The Hub, a “YouTube for human rights”

The international human rights organization Witness, founded in 1992 by musician and activist Peter Gabriel and the Reebok Human Rights Foundation, recently launched a project called The Hub.

Witness is a non-profit organization that provides video cameras, technical and strategic training to people in the field so that they can capture evidence of human rights violations.

The collected footage is used in different ways: as education and mobilization tools, as evidence in justice courts or to catalyze policy change. For example:

1. The arrest for war crimes in March 2006 in Democratic Republic of Congo of Thomas Lubanga Dyilo by the International Criminal Court resulted from an advocacy campaign by Witness’ partner AJEDI-Ka/PES, which included video distribution and screenings to key officials of the International Criminal Court.
   
   
2. Following the preview of a video by a Witness’ partner organization on the atrocities caused by landmines, the Senegalese Minister of Women’s and Family Affairs “pledged unprecedented funding for women landmine victims, and a regional hospital is providing prostheses free-of-charge.”

Witness said its goal is to provide resources to people so that they can “transform personal stories of abuse into powerful tools for justice, promoting public engagement and policy change.” In that context, the Hub initiative is a further step towards the promotion of human rights.

As Peter Gabriel described it at the launch of the new website in early November, the Hub is “the first online global platform that offers you the tools you need to use media for advocacy — enabling you and millions of others worldwide to use camcorders, cell phones and cameras to upload, share, and discuss your human rights-related footage, as well as organize campaigns to create change.”

The Hub is currently in a “beta” stage as kinks are ironed out. But you can participate in various ways, in particular by uploading human rights related videos, images and audio files.

These kinds of innovations are worth spreading and might inspire those in the disarmament and arms control community, especially those working in the field who have been witness to the practical consequences of human rights violations and related problems of human insecurity. Share what you see! As a Witness slogan puts it:

“See it. Film it. Change it.”

Aurélia Merçay


References

The Hub website: http://hub.witness.org/.

Witness website: http://www.witness.org/.

Prism Webcast News, “Peter Gabriel launches the Hub—a ‘YouTube for human rights’”, http://prismwebcastnews.com/pwn/?p=1584.

Video of Peter Gabriel at 2006 TED Conference, “Fighting injustice with a videocamera”, available online at http://www.ted.com/talks/view/id/23.

A registry for predictions

As part of our research, UNIDIR’s Disarmament as Humanitarian Action project has been exploring why it’s difficult to accurately predict future events in the political field (see John Borrie’s recent post “Putting Predictions to the Test”). On the same topic, I recently saw David Brin, a physics professor, NASA consultant and science fiction novelist, talk about the idea of a “prediction registry”.

Although making predictions about the future is an extremely difficult task—especially in the political field—this is something that humans have always done. (Brin noted that our prefrontal lobes, which appeared perhaps a few hundred thousand years ago and which are specific to the human brain, play a significant role in exploring potential outcomes and making predictions.)

Today, we’ve developed tools and techniques to help us make forecasts. Computer simulations, and agent-based modelling in particular, are used to analyze complex phenomena. Although very sophisticated, these new techniques can only provide a limited amount of information about the future behaviour of a complex system. This is because, as complexity theory shows, complex systems are “inherently” unpredictable.

However, as Brin noticed, this doesn’t prevent us from making predictions, nor does it prevent us from spending a lot of money and time in trying to make accurate guesses. Starting from this insight, and realizing that there is no record of who was right, how often and when, Brin proposed a prediction registry be set up: “anyone who claims any form of special foresight might be judged by the same standards that applies to any other field of endeavour—success or failure.”

In addition, each forecast would receive a “specificity multiplier”, taking a high value if the prediction is very precise (providing dates, names, places, etc.) and a low value it if the forecast is obscure.

This could be valuable. First, predictors and forecast specialists would “be held accountable for all of their predictions, not just those they later choose to remember.” This is important as it would significantly improve transparency. The introduction of an “accuracy score”, in particular, could reveal the most accurate predictors, giving them credibility and recognition, and increasing their role in policy making.

There might be some surprises. As Philip Tetlock showed in his book “Expert Political Judgment: How Good is It? How Can We Know?”, experts aren’t necessarily more competent than the rest of us.
Finding out who is right a lot in prediction and problem solving, while denying legitimacy to those who are consistently wrong, would probably be in society’s best interest.

But most importantly, the analysis of scores, Brin suggested, could also help us understand our own patterns of success, failure and predictions. Tetlock’s work has already underlined the influence of various psychological biases on so-called experts. Yet policy analysts and decision makers aren’t soothsayers. If we’re at all realistic, we need to recognise that predictors can never be always right. But if a prediction registry made more of them rigorous in their thinking and less instinctively cocksure in their predictions, that would be a big step forward for 21st century society.


Aurélia Merçay


References

David Brin, Accountability for Everyday Prophets: A Call for a Predictions Registry, 2005, available online at http://www.davidbrin.com/predictionsregistry.html.

A list of David Brin’s predictions is available online at http://earthbydavidbrin.pbwiki.com/Predictions.

Video of David Brin, interviewed at the 6th International Conference on Complex Systems (ICCS) in Boston in June 2006: http://complexity.vub.ac.be/~comdig/06iccs/Brin.MOV.

Photo by 'SeraphimC retrieved from Flickr.

Worldmapper

Professor Danny Dorling of the University of Sheffield in the United Kingdom reckons, “you can say it, you can prove it, you can tabulate it, but it is only when you show it that it hits home.”

Dorling and his colleagues are backing up this claim. Their research group on Social and Spatial Inequalities (SASI) has established the Worldmapper project in collaboration with Mark Newman at the Center for the Study of Complex Systems at the University of Michigan in the United States.

Worldmapper is a collection of some 366 world maps, in which territories are re-sized according to a chosen variable of interest. Indicators they’ve mapped range from wealth, education and health to population movements, goods production and natural disaster casualties.

