Missile Crises?

On Friday, the world's media reported that Russian President Vladimir Putin - speaking after a summit with European Union leaders in Portugal - said that U.S. plans for a missile shield with bases in Europe could precipitate a situation similar to the 1962 Cuban Missile Crisis:

"Analogous actions by the Soviet Union when it deployed rockets on Cuba provoked the Cuban missile crisis," he said.

"For us, technologically, the situation is very similar."

He added that current tensions had not reached the pitch attained during the Cuban crisis."

Thank goodness for that. Let's hope that policy-makers on both sides of the Atlantic don't really believe they're living through a historical parallel of the "thirteen days".

There are signs that the Russians don't really think so. In a Moscow Times op-ed about President Putin's "rather audacious comparison" with the Cuban Missile Crisis, Alexander Golts opined that:

"It is clear that Moscow has no desire to reach a compromise on the missile defense issue. On the contrary, the Kremlin has a vested interest in preserving an ongoing, smoldering conflict with the United States over nuclear weapons and missile defense. Putin and his inner circle are convinced that this is the only way Russia can regain its status as a superpower and stand on equal footing with the United States - at least in the nuclear sphere."

Whether or not this is true, historical analogies like President Putin's make for evocative rhetoric, which is no doubt what they're intended to do - to underline Russia's strategic concerns.

On European missile defence, President Putin is by no means the first to pull the draw card of history. Earlier this month, for instance, the New York Times reported that Tomas Pojar, the Czech Republic's Deputy Minister for Foreign Affairs, said "his government's support for the defense plan is based not only on a shared worry about future missile threats but also a "moral, historical" sense of appreciation for American support for Czech democracy."

Solidarity with our friends is good, provided we don't categorize actors only in terms of their identities and so fail to take into account interests. Once we entrench ourselves - and others - into categories based on what they are, rather than how they actually act, we can make it difficult for ourselves to see the world any other way, and almost invariably the way it really is. It makes it that much harder to problem-solve.

History is a narrative we impose on a complex reality. Without extreme care, we can create views of the past that reinforce our pre-dispositions, rather than enlighten us.

And it means most historical parallels don't bear close examination. Issues related to missile defence issue in Europe are complex, long drawn out and involve multiple actors in an evolving strategic context. It's exactly the sort of situation in which historical analogies aren't going to help, because they over-simplify a fine-grained reality by ignoring some of its subtler but defining features.

Golts argued in his op-ed that, actually, "the nuclear factor plays an increasingly minor role in U.S.-Russian relations" - a gradual diminishing of importance that began soon after the Cuban Missile Crisis.

Today, Russia and the U.S. have a broad range of strategic interests potentially in common, and these are where the emphasis should be, rather than on the past. Moreover, there are a number of ongoing or unfolding international crises - whether over missile defence, Iran, North Korea, the situation in Iraq, climate change or whatever - in which open-minds and ideologically flexibility are at a premium.

We need more finer-grained - not course-grained - analysis to see our way through these challenges. Maybe historians need to remind those on all sides of the missile defence debate about what history doesn't tell us, and that any attempt to read the past into the present is fraught with risk. History is at best an uneven guide - certainly not a road-map.


John Borrie


References

"Putin warns of new missile crisis", BBC News, 26 October 2007.

Alexander Golts, "Dreaming of New Conflicts", The Moscow Times, 30 October 2007.

Associated Press, "U.S. Considering Missile Defense Delay", New York Times, 23 October 2007.

The October issue of U.S. Arms Control Association's magazine Arms Control Today focuses on issues surrounding European missile defense.

Photo of a U.S. Air Force Jupiter intermediate range ballistic missile from the Cuban Missile Crisis period courtesy of Wikipedia.

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.

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."

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 Podcast – Warring instincts: what we can learn from behavioural economics & neuroscience?

On 25 May we held our latest Disarmament Insight symposium with disarmament practitioners including diplomats, international civil servants, representatives of civil society groups and researchers, entitled ‘Human security, human nature and trust-building in negotiations’.

We’re pleased to unveil the latest free podcast we’ve prepared from the fascinating presentations at that event. Click here to hear or download the second part of a talk by the economist and author of The Company of Strangers: A Natural History of Economic Life, Professor Paul Seabright.

Professor Seabright's talk investigated "how have human beings tamed our warring instincts?"

In the first podcast of two encapsulating his talk, Professor Seabright observed that, at a time when there's mounting concern about violence in modern society, rates of violent death are very much lower now than they were in the past, which he noted may come as a surprise to many.

In this second 30 minute podcast, "Warring Instincts: What we can learn from behavioural economics & neuroscience?", we've included Professor Seabright's slides to aid the listener. These are viewable on iTunes or in Quicktime Player in sync with the audio.


John Borrie


Reference

Photo: sketch of human skull by Leonardo da Vinci.

