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Ed Webb

PRESS RELEASE: While overall violence has declined in 2018, conflict is spreading | Acl... - 0 views

www.acleddata.com/...-in-2018-conflict-is-spreading

violence conflict Yemen Syria Afghanistan philippines MENA Africa Iraq war data

shared by Ed Webb on 06 Jan 19 - No Cached
  • Despite a decrease in total fatalities this year, the majority of countries experienced more conflict, expanding the scope of political violence across Africa, Asia, and the Middle East. The Armed Conflict Location & Event Data Project (ACLED)’s 2018 data show that both the number of new locations experiencing violence and the number of armed actors engaging in violence have risen since 2017. ACLED data also confirm that conflict hotspots like Afghanistan, Yemen, and Syria still have the highest rates of organized violence and highest death tolls, with a combined total of nearly 100,000 reported fatalities this year.
  • While political violence decreased overall in volume, it also expanded. In 2018, more locations saw violence, more conflict actors emerged, more actors targeted civilians than before, and more countries saw disorder increase than decrease within their borders
  • Conventional warfare dominates: The most violent countries in the ACLED dataset in 2018 are those with large conventional conflicts: Syria, Yemen, Afghanistan, and Iraq. Together, these four countries make up nearly 70% of all organized violence events recorded by ACLED in 2018
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  • Despite the growing prevalence of non-state actors, state actors remain the most violent actors worldwide: State actors in Yemen, Syria, and Afghanistan were active in the highest number of conflict events in 2018
  • The war in Afghanistan is the most lethal conflict in the world: Afghanistan was by far the deadliest country covered by ACLED in 2018, with nearly as many fatalities as Syria and Yemen combined, and 30% of all fatalities reported by ACLED during the year at more than 41,000*
  • Syria and Yemen remain flashpoints: The conflicts in these two countries had the highest number of organized political violence events in 2018 and were also the most dangerous places for civilians. Syria alone made up nearly 40% of the total number of violence events recorded for 2018, while this was the deadliest year for Yemen since ACLED began monitoring the war in 2016, with over 28,100 fatalities
  • Syria is the deadliest place for civilians: In 2018, nearly as many civilians were killed in Syria (over 7,100) as were in Nigeria, Yemen, Afghanistan, and the Philippines combined (over 7,600 total)
  • The Philippines is a war zone in disguise: Over 1,000 civilians were killed in the Philippines in 2018 – more than in Iraq, Somalia, or the DRC – highlighting the lethality of Duterte’s state terror campaign dubbed the ‘War on Drugs’
Ed Webb

America's Democracy Was Far Less Peaceful Than Political Scientists Pretended - 0 views

foreignpolicy.com/...o-americas-democratic-failures

US USA politics democracy history political_science analysis race racism authoritarianism

shared by Ed Webb on 18 Jan 21 - No Cached
  • Many political scientists like political behavior to fall into neat boxes, whether those be typologies cleanly defining terms or spreadsheets in which every row contains a discrete observation. They recognize that there’s always phenomena that won’t fit, cleanly, but those can be the basis of future research—or relegated to the “error term,” the leftover bin for the facts that theory doesn’t explain.
  • When the implicit definition of democracy is democracy with American characteristics, the exceptions don’t even register as exceptions—until some event so far out of the comfort zone of mostly white, upper middle-class academics forces us to confront them as if they were brand new.
  • The Center for Systemic Peace’s widely used Polity scores, for instance, give the United States between a +8 and +10 from 1809 to 2016—a stable, indeed maximally scoring, democracy. That period includes the Civil War, when the losing side launched a violent conflict rather than accept the election results.
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  • The United States Political Violence (USPV) database records numerous riots around elections during the mid-19th century. In April 1855, for example, hundreds of nativists “invaded” a German area of Cincinnati, Ohio, and destroyed more than a thousand ballots. Subsequent fighting led to two deaths. In August of that year, nativist Protestants attacked German and Irish neighborhoods in Louisville, Kentucky, killing at least 20. In Baltimore, election violence became routine in the 1850s, with 30 dead and 350 wounded in the 1856 election alone
  • The bloodiest efforts came in the repression of Black people. The USPV lists nearly 70 incidents of political riots and assassinations in the decade after the formal cessation of hostilities, mostly in the South but including riots in Philadelphia and Indianapolis
  • Widespread political violence around elections only really ended when the federal government conceded that the South would be run by whites. Even then, anti-government violence took place.
  • Flattering coding rules used to produce datasets make it too easy to dismiss any aberration when a look at the historical record keeps turning up aberration after injustice after atrocity. Historians, scholars of Black history, and political scientists specializing in race and ethnic politics have long been sharply critical of the idea that that concepts like democracy, sovereignty, or the rule of law can be as bluntly coded as standard datasets long did.
  • American democracy did not penetrate to state level until the 1960s. Nearly a quarter of the states denied voting rights to Blacks—who made up a majority in some of those states before the Great Migration—from the late 19th until the mid-20th century
  • A federal union with authoritarian states cannot but be at least partly authoritarian itself
  • Despite the abolition of slavery, the imposition of Jim Crow meant that neither Congress nor the presidency were elected by fully democratic, or even representative, means
  • Consider Max Weber’s workhorse definition of the state: the monopoly of the legitimate use of physical force within a given territory. By that definition, large swathes of the United States approached failed-state status for much of the 19th and early 20th centuries
  • just as today, there were voices even at elite institutions counseling patience and unity. An 1898 Yale Law Journal article defended lynching as a natural outcome of Reconstruction having given the ballot to former slaves too early, and urged “education,” not federal intervention, as the cure. Woodrow Wilson, a leading historian and political scientist long before he became president of the United States, defended the Ku Klux Klan and white terrorism as “aroused by the mere instinct of self-preservation.” Such efforts eventually paid off in helping to efface such atrocities from textbooks even as monuments—and popular culture—embraced Lost Cause nostalgia for the Confederacy.
  • Revisiting the United States as a partial or flawed democracy means confronting much of the history that celebrants of the liberal world order claim as a series of triumphs for democracy
  • social scientists have lately become more skeptical of the conventional verities of progress. The V-Dem Institute in Sweden has compiled indices of democracy that are more sensitive to conditions like racial segregation. They show the United States as substantially less democratic than other countries, like the United Kingdom or Sweden, for most of the 20th century. Political scientists investigate topics that once attracted little attention, like the relationship between American political violence and social transformation, how national economic integration led to the decline of lynching, or how the “carceral state” (more than 2 million people are held in U.S. prisons or jails) degrades U.S. democracy today.
  • In the immediate aftermath of the storming of the Capitol, reporters and others turned to the British seizure of the Capitol building in 1814 as the closest analogue. Turning to foreign invasion rather than domestic precedents, however, says a lot. It suggests that people do not know the domestic precedents even exist, and it reinforces the notion that American political violence is “unthinkable.” (Even describing the 1814 incident as “foreign” is complex. The burning of Washington in 1814 was carried out by a British force that included marines previously enslaved by Americans—and motivated by hatred of the slavery system.)
  • it’s time to think more openly—and less defensively—about the totality of U.S. political history and behavior at home and abroad
Ed Webb

