Global Terrorism on the Decline

According to the Human Security Report Project, an academic institute now housed at Simon Fraser University, global terrorism has declined dramatically, challenging the expert consensus that terrorism is on the rise. The key findings are outlined in its press release:

Fatalities from terrorism have declined by some 40 percent, while the loose-knit terror network associated with Osama bin Laden’s al-Qaeda has suffered a dramatic collapse in popular support throughout the Muslim world.

There has been an extraordinary, but largely unnoticed, positive change in sub-Saharan Africa’s security landscape. The number of conflicts being waged in the region more than halved between 1999 and 2006; the combat toll dropped by 98 percent.

The decline in the total number of armed conflicts and combat deaths around the world that was reported three years ago in Human Security Report 2005 has continued.

The entire report can be accessed here.

Does this mean the global war on terror is working? Perhaps not. Consider the results of another study reported today by the University of Texas: researchers there have studied the cost-effectiveness of anti-terror policies, finding that the most expensive yield the lowest payoff:

The research found that increasing homeland security worldwide by 25 percent resulted in a payback of about 30 cents on a dollar.

Increased offensive measures, like those against the Taliban after 9/11, had a payback of 8 to 12 cents on a dollar. The biggest benefits came from increased cooperation among police forces and governments. This approach paid back $5 to $15 per dollar spent, depending on cost assumptions.

Interesting.

Responsibility to Protect

I was recently asked to post a bit of background on the Responsibility to Protect Doctrine (aka R2P).

This concept was first articulated by an Independent Commission established by the Government of Canada to attempt to resolve the tension between the norm of state sovereignty, on which the entire UN Charter regime rests, and the protection of civilian populations from grave human rights abuses at the hands of their own governments – a parallel set of principles also espoused by the UN Charter preamble and articulated in two further sets of treaties – human rights law and international humanitarian law.

The tension between these principles had become evident in the 1999 Kosovo crisis, which posed a choice between two competing principles: 1) do something to prevent what many thought to be a looming genocide and 2) do something legally. Under the UN Charter regime, military intervention in a sovereign state is never legal unless authorized by the UN Security Council, which requires a 2/3 vote and no vetoes by those holding Permanent Status on the Council (the US, UK, Russia, China and France). Because the Council is split on the legitimacy of intervention even in cases of genocide, such consensus is rarely forthcoming.

The International Commission on Intervention and State Sovereignty (ICISS), peopled by prominent scholars and jurists, produced a landmark report in 2000, redefining sovereignty as responsibility. Previous, sovereignty had been understood as a claim to absolute autonomy within one’s territorial borders. The R2P doctrine places the burden of proof on the state to govern responsibly so as to protect its civilian population. If it fails to do this or directly threatens its citizens’ bodily integrity rights, it sacrifices its claim to sovereignty; at that point, the responsibility to protect is transferred to the international community.

The seemingly brilliant concept has worked well as a rhetorical device. It has been legitimated through adoption in a number of UN documents, including the High-Level Panel on Threats, Challenges and Change in 2004 and the 2005 UN Millennium Conference Outcome Document. However, it does not really provide a road-map to the mechanism for triggering a legitimate intervention. The criteria it gives for an appropriate intervention do not improve on just war theory, which dates back at least to Augustine. Its lofty language of “just cause,” “right intention,” “last resort,” “proporotional means” and “reasonable prospects” already framed the debate on Kosovo. And the section on “what do to when the Security Council will not act” lists primarily the exact same types of non-coercive operations that currently exist as band-aid efforts to mitigate suffering of civilians in armed conflicts.

Since “grave human rights abuses” are in the eye of the beholder, the big question of who should decide when violations of sovereignty are justified remains unanswered and a subject of controversy among governments. This is the context for Nikolas K. Gvosdev’s recent suggestion at the Washington Realist that the norm be revised to apply only to non-democracies. But I think that idea only skirts the same issue: who should decide who counts as a democracy?

GAO: US Unprepared for Al-Qaeda Attack

From Democracy Arsenal:

"Here is the title of a report from the Government Accountability Office on combating terrorism released today: The United States Lacks a Comprehensive Plan to Destroy the Terrorist Threat and Close the Safe Haven in Pakistan's Federally Administered Tribal Areas.

