One of the great failings of my life is that I haven’t yet met Samantha Power or had the chance to debate the issues with her over a cup of coffee or six. Not that my feeble brain could keep up anyway, or that I’d be doing a lot of challenging, since there really isn’t anything about her thinking and writing that I could ever take issue with. 

I started following her writing when I was immediate post-army, post-Bosnia, and still working on an M.A. thesis at the Montreal Institute for Genocide and Human Rights Studies with Frank Chalk, on mass-mediated ethnic incitement, foreign policy, and humanitarian intervention. She’d written some really, really good articles – on "suffering by comparison", people sitting in offices, Rwanda, Zimbabwe. Then a brilliant book on U.S. foreign policy in the age of genocide, which won a Pulitzer. She’s just published a new book, as well, which I’m ashamed to say I haven’t read yet.

I do manage to keep up with her weekly column in Time, though, and this week’s item, on how new media and online technologies can be used to mobilize support for worthy causes, is especially worth the time it takes to read it. In the US, it’s been an interesting week of political debate on appeasement and diplomacy. In the UK, there’s been a good deal of concern over radicalization and academic freedom, in the wake of a terrorism researcher’s arrest at the University of Nottingham. In light of all the hyperventilating, SP’s timely poke at social media raises some interesting issues for debates on radicalization, mobilization, and the potential for early warning.

Calling herself a "thirtysomething anachronism" who still reads "the hard copies of the New York Times and the Boston Globe", she notes that "my students marvel at me the way I once marveled at my mother for being slow to get an e-mail account. They don’t understand why right-thinking people would willfully make their hands dirty every day when they don’t have to. To them I am like a person who takes a shower in the morning and then decides to do gardening before work."

OK. Her real point, though, is this: "True, smudge isn’t great, but it seems a small price to pay for what the newspaper offers: serendipitous discovery and wide-angle perspective."

Much has been made of the convening and mobilizing power of today’s technology. A person inspired by a cause can blog about their outrage and plot a response on Facebook with other similarly animated people. While any single congressional district might not produce a groundswell to demand a halt to global warming or killing in Darfur, a virtual community unmoored from geography can deliver a critical mass. And once converted, advocates are far better informed than a generation ago. They can hear the personal tales of aid workers over Skype. When the Western press steers clear, they can access and share local media reports. Thanks to what Chris Anderson called the "long tail," far more documentaries are available than when movie theaters and video stores catered only to the most popular side of the market. Netflix carries close to 7,500 documentaries, allowing people already immersed in a cause to deepen their knowledge and commitment–and enabling proselytizers to attract new adherents.

For many of us, though, technology has actually lowered the odds of bumping into inconvenient knowledge. If I had been setting up a Google alert in 1989, mine would not have been for "China" or "human rights." In 1992, I certainly would not have asked for stories on "concentration camps." When I’m abroad these days and have to go without my newspaper, I often turn to the most e-mailed stories on news websites, which are generally opinion pieces (rather than news stories), from which I cherry-pick arguments or facts that comport with my pre-existing views. Reading this way, I rarely stray from the familiar and soothing.

She warns:

Amid the hoopla over new media, it is worth considering the costs of the personalization of news. Sure, viral YouTube videos of global conflicts and tragedies will occasionally find an audience, and movements may grow up around iconic new-media images as they did around the old. But while the long tail ensures once obscure documentaries remain available, citizen advocacy may have a short tail, causing the number of viable causes to get winnowed to a handful of megacauses. Burma may achieve the requisite market share, while Burundi fails to penetrate at all.

Further, the screen on which people view the world will narrow. Spared the burden of considering multiple parts of the world at once, single-issue advocates may have a hard time seeing the relationship of one foreign policy challenge to another. Viewing issues à la carte, they might be unable or unwilling to prioritize. To be fair, if young advocates fail to see the way Guantánamo has undermined U.S. efforts in Darfur, they are being no more tunnel-visioned than the Bush Administration. But they are the ones we are counting on to help turn things around.

It’s too easy to default to accessible information – there’s probably a good marketing reason for calling RSS subscriptions "feed". I understand SP’s cautionary, which is essentially a call to remain critical of all information sources (even print versions of the New York Times and the Boston Globe), and to remain wary of technologically-empowered group-think.

But the sheer variety of new media technologies and widgets suggests there’s an equally ready antidote to spoon-fed e-mail defaults and corporate-sponsored information clusters. Early warning, for example, used to be a labor-intensive process, a race against the clock to sift out indicators and warnings, on time, to identify the proverbial needle in the haystack or smoking gun evidence of command responsibility and criminal intent. No longer.

Serendipitous discovery sometimes comes from reading hard copy, sure – but I find that that has more to do with the tactile reassurance of a physical prop. Eureka moments in daily news reading don’t really happen the same way they do for researchers pouring through archived masses of data. Most open source information now being generated is near-instantly preserved in searchable online databases like Lexis-Nexis. Most currently generated information output is instantly available by subscription. This is a radical shift, a time inversion,  the collected mass of it representing an immediate archive of the now. This is the great new possibility: not of social network platforms, which serve their own purposes and can be useful, but of the next-gen web-filtering that’s available.