West Africa: Are Terrorist Groups Stoking Local Conflicts in the Sahel? - allAfrica.com - 0 views

allafrica.com/...201910150001.html

violence terrorism jihadism Sahel Mali BurkinaFaso Chad Niger Mauritania G5

shared by Ed Webb on 20 Oct 19 - No Cached
  • conflicts appear to be caused by struggles around power or resources between either the same or different socio-economic groups. Favouring particular sides in local conflicts enables violent extremist groups to easily recruit and strengthen their capacity, and exacerbate conflict.
  • there are contextual variations in how terror groups position themselves regarding local conflicts. They can be either directly involved in fighting or play the role of mediators. Their presence can also lead to a temporary break in conflict.
  • Criminal activities such as illicit trafficking and armed robbery, often resulting in violence, continue unabated. The state is either absent or minimally present in many areas, and therefore unable to provide protection to communities. Even in places where it is present, government authority is sometimes challenged.
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  • Several factors contribute to the ongoing violence in this region. Over recent years, the area has seen an increase in militias and community-based armed groups whose goal is to protect the community. At the same time there has been a proliferation of small arms and light weapons.
  • Trust and confidence in traditional mechanisms of conflict management have also eroded
  • Climate change and demographic pressure has disrupted the livelihoods of many and caused considerable tension between farmers, pastoralists and fishermen
  • since the 1980s, there has been conflict between the Fulani and Daoussahaq on the border between Mali and Niger, caused partly by competition for access to natural resources and criminal activities such as cattle rustling.
  • The Islamic State in the Greater Sahara exploits the Fulani's frustrations and desire for revenge by supporting them against the Daoussahaq. The Daoussahaq rely on the support of the Movement for the Salvation of Azawad - a militia mainly composed of Daoussahaq - which appears to benefit from France, Mali and Niger's help in the fight against terrorism.
  • Violent extremist groups also play the role of arbitrators between rival groups in Tenenkou in central Mali, Gabero in the Gao region, and in Oudalan, Burkina Faso.
  • n central Mali, issues such as the one linked to the competition for Koubi chieftaincy which was pending in court since 1999 were resolved by Katiba Macina.
  • Terrorist groups can be antagonists, mediators or suppressors of violence through the influence and control they exert in the areas where they operate. How groups succeed in restructuring social and economic life, and how they enforce solutions through direct threats, violence, fear or religious principles (e.g. through the idea that the land belongs to God alone) should be analysed.
  • To attribute the increase in violence solely to the exploitation of community conflicts by terrorists means potentially losing sight of the structural dynamics that underpin such violence. Incorrect labelling and understanding of local conflicts could exacerbate the situation. To restore peace and social cohesion in the long term, the root causes of local conflicts must be addressed.
Ed Webb

The ISIS Beat - The Drift - 0 views

www.thedriftmag.com/the-isis-beat

US USA military politics gwot CT terrorism analysis opinion Iraq Syria Afghanistan