The Worldmapper database also includes cartograms depicting military spending as well as violence and war statistics. I was particularly interested in a map representing territory size as the proportion of worldwide landmine casualties from 2003 to 2005.

The first image below is a classic world map. The second is the Worldmapper version, which visually depicts where casualties are occurring by appearing to swell or shrink areas according to their proportion of landmine casualties (click on the pictures to enlarge).



“Landmine casualty” here is drawn from the Landmine Monitor definition to refer to any “individual killed or injured as a result of an incident involving antipersonnel mines, anti-vehicle mines, improvised explosive devices, dud cluster munitions, and other unexploded ordnance”.

During the time period from 2003 to 2005, Landmine Monitor reported around 7,000 casualties from landmines and explosive remnants of war (ERW) worldwide per year. However, this figure “represents only the reported casualties and does not take into account the many casualties that are believed to go unreported.” The real number of new casualties from landmines/ERW each year is estimated by Landmine Monitor to be between 15,000 and 20,000.

As we can see on the map, the most affected countries in the time period 2003-2005 included Iraq, Afghanistan, Cambodia and Colombia. Together, these countries accounted for almost 4000—or 57%—of the reported number of casualties.


Aurélia Merçay


References

Worldmapper’s website: http://www.worldmapper.org .

Social and Spatial Inequalities (SASI) research group’s homepage.

D. Dorling, Worldmapper: The Human Anatomy of a Small Planet, PLOS Medicine, January 2007, volume 4, issue 1, edition 1, freely available online.

Let’s polish up the crystal ball

The World Future Society recently released the Outlook 2008 Report as part of the November-December 2007 issue of its magazine “The Futurist”.

This report includes some 70 forecasts covering developments and breakthroughs in technology, energy and the environment, international relations and society in general.

Among the thinkers who have contributed to “The Futurist” magazine in the past years are current climate change activist (and just-announced Nobel Peace prize co-winner) Al Gore, former United States Secretary of Defense Robert McNamara and former UN Secretary General Kofi Annan.

So, what should we expect in the coming years? Here are the top 10 forecasts of the Outlook 2008 Report, some of which are directly relevant to human security and multilateral disarmament diplomacy:

1. “The world will have a billion millionaires by 2025”, as a result of globalization and technology innovations.

2. “Fashion will go wired as technologies and tastes converge to revolutionize the textile industry.” Smart fabrics – such as colour-changing or perfume emitting textiles –, digital wallets and computer shoes are just a few examples of the new technologies that will radically transform the textile industry.

3. “The threat of another cold war with China, Russia, or both will replace terrorism as the chief foreign-policy concern of the United States.” According to Luttwak, terrorist attacks are a relatively minor threat to the United States that Soviet missile capabilities.

4. “Counterfeiting of currency will proliferate, driving the move toward a cashless society.”

5. “The earth is on the verge of a significant extinction event. The twenty-first century could witness a biodiversity collapse 100 to 1,000 times greater than any previous extinction.”

6. “Water will be in the twenty-first century what oil was in the twentieth century.”

7. “World population by 2050 may grow larger than previously expected, due in part to healthier, longer-living people.”

8. “The number of Africans imperiled by floods will grow 70-fold by 2080”. The predictions indicate a 38cm increase of sea level by 2080. If this is the case, the number of Africans affected by floods is estimated to grow from 1 million to 70 millions.

9. “Rising prices for natural resources could lead to a full-scale assault on the Arctic”. According to Brigham, the control over arctic natural resources will be a major political challenge in the next decades.

10. “More decisions will be made by nonhuman entities”. Because of the ever-increasing complexity of the world, artificial intelligence will play an increasing role in decision-making processes.

Of course, “The Futurist’s” predictions could well be proved wrong. That’s the problem with prediction – hence we’re not getting around in jet cars or rocket-powered backpacks despite assertions that it would be the case by today a few decades ago. Conversely, few saw the Internet or the iPod coming.

Humans often make their predictions based on current evidence and past experiences. If there’s one thing we’re learning in an increasingly interdependent world it’s that plenty of social phenomena are non-linear and inherently unpredictable. In complex systems – and complex social systems in particular –, actions sometimes have unintended consequences.

So, while forecasts like those in “The Futurist” are stimulating, I’m sure we’re in for some even more way-out surprises it didn’t predict – both good and bad.


Aurélia Merçay


Reference

The top ten forecasts from the Outlook 2008 report by the World Future Society are available online.

30% less pupils in Helmand province

According to IRIN (the Integrated Regional Information Networks of the UN Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs (OCHA)), more than 30,000 pupils attending school in the Helmand province in southern Afghanistan last year were absent in 2007. This represents a reduction of more than 30% in school attendance:

“This year we have 70,000 students in 90 functioning schools in Helmand province,” said Saeed Ibrar Agha, head of the provincial education department.[]
In 2002, less than a year after the Taliban were toppled, there were 224 functioning schools all over the province [].”

Insecurity explains why most schools are shuttered in the Helmand province. In the past 15 months, according to Saeed Ibrar Agha, Taliban insurgents and other armed groups targeting schools as symbols of the government have burned down more than 20 schools and killed 17 students, teachers and other staff.

The deterioration of security conditions has led to a flow of children to Lashkar Gah, the capital of Helmand province. Today, half of all provincial pupils (i.e. 35,000 children) are to be found in Lashkar Gar. The 27 schools open in the city have been unable to keep pace with demand and some classes have to be held in the open.

To end on a positive note, the number of female students – who were denied the right to attend school under the Taliban regime from 1996 to 2001 – has increased from 12,228 in 2006 (12%) to 14,500 in 2007 (21%) in the Helmand province. This is important. As a 2006 Human Rights Watch report observed, increasing females’ access to education not only benefits girls and women, but also the country’s development:

“It is now well-established that increasing girls’ and women’s access to education improves maternal and child health, improves their own children’s access to education, and promotes economic growth. For example, research has shown that an additional year of school for girls can reduce infant mortality by 5 to 10 percent, and that reducing the gender gap in education increases per capita income growth. Indeed, studies have found greater returns through higher wages on school investments for girls than for boys, particularly for secondary education.”

