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Ed Webb

Exit from a Sparse Hegemony: Central Asia's Place in a Transforming Liberal Internation... - 0 views

www.fpri.org/...ng-liberal-international-order

US USA IR Russia China analysis CentralAsia

shared by Ed Webb on 19 Feb 21 - No Cached
  • In our book Exit from Hegemony we argue that the era of American global hegemony is over and that the international order built by Washington in the immediate post-Cold War era has eroded significantly. It has been replaced by an emerging order that is more contested and multipolar. While U.S. President Trump helped to accelerate some of these dynamics, these pathways of change predated his tenure and will only continue to accelerate during the Biden Administration.
  • the rise of revisionist challengers (“Exit from Above”), the role of weaker states in soliciting alternative patrons (“Exit from Below”) and the increasing contestation in transnational networks between liberal and illiberal ideas and norms (“Exit from Within”).
  • a current power transition, as power, especially economic power, is diffusing from what was considered the global transatlantic core to the Global South
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  • Both Russia and, increasingly China, have been viewed as the main revisionist challengers to the liberal international order. The main vehicle for these counter-ordering efforts have been new economic and security regional organizations established by Moscow and Beijing to project their agendas and check the influence of Western counterparts. For Russia, this has included founding the Collective Security Treaty Organization (CSTO) as a regional security alternative to NATO, while in the economic sphere Russia has pushed for ever-increasing regional integration through the Eurasian Economic Union. For China, the most important of these new organizations is the Shanghai Cooperation Organization (SCO) founded in 2001. And in 2016 China also founded the Quadrilateral Cooperation and Coordination Mechanism (QCCM), established to promote regional anti-terrorist coordination and security cooperation between Tajikistan, Afghanistan and Pakistan. Around the same time investigative reports revealed that Beijing concluded an agreement to establish a military base in Tajikistan, with Chinese troops given the authority to patrol large swathes of the Tajikistan-Afghanistan border.
  • the Central Asians states attend more summits, working groups and interagency groups convened by Russia and China than they do for the liberal ordering organizations
  • In the 2000s the West’s patronage monopoly was dramatically broken by the rise of both Russia and China as goods providers
  • Not only did transnational actors promoting liberal ordering lose their influence, but the region has witnessed the rise of actors now promoting illiberal norms in a variety of settings. The SCO and the CIS began openly criticizing the inappropriateness of political liberalism, while also creating new formal and informal legal frameworks that allowed, in the extraterritorial actions against political exiles in name of counterterrorism,  including rapid extradition requests, investigations and even renditions.
  • we argue that Central Asian provides compelling evidence as to why this time transformations in the liberal international order are likely to prove far more significant and enduring. During the 1990s, the norms, institutions and actors associated with liberal ordering were pretty much the only source for integrating the new Central Asian states into global governance. However now, Central Asia is a far more dense and contested region, where different sources of order and norms openly co-exist, compete and interact with one another.
Ed Webb

From Poverty to Power by Duncan Green » Blog Archive » Failed States Index 20... - 0 views

www.oxfamblogs.org/fp2p

failedstates map interactive global south Oxfam blog bloggers

shared by Ed Webb on 14 Aug 09 - Cached
  • an interactive map of state fragility, to illustrate their Failed States Index 2009, covering 177 countries. Most fragile are Somalia, followed by Zimbabwe, Chad, Sudan and DRC. Most stable are (inevitably) the Scandinavians – Norway, followed by Finland and Sweden
Ed Webb

The End of History and the Last Map: How Cartography Has Shaped Ideas of War and Peace - 0 views

