Capturing the cost of cluster munitions

Last October we blogged that civil society actors seem to be waking up to the usefulness of satellite imaging technologies in trying to hold governments accountable for their actions, for instance for human rights violations or failure to protect civilians in conflict. (In contrast, the value of satellite imagery in traditional arms control was known from early in the Cold War - but cost and tight government control over access to imagery generally kept it out of the hands of non-state actors.) Amnesty International launched a website last year in partnership with the University of California at Berkeley to watch over parts of Darfur. And the American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS) later released similar satellite images of Myanmar.

Wired Magazine ran an interesting piece on 13 June, which presented some of the images collated by the AAAS's Geospatial Technology and Human Rights Project, which you can take a look at here. Its gallery presents a series of before and after satellite photographs spanning the globe, from Ethiopia to Zimbabwe to Myanmar, Eritrea, Sudan and even North Korea.

Among these images were two from Southern Lebanon. Conflict there in the summer of 2006 between Israeli Defence Forces (IDF) and Hezbollah saw both sides use cluster munitions - IDF launching them into Southern Lebanon on a massive scale, especially in the last few days of fighting.

A Human Rights Watch report, Flooding South Lebanon: Israel's Use of Cluster Munitions in Lebanon in July and August 2006 made considerable use of commercially-available satellite images matched with global positioning data to show the locations of cluster strikes and document their effects. In this way, satellite imagery played a role in raising the profile of concerns about the humanitarian impacts of cluster munitions, and therefore to the achievement of the Convention on Cluster Munitions (CCM) through the Oslo Process, in which Human Rights Watch was active as a member of the Cluster Munition Coalition.

And Human Rights Watch wasn't alone. Aerial and satellite photographs were also used by other NGOs on cluster munitions. Norwegian People's Aid, working with the Norwegian Defence Research Establishment and an independent explosive ordnance expert, Colin King, used similar techniques in their report, M85 - An Analysis of Reliability, which was presented and discussed in two Oslo Process conferences. And a Landmine Action UK report just out, entitled Counting the Cost: The economic impact of cluster munition contamination in Lebanon, cross-referenced satellite imagery of land use with data from the Information Management System for Mine Action (or IMSMA, which despite its title sometimes covers other forms of unexploded ordnance.)

John Borrie

GoogleEarth map of Lebanon from the Google Earth Blog.

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.

Putting Predictions to the Test

As part of it's work, UNIDIR's Disarmament as Humanitarian Action project is currently working on a publication looking at some constraints on multilateral negotiations, and how some of these might be overcome or at least potentially mitigated.

One conundrum for policy makers in general is that it's very difficult to accurately predict outcomes of complex political and economic processes, and this has implications for their work. Multilateral practitioners are no exception.

Meanwhile, it's often very difficult to get a handle on how good "expert" political judgment is. But not impossible. A recent book by Philip E. Tetlock, an American psychologist, has revealed through a careful decade-long study that people who make prediction their business - people who appear as experts on television, for instance, or who are quoted in newspaper articles, advise governments and businesses - are, on average, no better than the rest of us.

Tetlock's research team asked various specialists to judge the likelihood of a number of political, economic and military events occurring within a specific timeframe (about five years ahead). Close to 300 specialists offered outcomes representing a total number of around 27,000 predictions. As Nassim Nicholas Taleb observed in his book, The Black Swan:

"His study revealed an expert problem: there was no difference in results whether one had a PhD or undergraduate degree. Well-published professors had no advantage over journalists. The only regularity Tetlock found was the negative effect of reputation on prediction: those who had a big reputation were worse predictors than those who had none."

Ouch. But Tetlock's study didn't end there. His focus wasn't so much to show the real level of competence of experts, but to investigate how they spun their stories. Tetlock discovered various cognitive mechanisms of generating ex post explanation - mostly in the form of belief defence, or self-esteem protection.

Prominent were phenomena that psychologists call motivational biases, something Ashley Thornton has explored in previous posts on this blog. These include the self-serving attributional bias (the human tendency to blame unfavourable outcomes on external causes but take credit for favourable outcomes) and the confirmation bias (we tend to seek out and process information that confirms our pre-existing beliefs).

The New Yorker put it succinctly: "The experts' trouble in Tetlock's study is exactly the trouble that all human beings have: we fall in love with our hunches, and we really, really hate to be wrong."

Food for thought. More about Tetlock's work in future posts.


John Borrie


References

Philip E. Tetlock, Expert Political Judgment: How Good is it? How Can We Know? (Princeton NJ, Princeton University Press, 2005).

Nicholas Nassim Taleb, The Black Swan: The Impact of the Highly Improbable (New York, Random House, 2007).

To read a neat introduction to Tetlock's work in a review of his book in the 5 December 2005 edition of The New Yorker click here.

Picture by F33 retrieved from Flickr.

Satellites of Love?

"Satellite's gone up to the sky
Things like that drive me out of my mind
I watched it for a little while
I like to watch things on TV
Satellite of love ..."

