Neo-liberal Crisis Threatens Peru

Crisis threatens Peru, with presumed populist Humala taking a corporatist stand. Rhetoric is hardening on both sides, and no one appears able to define the struggle between the rural poor and international gold mining interests in a positive-sum manner.

Globalizing Paraguay

After decades of oppression, a reformist president was finally elected in Paraguay, only to be suddenly impeached last month. In the ensuing five weeks, Paraguay has rushed to open the country to the U.S. military and controversial U.S. corporations.

Leaders: Experimenting on Us?

When leaders appear to be promoting a short-sighted, evil, or counter-productive policy, are they in fact simply conducting an experiment, testing an hypothesis (perhaps with you as the test material) they wish to apply to a completely different issue?

Foreign Policy For the New American Administration

It would be naive, I suppose, to anticipate that the candidates for the U.S. presidency might put aside their immoral bluster about innocent populations they would "obliterate" to give some intelligent thought to the type of world the winner will inherit next January. So, perhaps we should do it for them. All with the foresight to estimate where current global political dynamics are carrying us are cordially invited to share their visions. The world can use your help.

One of the clearest trends I can see is the intensification of determination in official Washington to solve problems with military force. Closely allied with the use of force is the desire to ostracize and totally defeat those who disagree rather than trying to find areas of potential agreement think creatively about possible compromises. The May 8 editorial in Pakistan's Frontier Post quoted in my previous post neatly dismissed that approach to foreign policy, though its argument could have been even stronger if it had referred to the endless Colombian civil war, the endless Palestinian-Israeli conflict, or the coming tragedy in Lebanon.

Whoever enters the White House next January is going to be boxed in by a whole series of conflicts from which it will be extremely difficult to disengage. The failure of the candidates today to reject publicly and clearly this path of confrontation will only further limit their own freedom of action once elected...digging the ground out from under their own feet.

Election Debate: Where Are the Ideas?

An election in a democracy should be an opportunity for fresh ideas to rise to the top. So where are the ideas in the current U.S. presidential election? The list of dangerous and highly unstable situations in the world that are likely to make life miserable for the next U.S. president is long, and the level of instability is rising. Lebanon, Palestine, Iraq, Afghanistan, Iran, Pakistan, Somalia, and Colombia-Ecuador-Venezuela are all on a knife's edge. Mexico's drug cartel issue is not far behind.

From the Republican side, Ron Paul has been shunted aside, and McCain is grinning, "Full speed ahead!" One wonders exactly where he thinks he is going.

From the Democratic side, Kucinich and Robertson and Gravel have been shunted aside. Obama says "Change!" and says it grandly, but whenever he makes the mistake of becoming specific, he sounds just like every other mainstream leader who has gotten us into this trouble. Clinton can't make up her mind whether she (A) is still part of Bill Clinton's old liberal group that offered such hope to the nation for a brief moment so long ago or (B) another angry Republican suffering from an overdose of testosterone.

Neither Clinton nor Obama looks like Bush, and neither is likely to win by trying. On domestic issues, there are real differences, but the rest of the world is not going to disappear. How to climb out of the hole we have dug ourselves into needs to be addressed.

Nader is not going to win, unless of course the unthinkable happens and we all start thinking for ourselves, but at the moment a protest vote for Nader does indeed, as suggested elsewhere, sound like the way to go.

Iraq, Somalia, Pakistan, and...Mexico???

While most of us Americans who pay any attention to what is happening anywhere outside our own borders in the first place are focused on Islamic countries, Latin America is still here, as shown by this extremely disconcerting note from Adam Isaacson, one of the most reliable Latin American bloggers:

"...in Mexico, a top defense official made an absolutely stunning admission: more than 100,000 soldiers have deserted Mexico’s army in the last seven years - and
many of them are now in the service of narcotraffickers. Yet Mexico’s police are
at least as troubled: in three important border towns this week, the Mexican
Army forced municipal police to cede control, citing widespread allegations that local law-enforcement was deeply infiltrated by drug cartels. Meanwhile Congress is still considering a Bush administration proposal to give hundreds of millions of dollars in aid to Mexico’s security forces."