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.

Putting ourselves in the shoes of our enemies

Academics, it might be argued, have the luxury of thinking outside the box in a way that isn’t open to diplomats and policy-makers. Instead, the latter have to apply worst-case thinking because there are no guarantees about the current and future intentions of potential adversaries. But ‘playing it safe’ in this way ignores the possibility that others might be arming out of fear and not malevolence. And if both sides are arming out of fear and mistrust, the result could be a vicious circle of power and security competition no one wanted.


The fundamental problem, as the British historian Herbert Butterfield pointed out over half a century ago, is that diplomats “may vividly feel the terrible fear that [they] have of the other party, but [they] cannot enter into the [others] counter-fear, or even understand why [they] should be particularly nervous”. He added that it’s ‘never possible for you to realise or remember properly that since he cannot see the inside of your mind, he can never have the same assurance of your intentions that you have’. This is the security dilemma, a key research area of the David Davies Memorial Institute of International Studies (DDMI) at the University of Wales Aberystwyth.

The security dilemma confronts all groups in a condition of anarchy (defined as the absence of a central authority) and it arises from the existential condition of uncertainty that characterises all human relations. Analysing these kinds of situation was a major focus of international relations theory during the Cold War. Far from belonging to a bygone era, however, security dilemmas require further careful study because they’re still prevalent – and very dangerous – today.

Recognising this, the DDMI held a workshop in Aberystwyth on 4 May focusing on the ‘Nuclear Security Dilemma in Northeast Asia’, gathering together a diverse bunch of diplomats, academics, and researchers. One contributor to the workshop argued that what motivated North Korea in its nuclear ambitions is ‘fear – fear of the United States, fear of China, and fear of Japan’. Others maintained that North Korea has nothing to worry about because it knows the United States and South Korea would never attack it.

But the DPRK has not been so easily reassured. Building upon Butterfield’s core contention, three decades ago Robert Jervis highlighted the psychological dynamics that blind policy-makers to recognizing how their ‘own actions could be seen as menacing and the concomitant belief that the other’s hostility can only be explained by its aggressiveness’ (see the references below). The danger is that if the White House believes the DPRK knows that the United States is not a threat, Pyongyang’s arming must indicate aggressive intent. Other possible interpretations of North Korea’s motivations abound, underlining the challenges involved in seeing security dilemmas and the full range of responses clearly.

The negative consequences of groups and individuals failing to enter into the counter-fear of others is exacerbated if decision-makers operate with benign self-images that blind them to how their actions and behaviour might be seen as threatening by others. What’s more, the converse of a benign self-image is the attribution of a malign image to the character and actions of adversaries. Ken Booth and I call this ‘ideological fundamentalism’ in our forthcoming book on the security dilemma. Governments operating with such a mindset are blinded to the possibility that the other side might have legitimate grievances and security interests.

The security dilemma facing governments with peaceful intent is whether to risk a trust-building move in a world where there can be no guarantees about the current and future intentions of others. Even if actors can enter into the counter-fear of others, they might be so fearful that acting on this will place them in a vulnerable position should their trust prove misplaced, that they feel unable to take such a risky leap of trust.

This situation seems to characterise the nuclear standoff on the Korean peninsula. Should we assume the worst about Pyongyang’s motives and intentions and prepare for a showdown before they become too strong? Or does such a path risk a terrible war - perhaps one in which nuclear weapons might be used? Given the costs and risks of such a conflict, surely the prudent course lies in trying to reassure rather than provoke the regime in Pyongyang.

Diplomats and policy-makers need to understand how their adversary might be acting out of fear (remembering that ambition is sometimes in play), including crucially, the role that their own actions may play in provoking that fear. This was the challenge thrown down by Butterfield, and it guides the DDMI’s new project on ‘Trust-Building in Nuclear Worlds’. Our workshop on 4 May was the first in a series aimed at exploring with practitioners the possibilities of exercising empathy of this kind: it remains to be seen whether decision-makers in the United States and the DPRK can make the leaps of trust that might lead eventually to the denuclearisation of the Korean Peninsula.


This is a guest blog by Professor Nicholas J. Wheeler. Professor Nicholas J. Wheeler is Director of the DDMI. You can also read a piece by Disarmament Insight contributor John Borrie on the DDMI’s website by clicking here.


References

Bleiker, R. (2005) Divided Korea: Toward a Culture of Reconciliation, Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press.

Booth, K. and N. J. Wheeler (forthcoming 2007) The Security Dilemma: Fear, Cooperation and Trust in World Politics, Palgrave: Macmillan.

Butterfield, H. (1951) History and Human Relations, London: Collins, pp. 9-37.

Collins, A. (2000) The Security Dilemmas of Southeast Asia, Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan.

Glaser, C. L. (1990) Analysing Strategic Nuclear Policy, Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press.