Aurélia Merçay


References

AFGHANISTAN: Boys' education slides in Helmand, IRIN’s report, 8 October 2007, available online at http://www.irinnews.org/Report.aspx?ReportId=74690 .

Human Rights Watch, Education in Afghanistan and its Importance for Development in Lessons in Terror: Attacks on Education in Afghanistan, July 2006, available online at http://www.hrw.org/reports/2006/afghanistan0706/3.htm.

Photo by Jim Birt retrieved from Flickr: brightly coloured burqas worn by Afghan girls on their way to school in Gereshk, Helmand Province (Afghanistan, May 2007).

Complexity and Arms Control Diplomacy

As part of its work, the Disarmament Insight initiative has hosted a sequence of workshops this year with Geneva disarmament practitioners to encourage them to think out of the box in their work. For example, previous visitors to our site may recall that on 25 May we held a workshop on 'human security, human nature and trust-building in negotiation' with speakers including the primatologist Frans de Waal, economist Paul Seabright and Robin Coupland from the International Committee of the Red Cross. (Podcasts of some of these talks are available by clicking on the podcast panel in the left column.)

Yesterday, we hosted another workshop with multilateral practitioners, this time on the theme of 'complexity and diplomacy: Understanding the implications for multilateral arms control'.

Diplomats love to talk about the complexity involved in their endeavours. But they usually do it in a rhetorical sense, without realizing that complexity is actually a domain of scientific research and that complex phenomena have particular features. But what's complicated isnt' the same as what's complex. A better understanding among arms control practitioners about what complexity is - and recognising the hallmarks of complex social phenomena - could, we think, help make their work more effective and has implications for human security thinking.

Small arms proliferation and the diffusion of new technologies, like say those in the life sciences that could be turned to hostile use, have many characteristics that indicate they're complex social phenomena. Multilateral negotiations themselves might also even be considered as complex social phenomena. We explored some of these ideas in our third volume of research, Thinking Outside the Box in Disarmament and Arms Control Negotiations.

Yesterday we were joined by two speakers who've been big influences on our thinking - Paul Ormerod and Philip Ball (pictured above). Philip, a consultant editor at the scientific journal Nature and science writer and broadcaster, is author of a remarkable book, Critical Mass: How One Thing Leads to Another, which won the Aventis Prize in 2005 and explores the relevance of complexity and statistical physics to the social world. Paul Ormerod is an economist and author of Butterfly Economics and Why Most Things Fail, and is an innovative and creative modeller on a wide range of real-world issues ranging from violent crime in the United Kingdom to the political stability of China.

In addition to the DHA project's own resident physicist and researcher, Aurélia Merçay, Philip and Paul discussed their work, and the relevance of concepts and applications of complexity to arms control efforts. One such application is a conceptual multiple equilibrium model Aurélia developed to examine the mechanisms involved in demand for small arms, in part based on Paul Ormerod's work. And it's clear from discussion with the diplomats and others attending that there are many other potential useful applications.

In coming weeks, after the dust has settled, look out for free podcasts of presentations by Aurélia, Philip and Paul from this site, or for download from the iTunes Music Store by searching there for 'Disarmament Insight'.


John Borrie


References

Ball, Philip, “Critical Mass: How One Thing Leads to Another.” London: Arrow

Merçay, Aurélia & Borrie, John, A physics of diplomacy? The dynamics of complex social phenomena and their implications for multilateral negotiations in Borrie, John & Martin Randin, Vanessa (eds.), “Thinking Outside the Box in Multilateral Disarmament and Arms Control Negotiations.” Geneva: UNIDIR: 2006.

Merçay, Aurélia, Non-Linear modelling of small arms proliferation in Borrie, John & Martin Randin, Vanessa (eds.), “Thinking Outside the Box in Multilateral Disarmament and Arms Control Negotiations.” Geneva: UNIDIR: 2006.

Ormerod, Paul, “Butterfly Economics.” London: Fontana: 1999.

Ormerod, Paul, “Why Most Things Fail: Evolution, Extinction and Economics.” London: Faber & Faber: 2005.

Children’s drawings describing Darfur atrocities

Human Rights Watch (HRW): What's happening here?
13-year-old artist: These men in green are taking the women and the girls.
HRW: What are they doing?
Boy: They are forcing them to be wife. The houses are on fire.
HRW: What's happening here?
Boy: This is an Antonov. This is a helicopter. These here, at the bottom of the page, these are dead people.

Last week, while looking for a picture to illustrate a post on systematic rape in DRC, I came across a series of drawings from children who were refugees in camps along the Chad-Darfur border.

These pictures date from February 2005, when two Human Rights Watch researchers, Dr. Annie Sparrow and Olivier Bercault, visited refugee camps in Chad in order to assess issues of insecurity and sexual violence.

The two researchers gave paper and crayons to children so that they could draw while their parents and caretakers were interviewed.

Without any instructions or guidance, the children drew scenes from their experiences of the conflict in Sudan’s Darfur region: the bombings by Sudanese government helicopters and Antonov planes, the villages burning, the attacks by mounted Janjaweed (using the UN definition, the Janjaweed – thought to mean “a man with a gun on a horse” – are comprised of nomadic Arabic-speaking African tribes, the core of whom are from Abbala (camel herder) background with significant Lambo recruitment from the Baggara (cattle herder) people), the shootings of civilians, the rape of women and girls, and the flight to Chad.

Although they date from early 2005, these drawings are highly topical. According to UN estimates, the Darfur conflict – which is still going today – has killed more than 200,000 people and at least 2.2 million people have fled their homes since 2003.

Click here to see Darfur children’s drawings.


Aurélia Merçay


References

Darfur Drawn, The conflict in Darfur through children’s eyes, Human Rights Watch, http://hrw.org/photos/2005/darfur/drawings/index.htm.