According to a Mexican official quoted in the Mexican press,

Más de 100 mil militares han desertado del Ejército mexicano en los
últimos siete años, algunos de los cuales han engrosado las filas de los grupos
criminales, en particular del narcotráfico, afirmó hoy el subsecretario de la
Defensa Nacional, Tomás Ángeles Dahuajare.

One might say that the important point is what is meant by the word "algunos" (some), which is just as vague in Spanish as in English, but the existence of such a career path at all is really the troubling part. Indeed, the official noted that the trend is growing. This hints at an underlying social dynamic that might theoretically be dangerously nonlinear.

Anyone have anything to add on this issue?

An invitation:

From my vantage point as an observer of politics in the Islamic world, this Mexican story sounds way too familiar. If it were Afghanistan or Pakistan, the knee-jerk American reaction would be to blame it on al Qua'ida or Sunnis or the Islamic faith; if it were Iraq, the knee-jerk reaction would be to blame it on Iran. To get away from such simplistic mental models and force ourselves to examine real social dynamics, I would propose an analysis of social collapse that compares Latin American cases with cases in the Islamic world.

I know, this crosses institutional boundaries. How would we ever get Latin American and Islamic specialists in the same room??? All I can say is, "This is important, folks. South Waziristan on the Texas border is not something we really need to live through."

Anyone interested in organizing a little workshop?

Complexity and Dynamics of Global Violence

How to comprehend the functioning and evolution of human civilization as a complex system will be one of the great scientific challenges of the 21st century. A key sub-question concerns the interplay between individual human behavior and the various components of the international political system. Progress toward answering this question promises invaluable payoffs in terms of wars avoided and human aspirations satisfied.

To sketch out the nature of the problem, one can simplify to a three-lens view of international relations:

· One lens shows the familiar broad overview of events: sequence is fairly clear but causality far less so, which leaves us vulnerable to surprise.

· A more powerful lens reveals the causal dynamics. The concepts for interpreting what we see at this magnification are well developed and can even in some fields be represented by equations (because it is assumed that all actors in a given class behave the same), but culture lags behind: we are unfortunately not accustomed to thinking very clearly about the nature of feedback loops and delays in the context of international relations. We have a valuable set of interpretive tools for minimizing surprise in global affairs and for avoiding foreign policy failures that we have simply not bothered to use.

· The third lens is still being polished; though the view through it remains murky, we need to start using it because it shows a far more accurate image of reality. This is the lens that reveals not only the actions and dynamics of a system but also the various structural components. If these components are at multiple levels (individual, group) and all are interdependent, the result is complexity. The theory of complexity that is taking shape today is designed to illuminate systems composed of multiple interdependent parts whose connections at one level (e.g., individual) give rise to seemingly counterintuitive behavior at other levels (e.g., group, national, regional, or system-wide).

The first lens shows us speeches, invasions, elections. The second lens shows the forces causing those events, which it may be reasonable to classify into political, economic, demographic, cultural, and technical. The third lens presumably should show how new behavior emerges at one level from highly complicated interactions at another. More precisely, behavioral dynamics will occur at multiple levels within each of the five sectors mentioned above and others will occur among those sectors.

Exactly how to apply these ideas to international relations is a challenge that remains to be solved. Among the specific problems that seem appropriate subjects for viewing from the complexity perspective are:

· How Palestinian infighting has emerged to undercut the Palestinian people’s long struggle for independence from Israeli colonization;

· How a peasant rebellion for justice against exploitative big landowners in Colombia evolved over half a century into a battle between guerrillas and paramilitaries, with both selling narcotics and committing atrocities against the innocent;

· How violence-addicted extremists gained ascendancy on all sides so quickly after the brief glow of post-Cold War hope, leading to the casting aside of fundamental rules for governing the international political system;

· How the Iraqi insurgency evolved into Sunni-Shi’ite in-fighting at the expense of efforts either to resist the U.S. occupation or rebuild Iraq, with the emergence of new types of behavior (e.g., blowing up holy sites).