Jervis, R. (1976) Perception and Misperception in International Politics, Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press.

Johnston, A. I. (2004) ‘Beijing’s Security Behaviour in the Asia-Pacific: Is China a Dissatisfied Power?’, in J. J. Suh, P. J. Katzenstein and A. Carlson (eds), Rethinking Security in East Asia, Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, pp. 34–97.

Kydd, A. H. (2005) Trust and Mistrust in International Relations, Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press.

Suh, J. J. (2006) ‘Producing Security Dilemma out of Uncertainty: The North Korean Nuclear Crisis’, Mario Einaudi Centre for International Studies, Cornell University, October 2006.

More about the DDMI’s work on trust-building, including a rapporteur’s report about its recent workshop, can be found here and here.

Photo retrieved from Flickr.

And now for something completely different

Regular visitors to this site will have noted that over the last month or so our blogging has focused on two important multilateral meetings - the preparatory meeting of the nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty in Vienna and, more recently, a meeting of the Oslo Process in Lima, Peru, which is working to address the humanitarian impacts of cluster munitions.

I would have been in Peru blogging to you personally, dear reader, but for a meeting of our own near Geneva, hosted as part of the work of the Disarmament Insight initiative to help multilateral disarmament practitioners think out of the box.

On Friday 25 May, around 25 invited disarmament diplomats at both ambassador and working level, experts from United Nations agencies and the International Committee of the Red Cross (ICRC), researchers, civil society representatives and the Disarmament Insight team met for a one-day symposium on the themes of "Human security, 'human nature' and trust building in negotiations".

To help us, our speakers included:

- Frans de Waal, Director of the Living Links Center and C.H. Candler Professor of Primate Behaviour at Emory University, who explored what multilateral practitioners can learn from our closest relatives in the animal kingdom, including the chimpanzee and the bonobo, about negotiating and the nature of aggression and reconciliation. Frans was recently named by Time magazine as one of its 100 people shaping the world in 2007.

- Paul Seabright, Professor of Economics at the University of Toulouse and author of "The Company of Strangers: a Natural History of Economic Life", who analysed the interactions between our minds and our institutions in modern life, which may help us to understand better why in some contexts conflict seems so intractable.

- Dr. Robin Coupland, the ICRC's adviser on armed violence and the effects of weapons and a former war surgeon, who discussed how de Waal's and Seabright's views tie into understanding armed violence.

- Yours truly. I talked briefly about the notion of 'cognitive ergonomics' - of looking at multilateral negotiating processes and how we could better design them to leverage our cognitive and social skills as human beings.

The emphasis of the symposium was on informal discussion and it followed the Chatham House rule. While respecting that rule, we'll be posting more information about the symposium here, including pod casts of some of the presentations, over the coming weeks.

So check back regularly for some fresh ways of "thinking differently about human security" from what was a productive gathering of big-brained social apes.


John Borrie


Reference

Info about the ICRC's work on weapons and humanitarian law is available here.

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

What we could learn from the Man of the Woods

Today, the British Sunday Times reported that the chimpanzee has just been knocked off the top of the "IQ tree". What that tree is, and whether that includes another primate species likely to lay claim to that title - homo sapiens - is unclear (I assume it doesn't). The article said:

"ORANG-UTANS have been named as the world’s most intelligent animal in a study that places them above chimpanzees and gorillas, the species traditionally considered closest to humans.

The study found that out of 25 species of primate, orang-utans had developed the greatest power to learn and to solve problems.

The controversial findings challenge the widespread belief that chimpanzees are the closest to humans in brainpower. They also suggest that the ancestry of orang-utans and humans may be more closely entwined than had been thought."

James Lee, a Harvard psychologist quoted by the article as an author of the study making these claims apparently said, “It is even possible that an orang-utan-like forager occupied a pivotal link in the chain of descent leading to man.”

Well, good on the orang-utan, of which I'm very fond. And it's great that some prominence is being given to them when orang-utans are endangered as never before due to encroachment onto their home habitats in the swampy jungles of Sumatra and Borneo. One of the tragic ironies about growing interest in renewable alternatives to fossil fuels is increased demand for palm oil, which is accelerating the destruction of the homes of these amazing human relatives to make way for palm oil plantations. (Orang-utan means "man of the forest" or "man of the woods" in Malay and Indonesian.)

By way of background, most people are aware that we share most of our DNA with the common chimpanzee (Pan troglodytes). Less well known is that there is another species of chimpanzee that's just as closely related to us, one that vaguely resembles Pan troglodytes, but which socially is completely different from both. I'm talking about the bonobo, or Pan paniscus. In fact, until the late 1920s, scientists didn't even have an inkling that bonobos were a different species from common chimps given their resemblance, and referred to the few museum specimens as pygmy chimpanzees.