A. Sparrow and O. Bercault, The Art of War: Children's drawings illustrate Darfur atrocities, 14 July 2005, Slate, available online at http://www.slate.com/id/2122730/.

Statistics retrieved from a press conference by UN Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon at UN Headquarters. See "Darfur: Ban Ki-moon says peace talks must be 'final phase' towards settlement", UN News Centre, 10 September 2007, available here.

Drawing from a 13-year-old boy, who fled Darfur and was living in a refugee camp in Chad in 2005 (no more recent information), see http://hrw.org/photos/2005/darfur/drawings/13.htm.

Systematic rape in Congo: a weapon of war

Last week, John Holmes, UN Under Secretary General for Humanitarian Affairs and Emergency Relief Coordinator, spent four days in Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC) as part of the UN’s efforts to assess the humanitarian situation in the region.

Quoted in a Washington Post article published on 9 September 2007, he described the prevalence and intensity of sexual violence against women in eastern Congo as “almost unimaginable” and “worse than anywhere else in the world”. “Rape has become almost a cultural phenomenon”, Holmes noted.

In DRC, sexual violence is a component of a broader environment of insecurity. The presence in the forests of eastern Congo of Hutu militias (which fled Rwanda after the 1994 genocide), along with other armed groups, has menaced the Congolese civilian population for more than 10 years. As Holmes described it:

“There needs to be a political solution to the problems there, which are connected to the past, to the genocide in Rwanda.”

Some figures? In DRC, according to the United Nations:
> About 300’000 people have been displaced in the last 10 months. Because basic resources, such as food and clean water, are missing in refugee camps, people die from hunger or disease;
> Nearly 4’500 cases of sexual violence have been reported in just one eastern province of DRC in the last 9 months. Real figures are probably much higher.

Systematic sexual violence against women and girls is a facet of warfare. It is used as a weapon of terror, aiming at terrorizing and dominating civilian populations, who often have to flee their homes in the hope of escaping sexual assaults, torture and mutilations. An article published in The Nation in 2004 noted that:

“Based on personal testimonies collected by Human Rights Watch, it is estimated that as many as 30% of rape victims are tortured and mutilated during the assaults, usually with spears, machetes, sticks or gun barrels thrust into their vaginas. [] About 40% of rape victims, usually the younger ones , aged 8 to 19, are abducted and forced to become sex slaves.”

Beside the physical and psychological damage inflicted on women and children, it is reported that systematic rape is leading to a wide contamination of the population by HIV/AIDS.

Sexual violence in DRC is of a “systematic” nature. By recognizing that sexual violence is deliberately and strategically planned – like it was the case in Rwanda and in Bosnia-Herzegovina (in 2001, for the first time ever, rape was successfully prosecuted as a crime against humanity in a trial of the International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia) –, a case could be made that it violates international humanitarian law.

Rape in DRC could then be prosecuted as crime against humanity or as a form of genocide.


Aurélia Merçay


References

Stephanie McCrummen, “Prevalence of Rape in E. Congo Described as Worst in World”, The Washington Post, 9 September 2007, available online here.

Jan Goodwin, “Silence=Rape”, The Nation, 8 March 2004, available online here.

Photo by cyclopsr retrieved from Flickr: "the surgery of 4-year-old Vitonsi was successful and she is now recovering. But she, as well as her mother, is deeply traumatized by the rape."

Analyzing armed violence: the Taback - Coupland model

Promoting human security will benefit from meaningful data. I recently attended a meeting organized by the Small Arms Survey (SAS) in Geneva, Switzerland, on the potential of using the Taback-Coupland model for human security mapping.


Nathan Taback, a Canadian statistician, and Robin Coupland, an advisor on armed violence at the International Committee of the Red Cross and former field surgeon, have developed a model that converts media reports into data in order to document and analyze the effects of armed violence.

The model is constructed around four parameters, which the researchers assume to be the “risk factors” for the effects of armed violence. It includes the nature of the weapon, the number of weapons used, the way the weapon is used, and the victim’s vulnerability. Coupland and Taback describe their model in a chapter of our third volume of research (“Thinking Outside the Box in Multilateral Disarmament and Arms Control Negotiations”).

The idea is that, by extracting significant information from media reports – like the number of people killed, the number of people wounded, the type of weapon used, the number of weapons and the vulnerability of the victim (for instance, was there a wall to take shelter behind?) – then it’s possible to draw conclusions about the intent of the perpetrator.

This is pertinent to international criminal law. By providing a context, the Taback-Coupland model permits an “evidence-based” dialogue about the perpetrators and their intents and about the victims and their vulnerabilities.

A second way to use the model is to conduct probabilistic risk assessment of a country or a region and draw conclusions on which scenario is particularly risky for a specific vulnerable group.

Taback and Coupland tested their model using news reports on attacks on journalists, as these events tend to be well reported. Further applications – some already putting the model into practice, others at a preliminary stage – include a registry of explosive violence (Landmine Action UK), a registry of sexual violence in Democratic Republic of the Congo, and test-cases for country assessments carried out by the Geneva-based Small Arms Survey (in Uganda, Nigeria, Mauritania and Nepal).

Many participants at the meeting pointed out the poor quality of media reports and their lack of reliability. However, although not comprehensive, media reports are the only day-to-day public source of information about human insecurity. While one should be be careful when using media reports, it’s sometimes the only information available and it’s nevertheless possible to glean useful information from it.

Moreover, a long-term perspective could be to develop the model as a tool for journalists, who could directly enter the relevant data of the events linked to armed violence they observe.

While there are international surveillance systems for monitoring infectious disease outbreaks, no such system exists (yet) to evaluate on a regular basis the effects of armed violence on peoples’ lives. With that in mind, the method developed by Taback and Coupland is a useful contribution to international efforts to enhance human security, including in disarmament.


