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."
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