shared by Ed Webb on 02 May 21 - No Cached
  • even as the new Biden Administration announced the withdrawal of troops from Afghanistan, to “end” the twenty-year war, it will continue airstrikes and raids to tackle the ever-looming threat of terrorism.
  • As the persistence of far-right nationalism suggests, ideologies cannot so easily be destroyed — even those we thought we had bombed out of existence seventy years ago. Yet, the world refracted through this war (the “only one” of the 21st century, Bush hoped) has left us not just morally inept, but also woefully misguided about what is to come next
  • ISIS has taken control over parts of regime territory in the deserts of central Syria, and slices of S.D.F.-controlled Deir ez-Zor province are witnessing a full-blown ISIS insurgency, underscoring just how central the question of governance is to the group’s appeal. But the U.S. and its allies’ focus on ideology risks ignoring why ISIS gained support in the first place. Raids and detentions, torture and execution, and governance that politically marginalizes certain groups and offers few options for justice or accountability will only build anger. It is these layers of political and social contexts that are lost in most coverage, even if they will shape Iraq and Syria for a long time to come. 
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  • The S.D.F. offers a remarkable vision to counter ISIS’s draconian rule — local councils, farmers’ cooperatives, and committees that promote the rights of oppressed minority groups. In the village of Jinwar, a female-controlled town, the S.D.F. has built a commune for women and their children, both Kurdish and Arab, seeking to escape oppressive families and realize a community without patriarchy. According to the constitution of the so-called Autonomous Administration of North and East Syria, the S.D.F.-linked ruling authority in the region, a post-ISIS Syria will be “a society free from authoritarianism, militarism, centralism and the intervention of religious authority in public affairs.” In order to realize this vision, part of the S.D.F.’s mandate is not just to govern, but also to annihilate ISIS. Several soldiers and S.D.F. spokesmen told me that the war against ISIS isn’t over — its aim now, with the support of the U.S., is to destroy sleeper cells and root out the ideology.
  • If we portray certain enemies solely as existential threats, we sweep over the political conflicts unfolding in places like Iraq and Syria, and the political violence wrought upon these communities, even by those who claim to be fighting a just war.
  • If our enemy is everywhere, we will seek allies in even the most oppressive of regimes (like Egypt and Saudi Arabia) to hunt down “terrorists,” no matter if they are gun-wielding militants or political dissidents who believe that the current state of affairs does not serve them.
  • If a war is a “good war,” or merely conceived of as a necessary one, it matters little why a terrorist group gained support, or how we may be inadvertently contributing to the group’s appeal. Yet, while the current approach to terrorism has been wildly successful in building a cottage industry of extremism and deradicalization experts, it has failed to rid the world of terrorists.
  • Massacres of Iraqi civilians, deaths of Afghan civilians by airstrikes, and indiscriminate detention and torture and rape have all happened at the hands of state security forces, including those allied with the U.S.
  • The Manichean framework helps absolve the West of its role and its responsibility in ending an endless conflict. “Terrorism” has become so synonymous with horrific violence that most Americans are likely unaware that the vast majority of civilian deaths in global conflicts today are caused by states, not non-state actors.
  • As with other battles against evil, the “killers and fanatics” necessitated the dropping of bombs, an operation that Obama’s successor continued.
  • a core argument for the war depended on the idea that terrorism was, in essence, a form of religious violence
  • What the Bush administration argued, and what the media accepted, was that terrorism is not a mere tactic, but a full-blown ideology — what Bush called “the heirs of all the murderous ideologies of the 20th century,” including “fascism, Nazism and totalitarianism.” In practice, this means non-state armed groups not allied with the U.S. should be understood as terrorist organizations — no matter if, like the Taliban, Hezbollah, Al Qaeda, and Hamas, they have little else in common
  • By and large, the media accepted the Bush administration’s framing. By 2006, public criticism of the handling of the Iraq War was mounting, but even then, few questioned the legitimacy of the war itself. In a 2009 study of media coverage after 9/11, two scholars from the University of Texas found that journalists “helped brand the policy, [then] labeled the frame as public opinion,” ultimately contributing to the acceptance of that frame as a “fact of life,” and a “larger narrative of struggle and heroism.” Journalists did not treat the War on Terror as a policy decision made by the Bush administration, but as the natural and inevitable order of things. 
  • The political scientist Austin Doctor recently conducted a study of sexual assault by 143 rebel groups around the world, from 1989 to 2011, and separately applied the results of his analysis to ISIS.  He found a correlation between the presence of foreign fighters and increased incidence of sexual violence, which suggests that the Islamic State functioned much like other rebel groups — that ISIS is not so singular as it may seem.
  • mainstream media coverage of ISIS receives almost no scrutiny. But many other publications and reporters have operated on the same flawed assumptions and premises as Caliphate, ones that animated the West’s understanding of the Middle East long before ISIS gained its first foothold
  • the issue here isn’t just the violence — after all, Assad has also relished the torture, starvation, and murder of his citizens. Since 2011, his regime has used chemical weapons repeatedly, more than three hundred times according to one study. The critical difference is that while Assad depends on the international system for legitimacy (Russia and Iran are key supporters, and Syria remains part of the global financial system), ISIS rejects it. While Assad would prefer that the world looks away, ISIS practically begs us to stare. It aims to demoralize Western audiences, while projecting to potential recruits its vision of a new world order
  • In parts of the Caliphate, ISIS did promise a different model, at least nominally. In one piece of propaganda, the group declared, “The people are as equal as the teeth of a comb. There is no difference between the rich and the poor and the strong and the weak. The holder of a right has redress, and the grievance of an injured party will be answered.” In appealing to residents and new recruits, ISIS touched upon something familiar: the desire for justice, equality, and law and order in a world that has manifestly failed to deliver any. Women, too, found opportunities under ISIS. In Fallujah, they used the regime’s justice system to secure divorces, which had been more difficult under the Iraqi government.
  • civilians were likely to stay in ISIS-controlled territory because, among various reasons, the “quality of governance,” including “availability of electricity, cleanliness of streets, and crime rates,” was better compared to services provided by the Iraqi government
  • “All the locals here wonder why the U.S. coalition never came to rescue them from Assad’s machine guns, but run to fight ISIS when it took a few pieces of land,” one rebel told the Guardian. 
  • the current global order has left many people behind
  • decades of imperialism, like the U.S. invasion of Iraq, and Russia and Iran’s interventions, have irrevocably transformed communities in the Middle East. Similarly, though ISIS opposes the Saudi government, the Salafi-Jihadi underpinnings of the group could not have gained traction without the Kingdom’s years of effort of exporting and standardizing a particular form of Islam across the Middle East. 
  • devoid of any political context, terms like “radicalization” and “ideology” lose meaning
  • how ISIS appeared in the public imagination: as a movement beyond human understanding. The only sensible answer to so inscrutable and atavistic an adversary was total war.
  • This frenzied interest in the U.S.’s darkly powerful new enemy lured some journalists and analysts to focus on the group full-time. It emerged as a distinct topic from the Syrian civil war, whose crowded theater was becoming difficult to explain, or the Iraq War, now a nearly-adolescent 11 years old. Soon, writers covering ISIS, what Wired called “the world’s most important beat,” developed a signature flourish, describing it not just as a terrorist organization, but as an almost supernatural threat. “It is not clear,” argued a New York Review of Books piece in 2015, “whether our culture can ever develop sufficient knowledge, rigor, imagination, and humility to grasp the phenomenon of ISIS. But for now, we should admit that we are not only horrified but baffled.”
  • Stories of the group’s atrocities emerged in quick succession, echoing the parade of violence ISIS was proudly broadcasting on its own channels: public executions, conscription of child soldiers, disappearances and murders of thousands, Yazidi girls sold into slavery.
  • by narrowly focusing on the savagery of ISIS fighters, we miss the deeper and more important story of how ISIS grew into a political force, and of how it moved not just the hearts and minds, but the physical bodies, of tens of thousands
  • the core issue with Caliphate isn’t just that a lying source may have misled overeager journalists. Rather, the controversy, and indeed even the proposition that a “terrorism editor” would have resolved the problem, points to a deeper flaw in the way media has long covered extremism: divorced from the local and historical contexts that have fueled its rise
  • After a decade of the War on Terror and chaos in the Middle East, ISIS seemed to be the ultimate testament to an enduring clash of civilizations. It is not that surprising that ISIS itself encouraged this fantastical narrative — but it is striking that our media took their word for it.
Ed Webb

Australia Opens Investigation Into U.S. Police Violence Against Its Journalists - 0 views

foreignpolicy.com/...lence-australia-press-attacked

US USA politics violence media journalists rights diplomacy Australia Germany Britain UK FCO

shared by Ed Webb on 02 Jun 20 - Cached
  • Australian government will open an investigation into U.S. law enforcement assaulting an Australian news crew covering protests in Washington, D.C., highlighting the growing diplomatic fallout for the United States with its closest allies from its long-standing problems with police violence and racial injustice
  • Senior European and African leaders condemned Floyd’s death and violence amid the U.S. protests, while abroad thousands of people demonstrated in front of U.S. embassies and consulates from Canada to Spain to New Zealand
  • Senior U.S. diplomats abroad have been forced to respond to the unrest at home, condemning Floyd’s death and insisting the United States continues to be a voice on human rights and press freedom in the world. 
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  • press freedom advocacy groups have tracked more than 125 incidents in three days of journalists facing attacks from police and protesters and other press freedom violations, including incidents with foreign journalists from Germany, Britain, and Australia.
Ed Webb

Deterrence, Mass Atrocity, and Samantha Power's "The Education of an Idealist" - 0 views

