That’s the positive spin on this:

A YOUNG man whispers a confession: as a university student, he
killed six or seven of his peers. He cannot be sure of the number,
since his shots were fired in gun battles. He intimidated professors,
burned their cars, and helped kidnap—briefly—their children to force
them to give good marks to certain students. He did it all as a member
of a campus cult. When he renounced his membership, he got death
threats and moved to another city, where he lives today.

Nigeria’s university system used to be the finest in west Africa,
but today’s classes are overcrowded, buildings are crumbling and the
curriculum has remained unchanged for years. The cults emerged from the
shambles. Having started life as confraternities for the most academic
students, they have deteriorated into gang violence. The Exam Ethics
Project, a lobby group, says that inter-cult violence killed 115
students and teachers between 1993 and 2003. The real number may be
much higher.

And:

As their strength grew, the cults’ influence on the universities
became more malign. They exacerbated the corruption that had already
bred in unmanageably big classes and deteriorating facilities. Today,
older students and alumni flood campuses in the first weeks of the new
academic year to recruit for the cults. Omolade Adunbi, an
anthropologist, says that some students, fearing that they are going to
be failed in exams, believe the only way to protect themselves is to
belong to a cult where they can “harass professors”.

How did the cults become such a problem? Wole Soyinka, a Nobel
prizewinner for literature, helped found the Pyrates Confraternity, the
first such group, in 1952 at the elite University of Ibadan. Slowly,
splinter groups emerged: the Black Axe, the Klansmen Konfraternity, and
countless others. It was harmless fun to begin with. But military
leaders of the 1980s and 1990s saw the groups’ growing membership as a
chance to confront the leftist student unions, often aligned with
pro-democracy movements. So the confraternities were given money and
weapons. They turned against student activists—and against each other.
By the mid-1980s, violence had become so fierce that Mr Soyinka tried
unsuccessfully to disband his former creation.

Read the rest here.

Well then, that’s that. Thank the obviously well informed Mladic family  for this little clue as to the whereabouts of scion Ratko. If only we’d known earlier. So much wasted time. At least now, we can just go pick him up and get on with things.

Downing shots of raki on a recent day in front of the Mladic clan’s
tiny stone house, his first cousin Stretko Mladic said Mladic’s
survival skills had been honed from an early age when his mother was so
sick with typhoid that she could not breast-feed him. He said the
murder of Mladic’s father, a partisan, during World War II by Croatian
Nazis had forced him to become self-sufficient. Like many peasant boys,
the cousin said, he turned to Tito’s army, where he was inculcated to
ignore ethnic differences and to fight for the unity of Yugoslavia.

“His mother had no job, no pension, no husband, so from a young age
Ratko had to fight to survive,” Stretko Mladic said. “But he was
strong. He could swim faster than anyone, dive deeper, run faster,
throw stones over his shoulder farther than anyone. He is stubborn,
determined and never gives up. If there is a world under the sea, then
he is hiding there.”

So, following State Department modeling conventions for these sorts of things, this would be a bathymetric sanctuary. Problem solved, research milestone achieved. Now where’s that Minerva check?

Last week, Charli mentioned something at Duck of Minerva about architecture and governance, which coincided nicely with some new output from my favorite space and place blogs, and reminded me that I hadn’t covered the subject in a while. At BLDGBLOG, Geoff Manaugh writes about “The Psychiatric Infrastructure of the City,” reflecting on the impact of Boston’s Big Dig on the cognitive processes of residents. At Subtopia, Bryan Finoki comments on “Prisoner Boxes“, first detailed in a 2005 Vanity Fair article. 

Manaugh reflects on Boston’s massive urban reengineering project, which converted the city’s nightmarish (I drove it, once, to my eternal regret) Central Artery into a subterranean throughfare, apparently contributed to some commuter distemper while construction disrupted normal traffic flows, and ultimately freed up plenty of open park space. “What interests me here,” Manaugh writes, ” is not the obvious fact that bad traffic might
cause tempers to flare, but the idea that people might develop
historically unique psychiatric conditions because of a work of public
infrastructure under construction somewhere in their city.”

With his usual creative and well-reasoned flair, Manaugh speculates on ways in which the “psychiatric infrastructure of the city” might shape cognitive processes and conditions. Imagine a “new tunnel… is being dug between Manhattan and New Jersey”, or “a new flood barrier is under construction outside London – a
gleaming wall of metal that will rise from the tidal murk”. In the US, the project precipitates overbooked psychiatrists, complaints of  “nightmares of forced
reunion,” forced social gatherings, and home invasion – “The whole
island is ill at ease… all because of that new tunnel getting closer and closer to completion. ” For the UK,  Manaugh wonders whether this would “change the dreams of city residents,” altering London’s and Londoners’ self-perceptions and sense of identity, precipitating “A new confidence. Dreams of survival. Psychoanalysts
report that no one dreams of drowning anymore.”

On one level here, the answers are both uninteresting and obvious: of course,
these sorts of projects would affect the dreams, thoughts, and
nightmares of a city’s residents – after all, those new landmarks would
be a part of the world these people live within. But a less
obvious, or less easily tracked, impact might be postulated here –
that, say, a new bridge between San Francisco and Oakland might subtly
change how San Franciscans think about their peninsular city, and that
this only becomes obvious in retrospect, when someone notices that
prescription rates have changed or the divorce rate has plummeted. It was the psychiatric implication of a new bridge that did it.  Put
another way, if a new highway can have a measurable, and easily
detected, impact on a city’s economic health and administrative
well-being, then could a new highway – or bridge, or tunnel, or flood
wall, or, for that matter, sewage treatment plant – have a detectable
impact on the city’s mental health? After all, these sorts of massive public works “may carry a psychological burden,” the Boston Globe wrote back in 2006.