That is not some line buried in the report. That is the title. Wow.

This GAO report may be the most damning condemnation of the Bush administration's counter-terrorism efforts. The report goes on to say that the Bush administration has failed to develop any plan to address the Al Qaeda threat. Worse, the report finds that Al Qaeda is now able to attack the United States and represents the "most serious" threat to this country."

(Sigh.)

More on Killer Robots

So I'm starting to get really interested in following this whole robot ethics issue. Seems folks are bothered not just by the idea that robots may not be programmed well enough to follow the rules of war, it's the fear they may be programmed too well.

Not certain where I stand on all this, but it sure is fun to absorb the different viewpoints in the debate. Here is a fun, freaky and very visually entertaining video on the subject today, courtesy of some guy named Mark Dice who is worried about the New World Order and has a lot of time on his hands.



I'll be back.

Ha! The Bushies Are Listening

Recently I blogged about the USG's concern over state secrets escaping our territorial borders through the untimely demise of a US spy satellite due to crash-land somewhere on the terrestrial surface in March.

I made the case that one might be as concerned with human life as with the security of our satellite technology.

Seems the Bushies have paid heed to this dose of wisdom. They've decided to shoot down the satellite and justify it by citing the risk to human populations if it should hit land:

"They say the satellite contains a hazardous material which could be fatal if inhaled by humans.

A US general denied claims that the main aim was to destroy secret parts."

In fact, they're bending over backward it seems to claim that destorying satellite secrets has nothing to do with the decision to pull the trigger.

"General James Cartwright said confidential components would be burned up in the atmosphere and, in any case, that would not be a reason for shooting down the satellite."

Of course it's rubbish, but the fact that they feel they must claim it is says a lot about how "human security" is displacing "national security" in "security-speak." It's a good sign - norm change always does begin with hypocrisy. Anyways, it's nice to know the Bushies are paying attention.

New Tool for Threat-Downs

Now here is something very interesting.



I am always intrigued to see what counts as a "global incident." The threats here seem primarily threats to the state. I'd like to see one with some generic human security measures - areas of low-level repression, civil wars, massacres, disappearances. It would be fascinating, for example, to have someone tracking the intensity of the violence in Kenya using such a tool.

The authors are developing similar maps for things like pandemic outbreaks and "USA school incidents." Hmm.

Satellite Security v. Human Security

A while back I blogged about the concept of "human security." But not expansively. My students sometimes get a little confused about this term, it meaning so many different things to different people. And Roland Paris up at University of Ottawa has argued famously that the concept represents more hot air than a genuine paradigm shift in strategic thinking.

So here's a story that both illustrates the concept of human security and lends credence to Paris' argument. It seems a US spy satellite is dropping out of orbit and will likely hit ground somewhere in North America in the next few weeks. Big issue for the US military, it seems.


A human security frame, which privileges protecting individuals from threats to their security, would probably encourage consideration of the populated areas that could be affected. Instead, according to the London Register, experts at the defense thinktank Global Security is primarily concerned with the risks to "the secrets of the satellite":

"One concern the intelligence community is going to have is that parts of this satellite will fall into the hands of the Russians or Chinese or somebody else," says Global Security director John Pike.

According to Pike, the satellite carries a new generation of spy equipment, able to provide round-the-clock intelligence.

"The hopes were that this was going to be a more capable, less expensive spy satellite or radar satellite that could see objects through clouds and in the dark."

Oh yes, that would have been just fine.

Not Sure That's What "Human Security" Means

In an article entitled “Japan’s Defense Minister Braces for Aliens,” Agence France-Press reports:

As Japan takes a more active role in military affairs, the defence minister has more on his mind than just threats here on Earth.

Shigeru Ishiba became the second member of the cabinet to profess a belief in UFOs and said he was looking at how Japan's military could respond to aliens under the pacifist constitution.

"There are no grounds for us to deny that there are unidentified flying objects (UFOs) and some life-form that controls them," Ishiba told reporters, saying it was his personal view and not that of the defence ministry.