medium.com/...on-of-an-idealist-32231fb2bab4

US USA IR Libya Syria Bosnia Rwanda peace deterrence UN UNSC book review

shared by Ed Webb on 20 Nov 19 - No Cached
  • In Power’s Pulitzer Prize-winning A Problem from Hell, American force is one of many foreign policy tools that can and should be bent toward civilian protection and atrocity prevention globally; for many of her critics from the left, American force is to be dismantled; for many of her critics from the right, American force should serve core national security interests and nothing more.
  • In A Problem from Hell, Power argues that US policymakers did not act to stop genocide because they did not want to; in her memoir, she relates how a room full of civil servants whose thinking had been shaped by her first book found themselves in a years-long limbo over complex human disasters in Syria and Libya. Together, these cases constitute a real-time test of the “toolbox” of interventions Power first proposed at the end of A Problem from Hell; together, they reveal both the problem at the heart of her theory of foreign policy, and the still all-too-slender slate of effective policy alternatives to force across the political spectrum.
  • Libya and Syria serve as parallel cases through which questions about the US’s role in the world are refracted. The standard narrative is as follows: the US intervened in Libya under the guise of preventing mass atrocities, this intervention ended first in regime change and then in a failed state, and Libyans now live in enduring danger; the US did not intervene to protect civilians during the Syrian Civil War, war snarled the full region into conflict, and today Syrian civilians continue to die in unspeakable ways and uncounted numbers. At each stage, the narrative is in fact more complicated, particularly if we begin by asking whether the US did in fact prevent mass atrocity in Libya and end by noting the U.S. did in fact intervene in Syria in multiple ways, but the broad lines are still instructive for understanding public debate. Would Libyans have been better off in the absence of an American-led intervention, or would they have been worse off? Would Syrians have been better off for U.S. intervention, or would they have been worse off for it?
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  • “While administration officials could say they had imposed consequences on Assad’s regime for crossing the red line, they could not specific the nature of these consequences in any detail,” she writes. “Since even Assad didn’t know the particulars of the cost he would be bearing, he seemed unlikely to be deterred from carrying out further attacks.”
  • confronting ongoing or imminent atrocities can require quickly shifting perpetrators’ incentives. In the immediate aftermath of the Libyan protests, for instance, Power argues rapid, joint Security Council and American action “was probably the best example in history of governments hastily using a vast array of “tools in the toolbox” to try to deter atrocities.” But this proved insufficient: “The pressures that the United States and other countries were imposing on Qaddafi’s regime would take months to reach their full effect, and we had run out of further nonmilitary steps to take to try to affect the Libyan leader’s near-term calculus.”
  • the implicit promise of force underlies each alternative set of policies Power proposes. Actors who are willing to abandon mass atrocity campaigns voluntarily may be easily deterred — but actors committed to a mass atrocity campaign could find themselves diplomatically isolated, operating under economic sanction, or threatened by prosecution, and still continue to wage campaigns of death. “Stop this or else” undergirds threats when a powerful actor makes them. The toolbox’s logic is ultimately escalatory as a result: force is a tool of last resort, but no other tool works without the latent presence of American military force.
  • American military force underwrites other dimensions of statecraft, and mobilizes when other deterrent measures have failed. But the problem, then, is not simply, as her critics allege, that Samantha Power is a hawk, or that she doesn’t understand which conflicts constitute core American interests — the problem is that all deterrent models of atrocity prevention rest on the threat of force.
  • UN peacekeepers are the largest deployed force in conflict zones today; UN peacekeeping constitutes an enormous part of the Security Council’s agenda; the UN peacekeeping budget is separate from and larger than the UN’s operational budget; and a heated debate on the use of force by UN peacekeepers has now been running over twenty years. Peacekeeping is an effective tool that works best when it is all carrots and few sticks — but peacekeepers today are usually charged with protecting civilians under threat of imminent violence, as well. They rarely use force, and while they seem to protect civilians from rebels well, they struggle more to protect civilians from government forces.
  • Historically, when deterrence fails, the UN Security Council has outsourced this work — instead of sending in the Marines, for example, the UN instead turns to the French, as they did in the Central African Republic, or British Special forces, as they did in Sierra Leone, or — yes — NATO, as they did in the former Yugoslavia and then Libya.
  • discussions about US restraint are nearly entirely divorced from these extremely active debates about the use of force in UN peacekeeping — and considering the two together is instructive
  • a military with stunningly excess capability demands we continually interrogate its purpose; people who live under imminent threat of violence are not marginal to US foreign policy interests unless we define them that way; and the US outsources most conflict management to the UN system, which then relies on the military might of its member states to wield force in the places most dangerous for civilians
  • If unwilling actors cannot be swayed save by the use of force, and we are reluctant to use force for practical or ethical reasons, then we are left with two options: we can address the root causes of conflict, and we can help those refugees and internally displaced people who manage to escape violence. The first set of options requires reimagining the fundamental structures of foreign policy; the second set of options is currently so politically unpopular that it is remaking domestic politics across refugee-receiving countries
Ed Webb

Human Trafficking and Slavery Help Finance Terrorists and Earn Them Strategic Advantage - 0 views

foreignpolicy.com/...-money-and-strategic-advantage

IR analysis opinion networks trafficking crime migrants refugees

shared by Ed Webb on 05 Aug 20 - Cached
  • despite near-universal pledges to eradicate the crime, human trafficking and modern slavery continue unabated, affecting more than 40 million people worldwide
  • this practice supports terrorist and armed groups, bankrolls criminal organizations, enables abusive regimes, and undermines stability, according to a recent Council on Foreign Relations report
  • armed and violent extremist groups use trafficking as a direct tactic of war, generating profits and advancing their strategic aims. Insurgent groups—from central Africa’s Lord’s Resistance Army to Libyan militias—have used captives to expand military capabilities and support operations, with victims forced to serve as combatants, messengers, cooks, porters, and spies. Other terrorist organizations—including the Islamic State and Boko Haram—engage in sex trafficking. They use enslaved women to attract and mobilize male fighters and generate significant revenue as well. In 2014 alone, ransom payments extracted by the Islamic State amounted to between $35 million and $45 million. In other words, such groups use trafficking to expand their power and capabilities, thereby prolonging conflict.
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  • Refugees and migrants are at particularly high risk of both labor and sex trafficking, and their numbers are increasing—by the end of 2018, more than 70 million people had been forcibly displaced by violence, conflict, and persecution, close to double the figure a decade ago
  • In Central America, smugglers, criminals, and traffickers—emboldened by restrictive and punitive U.S. immigration policies—capitalize on migrants’ desperation to reach safety in the United States: Smugglers charge migrants exorbitant fees, and some leverage debt into forced labor or sexual exploitation. In that way, human trafficking bankrolls operations for transnational crime syndicates and extremist groups; forced labor produces an estimated $150 billion annually for perpetrators, making it one of the world’s most profitable crimes.
  • Some repressive governments traffic their own citizens and compel them to labor in harsh conditions in order to bolster the economy or suppress dissent. The U.S. State Department estimates that the North Korean government, for example, has close to 100,000 forced laborers working abroad, mainly in China and Russia, often in harsh conditions. By taxing those overseas workers, the regime has generated more than $500 million annually, thereby helping it mitigate the effects of economic sanctions.
  • Between 2001 and 2011, one study found that the presence of peacekeeping forces was positively correlated with forced prostitution, damaging public perceptions of the United Nations
  • U.S. government inspectors uncovered abuses by Defense Department contractors participating in labor trafficking. The contractors were allegedly hiring workers from third-party countries to work in a variety of support jobs—including food services—on U.S. bases in Kuwait (an issue previously documented on U.S. bases in Iraq); investigators found that the contractors had illegally charged recruitment fees to the victims, housed them in substandard conditions, and withheld their passports. Perpetrating sex and labor trafficking diminishes U.S. influence in tackling the very same crime
  • Despite the security implications of human trafficking, convictions for trafficking offenses are rare, programs focused on prevention and protection are underresourced, and most efforts to address human trafficking are detached from broader conflict prevention, security, and counterterrorism initiatives. The issue of trafficking has been seen as a concern primarily of human rights activists, not of the national security community. However, a growing body of research and evidence suggests that as security threats converge, human trafficking becomes a threat multiplier, since it finances other criminal activities and foments greater insecurity.
Ed Webb