Aurélia Merçay


References

Cost Working group meeting on Using the Taback-Coupland Method for Human Security Mapping in SAS Country Assessments, Small Arms Survey, Geneva, Switzerland, 3 September 2007.

Picture inspired by a scheme presented by Robin Coupland at the meeting.

For more information, see N. Taback & R. Coupland, “Security of journalists: making the case for modelling armed violence as a means to promote human security”, published in Thinking Outside the Box in Multilateral Disarmament and Arms Control Negotiations.

For a further introduction to the thinking behind the Taback-Coupland model see Robin’s chapter in our first volume of research, entitled “Modelling armed violence: a tool for humanitarian dialogue in disarmament and arms control”.

Myths about Climate Change and Conflict?

Last week, I came across an article published on Foreign Policy magazine’s website entitled “The New Myth About Climate Change” by Idean Salehyan, an assistant professor of political science at the University of North Texas.

According to the author, the thesis that global warming increases the probability of conflict – a proposition supported by United Nations Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon and even discussed in the United Nations Security Council as we reported on May 3rd 2007 – is a “myth”. Salehyan develops his argument around three points:

1. “there is little systemic empirical evidence that resource scarcity and changing environmental conditions lead to conflict”

Global warming occurs over a long period of time, and it is true that its effects have largely been subtle. The emerging scientific consensus, however, is that the most important effects of global warming are still to come (see reports by IPCC, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change).

Is global warming likely to increase the probability of conflict? Yes, is what a growing chorus of experts thinks. There are several ways in which specialists believe global warming will impact on the likelihood of conflict. This includes border disputes, migration movements, energy and other resource shortages (notably, freshwater, cultivable land, crop yields and fish stocks), which may lead to societal stress and humanitarian crises, as the British government outlined in its UN Security Council paper.

Salehyan observes that, although the global warming process has already started, the global number of conflicts is falling; “if global warming causes conflict, we should not be witnessing this downward trend.”

I don’t agree with that. Salehyan’s linear way of thinking is simplistic and fails to comprehend the truly complex nature of conflicts’ dynamics. Conflicts are complex social phenomena that result from inter-relationships between several (if not myriad) factors. This means that, as global warming increases the chances of conflict, other factors – for instance, social, economic or political conditions – are at play and combine their effects to create a global trend.

Crucially, Salehyan has made his inference based on an apparent correlation between climate change and conflict during a particular period of time. Yet neither climate change (nor the number of conflicts) follows a linear trend. The number of conflicts can fall, but then abruptly rise again and we cannot predict what will happen based on assertions of past incidence of conflict. Moreover, while it is true that, historically, the incidence of inter-state war has fallen in the recent years, other forms of conflict have emerged.

2. “arguing that climate change is a root cause of conflict lets tyrannical governments off the hook”

Salehyan argues that “if the environment drives conflict, then governments bear little responsibility for bad outcomes.” This is misleading and absurd. Stating that climate change is a contributory factor in conflicts – like in Darfur, example cited in Salehyan’s paper – doesn’t excuse nor remove responsibility from governments.

3. “dire predictions about the coming environmental wars imply that climate change requires military solutions”

I don’t understand Salehyan’s logic here. “Dire predictions about the coming environmental wars” imply, in my opinion, that we must take measures to reduce global warming, and we need to start now to design solutions in order to anticipate the consequences of climate change and limit its humanitarian impact as much as possible.

Dire predictions instead strengthen the road for strong, effective international institutions and flexible, collective action, because no state can deal with the impacts of climate change on its own.

If, with this paper, Salehyan’s intent is to provoke controversy, he’s succeeded. But maybe it’s time to raise the level of the debate.


Aurélia Merçay


References

Idean Salehyan, The New Myth About Climate Change, posted in August 2007 on Foreign Policy and available online at http://www.foreignpolicy.com/story/cms.php?story_id=3922.

The UK’s concept paper and other documents from the UNSC discussion can be found here.

Photo by Oyzman retrieved from Flickr.com.

New feature: print or save Disarmament Insight postings

As you’ve probably noticed, we have just included a new option that allows visitors to save Disarmament Insight blog postings in PDF format.

It is now possible to have a printer-friendly version of all or just one of the postings on the site.

1) To print all postings displayed on the main page:
Simply click the button "Save page as PDF".

2) To print a single post:
Click on the post’s title (this will open a page displaying only this post);
Click the button “Save page as PDF”.

Hope you’ll find this useful.


Aurélia Merçay

AFGHANISTAN: Taliban Plant Hundreds of Mines in Helmand Province

Provincial officials say Taliban insurgents have planted hundreds of anti-personnel mines in several districts of Helmand in the last six months.
Engaged in long battles with Afghan security forces backed by NATO-led international troops, Taliban fighters have turned to landmines to block entry to areas where they operate, said Nabijan Molakhiel, a former police chief and a military expert."

This is a quote from a news report by IRIN - the Integrated Regional Information Networks. Click here to read the complete report.


Aurélia Merçay

Al-Qaeda’s Internet

In November 2001, Hamid Mir, a Pakistani journalist reporting from Afghanistan, watched “every second al-Qaeda member carrying a laptop computer along with a Kalashnikov” as they prepared to flee American bombing.

These are the first lines of an article I recently read in “Le Temps”, a Swiss newspaper, describing the growing role the Internet allegedly plays in al-Qaeda’s terrorist activities.

Terrorist organizations, and Al-Qaeda in particular, have not been caught on the hop by the fast development of recent technology. Quite the opposite: terrorist presence on the Internet is becoming ever more pervasive and sophisticated (last figures estimate the number of sensitive websites to 5’000).

As described in a report by Gabriel Weimann, the Internet is in many ways the “ideal arena” for terrorist activities. Evident advantages include its ease of access, anonymity, little or no regulation and the possibility of communicating to a vast potential audience. Moreover, the volatility of websites, which can close and re-open with a different URL every day, increases the difficulty of tracking terrorist activities.

