Well, everyone’s doing it. Tom Ricks has one. So does Drezner. Who am I to resist peer pressure? Here are my top five picks for anyone interested in getting smart on the geopolitics of sanctuaries/safe havens. Yes, it’s more than just a guerrilla thing, and yes, it’s more than just a territorial thing. It’s even more than a material thing. It’s a whole lot of different things – but then, I wouldn’t want to let all the cats out of the bag before my book’s out, would I? 

I’ve excluded edited volumes (among them my two prior projects on the subject). I’ve also excluded unpublished papers, peer reviewed journal articles, and books on cognate topics like state failure, terrorist sponsorship, and the like). For COIN fetishists wondering why I didn’t include Mao et al: I’ve left out plenty of material, and stuck to a narrow sampling of secondary sources that take a swipe at this from an international relations perspective. Consider them your primers. 

Brynen, Rex. Sanctuary and Survival: The PLO In Lebanon. Westview Press, 1990.

DESCRIPTION: Drawing on extensive interviews with senior leaders in the PLO and its consequent organizations, this book examines the PLO’s Lebanese era in the broader theoretical context of relations between a national liberation movement and a sanctuary state. The author analyzes the PLO’s relations with the Lebanese government, its role in the civil war, the consequences of escalating conflict with Israel, and the challenges facing the Palestine movement after Israel’s 1982 invasion. Throughout, he focuses on the PLO’s efforts to maintain a secure political and military base of operations in Lebanon.

Hassner, Ron. War on Sacred Grounds. Cornell University Press, 2009.

DESCRIPTION: Sacred sites offer believers the possibility of communing with the divine and achieving deeper insight into their faith. Yet their spiritual and cultural importance can lead to competition as religious groups seek to exclude rivals from practicing potentially sacrilegious rituals in the hallowed space and wish to assert their own claims. Holy places thus create the potential for military, theological, or political clashes, not only between competing religious groups but also between religious groups and secular actors.

In War on Sacred Grounds, Ron E. Hassner investigates the causes and properties of conflicts over sites that are both venerated and contested; he also proposes potential means for managing these disputes. Hassner illustrates a complex and poorly understood political dilemma with accounts of the failures to reach settlement at Temple Mount/Haram el-Sharif, leading to the clashes of 2000, and the competing claims of Hindus and Muslims at Ayodhya, which resulted in the destruction of the mosque there in 1992. He also addresses more successful compromises in Jerusalem in 1967 and Mecca in 1979. Sacred sites, he contends, are particularly prone to conflict because they provide valuable resources for both religious and political actors yet cannot be divided.

The management of conflicts over sacred sites requires cooperation, Hassner suggests, between political leaders interested in promoting conflict resolution and religious leaders who can shape the meaning and value that sacred places hold for believers. Because a reconfiguration of sacred space requires a confluence of political will, religious authority, and a window of opportunity, it is relatively rare. Drawing on the study of religion and the study of politics in equal measure, Hassner’s account offers insight into the often-violent dynamics that come into play at the places where religion and politics collide.

Lang, Hazel J. Fear and Sanctuary: Burmese Refugees in Thailand. Cornell University Press, 2002.

DESCRIPTION: An examination of the plight of the refugees of Burma’s protracted civil war, many of whom have fled across the border into Thailand. This study looks at the changing nature of the refugee situation and the responses of the parties involved, including the United Nations, the refugees themselves, and governments in both Bangkok and Rangoon. In the process, Fear and Sanctuary addresses pertinent international questions regarding civil war, ethnic resistance against an oppressive state, displacement, and refugee protection.

Lischer, Sarah Kenyon. Dangerous Sanctuaries: Refugee Camps, Civil War, and the Dilemmas of Humanitarian Aid. Cornell University Press, 2005.

DESCRIPTION: Since the early 1990s, refugee crises in the Balkans, Central Africa, the Middle East, and West Africa have led to the international spread of civil war. In Central Africa alone, more than three million people have died in wars fueled, at least in part, by internationally supported refugee populations. The recurring pattern of violent refugee crises prompts the following questions: Under what conditions do refugee crises lead to the spread of civil war across borders? How can refugee relief organizations respond when militants use humanitarian assistance as a tool of war? What government actions can prevent or reduce conflict?

To understand the role of refugees in the spread of conflict, Sarah Kenyon Lischer systematically compares violent and nonviolent crises involving Afghan, Bosnian, and Rwandan refugees. Lischer argues against the conventional socioeconomic explanations for refugee-related violence—abysmal living conditions, proximity to the homeland, and the presence of large numbers of bored young men. Lischer instead focuses on the often-ignored political context of the refugee crisis. She suggests that three factors are crucial: the level of the refugees’ political cohesion before exile, the ability and willingness of the host state to prevent military activity, and the contribution, by aid agencies and outside parties, of resources that exacerbate conflict. Lischer’s political explanation leads to policy prescriptions that are sure to be controversial: using private security forces in refugee camps or closing certain camps altogether. With no end in sight to the brutal wars that create refugee crises, Dangerous Sanctuaries is vital reading for anyone concerned with how refugee flows affect the dynamics of conflicts around the world.

