Showing posts from category conflict.
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2008 Failed States Index Highlights Remarkable Gains—and Losses
›June 26, 2008 // By Sonia SchmanskiThe 2008 Failed States Index, released on Monday by the Fund for Peace and Foreign Policy magazine, draws attention to the increasingly interconnected spheres of politics, environment, population, and security. The Index contains a number of widely anticipated inclusions, as well as a few surprises. Somalia, ranked third last year, is currently ranked first—a consequence of its weak transitional government, offshore pirates, and a refugee crisis that saw some 700,000 people flee Mogadishu last year alone.
But the news isn’t all bad. Among the bright spots in the Index:=- Liberia, still progressing on the path to stability after being last year’s most improved country, thanks to robust anti-corruption efforts and the resettlement of almost 100,000 refugees;
- The Ivory Coast, recently rocked by electoral discord, gaining stability as a result of a new peace agreement between between the rebels in the north of the country and the government-controlled south; and
- Haiti, despite recent protests against rising food prices, because of security improvements in Port-Au-Prince.
Both Bangladesh and Pakistan stumbled in the rankings this year, as did Israel, which has been steadily losing ground in the Index for some time as a result of deteriorating conditions in the West Bank and marked economic disparities. Bangladesh saw a number of destabilizing events this year, including postponed elections, a divided government, protracted emergency rule, and the devastating November cyclone, which displaced some 1.5 million people and destroyed vast tracts of agricultural land. Similarly, neighboring Pakistan suffered under the imposition of martial law, with the assassination of Benazir Bhutto creating serious questions about the country’s future.
Natural resources, the Index makes clear, can be a double-edged sword for developing countries. They offer the potential for huge amounts of state revenue, but there is no guarantee that citizens will benefit. Whether that revenue is distributed equitably is a critical determinant of stability. The authors write that “oil continues to be more burden than boon to the world’s most vulnerable states,” as government regimes often use profit from natural resource extraction to finance militaries and suppress opposition rather than foster development. For instance, a former finance minister from Sudan claims that President Oman Hassan al-Bashir directs over two-thirds of Sudan’s oil revenue to defense spending. Record-high food prices and high levels of inflation also contribute to state weakness; combine these factors with unpredictable natural events, many of which have rocked the world in the past year, and, as the Index authors put it, “the cracks of vulnerability open wider.” -
Weekly Reading
›An alert from USAID’s Famine Early Warning Systems Network warns that despite generally good rains, “conflict, livestock disease, and high prices for cereals and other essential goods have minimized the extent to which pastoralists can benefit from these rains, undermining their recovery from drought and elevating their food insecurity, which is evidenced by alarming rates of child malnutrition in several areas.”
The UN Security Council held a special session on gender-based violence this week, and the New York Times’ Nicholas Kristof applauded the Council’s (belated) attention to the issue. ECSP recently sponsored an event on gender-based violence in conflict and post-conflict situations.
East Timor’s citizens are demanding that the government revoke an MOU signed with an Indonesian company that would grant the company 100,000 hectares of land to plant sugarcane. -
In Egypt, Record Food Prices Lead to Family Planning
›June 12, 2008 // By Geoffrey D. DabelkoAt Egypt’s National Population Conference on Monday, Egyptian President Hosni Mubarak—whose government has struggled to respond to recent civil unrest over skyrocketing food prices and bread shortages—told attendees that high population growth is a “major challenge and fundamental obstacle” to development. The following day, Egyptian Minister of Health and Population Hatem el-Gabali announced an $80 million national family planning program with the slogan “Two children per family—a chance for a better life.” Egypt’s current fertility rate is 2.7 children per woman.
With a population of 81 million, Egypt is the 16th most populous country in the world, and, according to Philippe Fargues of the American University in Cairo (AUC), excluding the desert, Egypt has the highest population density in the world—twice that of Bangladesh.
Is the government’s plan a productive long-term response to the food crisis? How can it be part of a larger package? Or is population a distraction from the real issue of corruption, as identified by interviewees in the Washington Post article where I first read about the programs.