In his report, Weimann describes the numerous uses terrorists make of the Internet. He divides them into 8 categories:

1. Psychological warfare: the Internet is used as a means of pressure or to instill fear (e.g. diffusion of execution videotapes).

2. Propaganda: via the Internet, terrorist organizations can directly control the messages they want to communicate in ways that are cheap and instantaneous.

3. Data mining: Internet is used to gather information about a target. In his book “Black Ice: The Invisible Threat of Cyberterrorism”, Dan Verton claimed that:

al-Qaeda cells now operate with the assistance of large databases containing details of potential targets in the U.S. They use the Internet to collect intelligence on those targets, especially critical economic nodes, and modern software enables them to study structural weaknesses in facilities as well as predict the cascading failure effect of attacking certain systems.

4. Fundraising

5. Recruitment: the Internet, and some online forums in particular, have been used as platforms to recruit specialists, not to mention candidates to be suicide bombers.

6. Networking: Through the use of the Internet, loosely interconnected terrorist groups are able to maintain contact one with each other (for more info about terrorist networks, have a look at this former post).

7. Sharing information: Internet is used to provide technical advice, from the way to create a detonator with a cell phone, to bomb recipes and encryption methods.

8. Planning: the Internet can be used to coordinate terrorist activities. For instance, bombings in Casablanca, Morocco in 2007 occurred in an Internet café, where the bombers were waiting for last-minute instructions from over the web about their intended target.

In response, some government security agencies have implemented software, such as “Magic Lantern” or “Carnivore”, which aim to locate terrorist websites by scanning the Internet. These agencies have also recruited “cyberspies”, whose job is to infiltrate chat rooms and forums.

These initiatives, however, are limited in number and scope, and usually lack much financial support because policymakers tend to underestimate the migration of terrorism from the physical space to cyberspace. According to Le Temps, the Swiss government, for instance, doesn’t have a specialized agency to combat terrorist activities in cyberspace – instead it uses existing services to combat cyber-crime and pedophilia when needed.

Of course, adapting existing expertise and experience within governments to respond to new threats can be very effective. But in this context it may also indicate lack of attention. Meanwhile, the nature of terrorism will evolve with and take full advantage of new developments in technology and communication unless countered. Governments take heed.


Aurélia Merçay


References

Le Temps, “Internet, la nouvelle base arrière du terrorisme”, 3 July 2007 (Swiss newspaper).

Gabriel Weimann, How Modern Terrorism Uses the Internet, The Journal of International Security Affairs, Spring 2005 - Number 8, check that link.

Dan Verton, Black Ice: The Invisible Threat of Cyberterrorism, McGraw-Hill/Osborne, 2003.

Photo retrieved from Flickr.com.

Gapminder or “Making sense of the world by having fun with statistics"

“Fun” and “statistics” aren’t words that normally fit together. Endless unreadable charts, incomprehensible graphs (what does x stand for, again?...), average, mean, median, standard deviation…Yes, statistics can certainly be boring. However, as illustrated by Gapminder, a non-profit dedicated to communicating and disseminating global-development statistics, this isn’t necessarily the case.

Hans Rosling, one of Gapminder’s cofounders, is a Swedish medical doctor and public health researcher. While teaching international health at the Karolinska Institutet in Stockholm, Rosling realized that the traditional way of presenting statistics was an obstacle to his students’ understanding of the health and economic trends shaping the world. So, helped by his son Ola, he developed a short animated movie illustrating the progress of states – moving bubbles, whose size represents population – along both health and economic indicators. As described in a BusinessWeek article:

"When the bubble started to move, people got very excited!" Rosling gleefully recalls. His students sat bolt upright as he began calling global development as if it were a horse race: And there goes China down the stretch, while sub-Saharan Africa continues to fall farther and father behind.... "It was a tremendous breakthrough in my lecturing," reflects Rosling.

Rosling’s presentation, “Debunking third-world myths with the best stats you've ever seen”, was considered the high point of the 2006 Technology, Entertainment, Design (TED) Conference, which is an American alternative to the stuffier Swiss-based World Economic Forum. (The TED Conference, held annually in Monterey, California, is modestly described by its organizers as “The ultimate brain spa,” “Davos for optimists” and “A four-day journey into the future, in the company of those creating it.”) Here’s the video of Rosling’s talk:



Rosling’s work, however, isn’t just about eye-candy like nice animations. Behind the Gapminder initiative is the idea that data about the world should be free, accessible and understandable. Adopting an “open-source philosophy” may highlight possible errors and omissions and therefore has the potential to improve data quality and transparency.

As in global development, it’s time to promote a “fact-based worldview” in the field of armed violence. In June I attended a workshop organized by the Small Arms Survey in Geneva on measuring and costing armed violence. It occurred to me there that principles and tools, like the ones developed by the Gapminder initiative, could greatly increase understanding of armed violence and of its cost, not least among multilateral policy makers.

We know this because in January, as part of the Disarmament Insight initiative, we held a workshop with nearly 30 Geneva based multilateral practitioners from diplomatic Missions, international organisations, Non-Governmental Organisations and think tanks. Our warm up for the day was to show them Rosling’s 20-minute TED talk above. It had every one of them transfixed.

In a subsequent Disarmament Insight workshop in May, the economist Paul Seabright (author of ‘The Company of Strangers’) showed participants that some dimensions of global armed violence are deeply counter-intuitive, something we’ll return to in coming posts on this blog. Obviously, if policy makers are unaware of these dimensions they’re less likely to be effective in tackling problems of armed violence.

A “statistics about armed violence for the rest of us”, please?


Aurélia Merçay


References

Gapminder: http://www.gapminder.org/

Information about the TED conferences is available at http://www.ted.com/. You'll find Rosling’s presentation here (it can also be downloaded for free as a video podcast from the iTunes Music Store).

Andrew Blum, “Graphing the Development Gap”, BusinessWeek, 22 February 2006, available online here.

Photo of Hans Rosling retrieved from his personal blog.