Chimps and bonobos form a common genus: Pan. Our human lineage diverged from Pan only about 5.5 million years ago according to DNA comparisons. (In fact, some scientists argue that we're closely enough related in genes and time to chimps and bonobos that we should be regarded as a single genus: Homo.) Gorillas split around 7.5 million years ago and orang-utans an estimated 14 million years ago, much longer than our other relatives among the great apes - even if not that long in overall evolutionary terms.

In view of that, Lee's study would seem to indicate that the remarkable growth in mental faculties that are a hallmark of the higher primates must have started a very long time ago - perhaps much longer than conventionally thought.

Nevertheless, in reporting on Lee's study, one part of the Sunday Times article read as follows:

"He also found that the single most important factor in deciding a species’ intelligence was simply the size of its brain: “The correlation of brain size with mental ability found in humans appears to extend throughout the primate order.”"

Really? Well, if brain size translated into brain power, what about elephants and whales, which each have brains very large in total weight and size? I suspect Lee has been misrepresented here, and that he's referring to part of the brain called the neocortex. This is the bit that handles complex social relationships and is a recent addition in evolutionary terms, developing on the outer surface of the brain over time in response to the pressures of social living as these increased among our ancestors over millions of years.

Evolutionary psychologist Robin Dunbar and others at Liverpool University have compared relative neocortex size among the higher primates. The results are unambiguous: we have the biggest neocortex area by far, which figures as humans have the most complex social relationships and the largest social group sizes (although even we tend to max out at around 150 in terms of the sustained social relationships we can handle. Aurélia Merçay and I wrote a little about this and its implications for negotiating in chapter 7 of DHA's third volume, "Thinking Outside the Box" at left).

It's slightly surprising that orang-utans have come out on top among non-human primates in their abilities to carry out mental tasks because they're generally considered less sociable than chimps and bonobos. But then there's a lot we didn't realize about the way they lived until very recently, thanks to pioneering field work by the Dutch primatologist Carel van Schaik and his colleagues. Their definitive reports of tool use and, crucially, proto-cultural transmission of tool use among wild orang-utan populations astounded the scientific world in late 2005.

The ways primate species live socially is significant. Although chimps and bonobos are superficially similar in appearance and are species of the same genus, for instance, they live completely differently in social terms and also manage problems of conflict and achieve reconciliation in very different ways. (If chimps are from Mars, bonobos are from 'Boogie Nights'.)

Common chimps and bonobos live in larger and more complex social groups than orang-utans. If orang-utans are turning out to be much more mentally capable than previously imagined, there might also be things about their social life we've missed, given the difficulty of studying them in their dense and remote jungle habitats.

So what? Well, as another Dutch primatologist Frans de Waal explained in books such as "Chimpanzee Politics" and "Our Inner Ape", bonobos and common chimps have a lot to teach us about understanding the roots of human aggression and practical conflict resolution.

Not least about coalition politics, at which both species could show more than a thing or two to many an experienced human diplomat or politician. For example, de Waal documented machinations for power among competing males in a captive chimpanzee colony in the Netherlands in the 1970s that resulted in the death of one and which would have given Machiavelli a run for his money in terms of subtlety and complexity. (In the early 1990s, Newt Gingrich, U.S. House Speaker, was reportedly so impressed with "Chimpanzee Politics" that he made it required reading for his junior colleagues in Congress.)

As in humans, xenophobia, rape and murder have been documented in common chimps, which, by inference, has fuelled pessimism about 'Man, the warlike ape'. Yet good news is that our other equally close cousin, the bonobo, seems much more effective in resolving conflict and dealing with and preventing violence, which contradicts this gloomy view. It also seems to be no coincidence that coalitions of females hold the reins of power in bonobo society.

I wouldn't be surprised if orang-utans also have something useful to teach us about conflict and reconciliation, just as chimpanzee and bonobo studies are already doing. A lot is being learned about the role of emotions and gender, the origins of human morality and the influence of social hierarchies to fuel or restrain violence by placing our species within the context of our cousins, the other great apes.

Which is good news for us if we don't drive them to extinction first.


John Borrie


References

"Chimps Knocked Off Top of the IQ Tree", Sunday Times (15 April 2007): http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/news/uk/article1654998.ece

R.I.M. Dunbar, "Co-evolution of Neocortical Size, Group Size and Language in Humans", Behavioural and Brain Sciences, 1993: 16, pp. 681-735.

Frans de Waal, "Chimpanzee Politics: Power and Sex Among Apes" (rev. edn) (Baltimore: the John Hopkins University Press: 2000), "Our Inner Ape: the Best and Worst of Human Nature" (London: Granta: 2005)

International Herald Tribune/New York Times, "In Search of the Smart Orangutan" (16 November 2005), available here.

Image courtesy of Wikipedia under the GNU Free Documentation License.