Somewhere between Foucault and Agamben, Finoki explores familiar themes in micro scales, observing the constituent spaces of a disaggregated panoptic – free-floating, networked architectures of control.  Images of the prisoner boxes were recently obtained from CENTCOM through an FOI request, and published on the rejuvenated Memory Hole website (P.S. I prefer the Memory Hole 1.0 banner text).

For Finoki, prisoner boxes are primarily “another stark reminder that torture is, in and of itself, a space; that is, that torture happens within a space as much as it defines a space – even if it is out in the open for all to see.” More, “sometimes…. only the simplest rudimentary unit of space is all that is required to constitute torture.” There are subtle shades of Arendtian (Eichmann-esque?) banality woven into Finoki’s subtopic:

The prisoner box is anything but elaborate. Look at it, looks like a campsite outhouse. It is far from a specialized torture module of any kind. It does not have the sadistic anatomical engineering of an iron maiden, or even the spectacular proximity of a public thrashing where civic space has been converted into an arena for the collective participation in cruelty. It is very simply and adequately, a box made of plywood. It could be useful for so many things. However, when a person is made to sit inside one in the 100+ degree summer heat of Iraq all day long, week after week – it is then probably the cheapest human oven ever designed. It becomes torture space in its simplest form, reduced to its barest essence; the prisoner box as a minimal cubic space of biopolitics.

And:

Anyway, I guess what I find just as spooky as the existence of the boxes themselves is the ease of their potential erasure from the landscape. When I think about a spatial legacy of the ‘war on terror’, architectural objects and relics that we may look back upon, say, 200 years from now, as a forensic geography of the ‘war on terror’’s narrative of torture, perhaps the way we look back upon the ancient remains of war from the Dark Ages as artifacts of barbarism; or even the more modern ruins of the Cold War as living museums of institutional paranoia – these “prisoner boxes” probably won’t last. They are this way the perfect epitome of the ‘war on terror’’s environmental imprint, or the lack thereof, in that they are made fleeting, detached, improvised, totally exceptional, politically and physically; meaning, they are designed to technically no longer exist once they’ve fulfilled their usefulness. Unlike the colossal shells of megaprisons, they are disappearing acts, blips on the future radars of human rights organizations around the world; collapsible serial boxes for an evidenceless trace of the ‘war on terror’ architectural secrecy.

One wonders at the scaled poesis of space in war. What configuring of identity and community? What locational elisions, battlespace seams? Panoptic, subtopic, urbanoptic; transspatial, dystopic, hypocentric. When do efforts at regulating conflict spaces, mechanisms of governing it, transcend rigid academic disciplinary and professional boundaries? Battlespace poetics: art or science? Doctrine is important, law essential, ethics critical, technology often necessary. But at the end of the day, there must be a singular, creative, intuitive spark prostrating itself at the calloused feet of innovation and progress. 

Right?

If you haven’t already, go subscribe immediately to this blog. I’ve been dropping in on it now and again for a few months, and can’t recommend it enough. The authors post pseudonymously as Diodotus, Empedocles, and Cleitus the Black, who are, according to Elected Swineherd’s self-description: “A political scientist, a conflict analyst and a soldier of misfortune arguing about the gap between national and human security.” More about this hard-hitting brain crew here. I’ve also added it to the COIN-LAB page on CT-NET.

Gents: Drop me a line – consider this an open invitation to guest post at The Complex Terrain Laboratory any time you like, under your aliases or otherwise, on subjects of your choice.

H/T to Charli for reminding me.

I remember once sitting in a cafe in a Sarajevo suburb (of sorts), chatting with a British Army officer about a brilliant piece of travel writing by a lunatic young Scotsman who’d got it into his head to walk across Afghanistan. Actually, he’d walked from Istanbul to Nepal, but what he wrote about and published in a wonderfully clear and austere narrative called The Places in Between, was the Afghanistan portion of the jaunt.

The really interesting fact about that was that he did it in the first half of 2002, when US and Allied forces were relatively new on the ground and still piledriving Al Qa’ida into near oblivion. My British Army colleague had served in Afghanistan around then, and had actually run into Stewart during his walk.  There he was, he commented, "and he had this mangy old dog with him." Stewart had few accoutrements – a walking staff that could double as a latter-day mace, should the need arise for self-defence, and a tired and sorely abused fighting dog, Babur, that he picked up along the way.

For anyone interested in exploring the subtler nuances of refuge, The Places in Between is simply essential. Stewart’s books, too, represent something more substantial than first-hand accounts fit for war junkies and foolhardy romantics. After Afghanistan, Stewart has variously held an academic post at Harvard, served in the Coalition Provisional Authority in Iraq, and established the Turquoise Mountain Foundation in Kabul. For all these accomplishments, it’s his writing that’s especially striking – offering frequently cynical insights into the local dynamics of foreign intervention and the value of cultural knowledge.  I suppose the argument should be that it’s his experiences that elevate the writing, but I know the writing, so that’s what hooks my attention.

In this week’s issue of Time, Stewart takes a sensible poke at How to Save Afghanistan. It’s sure to draw fire. Perhaps this is his entree into the world of US public intellectual life, since the bio sketch appended to the article indicates that "He was recently appointed the Ryan Professor and the director of the Carr Centre for Human Rights Policy at Harvard University." Nothing yet posted at the Carr Centre website about this, but if it’s true, then it’s a big deal. The Carr Centre is home to a certain impassioned, redheaded, Irish-American Pulitzer-winning writer, among other luminaries. It was also where David Petraeus took his incubating counterinsurgency doctrine for human rights vetting before officially releasing it in 2006.