Of course analysts will read this as a thinly disguised attempt to garner domestic support for altering Article 9 of the Japanese constitution, so that the country can deploy its armed forces for more wide-ranging tasks. Unless one assumes that Japan intends to embark on some offensive war against the putative little green men, it’s hard to see how simply acknowledging the possibility they may visit predetermines the need for any serious doctrinal change.

I think there’s a more logical explanation. For years political scientists have been debating the definition of “human security.” Invented by Boutrous-Boutrous Ghali as a way to shift the concept of security from the defense of territorial states to the defense of people, the idea was to get the Security Council to start taking seriously things like genocide, starvation and climate change. But no one can agree on exactly what the term means: is it freedom from fear of direct physical threats, or also freedom from want? Does it mean anything and everything and if so what good is it as an analytical concept?

Perhaps the Japanese government, long a champion of “human security” in multilateral forums, is simply contributing to this conversation anew by reframing the debate.

Ishiba could also just be nuts.

"Ender's Game" and Human Security

A funny thing happened when I first told some friends and family about this blog and explained the title and epigraph: some were shocked.

This is because the epigraph is drawn from a book that apparently "glorifies child soldiering." [Admittedly, in Card’s Ender’s Game, Ender Wiggin enters “Battle School” at age six and battle itself at age nine, and by age ten is a full-fledged, if unwitting, xenocidaire.] My admiration for the story puzzles people because I run with a pack that tends to lobby against child recruitment as it is practiced by certain countries and rebel groups today.

The easy answer to this question (besides: "duh, it's just a book") is that the Ender series doesn’t so much promote the conscription of children as suggest that children can be and are moral and political actors much like adults.

But this frame does indeed have political implications. These will no doubt be revisited by critics once the Ender’s Game film, now in the screen-writing stages, hits the box office. After all, if the original novel can be interpreted as pro-child-recruitment (debatable), it’s certainly easy to suppose a bastardized film version will.

An obvious “negative” side-effect from a human security perspective is that images of child combatants as heroic political agents could adversely affect international standard-setting against child recruitment. It might do so by problematizing the simplistic stories transnational advocacy groups trade in: stories that tell us children are victims not actors, abductees rather than willing volunteers, and innocents rather than strategic, rational actors.

Then again, isn’t challenging stereotypes also perhaps a good thing?

Welcome, For Better or Worse.

We are a junior political scientist and a soldier of misfortune who have been arguing since childhood about political ethics and global social order. The basic question that informs our discussions is how, whether and on what terms the gap might be closed between national and human security. Can global governance "as if people mattered" be achieved?

As you will see, this range of interests gives us plenty of room to maneuver. Besides military doctrine, international law, and global civil society do not be surprised if you find the topics on this blog to include, among others: 1) the care and feeding of young megalomaniacs; 2) the relationship of science fiction and video games to geopolitics 3) and the so-called universality of human rights (cannibalism: barbaric primitive practice, or the other, other white meat?).

Why blog at all, and why now? We have different reasons.

Diodotus: "Political science today prizes abstract theorizing and number crunching over practical wisdom for citizens and statespersons. But as Einstein said, 'Not everything that counts can be counted, and not everything that can be counted counts.' Theory may be my bread and butter, but one hungers to be of use to the real world. It has taken me a few years and some inspiration from other academic bloggers to recognize that six hours a week with students is not enough."

Cleitus the Black: "Why, I choose to blog so the radiance of my inspired eloquence may illuminate the the grey matter of the downtrodden masses, of course! People should actually thank me for doing their thinking for them; it's "outsourcing" at its very best!"

Our blog’s name reflects the influence of Orson Scott Card, who foresaw the political blogosphere back in the late ‘80s when writing his famous novel Ender's Game. In the story, two brilliant middle-schoolers manage to influence world events by writing polemical commentaries under the pseudonyms “Locke” and “Demosthenes.” Of course all possible variations of those derivative titles were snapped up by other Card fans long before we took to the blogosphere ourselves, so we drew on one of our favorite Card quotes instead.

As for our own psuedonyms, interpret them as you please. We hope you enjoy reading and participating in our virtual debates, and if you find the material useful or illuminating, please feel free to recommend this page to your friends and enemies alike.