War and Peace and Primates…and Podcasts

The Disarmament Insight initiative aims to encourage disarmament practitioners to think differently about human security.

In line with that aim, the Disarmament Insight initiative held its second symposium, entitled “Human Security, ‘Human Nature’ and Trust-building in Negotiations”, at Château de Bossey near Geneva on 25 May 2007.

To stimulate fresh thinking and discussion, we invited some outstanding speakers including Frans de Waal, one of the world’s foremost authorities on ape behaviour and author of books including Chimpanzee Politics (1982) and Peacemaking Among Primates (1990) and Paul Seabright, economist and author of The Company of Strangers: a Natural History of Economic Life (2004).

As usual, we recorded talks in order to put them up on the website. Today, we have the pleasure to announce the release of Frans de Waal’s presentation: “War and Peace and Primates”.

In his talk, Frans de Waal explores what multilateral practitioners can learn from our closest relatives in the animal kingdom, including the chimpanzee and the bonobo, about negotiating, the nature of conflict and reconciliation.

We hope you enjoy this truly amazing presentation. Ideas worth spreading...

Coming soon: Paul Seabright’s presentation “How have human beings tamed our warring instincts?”

Watch this space!


Aurélia Merçay


Reference

Photo retrieved from Flickr.

Can global warming be a trigger for conflict?

On 17 April, for the first time ever, the United Nations Security Council (UNSC) debated the relationship between “Energy, Security and Climate”, based on a concept paper put forward by the United Kingdom.

In introducing these themes into the Security Council, the UK reportedly faced opposition from China, Russia, the United States and some developing countries via the Group of 77. These states apparently objected on grounds that global warming isn’t a matter of international peace and security. Some accused the Security Council of “ever-increasing encroachment” on the role and responsibility of other UN organs.

Such concerns have been heard before in other contexts whenever the UNSC has shifted its gaze (think terrorism or initial controversy about UNSC resolution 1540 on weapons of mass destruction). It still leaves the big question: is global warming likely to increase the probability of war?

Yes, is what a growing chorus of experts thinks. For instance, the vice-chairman of the UN’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, Prof. Munasinghe, said with regard to the situation in Sri Lanka:

“A major part of Jaffna and other northern areas will be submerged when the sea-level rises. So people are fighting and dying over areas that may soon not be there.”

For its part, the UK’s concept paper outlined several ways in which it believes climate change will impact on the likelihood of conflict, listing border disputes, migration, energy supplies, other resource shortages (notably, freshwater, cultivable land, crop yields and fish stocks), societal stress and humanitarian crises:

“The immediate drivers of conflict are likely to remain national and regional power struggles; ideology; ethnic, religious and national tensions; and severe economic, social or political inequality. The cumulative impacts of climate change could exacerbate these drivers of conflict, and particularly increase the risk to those states already susceptible to conflict, for example where weak governance and political processes cannot mediate successfully between competing interests.”

And, the paper also noted, “parts of the developing world are both particularly vulnerable to the impacts of climate change, and least equipped to cope with them.”

Media reporting on the debate indicates that controversy over discussing these issues in the UN’s premier security forum meant that, not for the first time, UNSC deliberations have generated more heat than light (no pun intended). Some studies, meanwhile, indicate that rich nations in the temperate north may escape or even benefit from the effects of warming, which is widely blamed on their use of fossil fuel. Not only would this be a very cruel irony. It also heightens suspicions that industrialized countries, whose interests are well represented in the UNSC, will use the body to try to impose self-serving measures on other poorer nations, in the process impeding their development.

Matters seem a very long way from that. Meanwhile, the discussion is at least a start in attempting dialogue about the links between climate, energy and security. And the UK’s concept paper underlines the need for new approaches to achieving and maintaining security that better respond to global interconnection in more productive ways.

Viewed from outside, fractious and ideological politics in the Security Council just highlight the limits of security perceptions based on Cold War certainties, and must seem a million miles away from the looming problems of human insecurity faced by ordinary Sri Lankans, Bangladeshis, Pacific Islanders and others because of the consequences of climate change on their lives. Maybe it’s time to ask how their perspectives can be brought into the process in order to keep it real, rather than rhetorical.


Aurélia Merçay & John Borrie


References

The UK’s concept paper and other documents from the UNSC discussion can be found here.

"Global warming could spur 21st century conflicts," Reuters, 16 April 2007, available at http://www.alertnet.org/thenews/newsdesk/L16221115.htm

“UN looks at link between global warming and unrest,” The Associated Press, 18 April 2007, available at http://www.iht.com/articles/2007/04/18/news/climate.php

“Climate change worse than civil war – UN expert,” Inter Press Service News Agency, 24 April 2007, available at http://ipsnews.net/news.asp?idnews=37463

Photo retrieved from Flickr

Trying to account for mass participation in the Rwandan genocide

In a period of about 100 days, from 6 April to mid-July 1994, experts have estimated that civilian militias and members of the national army dominated by the Hutu ethnic group killed some 500’000 to 800’000 Tutsi (another group) and moderate Hutu in the African country of Rwanda. While these figures are striking indicators of the most rapidly occurring genocide of the 20th century, also deeply disturbing was the high level of participation in the killing, estimated at between 200’000 and 500’000 people.

While the Rwandan genocide will forever remain morally unfathomable, how can we begin to account for such a large-scale level of participation in the killing, in the hope that unambiguous danger signs might be identified to prevent it happening again?

In a book published in 2006 (see reference below), Ravi Bhavnani posed the question: did killing Tutsi become the norm in the Hutu ethnic group? Bhavnani argued that the level of participation in the Rwandan genocide can be explained by the “emergence of a violence-promoting norm among the Hutu community”.

In his chapter, Bhavnani noted that studies pointing to explanations such as structural factors or to Rwanda’s culture – described as one “of fear” or “of deep conformity” – fail to explain the emergence of such large-scale violent behaviour. Likewise, the significance of the death of Rwandan President Habyarimana in a plane crash near Kigali airport on 6 April as the major catalyst for the genocide is problematic.

