Rethinking Security

The IR Film Festival

Over at Duck of Minerva, Rodger Payne responds to Stephen Walt's list of favorite international relations films with his own picks. Dan Drezner offers his own set of IR movies at Foreign Policy. I can understand the impulse. International relations theory, especially the statistically addled variant now dominant in many political science and international relations departments, is so abstract that it's begging for a humanizing device--like say, relating neorealist balance of power theory to Independence Day.

Of course, the danger is that certain cinematic visualizations can become so powerful that they end up providing a misleading view of policy dilemmas. Hollywood's role in the debate over torture and the "ticking time bomb" scenario is a case in point. Likewise, as I pointed out in my "Legacy Futures" commentary, our favorite science fiction visualizations of future conflict may colonize our imaginations and crowd out other alternative futures.

Exploring Design

David Axe has a nice little blog entry on Army attempts to use Operational Design to deal with the chaos of the modern day battlefield, tying it in to the "vortex of violence" he reported on last October. Design, originating from a framework developed by IDF BG (ret) Shimon Naveh, uses a critical method devised from systems theory, philosophy, and architecture to handle "ill-structured" problems. Design has proven hugely popular in the Army, finding its way into both FM 3-24 Counterinsurgency and FM 3-0 Operations as well as countless Military Review articles.

To some degree, the dualism that Design sets up between "engineering" and "design" thinking is a straw man, much like the binary that Basil Liddell Hart sets up between the "indirect approach" and head-on confrontation. Design's novelty is also somewhat suspect. Its utility, however, should be determined by whether it aids in defense planning--something independent of its theoretical construction. I've only seen one article critical of the framework so far, written by a Naval War College professor.

The Twitter "Infodemic"

I've got a new piece at ThreatsWatch on the social media "infodemic" and the swine flu.

A Global Social Netwar

I've been having a valuable dialogue on Mexican politics and the dynamics of netwar with former RAND researcher David Ronfeldt, co-author of "The Advent of Netwar","The Prospects for Cyberocracy", and many other influential works on conflict and state-building in the information age. Ronfeldt has a new post on my post about the aftermath of the Zapatista social netwar that evaluates the conflict's larger implications:

"In a sense, the significance of the Zapatista social netwar is barely about the Zapatista indigenas in Chiapas. ...This netwar was able to occur in 1994 because so many activist NGOs were already networked and mobilized outside of Mexico, ready for a new target, after having tried (quite unsuccessfully) to protest U.S. policy in Central America and/or halt passage of NAFTA. Then, years later, as we discuss in the Appendix, many Mexican and foreign NGOs turned away from the Zapatista struggle to focus (quite successfully) on other high-impact efforts: e.g., in 1999, the protest movement known as the 'Battle of Seattle'; and in 2000, the presidential campaign and election in Mexico that displaced the ruling PRI party from power. In sum, the Zapatista social netwar was about much more than the Zapatistas."

This goes well with Marine Corps Gen. Charles Krulak's comments about the information era's compression and nonlinear intermingling of tactical, operational, and strategic levels in "Three Block Wars." One other netwar question comes to mind though: what happened to the anti-globalization movement?

From the mid 1990s to the dawn of the Iraq war they were a major non-state movement in international politics that substantially shifted the normative ground in discussions of trade (for better or worse). Have they collapsed from lack of momentum or simply been subsumed into larger movements such as the global antiwar movement Or is Robert D. Kaplan correct when he argues that the backlash against globalization has been transmuted into a backlash against capitalism itself?

"It’s tempting to dismiss [the December 2008 Greek riots] as a purely Greek affair that carries little significance to the outside world. But the global economic crisis will take different forms in different places in the way that it ignites political unrest. Yes, youth alienation in Greece is influenced by a particular local history that I’ve very briefly outlined here. But it is also influenced by sweeping international trends of uneven development, in which the uncontrolled surges and declines of capitalism have left haves and bitter have-nots, who, in Europe, often tend to be young people. And these young people now have the ability to instantaneously organize themselves through text messages and other new media, without waiting passively to be informed by traditional newspapers and television. Technology has empowered the crowd—or the mob if you will. Pay close attention to Greece; at a time of world-wide economic upheaval, it might eerily presage disturbances elsewhere in 2009."