Complexity theory sensitizes us to questions that might otherwise be overlooked.

· The interdependence of the parts of a complex system (think of the difference between giving drugs to a sick person and repairing a car) warns one to expect “side” effects. Thus, if a problem in ties between two ethnic groups appears, from the complexity perspective, one would automatically ask how that would ripple through the whole system, with implications for system stability.
· The expectation that the way the parts of a complex system interact will be affected by the context in which the system exists focus attention on how external pressures modify the behavior of actors within the system.
· The assumption of complexity theory that variation exists among individuals cautions one to pay strict attention to details. (Note that this assumption directly contradicts the assumption of smoothness that is made when viewing dynamics [the second lens, above].)

· The concept of “emergence” sensitizes us to anticipate rather than be surprised by new forms of behavior that violate cultural norms (the rise of narco-paramilitaries, revenge destruction of holy sites, intifadas, ethnic cleansing, massacres of civilians, bombing of cities, threats of nuclear war against non-nuclear states).

The generic complexity theory we have today sensitizes us to ask certain key questions and prepares us to anticipate surprise. There is as yet little application of that generic theory to the specifics of human civilization, much less to the field of global politics, so the theory does not—yet—tell us what type of behavioral modifications we should anticipate. It remains to be seen whether or not we can construct a “science of human socio-political complexity.” What is the next step in the direction of that vision? The development of a framework to allow us to think more conceptually about the proper ways to use each of the three above-described powers of magnification--events, dynamics, and interdependence—would be a good place to start.

The Insurgency Closer to Home

Iraq and Afghanistan are not the only countries with insurgencies complicated by U.S. involvement. Closer to home is Colombia, a country Congress is about to focus on, at least for a moment. A little theory may help put this half-century-long civil war in perspective...

We may all agree that instability read as chaos, disease, and war is bad, while stability read as peace, progress, economic development is good. Nevertheless, there is a world of difference between saying:

A.) that stability requires that the current leaders, current customs, and current inequities remain in place and

B.) that stability permits all desired changes at whatever desired speed in leadership, custom, law, power relationships as long as those changes are achieved peacefully and with tolerance.

Recognition that stability need not mean stasis opens the door to fundamentally new policies. Dictatorships no longer need to be propped up by foreign powers interested in establishing commercial or military ties because one’s imagination is opened to the possibility of a new system that would both address the desires of the population for, say, social justice or political participation and address the foreign power’s interests:

• An oppressed population helped to gain social justice by a foreign power might well find it had no problem selling oil to that power;
• A foreign power that chose to support a rise in the wages of banana pickers against the wishes of international corporations might find the new country a much more stable source of bananas.

Colombia is a case in point. Half a decade ago, all sides in the endless Colombian civil violence, which in its current formulation has continued for four decades but really began at the end of the century – the 19th century, agreed to join together to negotiate a solution. After nearly four years of trying, the negotiations failed.

Among the many reasons for the failure of those negotiations and the continuation of the civil war up to today, with no end in sight, was a seeming closedmindedness about the definition of stability. There does not seem to have been any general recognition among the key participants in the negotiations of the wide range of possible changes in how economic resources and political power are apportioned in Colombia that could have been encompassed within the meaning of a stable, negotiated settlement of the Colombian civil war. Many are now dying in Colombia, in part as a result of how the key actors define the word "stability."

Regime Behavior and Instability

I have commented before on the fundamental importance of how one defines “stability” in international relations. Given the many current world problems directly tied to violent instability and violent efforts to eliminate it (for example), a brief focus on the often-overlooked ways in which instability may be provoked seems worthwhile.

The diagram pictures some causal relationships between state policy and tension in the populace, based on the following hypothesis:

Stability is a function of tension.