Starting from the idea that norms are emergent properties of social systems, Bhavnani used complexity theory and simulation by agent-based modeling (ABM) to try to develop an explanation for the emergence of a violence-promoting norm among Hutu people.

The existence of a norm depends upon complex patterns of interactions between the individuals forming a society. At the time of the genocide, Rwanda, Bhavnani argued, was a “densely populated, heterogeneous society” with frequent connections and intermarriage between the two major ethnic groups – Hutu and Tutsi – leading to a complex pattern of interactions. Bhavnani added:

“When a population mixes randomly, extremists eventually have the opportunity to interact with moderates, and observe and punish their behaviour.”

In other words, in Rwanda it was about killing or being killed.

By focusing on microlevel dynamics, Bhavnani hoped this ABM could show how local interactions could bring about massive Hutu participation in the killing. Of course, however intriguing, Bhavani’s work on its own is unlikely to settle the debate over what really caused the genocide. But it serves to underline the worth of studying collective violence by using bottom-up approaches and of appreciating the complex nature of many human social interactions or, as Bhavnani put it, that:

“The causes of conflict constitute partial explanations at best, and are inextricably linked to the process by which conflict unfolds.”

Aurélia Merçay


Reference

See chapter 6: Agent-Based Models in the Study of Ethnic Norms and violence, by R. Bhavnani in Complexity in World Politics: Concepts and Methods of a New Paradigm, N.E. Harrison & J.N. Rosenau, 2006, SUNY series in Global Politic, State University of New York Press.

Can network theory help track terrorists – or small arms?

Al Qaeda is often referred to as an atypical organization without central authority that operates like a swarm. In a 2005 interview, Spanish counterterrorism judge Baltasar Garzón said that, following the loss of key leaders during the first year of the U.S.-led global war on terrorism, Al Qaeda convened a strategic summit in northern Iran in November 2002, at which the group’s consultative council decided that it could no longer operate as a hierarchy, but instead would have to become a decentralized network.

Can network theory help us destabilize or even neutralize terrorist groups?

Well, it seems to be possible. In a recent article in The Boston Globe (see reference below), I read that the Pentagon asked a team of scientists from Boston to look at the potential of “social network analysis” to study the web of relationships among terrorist organizations, arms scientists, and suppliers in order to help prevent terrorists from acquiring or developing weapons of mass destruction.

By reconstructing the web of the cultural, political, and financial connections among terrorists, it’s possible to identify the individuals who are most highly socially connected. These key players – also known as “hubs” – are not necessarily the leaders of the organization: they are the nodes that hold the network together. By knocking down a critical hub, you may disable the whole network.

This method has been used retroactively by Valdis Krebs, a Cleveland consultant, to determine the key role of Mohamed Atta among the 19 hijackers involved in 9/11 terrorist attacks. Network theory was also at the center of the U.S. military programme called “Mongo Link”, whose aim was to chart Saddam Hussein’s relationships and which eventually led to his capture near his hometown of Tikrit.

Determining hubs and relationships in terrorist networks is a major challenge. Although some networks are obvious in hindsight, the real difficulty is to disable them before they act.

Network theory also may have wider applicability to other security issues, in which relationships are important to understanding what’s going on. (John Borrie and I discussed this in our chapter in the Disarmament as Humanitarian Action project’s third volume of research, see reference below.) In particular, a potential use for this tool could be to identify the significant nodes and critical connections of illicit small arms proliferation networks.


Aurélia Merçay


References

Bryan Bender, “Antiterrorism agency taps Boston-area brains: Analysts plumb arms networks”, The Boston Globe, March 27, 2007.

Aurélia Merçay and John Borrie , “A Physics of diplomacy? The Dynamics of Complex Social Phenomena and Their Implications for Multilateral Negotiations”, Thinking Outside the Box in Multilateral Disarmament and Arms Control Negotiations, UNIDIR, 2006, pp. 129-164, available online here.

Paradigm shift in the negotiation chamber

Multilateral disarmament and arms control negotiations have achieved scant success in recent years. Based on this observation, a few questions come to my mind: Can we get beyond blaming political will and find innovative ways to shift today’s approaches towards more productive strategies? How can multilateral negotiations be made more effective? In particular, how can new insights about the dynamics of cooperation help us tackle complex negotiation dilemmas?

I recently read an interesting report published by the Institute for the Future, an independent, non-profit strategic research group based in California, whose aim is to identify emerging trends that will transform the global marketplace. This report, entitled “Toward a New Literacy of Cooperation in Business: Managing Dilemmas in the 21st Century”, is in my opinion highly relevant to the practice of disarmament and arms control multilateral negotiators. One point stressed in this paper is that it’s necessary to develop our understanding of cooperation by looking at it through the lens of various disciplines:

“In the last decade, scientists and social thinkers in a range of fields have independently discovered cooperation at the heart of a number of important phenomena. Evolutionary biologists, for example, have revealed how symbiosis plays a key role in everything from cellular evolution to speciation and ecosystem complexity. Mathematicians are revealing basic patterns that underlie synchrony and swarming at all levels of nature, informing our understanding of how cooperative actions and institutions can emerge from distributed actors. Sociologists have revisited the “tragedy of the commons,” illustrating how various commons have been transformed into successful cooperative ventures in different industries and environments.” (see reference below)

An interdisciplinary approach, including insights from physics, psychology, evolutionary biology and behavioural economics shouldn’t aim at developing recipes to insure success of negotiating processes. In fact, when it comes to understand social groups’ dynamics, there are no recipes or magical algorithms. However, it seems to me that these studies have a lot to teach us about complex problem solving. And I like to think that in 20 years, I’ll be able to say that I was among the first to believe in this paradigm shift.


Aurélia Merçay


Reference

Saveri, A. et al., available at http://www.iftf.org/docs/SR-851A_New_Literacy_Cooperation.pdf