Swine Flu and Social Media

Foreign Policy 's techblogger Evgeny Morozov thinks that the swine flu outbreak is exposing Twitter's Achilles heel: it's herd mentality and lack of context:

Who knew that swine flu could also infect Twitter? Yet this is what appears to have happened in the last 24 hours, with thousands of Twitter users turning to their favorite service to query each other about this nascent and potentially lethal threat as well as to share news and latest developments from Mexico, Texas, Kansas and New York (you can check most recent Twitter updates on the subject by searching for “swine flu” and “#swineflu”). And despite all the recent Twitter-enthusiasm about this platform's unique power to alert millions of people in decentralized and previously unavailable ways, there are quite a few reasons to be concerned about Twitter's role in facilitating an unnecessary global panic about swine flu.

Morozov argues that Twitter, far from being a "global brain" that co-produces better understanding, is merely providing people with a platform to voice their ill-informed fears about swine flu. There's also a social dimension to the Twitter swing flu scare that goes beyond the "echo chamber" effect:

"Unlike basic internet search – which has been already been nicely used by Google to track emerging flu epidemics – Twitter seems to have introduced too much noise into the process: as opposed to search requests which are generally motivated only by a desire to learn more about a given subject, too many Twitter conversations about swine flu seem to be motivated by desires to fit in, do what one's friends do (i.e. tweet about it) or simply gain more popularity.

In situations like this, there is some pathological about people wanting to post yet another status update containing the coveted most-searched words – only for the sake of gaining more people to follow them. And yet the bottom line is that tracking the frequency of Twitter mentions of swine flu as a means of predicting anything thus becomes useless (however, there are plenty of other non-Twitter ways to track the epidemic and Mashable does a good job of summing them all up)."

What's very ironic about Morozov's sadly accurate critique is that Twitter's rise to fame as a communication medium was largely due to its disaster reporting function during the Mumbai attacks. Perhaps the lesson of the swine flu outbreak is that Twitter excels at geographically focused and instrumental events (such as terrorist attacks) but struggles when faced with distributed disasters like public health crises.

Medical Dimensions of Security

According to CNN: the latest count in Mexico's swine flu outbreak is 81 dead:

No kissing to say hello. No large crowds. No close contact. That's the advice of the Mexican government as more and more people die of swine flu, which has turned into a 'public health emergency of international concern,' according to the World Health Organization. The WHO advised all countries to be on the lookout for 'unusual' outbreaks of flu, following an emergency meeting Saturday as the seriousness of the outbreak became clear. By Sunday, 81 deaths had been deemed "likely linked" to a deadly new strain of the virus by health authorities in Mexico. Viral testing has confirmed 20 cases, said Dr. Jose A. Cordova Villalobos, Mexico's health secretary.

Going beyond the specific case of swine flu here, the prospect of global pandemics brings up larger theoretical considerations for security policymakers. While I may have specific theoretical and policy disagreements with the Human Security school, I do think that their holistic conceptualization of security is admirable. The case of this Mexican pandemic demonstrates the need to consider things like pandemics from a security as well as a public standpoint.

The crux of the problem is how precisely to integrate non-human (but obviously, in many ways, human-influenced) security threats into a larger security framework. Or is it better, conceptually, to separate security and public health policy frameworks in a conceptual sense and only integrate them on policy and operational levels?

The Gates Revolution and Mexico's Criminal Insurgency

Two new articles published this week. I have a piece at Huffington Post on SecDef Gates' fusing of theory and practice and a re-examination of Mexico's criminal insurgency. with Lt. John P. Sullivan at Small Wars Journal-a topic that we originally examined in August 2008.

Torture, Boyd, and Strategy

John Robb strikes exactly in the right note in a post on the strategic recklessness of torture:

"In short, a primary objective of US grand strategy should be to increase its connectivity within the moral sphere. The embrace of torture does exactly the opposite. It self-inflicts moral isolation on the US by violating codes of conduct we profess to uphold.

This moral isolation creates an internal dialogue plagued by mistrust, menace, and uncertainty. As a result, non-cooperative centers of gravity organically develop (internal opposition movements) and every decision becomes more difficult to accomplish. Over a long conflict, like the one we are engaged in, anything that leads to slower and less effective decision making this early in the process is nothing short of a disaster."

We hear all the time about the need to win the "information war," but the battle of perception cannot be separated from the normative battle to define the structures, beliefs, and codes of conduct that guide theory and practice in the international arena. To pretend that we can engage in public diplomacy or information operations while straying from norms that we helped create is the height of folly.

