A team of three academics – Jerry Ratcliffe of Temple University in the U.S., Shane D. Johnson of University College London in the U.K., and Michael Townsley from Griffith University in Australia  – have published their research on quantifcation of the "Space Time Dynamics of Insurgent Activity in Iraq".  Still in press so not yet available to the public, the article is forthcoming in the Palgrave MacMillan periodical Security Journal. Here’s the abstract:

This paper describes analyses to determine whether there is a space-time dependency for insurgent activity. The data used for the research were 3 months of terrorist incidents attributed to the insurgency in Iraq during U.S. occupation and the methods used are based on a body of work well established using police recorded crime data. It was found that events clustered in space and time more than would be expected if the events were unrelated, suggesting communication of risk in space and time and potentially informing next event prediction. The analysis represents a fi rst but important step and suggestions for further analysis addressing prevention or suppression of future incidents are briefl y discussed.

My first impression on reading this was that the authors had made the standard error of either conflating terrrorist and insurgent spatial syntax, or insufficiently distinguishing one from the other. They haven’t done either. This is important work, innovating in an area of knowledge long predicated on historically-contingent macro theories of guerrilla warfare. It treats insurgency through a criminological lens and applies fine-resolution police crime mapping and conflict prediction approaches to conditions in Iraq. The authors draw from rational choice theory, based on the notion that 

we should consider terrorism as a type of crime and that the decision-making processes of criminals and terrorists are broadly similar. Terrorists have certain goals (both short and long term), and are constantly evaluating opportunities to achieve these in terms of a risk and reward calculus. Like offenders, terrorists have limited resources (money, time and personnel) and attempt to evade the attention of organisations dedicated to preventing their activity. In short, attacks are carried when the perceived reward exceeds the perceived risk. In concrete terms:

(1) not all targets are equally attractive to terrorists; and

(2) terrorists are unlikely to be able to strike at will because they are constrained by finite resources or excessive risk. 

Their methodology relied on "an epidemiological model of infectious diseases to test for the communicability of future risk" (p. 4), something they’d used previously to assess the potential spread of burglary risk. Finer resolution scoping of the problem, they argue, is well suited to supporting the tactical-level prediction necessary for operational counter-network collection, analysis, and defeat. But, they acknowledge, it doesn’t really help with strategic level threat assessments.

I won’t spoil the fun by outlining their findings; stay tuned to Security Journal to read them for yourself. What’s worth noting at this point is that sub-tactical/micro-spatial phenomena are being investigated with this kind of precision – essentially driving our understading of the phenomenon from the bottom-up before we’ve even indexed any macro-spatial and multi-dimensional variables. This is less a comment on the article than it is a critique of the state of the art. 

In April I tagged Steve Coll’s write-up in the New Yorker on free-speaking senior military officers and their treatment by a thin-skinned White House ("Iraqi Jabberwocky"). The discussion was a good lead-in to the events of the past week, which saw senior US Air Force management sacked for a variety of reasons. Two new publications germane to the issue are worth reading:

• Robert L. Bateman, "Cause For Relief: Why Presidents No Longer Fire Generals." Armed Forces Journal (June 2008).
• Martin L. Cook. "Revolt of the Generals: A Case Study in Professional Ethics." Parameters (Spring 2008).

Historian Mark Grimsley, at Blog them Out of the Stone Age, notes of the Bateman piece: "It was conceived and written long before Secretary of Defense Robert Gates’s recent relief of the Secretary of the Air Force and Air Force Chief of Staff, but I would imagine that this event hasn’t altered Bob’s overall perspective — though surely he must take it as a positive sign."

Re. Betz vs. Mazarr: not taking a side on this one, because it’s not an either/or issue – except to suggest that the crystal clear answer to the question "which major conventional aggression are we talking about" is the next one. Obviously.

Three points:

1. The question that consistently rears its head in asymmetric scraps is whose interests are served by the actions of irregular forces and their outcomes? Such interests almost always defers to those of states. Surrogacy is, like sanctuary, and extremely elastic concept. The implication of this is that irregulars as extensions of statecraft are de facto components of the conventional arsenal, notwithstanding their roles as ultimately autonomous agents.

2. Definitionalism and categorization can also too easily and quickly become excuses for glossing over contingency. The trend has been to consider local conflict detail more carefully, not default to macro perspectives. Granularity is the new spatial mantra.

3. "War amongst the people" is an essentialist crock. We dealt with that in the 1990s. Then, it was thought of in slightly less charitable, genetically-embedded terms: "they’ve always been that way", and intervening or helping is an exercise in futility, so let’s not bother. That kind of fundamentalism doesn’t sit well in this corner. We know R2P is dead – witness how neatly we now respect Sudan’s and Burma/Myanmar’s sovereign borders. That’s no reason to concede to neo-con pap.

WTF?!?

Bryan Finoki’s latest entry at Subtopia, Of Steel and Bone, commenting on a New York Times Picture of the Day for 30 May. The NYT’s caption identifies it like so:  "In Bangalore, India, Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) members watch through a fence as their leader B.S. Yeddyurappa, not shown, is sworn in as the chief minister of the southern state of Karnataka. The party won the largest share of government seats in the recent state elections." Bryan, because he’s like that, looks a little more deeply into the meaning of it.

"Intriguing to me is this anonymous chain of arms and hands seeping through the fence", he writes, "a fence equally anonymous, and a scene that perhaps could be found dispatched at so many different coordinates around the world."

It may not be intentional, but the way the photo reduces humanity to a random assembly of arms and hands detached from any bodies casts an effective portrayal of how refugees and migrants are perceived and treated by national governments in the current geopolitical climate. As if the detained, or even those just enclosed – more so, those who have been disenfranchised – aren’t even seen as full bodied human beings, but as an excess of ‘othered’ limbs seeking to worm their way past the wrought iron gates, resting their tired elbows and emptied hands before recocking them towards some sort of handout.

He wonders "if this image of bare-knuckled laborers provides an accurate critique of how the media distorts representations of the world’s excluded populations, or whether it is merely another dehumanizing consequence of the media".

Either way, I find something subtly revolutionary in this photo – a suggestion that fences alone wont stop the power of unwanteds or completely shun them out from finding their spaces in or through the gaps. There is a solidarity in these arms lurking below the depiction of the fence as being able to hold back a mob, that symbolizes how – not only is the border fence itself forged equally of bone and steel – but the human connections interwoven in the border are far more powerful than any bolted or welded barricade. To not see this human side is to accept then that the humanity in this photo is simply just another piece of the fence itself, as if body parts are an acceptable supplemental materiality in the composition of the barrier.

There’s more. Go read it.