RSS blenders and mixers, and aggregators like Newsgator and Netvibes, certainly help to winnow out the uninterersting bits and narrow our optic. But web-filtering is most valuable for its ability to turn pretty much any desktop into a data catchment area the proportions of which were once reserved for BBC Worldwide Monitoring or the former Foreign Broadcast Information Service. Significantly, they also streamline source management – sort of like the finding aids I use to use to sort through microfiche collections of U
.S. State Department dispatches.

Now, instead of receiving separate e-mail alerts on the latest International Crisis Group, Human Rights Watch, Institute for War and Peace Reporting, and ReliefWeb news – or going from website to website to "manually" find what I need – I can plug all those RSS subscriptions into a reader and get a single running feed right on my monitor. There’s a lot of junk on the web, and the importance of remaining critical and thinking about how to collate and categorize information doesn’t go way. Apply that to new filtering technologies, and we may have something.

Things have changed since I first left the Army and SP was starting to show her brilliance. Then, radicalization and mobilization were about radio in Africa and broadcast media in the former Yugoslavia, about sick nationalism and ethnic cleansing. As she once put it – possibly on Charlie Rose – 9/11 sucked the wind out of some important Clinton-era issues: human rights, humanitarian intervention, accountability for war crimes, R2P. But the early warning lessons of that era are directly linked to how we can do some things better today.

SP would probably agree, though, that none of it means a thing in the absence of political will and in an atmosphere of partisan hysterics.

Just getting caught up with reading again. In the week of Scott McCLellan, you’ve got to love all the chatter about Bush’s earlier appeasement comments (lordy, you mean the Administration’s wordsmiths mutilated history in the service of pithy rhetoric? this is unprecendented.…). The Economist‘s note, "Speaking to the Enemy", makes some interesting points on the subject:

EVERY noun enjoys its 15 minutes of fame. Some get more fame than they deserve. In America’s foreign-policy debate one that has been bandied about too much lately is “appeasement”. When he spoke to Israel’s parliament on May 15th, George Bush blasted those who sought “the false comfort of appeasement” by negotiating with terrorists and radicals in the Middle East. Barack Obama assumed the barb was aimed at him. He in turn accused Mr Bush and John McCain, the Republican candidate, of “hypocrisy and fear mongering”.

Coming to Obama’s defense, the newspaper writes

Speaking to the enemy is an ordinary part of diplomacy and does not on its own amount to appeasement. In Munich in 1938, Neville Chamberlain’s sin was not that he talked to Adolf Hitler, but that instead of standing up to him he sold Czechoslovakia down the river. Had the British prime minister then been Winston Churchill, the outcome of the meeting, and the history of the world, might have been different. In January 1991 in Geneva, for example, America’s secretary of state talked face-to-face to Tariq Aziz, a nasty piece of work who was Saddam Hussein’s foreign minister and is currently on trial for murder. But nobody has ever been silly enough to accuse James Baker or the president who sent him (one George H. W. Bush) of appeasement. And that is because instead of letting Iraq keep Kuwait, which it had just invaded and annexed, Mr Baker told Mr Aziz that America would throw Iraq out by force if it did not leave. Hardly appeasement.

More, "Are there any people, organisations or regimes so evil that the mere act of talking should be beyond the pale, no matter what is said?"

You might expect North Korea to fall into such a category, given the slaughter and starvation for which its present dictator and his late father are responsible. Strange, then, that the very Mr Bush who admonished the appeasers from Israel’s parliament has allowed Americans to negotiate with the North for years. If these talks ever make Kim Jong-Il give up his nukes, nobody in his right mind will hold Mr Bush’s decision to talk against him. And if it’s fine to speak to North Korea, why rule out talking, as Mr Obama says he would, to Iran? As it happens, American diplomats already talk to their Iranian counterparts, though only about Iraq.

It gets even more interesting:

There is, however, a wrinkle. Speaking to the enemy should never be ruled out. But withholding talks can sometimes make your adversary give something up beforehand. For decades Israel and America said they would not talk to the Palestine Liberation Organisation until Yasser Arafat renounced terrorism. Eventually, he did. The same tactic might make Hamas, Hizbullah or Iran drop their stated plan to eliminate the Jewish state. A tactic, however, is not a principle. Choosing the right one requires guessing how much value the other side places on talking, and what it might pay for the privilege. Israel, incidentally, is currently in talks not only with Syria but also, indirectly, with Hamas.

Absolutely… and the Irish Republican Army’s success at bringing the British government to the negotiating table, on multiple occasions, despite stiff upper lip protestations that such a travesty would never transpire? Transpire the politicians did, and so the negotiations took place.

In the interest of balanced reporting and commentary, The Economist manages its usual tour de force sampling of historical cases and precedents, concluding with a nice swipe at Gordon Brown for denying the Dalai Lama an official Number 10 meet’n greet:

Mr Obama, it is true, has got into trouble by implying that he himself would sit down to unconditional talks with Iran’s Holocaust-denying president, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad. That would be poor diplomacy: the prize of such an encounter could be withheld until minions persuaded Iran to stop enriching uranium in accordance with the UN’s orders.