The hypothesis implies the intuitive: if social tension rises, so will instability. Other causes are of course possible, but the underlying psychological state of the populace is one that is all too often overlooked. The diagram posits four causal loops, each of which may increases tension:

1) Foreign aid may induce the repression of minority rights (by giving the regime the confidence to turn its back on the minorities);

2) Civil rights may be repressed;

3) Arms imported by the regime may be used against the people.

A couple points are worth making about this simple diagram. First, reality is of course more complex. There may be loops that mitigate violence, connections directly from one loop to another, etc. But this diagram is already complicated enough – with three separate ways that tension might be raised, which leads to the second point. One might well implement a policy that successfully mitigated one of these causal pathways and not even notice an impact on social tension because the other loops were still provoking so much of a rise in tension and resulting instability. For success, policies will need to be developed that address each causal loop that is operating in the given situation.

Does anyone see a connection between these ideas and any of the world’s current violence?

Statesmen Do Not Play Chess

Chess is a grand image for self-important world actors: their armies march across the stage, rooks and bishops plot devious pincer movements, queens sweep through to deliver the coup de grace. But international competition for influence over the Mideast is no game. The dead in the World Trade Center and Jenin and Beirut and Fallujah attest to that.

If one chooses to use game imagery, then chess should certainly not be the game in mind. The modern, interconnected, interdependent, nuclear world needs a much more sophisticaly metaphor than the Dark Ages "exterminate thine enemy" nonsense of chess. The game of politics, played skillfully, rests on a vision of compromise, but compromise in a very special sense.

Power is the issue, but power has attributes little appreciated by your average power-hungry but politically inept and testosterone-blinded political actor. Power is infinitely maleable. It can of course run out; it can be monopolized…but it need not be. Power can be transformed. Therefore, political compromise need not be a mindless and frustrating redivision of the same old pie. Handled skillfully—and herein lies the distinction between ‘politician’ and ‘statesman’, political compromise is the art of transformation: not only can the pie get bigger but multiple pies can be baked.

If a resource-rich but economically less developed country sold some of its resources to an industrial country and took the profits for honest national purposes, say, the creation of a modern educational system and an egalitarian economy, while the industrial country in turn built up its own economy, the pie would be bigger. Each country would end up with more "power"—more capability to do things.

If our two utterly mythical countries had started out in a military competition (e.g., the industrial country being intent on colonizing the other and stealing its resources or the less modernized country intent on overtaking the industrial country as the preeminent power in its own region), then the above scenario with its peaceful, cooperative and mutually-beneficial outcome would have effectively baked new pies. Rather than one military power pie, where the bigger Side A's piece, the smaller Side B's piece, the result would be additional pies.

An economic pie would be shared in some manner, no doubt not really 50-50, but that pie would be growing, with benefits on both sides. An intellectual pie might grow as well, with a new population receiving a modern education, cultural exchanges, and a general increase in knowledge occurring.

These are simple examples to make the point that skillful management of international affairs can replace the politician’s dangerous, zero-sum approach to international affairs with a safer, positive-sum approach in which compromise is the process of transformation of the competition. With multiple, growing pies, the two sides no longer need to compete to take each other’s share. One side may retain most of the military power, while the other gains, say, economically or in terms of status.

The brilliance of politics lies in the quest for transformation. Chessmen don’t transform: they conquer or die. The art of politics is to redefine an insoluable issue into an issue that is soluable. The possibilities are limited only by the human mind:

• Once there were two superpowers who ruled the world, both armed to the teeth with nuclear weapons aimed at each other and sufficient to destroy the opponent, themselves, and all the rest of mankind several times over. Sensing that something was amiss, they managed to transform the competition just enough to avoid open war…engaging, for example, in an intense competition over Gold Medals.
• Could one imagine Tel Aviv replacing its generation-long history of invading Lebanon and destroying the livelihoods of Lebanon's poor with an economic assistance program designed to enable them to become part of Lebanon's political system - with a stake in preserving it?
• Could one imagine India and Pakistan agreeing that each of those countries has more than enough problems and potential without Kashmir as a possession and deciding that helping the Kashmiri people to develop their homeland as a friendly neighbor might not be so unbearable after all?
• Could one imagine Colombians deciding that it might be worth the price to give Colombia's poor peasants control over their own land in an effort to end a half century of civil war?
• Could one imagine Washington and Tehran renouncing violence and focusing their competition for Mideast influence instead on a cultural level by, say, funding competing educational systems?

