A while back Tim mentioned a great new blog by NYU political science doctoral student Drew Conway, entitled Zero Intelligence Agents, which asks the question “How can the social sciences, mathematics, and computer science combine to affect national security policy?” Indeed. I’ve been meaning to add it to the CT-NET COINLAB page for a while. It’s there now. Go read.

Chris Albon‘s intelligent and focused weblog, War and Health, deals with armed conflict, public health, and human security. Worth reading. I’ve just added it to the CT-NET COINLAB page.

 

I took my revenge after a hundred years, and I only regret that I acted in haste.
-Pashtun Proverb 

A few weeks ago CTLab’s esteemed Managing Editor tagged me with the equivalent of a chain-letter. Now normally, this is the kind of thing I flush down the toilet with extreme prejudice, and walk briskly away, whistling a merry tune as I go. In this case, I thought it better to lie in wait, lull my tormentor into a complacent stupor, and then pounce. And so it goes. 

The rules are simple:

1. Link to your tagger and post these rules on your blog.
2. Share 7 facts about yourself on your blog, some random, some weird.
3. Tag 7 people at the end of your post by leaving their names as well as links to their blogs.
4. Let them know they are tagged by leaving a comment on their blog.
5. Present an image of martial discord from whatever period or situation you’d like.

Because we’re a creative and irreverent lot, recipients sometimes add new rules, like here, or duck full compliance, like here. So I do both, adding rules 6 and 7, thereby completing the meme and killing it dead in one fell swoop.

6. Introduce a martial proverb.
7. Create a feedback loop and spike the meme.

XXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXX

Rule 1 – Check
Rule 2:

1. I served four years in 1st Bn Princess Patricia’s Canadian Light Infantry. With a name like that, you HAVE to be hard. I spent another few years in the Canadian Army doing something else.

2. I’ve followed a non-traditional educational and professional trajectory, yet despite all that somehow ended up doing exactly what I always figured I’d be doing, through a series of unlikely but fortunate circumstances that could have been neither predicted nor planned for. Go figure. Call me a queue-jumper.

3. I rescued my three year old dog Rufus, who looks like a golden retriever but is really a street mongrel, from the blown out shell of  a house in a frontline suburb of Sarejevo. He was eight weeks old at the time.

4. I have a thing for brainy Irish-American redheads.

5. I once stood smack in the middle of a very large, partially excavated, secondary mass grave site. The stink of decay was heavy and cloying. All women and children. And that’s what makes me a true believer.

6.  I like it when it rains. I especially like running in the rain. I also like running in -25, with at least several inches of snow on the ground. I’m Canadian, what did you expect?

7. I must not fear. Fear is the mind killer. Fear is the little death that brings total obliteration… 

Rule 3 – Check (refer back to Rule 1, elaborated below)
Rule 4 – Check
Rule 5 – Check (see top of post – that’s Rikki-Tikki-Tavi. Yes, Kipling, this is a COIN blog after all)
Rule 6 – Check (see the beginning of this post)
Rule 7 – Check (refer back to Rule 1 through Rule 3, elaborated below, and supported conceptually by the Rule 6 meme)

TAGGED:

1. Tim Stevens
2. Tim Stevens
3. Tim Stevens
4. Tim Stevens
5. Tim Stevens
6. Tim Stevens 
7. Tim Stevens 

Done. You can all thank me later for sparing the web more chain-meming. And Tim can thank me for creating excessive superfluous links to Ubiwar. But the MEME DIES HERE…

Now get back to work! 

My paper proposal, on "Regulating Complex Terrain in Counterinsurgency", has been accepted as part of a panel on counterinsurgency at the British International Studies Association Meeting, at the University of Exeter in December. This is what the panel looks like, from the BISA 2008 provisional programme:

CHALLENGES AND COMPLEXITIES IN COUNTER-INSURGENCY (Insurgencies and Small Wars w/grp)
Convenor: Andrew Mumford (Warwick)
Chair: Sergio Catignani (EUI)
Michael Innes (UCL) Regulating ‘Complex Terrain’ in Counterinsurgency
Huw Bennett (King’s) Barbarity in British Counter-Insurgency: The Strategic Role of Coercion Against Non-Combatants, 1945-2008
Armando Geller (Manchester Metropolitan) and Nanda Wijermans (University of Groningen) Modelling Crowd and Riot Emergence in Afghanistan: An Evidence-Driven Opinion Dynamics Model
Mark Knight (International Organisation for Migration [IOM]) Hardware and Software: Non-Military Capacities and Concepts in Counter-Insurgency
Isaiah Wilson (US Military Academy, West Point) Supplying Insurgencies and Counter-Insurgencies

Charli Carpenter, an Assistant Professor of at the University of Pittsburg’s Graduate School of Public and International Affairs, has just published a short piece on the Geneva Conventions in the war on terror in The National Interest. Writing at Duck of Minerva, where she’s a contributor, Carpenter notes the challenges involved with crossing from academic publishing to  writing for a policy audience (or at least, involved with dealing with differing degrees of editorial license). More important, though, is the subject of her paper. In "Geneva 2.0", she sums up many of the basic issues that inform this particular debate, getting right to the heart of the problem when she writes

In January 2002, then–White House legal counsel Alberto Gonzales wrote a memorandum to President Bush in which he argued that “the current paradigm renders quaint” many of the provisions of the 1949 Geneva Conventions. This remark set the stage for a series of efforts by the Bush administration to claim that the Geneva Conventions did not apply to the global war on terror, that they applied to some detainees but not others or, at a minimum, that the president is entitled to interpret the treaty’s “grave breaches” clauses as he pleases.

These and subsequent actions have set off what some have called a crisis in the laws of war, ironically pitting the U.S. government (perhaps the most Geneva‐compliant superpower in history) against human‐rights‐minded elites whose admirable goal is to promote the very principles for which American political culture has long stood. The arguments of the Bush administration when
it comes to torture, prisoner-of-war status and extraordinary rendition have been met with outrage by the international community, constitutional scholars and human-rights organizations like Amnesty International, which has referred to Guantánamo Bay as the “gulag of our times.”

But the polarization of these two camps obscures the broad middle ground that exists between them. Both have forgotten that the laws of war always represented a compromise between humanitarian principles and security needs. Advocates for applying current international humanitarian law to all detainees in the global war on terror may hold the moral high ground, but they often misconstrue the political logic of the Geneva regime and its historical context. Those who argue the conventions can and should be disregarded at great powers’ discretion gravely underestimate the importance of the regime to securing U.S. interests in the new century.

A lot of work’s been done on this subject, not the least of which has been the New Battlefields, Old Laws (NBOL) project at the Maxwell School – the same project that provided the inspiration and impetus for the creation of CTLab. Although National Interest isn’t providing free access to the full article, Carpenter kindly provides a footnoted draft at DoM. I’ve read it, and it’s worth the investment.

To punctuate, Carpenter argues 

The contemporary problem—for both governments and transnational rights advocates—is that neither sovereignty nor battle space is what it used to be. The solution is neither to blindly promote adherence to the letter of the law nor to continue to willfully flout its spirit. Instead, both the U.S. government and members of the transnational human‐rights network should seek to update and clarify these rules through an international conference that would lead toward a new additional protocol to the Geneva Conventions.

Absolutely.