I posed these questions to a demography and security listserv and got some interesting responses. According to Valerie Hudson of Brigham Young University, a political scientist known best for her book Bare Branches on the security implications of imbalanced male-female population ratios: “Mubarak would do more to achieve his goal of 2.0 children per woman by a focused plan to raise the status of women, for example, by:- Outlawing polygamy, or erecting such high legal barriers to it that it becomes impractical
- Fully implementing CEDAW [the Convention on the Elimination of Discrimination Against Women]
- Enforcing the ban on FGM [female genital mutilation]; 97% of Egyptian women are circumcised
- Educating women on a parity with men; the median number of years of schooling for men is 6.3; that for women is 4.4
- Raising average age at first marriage for rural women (current average is 19)
- Creating more parity in family law for women in matters such as divorce, inheritance, etc.—all of which can be found in CEDAW.”
“I don’t think population pressure is a distraction from the real issue of corruption; though the government of Egypt is indeed corrupt by developed-world standards (or maybe by any standard). Corruption, which is symptomatic of state weakness, limits the ability of the Egyptian government to address this problem credibly and effectively. But it doesn’t mean they are wrong about the problem.
I was actually struck by the modesty of official ambition to reduce the fertility rate from 2.7 (which is slightly above the world median, apparently) to 2.0 (which I’m guessing is pretty close to the middle). This assumes that, basically, a steady state population of, say, 100M Egyptians would be sustainable indefinitely. I’m not so sure of that. The impact of anticipated climate change on Egypt may prove quite formidable by the end of this century. I’m not sure a leveling off after some additional increase will do the trick….Too pessimistic? I hope so.” -
Climate Change, Resource Scarcity Motivating Local-Level Conflict in West Africa
›June 10, 2008 // By Daniel GleickThis weekend, Jan Egeland, UN Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon’s special adviser on conflict, concluded a trip through Burkina Faso, Mali, and Niger to study the effects of climate change on the Sahel. The “trip has convinced me that there is a very clear link between climate induced resource competition and conflict, and I will be using what I have seen here to convince sceptics ahead of the Copenhagen meeting in 2009,” writes Egeland in one of his daily dispatches to IRIN News.
Climate change is causing diminished rainfall in the Sahel, and what rain there is comes in unpredictable flood/drought cycles, which alternately sweep away and wither crops. Local farmers adapt to these changes by using unsustainable farming practices, which may produce higher initial yields, but ultimately lead to lower long-term yields. Growing populations further strain these countries’ shrinking water supplies.
With limited water and fertile land, conflict and the potential for conflict are on the rise. “As was explained to me by the Nigerien minister of water who travelled with me in one of the many cars in our convoy through the desert, there are already many conflicts between and among nomads and agricultural people in Niger, and between various ethnic groups, because of the scarcity of resources,” writes Egeland. “Others have estimated that around Lake Chad there are as many as 30 or more named armed groups, and the potential for increased conflict is endless.” These conflicts are almost universally local—in Mali alone, “there are hundreds of small and quite localized conflicts,” he says. The brewing and active conflicts fuel arms trafficking, a security concern in its own right.
Egeland believes that major international investment in climate change adaptation is important to reducing both poverty and the potential for conflict in the region. He calls for developed countries to provide both monetary and technical aid to African countries struggling to adapt to the effects of climate change, and he plans to continue his advocacy in preparation for the 2009 climate meeting in Copenhagen. -
Climate Change, Migration, Conflict: Are the Links Overblown?
›June 9, 2008 // By Wilson Center Staff“Experts say a third of Bangladesh’s coastline could be flooded if the sea rises one metre in the next 50 years, creating an additional 20 million Bangladeshis displaced from their homes and farms,” says a recent article from Reuters, echoing a refrain about the links between climate change, migration, and instability that has become common in news stories and think tank reports over the past several months.