Good leaders accomplish such redefinition.

Mercenaries

The United Nations working group on mercenaries has issued a report that merits close reading by everyone concerned with the quality of our lives, the state of democracy, and governance of our world. My thanks to Cyril Mychalejko at Dissident Voice for alerting me to this important report. Since the report speaks for itself, I shall simply provide a few quotes.

1) "PMSCs [private military and private security companies] in
Iraq commonly operate without control, without visibility, without being accountable beyond the private company itself, and in complete impunity." (p11)

2) "In Iraq, PMSC employees account for 3 of 10 soldiers deployed by the regular armed forces of the coalition. During the first Gulf War, in the early 1990s, only 1 of 100 was employed by a PMSC. The exponential expansion of PMSCs is not only reflected in the number of employees, but also in the quantity of contracts, which amounted to more than US$ 100 billion in 2006.7" (p 11)

3) "In its report to the General Assembly, the Working Group expressed its concern at the participation of the employees of two PMSCs in violating human rights, which occurred in the prison of Abu Ghraib (A/61/341, para. 69). These employees held key functions without being accountable to effective regulatory and control mechanisms, as the employees allegedly implicated have not been subject to any investigation nor sanctioned. Their alleged involvement, with others, in the Abu Ghraib torture scandal "has increased suspicion, especially from the United States military, of the reliability of (private) contractors" and contributed to hamper reconstruction efforts in Iraq.10 The Working Group is oncerned that these cases are not isolated, and could represent only a fraction of all cases." (p12)

4) "Another phenomenon of interest to the Working Group is the increasing use of force by PMSCs and private groups that are exercising domestic police functions in Latin American countries. This trend has led to a situation where in many countries the employees of PMSCs have surpassed the numbers of the police forces. For example, in Honduras, estimates vary that PMSCs, whether legally registered or illegal, effectively employ between 12,500 and 70,000 security guards, compared to the national police which has an estimated 8,000 police
officers." (p 18)

5) "...the Working Group issues the following recommendations:
- The Working Group calls upon all States that have no yet done so to consider taking the necessary action to accede to or ratify the International Convention against the Recruitment, Use, Financing and Training of Mercenaries (entered in force in 2001). It encourages States parties to introduce national level legislation against mercenarism, through introducing and adopting specific provisions in the national criminal codes, or to introduce separate legislation on mercenaries. The Working Group also invites Member States to consider also regional standards for possible incorporation in domestic legislation, notably
where such instruments are adopted by subregional organizations, as is the case with African Union, the Commonwealth of Independent States and the Economic Community of West African States;
- The Working Group recommends the urgent need to embark on a process of determining the future of the monopoly of States on the use of force, and suggests a process of regional preparatory round tables during 2007 to lead to a global round table in 2008;
- The Working Group urges States to meet the challenge of regulating and attributing the responsibility that arises from the structure and transnational nature of the PMSC industry and its global reach, as well as the exponential growth of the numbers and activities of PMSCs in different regions. To this end, the Working Group urges States to avoid granting blanket immunity, leading to effective impunity, to PMSCs and their personnel;
- The Working Group recommends thresholds of permissible activities, enhanced regulation and oversight of PMSCs at the national levels, including the establishment of regulatory systems of registration and licensing of PMSCs and individuals working for them. Such regulation should include defining minimum requirements for transparency and accountability of firms, screening and vetting of personnel, and establish a monitoring system including parliamentary oversight. States should impose a specific ban on PMSCs intervening in internal or international armed conflicts or actions aiming at destabilizing constitutional regimes;
- The Working Group recommends human rights components in ducation and training programmes to be offered to the staff of PMSCs, including on international humanitarian law, international human rights law, and United Nations standards on the use of force;" (p 24-25).