The Women of Daesh: Thinking about a Decade of Research on Women, Gender, and Terrorism - 0 views

www.e-ir.info/...-on-women-gender-and-terrorism

gender feminism IR ISIS analysis women violence terrorism

shared by Ed Webb on 15 Nov 16 - No Cached
  • Daesh has paired actively recruiting women to be a part of the organization with a formal ban on female fighters. This is unique because there are a lot of organizations that either ban female fighters or recruit women, but few that do both
  • the formal role that women are to have in Daesh is as biological and cultural reproducers of the Caliphate: wives and mothers, both literally and figuratively, of the cause
  • much of the attention to date about women in Daesh is the organization’s ability to attract Western women to travel to Syria and Iraq to join its ranks
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  • In recent decades, treating women well (or at least appearing to) has become a sine qua non of liberal, developed statehood – and critique of Daesh (deliberate and resolute) failing on those axes also serves a delegitimizing function for the organization.
  • women who participate in extralegal violence are often more complicated than the gender stereotypes they tend to be portrayed as
  • one of our interviewees suggested that one of the reasons that women were joining Daesh in such large numbers was because the organization was better at listening to, and catering to, the sex-specific needs women express than its opponents who were putting together counterterrorism strategies
  • those who do not think about gender, or who think about gender in over-simplistic ways, do so at the risk of the accuracy, coherence, and effectiveness of their engagement with violent extremism, as analysts or activists or both
Ed Webb

Trump Bends Over to Kiss the Blarney State - Foreign Policy - 0 views

foreignpolicy.com/...over-to-kiss-the-blarney-state

Eire Ireland US USA politics diplomacy Trump

shared by Ed Webb on 03 Jun 19 - Cached
  • One area in which the Trump administration is normal, after all, is in its approach to Irish relations. Appointing a wealthy Irish American donor to be ambassador? Check. Mumbling vaguely about what, exactly, the two leaders talked about in their substantive discussions? Check. (“We’re having some good talks about trade and about military and about cyber,” Trump said of his 2018 bilateral meeting with Varadkar.) Tired reliance on tropes about Irish tribalism? Also check. (“You don’t want to fight with the Irish. It’s too tough”; “The Irish are confident, fierce, faithful, tough, and true.”) Those sorts of gestures, even for the Trump White House, show a lack of seriousness and preparation that one wouldn’t expect in most other relations with a wealthy democracy. But they’re all too typical of the way U.S. politicians have treated Ireland—always with an eye toward the sizable percentage of American voters who claim Irish ancestry.
  • U.S. politicians soon paid Catholic Irish Americans the compliment they pay any important group: They pandered to them
  • As Ireland became secular and wealthy, the successful conclusion of talks between governments and militants in Northern Ireland—brokered largely by the United States—meant that it also became far more peaceful
  • ...6 more annotations...
  • The Good Friday process also marked the last time that a U.S. administration would engage with Ireland as a modern country—as something more than a photo opportunity to impress clover-wearing, Riverdancing, green Guinness-drinking voters back home
  • failing to correct American misperceptions about Ireland helps Dublin tremendously – which gives the Irish good reason to keep up the tradition of putting on the poor mouth. If Americans treat Ireland as a poor country—and not as one that has a GDP per capita of $84,000, compared with the United States’ $62,500—that helps Irish diplomats lobby for special treatment. (Fair warning: The small size of Ireland’s population and its role in global finance make these comparisons difficult—but under just about any comparison, Ireland is fairly well ensconced in the high-income group and has the fourth-highest ranking on the United Nations Human Development Index, well above the United States.)
  • Ireland’s historic cultural transformation—ending the ban on abortion and greatly easing divorce—is in many ways symbolized by Varadkar himself. The youngest premier in the republic’s history, Varadkar is also half-Indian by descent and is partnered with another man, Matthew Barrett. Varadkar has apparently found it is either morally necessary or politically expedient—or both—to push back against traditionalist American politicians. In March of this year, Varadkar and Barrett breakfasted with Vice President Mike Pence and his family, where the Irish leader pointedly called out discrimination against sexual minorities. That’s a far different relationship than Kennedy or Obama ever had with an Irish leader. And Varadkar’s frostiness toward Pence mirrors the gap between Ireland’s current progressive image and the largely older, conservative, and white-identifying traditional Irish American constituency.
  • The threat of a hard Brexit and the reimposition of a hard border between the republic and the North jeopardize both political and economic stability.
  • In the absence of any major U.S. strategic interest in Ireland (which isn’t even a member of NATO), the greatest Irish leverage in Washington comes from fraying ties of family and identity. But that is far from the level of sustained influence and power that earlier generations wielded
  • U.S. investment and tourism are welcome, of course, but the focus of Irish diplomacy is squarely on Brussels
Ed Webb

This is how we won a historic victory for women's and LGBTIQ rights in international la... - 0 views

www.opendemocracy.net/...iq-rights-in-international-law

law international UN rights gender civil_society LGBT LGBTQ

shared by Ed Webb on 27 Jun 19 - Cached
  • after a worldwide campaign, and many long meetings and legal arguments, the new draft of the international crimes against humanity treaty has lost an outdated definition of gender that could be used to limit protections for women and LGBTIQ people in war.
  • Previous drafts of this treaty included a definition of gender borrowed from the Rome Statute (which governs the International Criminal Court (ICC)) that isn’t clear on who is protected. It says: “the term ‘gender’ refers to the two sexes, male and female, within the context of society” – overlooking trans and gender non-conforming identities and leaving it open to dangerous interpretation
  • Can human rights advocates working together make a difference? Just ask Ray Acheson, who led a civil society advocacy coalition that secured a legally-binding provision on gender-based violence in the Arms Trade Treaty. Ray recalls: “At the beginning, we were getting questions [from governments] like, ‘What does gender-based violence have to do with the arms trade? I don’t get the connection.’ By the end, we had a hundred states saying that it had to be in the treaty and it had to be legally binding”.
  • ...5 more annotations...
  • Under international criminal law, you can’t persecute people based on sexual orientation, gender identity or sex characteristics. But fundamentalists around the world are promulgating fear and justifying discrimination with claims that women and LGBTIQ rights advocates want to impose what they call “gender ideology” – a supposed attack on “natural families”, “feminine values” and the male-or-female binary as the will of God.
  • We spent the first six months organising meetings with experts to work out our legal arguments and reasoning. We held seven briefings to receive feedback from representatives of the International Law Commission, governments, and civil society from around the world. We also distributed a toolkit in four languages to support broad civil society input on the treaty’s gender language and other key provisions.
  • nearly 600 organisations and academics from more than 100 countries signed our open letter. At least nine other civil society submissions echoed our demands, including from 60 African human rights groups, led by the Southern Africa Litigation Center; 12 transgender rights groups; two intersex rights groups; and Human Rights Watch.
  • 19 governments affirmed that the rights of women and LGBTIQ people are protected under international criminal law and said this treaty must reflect that. No state spoke against gender rights in the treaty process. An astounding 24 UN special rapporteurs and other experts signed another submission echoing our legal reasoning.
  • the treaty goes to the UN General Assembly this autumn, where states will again debate its language and decide its fate
Ed Webb