foreignpolicy.com/...haped-war-peace-end-of-history

war peace map maps IR history empire

shared by Ed Webb on 23 May 20 - Cached
  • Spreading peace and democracy has never been cartographically convincing, even to its promoters. And it could sometimes look downright sinister to those on the wrong side of the map. At the same time, maps are ideally suited to essentialist visions of the world that, accurately or not, divide people into discrete, ready-to-clash units, each with their own color and territory. Perhaps as a result, maps have served nicely as a metaphor for those who assumed conflict was more natural, or more interesting, all along.
  • After the Cold War ended, maps of peace and harmony proved far less visually engaging than their predecessors and were just as ideologically fraught. Perhaps the best modern-day cartographic depiction of what liberal internationalism’s triumph might look like is Freedom House’s map of freedom in the world, with all the countries gradually ticking green. Like maps of global risk or human development, the Freedom House map offers a ready metric for imagining Western politics and living standards spreading across the globe.
  • For those who wanted a more militant depiction of liberal internationalist ambition, there was also “The Pentagon’s New Map.” Published by the political scientist Thomas Barnet in 2003, it generated a flurry of media attention before being largely forgotten in the disastrous aftermath of the Iraq War. The map envisioned the United States’ 21st-century military strategy as “identifying the problem parts of the world and aggressively shrinking them.” Through interventions like the invasion of Iraq, Washington would expand the “functioning core” of globalization and eliminate the “non-integrating gap,” which was plagued by terrorism, poverty, and repression.
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  • these two maps capture the paradox of America’s post­-Cold War liberal internationalism. Americans might have seen their ambitions as benign, but many others around the world found them threatening. The result is a strange contradiction whereby organizations like Freedom House and the Open Society Foundations appear to represent a kind of earnest if slightly quixotic idealism in Washington while becoming the subject of countless conspiracy theories abroad. For those who imagined color revolutions as a series of CIA-sponsored plots to spread U.S. influence under the guise of democracy, the Freedom House map was also the Pentagon map; seeing the world painted all one shade was tantamount to the United States conquering it.
  • Maps have proved particularly popular with people looking for the so-called real fault lines—be they religious, ethnic, or geopolitical—along which the post-Cold War world would inevitably fracture
  • an equally essentialist view of human society inspired a series of completely contradictory maps imagining what the Middle East’s so-called real borders would look like. Amid the chaos of Iraq’s civil war, some observers began to focus on the fault lines within Huntington’s category of Islamic civilization and concluded that it was, say, the tensions between Sunnis, Shiites, and Kurds that would ultimately prove insurmountable. In 2013, for example, one widely circulated map from the New York Times showed how Syria and Iraq might end up reconfigured on ethno-sectarian terms as four smaller, seemingly more homogeneous, states.
  • while the post-Cold War world has indeed remained conflict-prone, the conflicts themselves have not followed the predictions of any one particular pessimist
  • Risk geopolitics are certainly more fun to read about than the alternative, and they make for sharper and more compelling maps. But they also come at a cost
Ed Webb

The Choice Between a U.S.-Led Rules-Based Order and a Chinese 'Might-Makes-Right' One I... - 0 views

foreignpolicy.com/...-based-international-order-too

IR analysis US USA China military diplomacy

shared by Ed Webb on 30 May 21 - Cached
  • the distinction between the United States’ supposed commitment to a system of rules and China’s alleged lack thereof is misleading in at least three ways. First, it overlooks the United States’ own willingness to ignore, evade, or rewrite the rules whenever they seem inconvenient
  • China accepts and even defends many principles of the existing order, although of course not all of them
  • statements such as Blinken’s imply that abandoning today’s rules-based order would leave us in a lawless, rule-free world of naked power politics, unregulated by any norms or principles whatsoever. This is simply not the case: Scholars of widely varying views understand that all international orders—global, regional, liberal, realist, or whatever—require a set of rules to manage the various interactions that inevitably arise between different polities
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  • “any intergroup order must be defined by rules of group membership and … political authority.”
  • the issue is not the United States’ preference for a “rules-based” order and China’s alleged lack of interest in it; rather, the issue is who will determine which rules pertain where
  • The United States (generally) prefers a multilateral system (albeit one with special privileges for some states, especially itself) that is at least somewhat mindful of individual rights and certain core liberal values (democratic rule, individual freedom, rule of law, market-based economies, and so on).
  • the United States also likes many existing institutions (the IMF, NATO, the World Bank, the reserve role of the dollar, to name a few) because they give the United States greater influence.
  • China favors a more Westphalian conception of order, one where state sovereignty and noninterference are paramount and liberal notions of individual rights are downplayed if not entirely dismissed. This vision is no less “rules-based” than the United States’, insofar as it draws on parts of the United Nations charter, and it would not preclude many current forms of international cooperation, including extensive trade, investment, collaboration on vital transnational issues such as climate change. China is also a vocal defender of multilateralism, even if its actual behavior sometimes violates existing multilateral norms
  • International orders inevitably reflect the underlying balance of power, and China’s rise means that its ability to shape some of the rules (or to refuse to go along with rules that it rejects) will be considerable
  • what U.S. allies really want is for the United States to take its oft-repeated commitment to a “rules-based” order more seriously.
  • China’s emergence (and, to a much lesser extent, Russia’s regional sway) gives other countries more options than they had during the unipolar era
  • Autocratic nationalists in some countries may prefer China’s explicit rejection of liberal values and ideas about sovereignty, but Beijing’s increasingly bellicose behavior and its willingness to punish others for even minor transgressions has sparked growing concerns about what a more China-centric order might be like.
  • Americans may exaggerate the benevolent nature of U.S. hegemony, but its geographic distance from others and relatively benign intentions made its position of primacy more acceptable to many other states than the overall distribution of power might suggest.
  • even like-minded allies who welcome U.S. leadership want it to be exercised more judiciously. It’s not U.S. hegemony per se that bothers them; it is the excessive exploitation of hegemonic privilege
  • The United States and China are going to have a great deal of influence over the rules that emerge either globally or within whatever partial orders each might lead. But to gain others’ compliance, they will still have to give other states at least some of what they want, too.
  • Merely showing up at major global forums, treating other participants with respect, and showing a degree of empathy for others’ concerns are going to play well. If Beijing remains committed to its self-defeating “wolf warrior diplomacy,” a U.S. charm offensive will be even more effective.
  • If Chinese leader Xi Jinping’s loftiest ambitions are realized and China eventually occupies the commanding economic heights of the 21st century, it still won’t be able to take over the world. But such a position will give it a great deal of influence over the rules of the international system, because other states will be less willing to defy it openly and forced to adapt some of their practices to conform to Chinese preferences
  • Undertaking the reforms that will be needed to retain the necessary economic strength would be good for the United States in any case
Ed Webb

