. But not all have abandoned hope.

Resilience and Hope

Despite the seemingly dire straits of life, the youths of Palestine are still resilient enough to try change the de facto situation, by engaging in community initiatives. They have, for example, on different occasions, engaged in non-violent and peaceful protests to contribute to the ending of the circumstances in the West Bank and the Gaza Strip. For example, the youth march movement in 2012 during ‘the Arab Spring’ to end the Palestinian division. After 2014 war in Gaza, they also participated actively, in non-violent activities to end the siege in the Gaza Strip by protesting close to the ‘buffer zone’ or in front of the ‘security fence’ with Israel in the Gaza Strip.

Now, in 2017, the Palestinian youth, across their homeland, have seized the initiative again to protest peacefully against the closure of Al Aqsa. They are still seeking a better future and attempting to find any opportunity for hope and change. They attempt to find out about the latest leaks of reconciliation between Hamas and a Fatah wing in the Gaza Strip to end the conflict between the two sides that has divided the Palestinian house. If reconciliation takes place between the two sides, it will contribute to changing the social and political circumstances of the entire society and of youth in particular.

In addition to these political developments, there have been a number of community activities to help keep youth hopeful for a better future. For example, the Gaza youth UNRWA Football team that won the Norway Cup last year continued preparation and already left the Strip for Denmark and Norway to participate in two different international football tournaments in the last week of July and the First week of August. This kind of participation always gives youth and the whole society hope that there is still a bright future coming soon where they can achieve justice, peace and freedom.

Dr Ibrahim Natil is a Fellow at the Institute for International Conflict Resolution and Reconstruction, Dublin City University http://iicrr.ie/people/fellows/dr-ibrahim-natil/. He is an international human rights campaigner, nominee for the Tällberg Foundation Global Leadership Prize, 2016 and the founder of Society Voice Foundation http://www.mbialumniassociation.org/alumni-news/news-folder/year-of-publication/2016/qa-ibrahim-natil/