The Coronavirus Pandemic Has Created a Hidden Global Human Trafficking Crisis - 0 views

foreignpolicy.com/...demic-human-trafficking-crisis

trafficking pandemics rights humanitarian NGOs crisis disaster

shared by Ed Webb on 03 Aug 20 - Cached
  • the Global Protection Cluster—the independent network of over 1,000 international nongovernmental organizations, headed by the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees and focused on supporting vulnerable groups in times of crisis
  • For anyone familiar with the mechanisms and methods that drive trafficking, it’s obvious why rates of exploitation spike during international crises. Whether it takes the form of recruiting, transporting, or harboring individuals through the use of force, coercion, or fraud (or all of the above), trafficking is predatory behavior, and people who are vulnerable—such as child brides or refugees—are invariably the ones most at risk. But in times of emergency—be it a flood, a drought, or a famine, a declaration of war or a recession—support structures shift and collapse. Communities that were once strong become suddenly weak as people grapple with losing their families, their homes, and their jobs. For traffickers around the world, each disaster signals a sudden availability of potential prey.
  • few in the humanitarian sector appear to have anticipated the domino effect of exploitation that top-level experts assert the coronavirus has already kicked off—and that trafficking specialists are now scrambling to prevent across the globe
  • ...9 more annotations...
  • “You have an increase in economic inequality, stigma, separation from family, the death of family members,” she said, “all of which are well established risk factors for trafficking, and all of which are also the results of both major and localized outbreaks.” The influx of UN peacekeepers (as seen during local and regional outbreaks such as yellow fever in Brazil and Lassa fever in Nigeria) poses an additional risk,
  • funding cuts may be exacerbating the very thing that anti-trafficking actors are working to confront: Earlier this month, the World Food Program was forced to slash its food distribution programs by up to 50 percent in trafficking hot spots including conflict-stricken Yemen and refugee camps in Uganda, positioning already socially and economically vulnerable communities on even shakier ground
  • Restrictions on movement during the coronavirus pandemic won’t stop trafficking. Millions of people are still in captivity, and it’s a common misconception that trafficking must involve crossing international borders.
  • numerous leading humanitarian organizations have no specialized anti-trafficking training available for their staff members. Others are still discussing and debating their strategies—months into the pandemic and at a time when international lockdowns mean an estimated 75 percent of humanitarian operations are temporarily on pause.
  • “Trafficking data is unreliable, and so is outbreak data,”
  • Within two and a half years of the first diagnosis of Ebola in 2014, more than 11,000 people in Guinea, Liberia, and Sierra Leone had died after contracting the virus, and over 16,000 children had lost one or both of their parents. Child sexual exploitation soared: the United Nations Development Program reported that teenage pregnancy increased by 65 percent during the outbreak in Sierra Leone, while research by Plan International, World Vision and Save The Children revealed 10 percent of young people knew of girls who were being forced into prostitution following the loss of a family member. The U.S. Department of State also acknowledged in its 2016 Trafficking In Persons Report that governmental anti-trafficking activities were on pause in Ebola-affected countries—leaving thousands of people at risk.
  • despite reports of trafficking during the pandemic, governments are redirecting resources away from counter-trafficking activities—placing added pressure on the humanitarian sector to step up
  • “It’s what happens when people don’t have livelihoods, don’t have social support, cannot afford health care, cannot afford child care. Even in normal circumstances we would say we need to address the factors that make people vulnerable to trafficking. This pandemic has made these things very obvious.”
  • It may not be possible to predict exactly when an outbreak such as the coronavirus will strike, but it’s not the first time a crisis has seen family structures collapse and left vulnerable groups at risk of exploitation. “It concerns me that this trafficking risk is not being integrated in any systematic way to humanitarian response plans right now,”
Ed Webb

Daily Dot | How Anonymous gamed Twitter to shed light on a hidden massacre - 1 views

www.dailydot.com/...rohingya-burma-myanmar-twitter

activism activists Burma Myanmar anonymous anonops

shared by Ed Webb on 25 Mar 13 - No Cached
  • OpRohingya on Sunday was extremely successful: not only did they trend No. 1 in the U.S., but they were also #3 in the U.K. and hit top 10 worldwide. For those who might dismiss this as slacktivism, we'd draw your attention to the fact that this morning a report on the Rohingya slaughters is on the front page of the Guardian, which has not previously covered the issue. Al Jazeera, the Qatari network, has covered the Rohingya issue a number of times, but it has yet to truly penetrate Western media, which is riding a wave of optimism since Aung San Suu Kyi was freed from her decades-long house arrest. Coverage on radical sites has been growing, but until the Twitter storm, there was virtually no coverage in what could be considered the Mainstream Media.  Tweets in the tweetstorm included the fax number to the CNN assignment desk (no joy there so far) as well as a live protest, livestreamed, in front of the CNN offices. The protesters were reportedly told by a CNN staffer that they "don't care" about the issue. The protest was, as all protests currently are, livestreamed. In a hearkening back to Tiananmen Square days, black faxes were sent to Burmese embassies, and numerous government sites including the office of the president were either DDoS'd or defaced. Instructions for the Twitterstorm, distributed on Pastebin, were unusually detailed, which certainly had an impact on their effectiveness. By laying out so many specific options, Anonymous maximized the chance that someone would feel connected enough to any specific one to tweet it, and by suggesting copy/paste tweets rather than retweets, Anonymous successfully gamed the Twitter system, gaining the top ranking. 
  • Ed Webb on 25 Mar 13
     
    Can online activists affect international politics through awareness-raising campaigns?
Ed Webb

Is Turkey's Foreign Policy Really Sunni? - Al-Monitor: the Pulse of the Middle East - 0 views

www.al-monitor.com/...rkey-sunni-foreign-policy.html

Turkey Syria Iran Iraq sectarianism diplomacy IR

shared by Ed Webb on 11 Jan 13 - No Cached
  • it would be wrong to believe that bigoted Sunnis in Ankara embarked on an anti-Shiite mission in the Middle East that has left Turkey at odds with central governments in Syria, Iraq, and ultimately in Iran. To the contrary, Ankara has gone to great lengths to avoid the region's sectarianism, but its efforts have not been very fruitful.
  • it would be also wrong to assume that the reality of sectarianism in the Middle East isn't influencing feelings in Ankara and in Turkish society more broadly. The Alawite-Sunni conflict in Syria is creating bitterness between Turkey's Alevis and Sunnis, although violence seems highly improbable. On the other hand, Turkey is indeed beginning to be perceived as a Sunni power in the region.
Ed Webb

Dalby geoeconomics of GWoT - 1 views

economics globalization GWOT

shared by Ed Webb on 15 Nov 16 - No Cached
  • a broad complemen-tarity of geopolitical categories that link imperial military actiondirectly with neo-liberal globalisation. Both rely on a dichotomousmapping of the world into civilised core and dangerous periphery,categories that reprise earlier imperial mappings of the world andreplicate the violent practices of empire
    • Ed Webb
      Ed Webb on 15 Nov 16
       