See where water is scarcest in the world - and why we need to conserve - Washington Post - 1 views

www.washingtonpost.com/...water-scarcity-map-solutions

water climate development economy SDGs agriculture

shared by Ed Webb on 16 Aug 23 - No Cached
  • An analysis of newly released data from the World Resources Institute (WRI) shows that by 2050 an additional billion people will be living in arid areas and regions with high water stress, where at least 40 percent of the renewable water supply is consumed each year. Two-fifths of the world’s population — 3.3 billion people in total — currently live in such areas.
  • the Middle East and North Africa regions have the highest level of water stress in the world. Climate change is shifting traditional precipitation patterns, making the regions drier and reducing their already scarce water supplies. Population growth and industrial use of water are expected to increase demand.
  • The WRI analysis accounts for surface water, but not groundwater stores that are tapped when lakes, rivers and reservoirs run dry. This means the new estimates may underestimate risk. Many rural areas use groundwater for drinking water and farmers worldwide rely on it for irrigation. But groundwater often replenishes much more slowly than surface water.
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  • Only half of 1 percent of the world’s water supply is fresh water in liquid form. The rest is saltwater or frozen into glaciers.
  • its biggest use, globally, is for food production
  • “It’s much more useful and easier to live with if the water all comes regularly and without these extremes. But more and more, that’s not the case.”
  • If surface water is in short supply, people often turn to groundwater, which can be rapidly depleted. In India, nearly 60 percent of the population makes a living from farming. For decades, the government supported farmers by subsidizing the cost of diesel to run water pumps and tractors and by purchasing wheat and rice at an artificially high price. Water demand to irrigate rice and wheat fields is contributing to groundwater depletion in the northern region of Punjab.
  • “More people demand more water, but also each person demands more water as they get wealthier,” Iceland said. “So as you get wealthier, you move from a more grain and vegetable-oriented diet to a more meat-oriented diet.”
  • Growing and feeding a cow to create one pound of beef requires as much as 1,800 gallons of water, by some estimates. Calorie-for-calorie, that’s almost eight times as much water as vegetables and 20 times as much water as cereals like wheat and corn.
  • Water-intensive crops like sugar cane and cotton could also drive demand in sub-Saharan Africa, where water use is expected to double over the next 20 years. Many areas still lack infrastructure to reliably deliver water for irrigation. As those pipelines are built, more farmers will have access to water, which will further strain surface water supplies. Inefficient water use and unsustainable management could lower gross domestic product in the region by 6 percent, according to WRI.
  • One Saudi company is growing alfalfa in the Arizona desert, pulling from the area’s groundwater supplies. That alfalfa is then shipped overseas to feed cattle in Saudi Arabia, where industrial-scale farming of forage crops has been banned to conserve the nation’s water.
  • Water is also integral to mining lithium and other minerals used in electric vehicle batteries and renewable energy infrastructure. These critical minerals are often found in arid places like Chile, which is already water-stressed and is projected to use 20 percent more water by 2050, according to WRI.
  • Since farming accounts for the most water use globally, experts say that micro-sprinklers and drip irrigation instead of flood irrigation are an important solution.
  • reducing meat and dairy consumption can decrease individual water footprints. Reducing food waste could also help reduce water use. In the United States, more than a third of food ends up in the landfill. The biggest single contributor to food waste is throwing away food at home.
Ed Webb