The issue goes beyond the canard that Obama supposedly favors "civil rights for terrorists." Whether or not to torture is ultimately a choice about what America is and the role we want to play in the world. Some will undoubtedly counter that norms aren't important and produce some Machiavelli's famous saying that it is better to be "feared than loved"--ignoring, of course, Machiavelli's qualification that a prince should avoid being "hated and despised."

Social Netwar, Fifteen Years On

In 1994, a hitherto unheard-of rebel group led by a pipe-smoking press-hound forever changed Mexico's political system and pointed the way to a new kind of activism and insurgency. The Zapatistas, rising on behalf of Chiapas peasants, transformed their local insurgency into a globalized "netwar" targeted at the credibility and will of the Mexican government. In the process, the Zapatista leader Subcommandante Marcos became a global celebrity of the nascent anti-globalization movement and coerced the Mexican government into agreeing to expansive land reform.

The Harvard International Review (HIR) takes a look at the results of the Zapatista netwar fifteen years on and find little long-term change in the everyday lives of Chiapas peasants:  

"The peasants of Chiapas today face bleak economic conditions. State GDP has largely been stagnant since the 1990s, and the poor states of Mexico’s South have, as a result, fallen further behind the rest of the country. The solution for most young, male peasants, is increasingly migration to the United States. Chiapas has moved from the bottom third to the top third of states receiving international remittances during this period.. ...The land reforms of the mid-1990s have not brought economic self-sufficiency, because the redistributed land is of low quality, and has been sub-divided into plots that are simply too small to yield enough for survival. All of this has happened at a time when the Mexican state has offered little in the way of subsidies to small farmers, and has also failed to offer an alternative development path that would move Chiapas up the value chain.

...In spite of changes in political institutions, such as democratic elections, or decentralization, political practice at the state level in Mexico continues to be dominated by patron-client relationships and high discretion on the part of politicians. Thus, even though the PRI has been humbled, and new resources have been made available to Chiapas, and even though indigenous peasants have entered politics, dysfunctional institutions and corruption persist. The result is a failure to ameliorate basic inequalities. These findings are consistent across states as different as Oaxaca, Mexico and Chiapas."

Much of this, of course, is tied to the larger problem of Mexico's political system. But it does demonstrate the difficulty of netwar groups to sustain campaigns after the "culminating point" has been reached. The report notes that the Zapatista response once they gained power has mainly focused on building parallel state institutions that are not economically viable. At the same time, the growing removal of the Zapatistas from Mexico society in these parallel zones reduces their influence and pressure over larger Mexican politics. The Zapatista social netwar succeeded is because they created a "netwar" that nationalized and globalized their campaign, spreading their influence over all of the Mexican state. Once they disconnected themselves from the campaign they created, HIR points out that they "missed an opportunity to build a broad movement to reform the state."

Continuity in Russian Counterterrorism

Interesting article from Perspectives on Terrorism looking at the continuity of Russian counterterrorism policy since the days of the Tsar:

"Since the first terrorist campaign set up by the Russian revolutionaries in the late 19th century, terrorism in Russia has been regarded as an assault against the state personified by the Tsar, the communist party, or the central government and leadership of the modern state, respectively. In the epoch of Tsars, terrorism was coterminous with the revolutionary movement against absolutism.[4] During the early years of the Bolshevik rule, it was tantamount to counter-revolutionary anti-Communist actions. Two decades later, terrorism was viewed as subversive activities of foreign intelligence services, or acts of resistance to the Soviet government orchestrated by secret services from Western states. Neither the Soviet Union nor contemporary Russia has clearly defined terrorism or distinguished it from other crimes of a violent or political nature.[5] This ill-defined legal construct allowed the government full discretion to bring forth charges of alleged terrorist crimes. The vague definitions created uncertainty in the application of law, which allowed for politically motivated enforcement of the criminal legislative provisions."

The problem with this kind of policy is that it politicizes counterterrorism policy and allows for the conjunction of counterterrorism operations with forms of social control. The current calm in Chechnya is largely due to the the skill of Chechen President Kadyrov in utilizing the classic Machiavellian tactics of divide and conquer. He co-oped some of his adversaries and ruthlessly eliminated the rest. This is not as much due to the excellence of Russian counterterrorism and counterinsurgency forces than the skillful application of indirect rule.

But although it has been largely pushed out of Chechyna, the larger insurgency is still at work in the surrounding regional republics. And there may be some indications that a certain amount of "dead-enders" are at work inside Chechnya proper. For all of the blood shed, the horrors of Beslan may very well be repeated.