      As should be clear, Dalby takes a critical approach to geopolitics, drawing on the World Systems Analysis of Immanuel Wallerstein, who first developed the concept of core and periphery in modern IR.
  • Such metageographies understood as the “spatial structures throughwhich people order their knowledge of the world”,5 often function as theontological categories of political thought and both limit and shape thinkingaccordingly.6 Metageographies “graph the geo” as in literally “writing theearth” in ways that are apparently obvious but which are spatial specificationswith very considerable power.
  • discrepancies between olderformulations of empire with assumptions of territorial control and nationalambition abroad, and novel formulations of Empire, where sovereignty andeconomic power transcend the geopolitical constraints of sovereign nationstates
  • ...6 more annotations...
  • in these two exercises in practical geopolitical reasoning, liesthe logic of the global war on terror and the imperial aspirations of the Bushadministration to effectively extend the remit of Empire by forc
  • the events of 11 September have set in motiona rethinking of the military priorities in Washington. While it is too soon toknow how this reorganisation of the American military will play out, andwhether any of it will change the fortunes of the occupations in Iraq orAfghanistan, what is key to Barnett’s whole discussion is the reinterpretationof the geopolitical map, a redrawing of the spatial categories and the inven-tion of a whole new region of potential dangers where a third of the world’spopulation lives outside the reach of globalisation
  • the assertion that America is a nation at war and there-fore military actions are an integral part of foreign policy initiatives. The worldis divided into commands which cover the whole globe and increasingly pro-vide the infrastructural capacity to move combat forces rapidly from one partof the globe to another.
  • The bifurcation of the world into wild and tame, civilised and barbar-ian, integrated and non-integrated underlies all three of the geopoliticalvisions discussed here
  • his imperial vision, and in Kaplan’s writing, at least, it isunapologetically an imperial vision, with all the moral codes of missionaryzeal that come with patrolling the uncivilised landscapes of the periphery,comes with the premise of civilisation’s moral and technological superiority
  • strategies of regional economic integration are understood as an importantkey to providing economic prosperity that should in turn undercut theappeal of terrorist violence
Ed Webb

Monsters of Our Own Imaginings | Foreign Policy - 0 views

foreignpolicy.com/...russels-bombings-islamic-state

terror terrorism foreignpolicy IR analysis opinion GWOT walt Belgium ISIS Qaeda

shared by Ed Webb on 03 Apr 16 - No Cached
  • Terrorist attacks have occurred in Europe, America, Russia, China, Saudi Arabia, Turkey, and many other places, and no level of surveillance, police presence, border controls, drone strikes, targeted killings, or enhanced interrogation is going to prevent every one of them. Even if we could provide absolutely air-tight protection around one type of target, others targets would remain exposed
  • the belief that we could eliminate the danger entirely is no more realistic than thinking better health care will grant you eternal life. For this reason, condemning politicians for failing to prevent every single attack is counterproductive — and possibly dangerous — because it encourages leaders to go overboard in the pursuit of perfect security and to waste time and money that could be better spent on other things. Even worse, the fear of being blamed for “not doing enough” will lead some leaders to take steps that make the problem worse — like bombing distant countries — merely to look and sound tough and resolute.
  • there is no magic key to stopping terrorism because the motivations for it are so varied. Sometimes it stems from anger and opposition to foreign occupation or perceived foreign interference — as with the Tamil Tigers, Irish Republican Army, al Qaeda, Hezbollah, or Hamas. In other cases, it arises from opposition to a corrupt and despised ruling elite. Or it could be both: Osama bin Laden was equally angry at “crusader” nations for interfering in the Muslim world and at the Arab governments he believed were in cahoots with them. In the West, homegrown terrorists such as Anders Breivik or Timothy McVeigh are driven to mass murder by misguided anger at political systems they (falsely) believe are betraying their nation’s core values. Sometimes terrorism arises from perverted religious beliefs; at other times the motivating ideology is wholly secular. Because so many different grievances can lead individuals or groups to employ terrorist methods, there is no single policy response that could make the problem disappear forever.
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  • Compared with other risks to human life and well-being, contemporary international terrorism remains a minor problem
  • The Islamic State killed 31 people in Brussels on Tuesday, but more than half a billion people in Europe were just fine on that day. So when the British government raised the “threat level” and told its citizens to avoid “all but essential travel” to Belgium following Tuesday’s attacks, it is demonstrating a decidedly non-Churchillian panic. Needless to say, that is precisely what groups like the Islamic State want to provoke.
  • the same toxic blend of media and politics that brought us Donald Trump’s candidacy makes it nearly impossible to have a rational assessment of terrorism
  • Newspapers, radio, cable news channels, and assorted websites all live for events like this, and they know that hyping the danger will keep people reading, listening, and watching. The Islamic State and its partners really couldn’t ask for a better ally, because overheated media coverage makes weak groups seem more powerful than they really are and helps convince the public they are at greater risk than is in fact the case. As long as media coverage continues to provide the Islamic State et al. with such free and effective publicity, why should these groups ever abandon such tactics?
  • The Islamic State wouldn’t have to use terrorism if it were strong enough to advance its cause through normal means or if its message were attractive enough to command the loyalty of more than a miniscule fraction of the world’s population (or the world’s Muslims, for that matter). Because it lacks abundant resources and its message is toxic to most people, the Islamic State has to rely on suicide attacks, beheadings, and violent videos to try to scare us into doing something stupid. The Islamic State cannot conquer Europe and impose its weird version of Islam on the more than 500 million people who live there; the most it can hope for is to get European countries to do self-destructive things to themselves in response. Similarly, neither al Qaeda, the Islamic State, nor other extremists could destroy the U.S. economy, undermine the U.S. military, or weaken American resolve directly; but they did achieve some of their goals when they provoked us into invading Iraq and when they convinced two presidents to pour hundreds of billions of dollars into the bottomless pit in Afghanistan.
  • Terrorism is not really the problem; the problem is how we respond to it
  • At the moment, the challenge of contemporary terrorism seems to be bringing out not the best in the West — but the worst. Instead of resolution and grit, we get bluster and hyperbole. Instead of measured threat assessments, patient and careful strategizing, and a realistic sense of what can and cannot be achieved, we get symbolic gestures, the abandonment of our own principles, and political posturing.
  • how would a grown-up like Marshall or Dwight D. Eisenhower respond to this danger? No doubt they’d see it as a serious problem, but anyone who had witnessed the carnage of a world war would not be cowed by intermittent acts of extremist violence, no matter how shocking they are to our sensibilities. They’d use the bully pulpit to shame the fearmongers on Fox and CNN, and they’d never miss an opportunity to remind us that the danger is not, in fact, that great and that we should not, and cannot, live our lives in fear of every shadow and in thrall to monsters of our own imaginings. They would encourage us to live our daily lives as we always have, confident that our societies possess a strength and resilience that will easily outlast the weak and timorous groups that are trying to disrupt us. And then, this summer, they’d take a European vacation.
Ed Webb