Why social distancing won't work for us - The Correspondent - 0 views

thecorrespondent.com/...6093840060-b798466e

pandemics Africa Nigeria cities urban health economy

shared by Ed Webb on 30 Mar 20 - No Cached
  • My family and I live in Lagos, Nigeria, a tightly packed city with a land mass of only 1,171 sq kilometre and a population anywhere between 15 and 22 million, depending on who you ask. If New York never sleeps because the lights are always on and there’s always somewhere to be, Lagos never sleeps because there’s no power, it’s much too hot indoors and you might as well have a good time while you’re out trying to catch a breeze. Going by the dictionary definition of the word "slum" - "a squalid and overcrowded urban street or district inhabited by very poor people" - my home city is the largest one in the world. And across my continent, more than 200 million people live in one.
  • Sourcing water is arduous and expensive, so people are unlikely to prioritise frequent hand-washing. Public transportation consists mostly of privately owned vehicles in which intense proximity is inevitable.
  • Street trading and open-air markets are such a fundamental part of the fabric of Lagos that we joke that you could leave home in just your underwear and arrive at your destination fully dressed
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  • The cost of living in Lagos is also very high, which means that home ownership is the exception for Lagosians rather than the rule. The majority of renters live in extremely close quarters, in a kind of private proximity that mirrors the density of public life.
  • In my city, grimy currency notes go from hand to hand throughout the course of everyday life. People sweat on one another in transit. Communal toilets, kitchens and bathrooms are typical in low-income neighbourhoods, and can be shared by as many as 40 people in one building. In the poorest neighbourhoods, sanitation is non-existent because neither piped water nor sewage management systems are available.
  • even if we wanted to, we simply don’t have the space to socially distance from one another
  • there are other threats more real and more immediate than a respiratory infection which has so far tended to kill old people in faraway places most of us will only ever see on TV. The idea of social distancing is not just alien to us, it is impossible for social and economic reasons too. Cities such as Lagos are kept alive by the kind of interpersonal interaction that the global north is currently discouraging or criminalising.
  • In Lagos, about six million people live on incomes earned largely on a daily basis
  • For such people, the possibility of catching a previously unheard-of illness is a far less dangerous one than the knowledge that not having anything to eat is always a sunrise away.
  • If rape and torture are not enough to deter people from leaving home every day to try to make some money to survive, a novel coronavirus outbreak is not likely to succeed either
  • In Nigeria, it won’t matter whether we get 20,000 cases all at once or over the course of a few months; with fewer than 500 ventilators for a population of 200 million,
  • In all likelihood, the social expectation that female relatives will care for the sick and dying will hold sway in this outbreak, which means that in the immediate term, girls and women may be at disproportionate risk of infection and re-infection. Still, as 80% of coronavirus patients report mild to moderate symptoms,
  • The failures of the government have been mitigated by the fact that we are socialised to see to the wellbeing of our communities and their members; this has been a workable solution until now.
  • a reality that is extremely widespread across Africa: people survive difficulty by coming together as communities of care, not pulling apart in a retreat into individualism. 
  • It’s time for us Africans to start thinking about solutions that are not based on the legitimate fears of other nations, but on our own established realities.
Ed Webb

RSF launches Tracker 19 to track Covid-19's impact on press freedom | RSF - 0 views

rsf.org/...covid-19s-impact-press-freedom

media censorship politics pandemics RSF

shared by Ed Webb on 02 Apr 20 - No Cached
  • Reporters Without Borders (RSF) is launching Tracker-19 to monitor and evaluate the impacts of the coronavirus pandemic on journalism and to offer recommendations on how to defend the right to information.
  • Called “Tracker 19” in reference not only to Covid-19 but also article 19 of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, this project aims to evaluate the pandemic’s impacts on journalism. It will document state censorship and deliberate disinformation, and their impact on the right to reliable news and information. It will also make recommendations on how to defend journalism.
  • without journalism, humankind could not address any of the major global challenges, including the climate crisis, biodiversity loss, discrimination against women and corruption.
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  • “Censorship cannot be regarded as a country’s internal matter. Information control in a given country can have consequences all over the planet and we are suffering the effects of this today. The same goes for disinformation and rumours. They make people take bad decisions, they limit free will and they sap intelligence.” 
  • RSF has taken measures to ensure that it remains as fully operational as possible while guaranteeing the safety of its personnel and partners. The data RSF collects comes from its network of bureaux and correspondents. Tracker-19 offers an interactive world map on the press freedom situation, constant coverage of developments and analyses of key issues. 
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