Yet not everyone agrees that climate change will lead to massive, destabilizing human migrations. “Contrary to conjecture from security researchers, we find little evidence that migration will exacerbate already volatile situations in the developing world,” write Clionadh Raleigh and Lisa Jordan in “Assessing the Impact of Climate Change on Migration and Conflict,” a paper prepared for the March 2008 World Bank “Social Dimensions of Climate Change” workshop. “As the people most affected by climate change are typically the poorest and least powerful within a country, they are less capable of waging significant conflicts to redress grievances against neighbors or governments.” In addition, they maintain, environmental migration tends to be short-term and internal, further lessening the likelihood that it will lead to conflict.
Although environmental degradation can increase people’s vulnerability to floods and landslides, so can “unequal patterns of asset ownership and income, rural land tenure systems, population growth in marginal areas, and governments’ land access policies,” say Raleigh and Jordan, and it is important that climate change not make natural disaster risk analysis one-dimensional. The authors agree that Bangladesh will be highly vulnerable to floods and wind storms in the future, but argue that this does not necessarily make them potential “climate migrants,” as even people who are very vulnerable to climactic changes can—and do—develop resilience strategies for dealing with gradual and extreme changes. -
Not All Water Cooperation Is Pretty
›As Karin Bencala and Geoff Dabelko point out in the current issue of Columbia University’s Journal of International Affairs, transboundary rivers and aquifers all over the world can, and do, provide opportunities to bring riparian parties together. We can identify a degree of cooperation in the management of most of the transboundary water resources in Asia, the Middle East, and North Africa. But now is the time to stop the pendulum from swinging too far towards mistaken notions of “water peace.” Tensions linger on the Tigris and simmer on the Jordan. The Nile is allocated in a remarkably inequitable and unsustainable manner, as are many of the rivers falling in all directions off the Tibetan plateau. We must continue to question regimes that preserve inequity, treaties that are ineffective “paper tigers” (Bernauer 2003, p. 547), and organisations designed chiefly as sinks for lending and donor agencies. We will be doing the world no great service if our gaze shifts to under-qualified examples of cooperation and away from the root causes of water conflict.
We should be wary of applying the “cooperation” label to transboundary interactions where asymmetric cooperation merely poisons relations and prolongs unfair arrangements. Cooperation has many faces, and not all of them are pretty. The 1994 Israel-Jordan Peace Treaty is regularly cited as a model of cooperation, for example, yet as Itay Fischhendler (2008) (subscription required) has shown, the ambiguity built into the agreement favours the more powerful (Israeli) side. In private conversations, Jordanian officials concede frustration that the agreement they signed fell far short of guaranteeing Jordan an equitable share of the waters. Last month, the Economist highlighted several other cases of such asymmetric water cooperation.
Recent efforts by Friends of the Earth Middle East (FOEME) demonstrate cooperation of a completely different nature. FOEME’s Good Water Neighbors project brings together mayors from Jordanian, Palestinian, and Israeli towns on the Jordan River in an effort to improve its quality. The project, like the organisation itself, represents all sides in equal measure. This equitable cooperation should be the standard analysts and policymakers shoot for.
We must be careful not to divorce small-scale cooperation from the broader water conflict within which it takes place, however. At the state level, the distribution of transboundary freshwater between Israel and the Palestinian territories remains an inequitable 90-10 split. The Israeli-Palestinian Joint Water Committee (JWC) established following the 1995 Oslo II interim agreement gives the Israeli side an effective veto over even basic rainwater catchment projects (for instance, in the southern West Bank). Multiple USAID, European, and UN development projects remain stalled because they have not cleared the JWC’s triple hurdle requiring that all water-related projects obtain Israeli technical (fine), political (?) and military (!) approval. Jan Selby (2003) (subscription required) insists this is not cooperation, but “domination dressed up as cooperation.”
While asymmetric, dominative, strategic, self-interested, and token cooperation all fall short of violent conflict, we should bear in mind that the tensions relating to the uglier faces of cooperation do not disappear with time. At the very least, treaties must be structured more equitably, in accordance with the basic water-sharing principles of international water law. They should also include re-visiting clauses, to modify the agreement when changes in politics or climate present the people dependent on the waters with a different set of circumstances. The ongoing water negotiations between Israel and Palestine and the imminent negotiations between Israel and Syria make understanding water cooperation much more than an academic indulgence. We must all push where we can to get it right.