BBC News - Wars, public outrage and policy options in Syria - 2 views

www.bbc.co.uk/...blogs-echochambers-26347519

US USA foreignpolicy opinion publicopinion diplomacy policy analysis media Syria

shared by Ed Webb on 26 Feb 14 - No Cached
  • We've heard these pleas before. The BBC reports regularly from inside Syria, as do several American papers, and although coverage of the Syrian war is not wall-to-wall on American networks, it gets regular, consistent attention. So where is the public outrage about a war so chaotic and dangerous that even the UN has stopped keeping track of the death toll? Have we all become numb to the pain of others?
  • The world inevitably tires of complex, long conflicts where there are no clear answers about how to end the violence. This cartoon in the New Yorker is a harsh but perhaps accurate look at how the collective conscience deals with the relentless stream of bad news from Syria.
  • Spare a thought for the North Koreans, too. A UN report out last week, too horrific even to read, compares the abuses committee by the government to Nazi Germany. I have yet to see much outrage or calls for action
  • ...2 more annotations...
  • When they discuss US policy options for Syria, administration officials repeatedly point to the fact that Americans have bigger concerns closer to home and that President Barack Obama is very mindful that the public has no appetite for interventions abroad, no matter how limited
  • The question is whether it would become more tenable for the president to take action if the public demanded it. Possibly, but that's not how public opinion works. People demonstrate to end wars and bring the troops home, like with Vietnam. They protest against invasions, like Iraq in 2003, when their country's troops are about to be shipped overseas. Or they support military action when their own country has come under attack. But people rarely rise up to demand action because of a sense of collective justice.
Ed Webb

Middle East peace effort's missing key: female negotiators. - Yahoo! News - 0 views

news.yahoo.com/...ybrown

israeliarab gender women feminism palestine israel

shared by Ed Webb on 16 Sep 09 - Cached
  • These women work toward a sustainable peace as committee members, as demonstrators, and as mothers raising and educating their children despite occupation. But their representation in formal negotiations is inadequate. Because Israeli and Palestinian women are disproportionately affected by occupation and the threat of violence, their input into the national security debate – and international negotiations for peace – is essential.
  • The suffering that women face under increased militarization should translate into a large presence in the security sector. But the Haifa Feminist Center reports that men are overwhelmingly the central decisionmakers in matters of formal conflict resolution, while female politicians largely address socioeconomic issues within the "private" sphere.
  • For years, women's organizations in Israel and Palestine have worked to increase female participation in the peace process. Groups like the Haifa Feminist Center have organized conferences and lobbied legislators, while the Palestinian section of the Women's International League for Peace and Freedom has met with Palestinian leadership about increasing the number of high-level posts held by women. Such grass-roots efforts should be supported and recognized by US diplomats and the Obama administration, both politically and financially. One simple step for major players to take could be to facilitate increased information-sharing between these organizations, the Israeli government, the Palestinian Authority, and members of the Quartet. That alone could bring a spotlight to this issue.
  • Ed Webb on 16 Sep 09
     
    Does a feminist approach to policy in this area add significantly to the debate? How would a Realist respond to this argument?
Ed Webb

No-fly zone: Clouding words of war | empirestrikesblack - 0 views

empirestrikesblack.com/...fly-zone-clouding-words-of-war

war analysis opinion Libya intervention liberalism empire

shared by Ed Webb on 13 Jun 11 - No Cached
  • Liberal war is so useful, particularly to ‘good Europeans’, because it denies it is war. It is a no-fly zone protecting human rights! While quite obviously joining the Libyan rebels in their war on the regime, coalition commanders are forced to pretend otherwise. They regularly and politely inform Gaddafi’s forces where they need to regroup to avoid being destroyed in the name of universal values. In essence, and without ever saying so, the message to Gaddafi is that he must stop defending himself from those who would overthrow him. Why, we might ask, is it not possible to speak more plainly, at least to ourselves? Why must war be confronted with liberal euphemisms? At the core of liberal war is a contradiction between big rhetoric – humanity, innocence, evil – and limited liability, signalled by ‘no ground troops’ and the pathetic legions of UN peacekeepers.
  • Historical memory is a casualty so instantaneous no one notices. The US fought its first war in what is now Libya, against the Barbary pirates, also justified by humanitarian concerns undergirded with commercial interest.
  • tales of well-intentioned Westerners and violent natives
  • ...2 more annotations...
  • He may be a character from history’s funhouse, sent to remind us that contingency’s reign is great, but his origins are to be found in the conjoined histories of the West and the rest. More recently, Gaddafi’s border police and coast guard, trained and assisted by the EU, have been greatly valued by the ‘good Europeans’ for helping keep out the Africans. Liberal war’s last service is to locate the source of violence in the natives, on the backward peoples of the non-European world, not on the Westerners who exploit, invade, occupy and bomb. If we go by official rhetoric, the problem in Iraq and Afghanistan apparently has to do with religious and ethnic prejudice among the peoples there, who irrationally keep killing one another as well as Western soldiers kindly sent to modernise them. The great cost of liberal war is clarity.
  • War is not a morality tale, but a violent mutual embrace. Serious thinking begins with acceptance that we in the West are now combatants, and ethical responsibility requires seeing beyond the seductions of liberalism.
Ed Webb

Does Climate Drive Warfare? A New Study Suggests There's No Question - 0 views

www.huffingtonpost.com/...conflict-warfare_n_935406.html

climate conflict environment war

shared by Ed Webb on 25 Aug 11 - No Cached
  • numerous books and studies have sought to explore the complex connections between the environment and social friction. But the need to do so has gained increased currency -- and urgency -- not least because many climate scientists believe that the cyclical climate patterns driving weather in many of the world's less developed regions will become more frequent and more intense as average global temperatures rise. That notion helped inspire a new study conducted by a team of researchers at Columbia University's Earth Institute. Indeed, what Parenti hypothesized anecdotally through Loruman's story and profiles of myriad other conflicts brewing across the globe, the researchers attempt to quantify statistically -- perhaps for the first time. The analysis, to be published Wednesday in the journal Nature, reveals a striking connection between global climate and civil conflict -- though the underlying mechanism driving that connection remains something of a mystery.
  • effected
    • Ed Webb
      Ed Webb on 25 Aug 11
       
      'affected'
  • not everyone is convinced. Halvard Buhaug, a senior researcher at the Center for the Study of Civil War in Norway said he was intrigued by the study's findings, but he said far more research was needed. "All of us agree that climate is not going to be the sole driver of conflicts, and at best, it may contribute to some or even many," Buhaug said in an interview. "But I remain skeptical about the causal effect of climate on many conflicts." He pointed in particular to the near instantaneous impact of El Niño on conflicts suggested in the new research. Disruptions in trade or agricultural under-performance -- and associated changes in state income -- Buhaug said, would likely take far longer to manifest than the findings suggest. He also said he was puzzled by the fact that the authors appeared to carefully, and correctly, eliminate the possibility that local changes in temperature and rainfall could fully account for any upticks in violence. "What could it be that could have such an immediate effect but does not work through local changes in climate?" Buhaug wondered.
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