In our third volume of research, Andreas Persbo and Michael Crowley from the London-based Verification Research, Training and Information Centre (VERTIC) looked at the roles Non-Governmental Organizations (NGOs) play in the monitoring and verification of international arms control and disarmament agreements. They observed that:

"one area of NGO activity that has not been adequately studied has been the crucial role played by the NGO community in monitoring, and in some cases verifying, international agreements. Indeed, non-governmental monitoring, sometimes referred to as "citizens' reporting", "inspection by the people" or "civil society monitoring", has become an important element in the international community's evaluation of how effectively states implement their treaty obligations on a wide range of issues."

Once upon a time, technologies like satellite imaging were restricted to a few governments, and during the Cold War were initially harnessed for surveillance of the adversary's territory and activities. Eventually, satellites emerged as important elements of arms control verification. And, over time, the cost of space satellite imaging technology has come down and been increasingly commercialized for a huge range of uses - to the point where an ordinary schmo like me can look up Google Earth (which almost seamlessly blends satellite and aerial imagery) on the internet for free to see if I can see my home (I can).

Unsurprisingly, some civil society actors have woken up to the fact that such technologies could be helpful in trying to hold governments accountable for their actions, for instance for human rights violations or failure to protect civilians in conflict. In June of this year, for instance, Amnesty International launched a website in partnership with the University of California at Berkeley to keep watch over imperiled villages in the Darfur region of Sudan, and to post images online in order to enlist help to prevent violence. These images show, for instance, before and after photographs of scores of apparently destroyed settlements.

Earlier this month, the journal Science reported that its publisher, the American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS), had released similar satellite images of Myanmar, showing that dozens of villages in the eastern part of the country had been uprooted or razed to the ground. Science displayed images of a village near Kewy Kee in east Myanmar photographed by a commercial satellite on 5 May 2004, which had disappeared in an image taken on 23 February 2007.

It remains to be seen how effective such images will be in motivating the international community to step in to prevent such violence. But commercial satellite imagery is certainly very powerful in documenting abuses. And, it can provide plausible alternative interpretations to those put forward by government officials. Occasionally, it might even embarrass the intelligence community. One organization doing good work in this regard is the Federation of American Scientists, which has used openly available satellite imagery - some of it from Google - to pinpoint the launch, for instance, of new Chinese nuclear ballistic missile submarines.

A few weeks ago I was invited to a conference in Italy to talk about developments on the horizon in the life sciences with potential for hostile misuse. To illustrate the difference in scale between nuclear and biological facilities and challenges for verification, I showed my audience some satellite images of the Bushehr and Natanz nuclear facilities in Iran, alongside pictures of the Palo Alto district in Silicon Valley, California. An Iranian official in the audience afterward demanded to know where I had obtained these "sensitive" pictures. I told him I'd obtained them from Google Earth. I kid you not: "Who is this Google Earth?" he demanded to know.

It's serendipitous that Lou Reed's song, Satellite of Love (quoted above) came from an album entitled 'Transformer'. Not everyone's heard of Lou Reed yet, or is going to be a fan once they've listened to what he has to offer. Sounds like the same may be true of my pal, Google Earth - but hear from him and his ilk they will.


John Borrie


References

"Myanmar's Secret History Exposed in Satellite Images", Science (vol. 318), 5 October 2007.

"Satellites to Watch for Darfur Violence", Associated Press, 6 June 2007.

U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum+Google Earth website on 'Crisis in Darfur'.

Andreas Persbo & Michael Crowley, "The Role of Non-Governmental Organizations in the monitoring and verification of international arms control and disarmament agreements".

Photo of the beginning of the burning of Um Zelfa village courtesy of Brian Steidle, Alert/Sudan.

A “Green Seal” for arms control?

What do environmentalists know that the peace and security community doesn’t? Well, for one thing how to use the business’s community marketing machinery to support their goals.

One of the biggest trends in marketing in recent years is “green marketing” in which businesses lay claim to environmental bona fides as a means of encouraging affluent consumers to purchase their product or not shy away from doing so. A soymilk manufacturer sponsors a “Green Caps for Green Energy” program, a bottled water distributor supports global clean water efforts, a travel agency supports sustainable development projects. And then there’s all the companies from British Petroleum to Starbucks that seek to shrink the environmental footprint that they leave.

Outside the environmental field, there’s all sorts of similar efforts: Virgin Mobile is tying its sales effort to efforts to get homeless young people off the streets; Microsoft is willing to donate money to a variety of causes from the National AIDS fund to UNICEF for every Instant Message a customer sends; Ralph Lauren is opening a series of Rugby stores dedicated to volunteerism and community service.

Yet, as far as I know no similar efforts have been made in the peace and security community (and I’d love to be corrected if I’m wrong). It’s not clear why. To be sure, there are some obstacles—security policy is inevitably more politically charged than giving money to health issues, for example. And it’s also often far more complicated to explain.