McQueen, Carol. Humanitarian Intervention and Safety Zones: Iraq, Bosnia, and Rwanda. Palgrave MacMillan, 2005.

DESCRIPTION: Neither willing to engage in a meaningful way to save targeted civilians in Iraq, Bosnia and Rwanda nor stand entirely aside as massive violat
ions of humanitarian law occurred, states embraced safety zones as a means to ‘do something’ whilst avoiding being drawn into open warfare.Humanitarian Intervention and Safety Zones: Iraq, Bosnia and Rwandaexplores why and how effectively safety zones were implemented as a way to protect civilians and displace persons in three of the most important conflicts of the 1990s. It shows how states consistently sought to reconcile their political and humanitarian interest, a process which often led to problematic and ambiguous outcomes, and assesses in fascinating detail the difficulties and controversies surrounding the use of such zones, variously called safe havens, safe areas, secure humanitarian areas, andzones humanitaires sures. The book also asks whether or not such zones could serve as precedents for possible future attempts to ensure the safety of civilians in complex humanitarian emergencies.

or, “Cyberspace and the Viet Cong…”. I’ve been reading through some of the excellent Opinio Juris book discussion on Kal Raustaria’s Does the Constitution Follow the Flag? The Evolution Of Territoriality in American Law (OUP, 2009). Tim Zick’s post on Cyber-Territoriality really caught my attention, particular with this quote from a June NYT report on cyberspace and privacy:

…the Defense Department views cyberspace as its domain as well, a new battleground after land, sea, air and space. The complications are not limited to privacy concerns. The Pentagon is increasingly worried about the diplomatic ramifications of being forced to use the computer networks of many other nations while carrying out digital missions — the computer equivalent of the Vietnam War’s spilling over the Cambodian border in the 1960s. To battle Russian hackers, for example, it might be necessary to act through the virtual cyberterritory of Britain or Germany or any country where the attack was routed.

I want to cry eureka. The reference to cross-border operations during the Vietnam War is genius, even if the follow-on explanation is a bit iffy. The Vietcong used Cambodia and Laos as sanctuary – of the traditional, Maoist, guerrilla variant. It makes the connection between much less convincing contemporary assertions about cyberspace as terrorist sanctuary and militant use of sanctuary more generally. Need to explore this one further.

Woe to those still working as staff officers when this research comes to fruition. Not only will you be required to do more with less, working 18 hour days squeezing the last once of juice out of your brain translating complex ideas into bone-simple but mind-numbing point papers and PowerPoint briefings. You’ll now also be required to learn and remember even more than you already do, and do it all with perfect recall (which means you’ll be held responsible for faulty memory, too). Good luck with that.

Danger Room’s Sharon Weinberger has twin pieces up at Slate and Foreign Policy. From the former, “Donkey Business“, on Gaza’s twilight economy:

GAZA—Something didn’t quite look right about the zebra, but it was hard to say exactly what. Of the several ramshackle zoos in Gaza, Marah, located not far from the Bureij refugee camp, is by far the cheeriest: The animals are lively, the enclosures clean, and children gather around the cage of a resting lion.

Then again, the competition is hardly stiff: The zoo in Rafah features dead animals left to rot in their cages; another animal park, situated in a densely populated neighborhood in Bureij, recently shut down amid financial difficulties (and after neighbors complained of the smell). A third, also in Bureij, is so short of funds that a fox is kept in a grocery cart with a board over the top.

From the latter, “Welcome to Hamaswood“:

It looks at first glance like a typical block in Gaza: concrete facades spray-painted with political graffiti, collapsed roofs, and a battered United Nations sign. But looking a bit closer, you notice that there’s something a bit too orderly, a bit too purposefully neglected, about the row of dilapidated buildings. The U.N. sign seems hastily painted on. Nearby is a fish pond.

Welcome to Hamaswood, one of the first movie sets owned by a U.S.-designated terrorist organization. Hamaswood — or, as the locals call it, the Asdaa Land for Artistical and Media Production — is a small studio city near the Gaza town of Khan Yunis. Less than a city block in size, Asdaa’s movie set is much smaller than any Hollywood studio, and it boasts a few features that you wouldn’t find in Cinecittà: for example, the fish pond as well as goat yards and cow yards, not intended for animal films but as money making livestock. As it turns out, running a terrorist movie studio involves problems that Samuel Goldwyn would never have dreamed of.

H/t Nathan.