Mark Zeitoun is a fellow at the London School of Economics’ Centre for Environmental Policy and Governance and heads the London School of Economics/King’s College London London Water Research Group. -
Scarcity and Abundance Collide in the Niger Delta
›May 29, 2008 // By Sonia SchmanskiThe Movement for the Emancipation of the Niger Delta (MEND) has claimed responsibility for a May 26 night attack on a Shell oil facility. A government spokesman confirmed the explosion, suggesting “that explosives might have been used by miscreants.” Through its website, MEND claims that 11 deaths resulted from the blast, although officials deny that anyone was hurt. The Niger Delta has long been plagued by violence, including the January 2006 kidnapping of four Shell workers by MEND and the October 1998 explosion that killed more than 1,000 people in Jesse, Nigeria. These and other episodes of violence—including pipeline sabotaging and kidnapping—have regularly disrupted the Niger Delta. Anger over increased economic marginalization—in 2006, Nigeria ranked 159th out of 177 countries on the UN Human Development Index—distrust of the national government, and a lack of effective avenues of recourse for those left behind by Nigeria’s oil boom have driven violent protests against the state and international oil corporations. Moreover, local people, many of whom live on less than $1 per day, sometimes cut holes in the pipes to siphon oil, which can inadvertently cause dangerous explosions.
Earlier this month, more than 100 people were killed when a construction vehicle struck an oil pipeline in Nigeria, reports the Nigerian Red Cross. Reports indicate that this event was an accident, but the explosion nevertheless prompted the editorial board of the Abuja-based newspaper Leadership to suggest that “all those who live near oil pipelines should consider relocating to safer places,” and to condemn the “wealth-seeking, greedy soldiers and policemen who are supposed to protect us and our property from criminals.”
For more on the politics and conflict surrounding oil in Nigeria, see this article by Kenneth Omeje, a research fellow at the University of Bradford in the United Kingdom, which examines Nigeria’s experience with oil extraction, the paradoxical circumstance of simultaneous resource scarcity and abundance, and the violent outbursts spawned by perceived government mismanagement of the country’s oil reserves. -
U.S. Army War College Report Says We Ignore Climate Change Security Risks “At Our Peril”
›May 20, 2008 // By Sonia SchmanskiThe narrow window of opportunity to address climate change makes it imperative that we “remove our heads from the proverbial sand,” writes editor Carolyn Pumphrey in “Global Climate Change: National Security Implications,” released by the U.S. Army War College earlier this month. The report aggregates the presentations given at a 2007 colloquium by the same name in Chapel Hill, North Carolina, and features contributions from several authors who have worked recently with ECSP, including Kent Hughes Butts, Joshua Busby, and John T. Ackerman (who has also been a guest contributor to the New Security Beat).
The risks associated with climate change include the spread of disease, severe drought, and coastal flooding, which could lead to decreased agricultural output, mass migration, and other challenges. Pumphrey writes that while social scientists are not in full agreement that violence will result from these developments, conference participants agreed that climate change presents a serious threat, “compounded by a context of rapid population growth, increasing economic appetite, pockets of extreme violence, and global interdependence.” By inflaming latent tensions, climate change will “complicate American foreign policy in a wide variety of ways,” says Pumphrey.
Since the Senate Armed Services Committee called environmental destruction a “growing national security threat” in the late 1990s, some effort has been devoted to crafting a U.S. response, but politicians have hesitated to act on uncertain scientific data, says Pumphrey, arguing additionally that the creeping dangers associated with climate change have only recently begun to captivate the public imagination, and that attempts to spice them up can lead to inaccurate exaggeration. Finally, Pumphrey says, pervasive overconfidence in the ability of “American ingenuity” to outpace emerging dangers has hindered decisive action.
Pumphrey calls for a three-pronged strategy that includes “better intelligence, better science, and better understanding of the relationships between such things as violence, society, and climate change.” She maintains that we must slow the rate of climate change and prepare for unavoidable changes, take action to alleviate international social distress, and prepare to address potential conflicts. And, she notes, this is “a job for everyone,” not just the military.