Statesmen who want to clamber onto their high horses should note that, in some cases, not talking can be a form of appeasement. This week Gordon Brown refused to invite the Dalai Lama, Tibet’s spiritual leader, to Downing Street but met him at the home of the leader of the Anglican church. That was a fudge to appease China, and is a genuine disgrace.

When to talk? When to snub? How to incentivize spoilers and outsiders to play by mutually agreed rules? Threat perception and strategic communication are critical… and so are the legitimacy thresholds that bracket them.

My publisher at Hurst just tipped me off to Ahmed Rashid’s review essay in the latest New York Review of Books. Three of the seven books (Nasiri, Lia, and Giustozzi) under review are Hurst publications in North American release.

Rashid, Ahmed. "Jihad Suicide Bombers: The New Wave." New York Review of Books (12 June 2008).

Kazys Vanelis, Director of Columbia University’s Network Architecture Lab, has an interesting blogpost, Surveillance Society, citing Naomi Klein’s Rolling Stone write-up on the situation in China (and you thought the UK was over-Big Brothered?).

In "The Return of the Intergalactic Planetary Landscape Architect," Alexander Trevi at Pruned blogs on defence-funded contractors building better exoskeletons, and how they might help with… gardening. Warning: Trevi’s piece is tongue-in-cheek and entertaining.  

 

 

Tony Waters, a Professor of Sociology at California State University, Chico and a blogger at Ethnography.com, has written up an interesting piece on the human terrain issue. In a 15 May blog post, he suggested the U.S. Army’s Human Terrain System needs "an experimental control." Waters doesn’t pass judgment on the role of social science in war (not the way others have, in any case), except to generally laud military interest in better understanding context and culture. Instead, citing Col. Martin Sweitzer’s 23 April testimony "before two House Armed Service Committee Subcommittees", he writes:

The first thing that struck me was the language of the military sub-culture. Much of what Colonel Schweitzer writes is an attempt to force what he and his HTT observe into pre-existing ways the military defines social situation. The terminology is replete with references to the military sub-culture, and their views of Afghanistan as being the focus of first security concerns, rather than issues of human relationships, power, kinship, ritual, etc., and other issues social scientists usually think about first.

Waters’ analysis of the military’s own culture, as opposed to the cultural terrain in which it operates, raises an interesting point on distinct military uses of social science. I’m told, for example, that the US Marine Corps doesn’t really buy into the Army’s human terrain system concept, which may or may not be attributable to the Corps’ expeditionary nature. Instead, it employs social scientists to look within – to better know it’s own organizational culture, to better understand its ability to learn and adapt. I don’t know if Army does the same, but I’d be surprised if it doesn’t.

Waters makes a couple of additional and important observations. The first is lexical:

But, the oddest terminology for me was his frequent reference to “kinetic operations” which by and large goes undefined, except to note that HTT cultural knowledge means that you have fewer of them. (I think that kinetic operations though has something to do with a type of search and seizure action that the military orders on its own criteria, and then conducts).

The second is epistemological:

But, the biggest question I had after reading Colonel Schweitzer’s testimony was whether the HTS concept worked or not. Despite the fact that he is speaking to Congress as an advocate for a program which celebrates the use of social science, the data he presented were only anecdotal, and do not reflect systematic evaluation. It may well be that the decline in the number of “kinetic operations” is due to HTS. But, as they say in research methods classes, “correlation does not necessarily imply causation.” Meaning, that just because two things happen at the same time, one does not necessarily cause the other. The classic example illustrating this principle is that you may eat carrots at dawn, and two hours later see more clearly, but it does not necessarily follow that the carrots cause improved eye sight. In the case of a reduced need for kinetic operations, the causes for that over the last year might have included bad weather, poor crops, good intelligence, bad intelligence, new commanders, a switch in Taliban strategy, switch in American strategy, etc. etc. The point being that just because the number of kinetic operations declined, it does not follow that it was caused by HTS.

Waters’ interpretation of "kinetic" isn’t incorrect, really, but it is far from accurate. "Kinetic" operations are operations in which force is applied – read the application or threat of lethal measures to effect an outcome (or achieve the objective, in military parlance).  I differ with Waters’ approach to causation in this case, and with the need for measures of effectiveness that stems from it. No one’s claiming that human terrain mapping, or any other knowledge feed, causes a reduction in requirements for/application of military measures. The pathway is more variegated and attenuated than that.

Advisors of any kind provide specialized subject-matter-expertise that fills a gap in Command-level decision-making processes.  Leaders involved in complex crisis situations who are better informed about things like culture and context (among a myriad of other issues), are less likely to misinterpret local conditions. Being able to discern threats from non-threats is critical in such fluid and dynamic operating environments, and broadens a soldier’s options to include non-kinetic measures.

So the causal relation is operationalized through a chain of influence – which arguably starts with objective criteria and measures, but ends with an inherently subjective, though better informed, application of human judgment on the selection of appropriate approaches, methods, and resources. Can this be measured or quantified? The mad scientists would have us think so. But bean counting gives us body counts, not strategy. Or didn’t we learn that lesson?

H/T to Tim.