Yet, it seems that there should be possibilities for winning support nonetheless. What about companies interested in the developing world contributing to gun buyback efforts or efforts to clear landmines, cluster munitions, and other explosive remnants of war? Since UNICEF and UNESCO are using companies’ marketing efforts to raise funds, how about raising additional revenue for the inspection efforts of the International Atomic Energy Agency and Organization for the Prohibition of Chemical Weapons?

As in other areas, companies are also interested in avoiding the damage to their reputation that might occur if they are tied to arms trafficking or dangerous weapons. At this summer’s Carnegie Nonproliferation Conference, for example, Ralf Wirtz of Oerlikon Leybold Vacuum talked about how his company, tarnished after inspectors discovered that some of its dual-use equipment was used in Iraq’s weapons of mass destruction programs, overhauled all of its export control procedures and decided to work pro-actively with governments.

Many corporations, however, see little incentive or are provided little guidance in how to tighten their end-use monitoring absent any embarrassing disclosure. Wouldn’t it be useful if there was a peace and security equivalent of Green Seal, which certifies products and services as environmentally responsible?


This is a guest blog by Miles Pomper, editor of Arms Control Today, the monthly magazine of the U.S. Arms Control Association.

Dis Insight editors’ note: what do readers think? Use the comment function at the foot of this post to let us know.


Reference

Photo downloaded from Flickr.

0800-HOW-IS-MY-DIPLOMACY? Technology and humanitarian action

Regular readers of the Disarmament Insight blog will have gathered that, among many things, we're interested in the impacts of technology on international decision-making. Patricia Lewis, for instance, has offered some of her personal observations about the changes mobile phones and Blackberries have wrought on interactions in multilateral meetings she's attended (See "Zapped! Mobile technology in the conference chamber").

There seems little doubt that continued improvements to wireless communications have radical implications for the coordination of international activities at many different levels.

For instance, The Economist newspaper ran a story on 26 July entitled "Flood, Famine and Mobile Phones". In it, the Economist argued that technology is transforming humanitarian relief - and shifting the balance of power between donors and recipients.

It all sounds great. But the Economist conceded that - beyond anecdotal evidence - there isn't a definitive verdict yet on how much of a difference such new technologies have made in achieving more effective humanitarian aid delivery.

Nevertheless, the evidence has been compelling enough to result in a brace of new initiatives. Non-Governmental Organizations have begun forming consortiums like NetHope, which spreads the cost of satellite communications and internet links. UN agencies like UNICEF and the World Food Programme have taken a particular interest in trying to achieve practical benefits in aid delivery from better communications, activities which should (in principle at least) result in superior coordination.

Meanwhile, even in the poorest parts of the world, technologies like mobile telephony are increasingly widespread. It's likely that such technologies really do have the capacity to transform aid delivery in some disaster situations - if donors and deliverers of aid are willing to listen to feedback from aid recipients and, of course, if the technological infrastructure itself still works or can be made to work in the midst of the disaster (a big "if" indeed, and glossed over by The Economist).

There's also another, deeper, point here. Quite often, there's a temptation to think of disaster victims as passive beneficiaries of aid, who should be grateful for anything they get. This attitude has to change: the ability of affected people on the ground (or in the flood water) to contribute to the information loop and decision making about their own welfare is crucial to improving responses to disasters, whether natural, man-made or conflict-related. Packages dropped to people from relief helicopters are only aid if they're what those people actually need. (The Economist noted the NGO Save the Children's finding that, in some recent humanitarian relief situations, victims would prefer cash help to food hand-outs.)

In other words, accountability is important, even in apparent situations of altruistic giving like disaster relief. Accountability is something we would do well to bear in mind in disarmament and arms control. In a recent book, former British diplomat Carne Ross argued that diplomats are a largely "unaccountable elite", who often don't take into account the interests of those they are supposed to be helping or representing, drawing on his personal experiences in the UN Security Council setting.

It's possible Ross over-states his case in parts. But in multilateral arms control there does sometimes seem to be a considerable distance between negotiators and those affected by lack of multilateral results, for instance on controls on small arms or the humanitarian impacts of cluster munitions.

It's a bit like the white van driver who may not care if she drives inconsiderately or even dangerously. The vehicle she drives belongs to the business she works for - it's hard to identify her or make her accountable. So in places like the United States, lots of business vehicles now come with a "how am I driving?" sign on them along with a hotline telephone number. Is 0800-HOW-IS-MY-DIPLOMACY? connected to a television hotline or Parliament maybe?

One question we perhaps need to ask is this: How - beyond their convenience - can new technologies make decision makers more accountable, and therefore more effective in achieving disarmament and humanitarian goals? Domestic electorates know remarkably little about what their diplomatic representatives do on their behalf overseas, and might be surprised at the degree of preoccupation of multilateral practitioners with process. Voices from the field therefore need to be heard and heeded more often.


John Borrie


References

The Economist, "Flood Famine and Mobile Phones", 26 July 2007

Carne Ross, Independent Diplomat: Dispatches From an Unaccountable Elite, London: Hurst: 2007.

Photo (Namibia: Helicopter rescues people from flood hit areas, Image ID: 20044304) courtesy of IRIN.