Showing posts from category foreign policy.
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Another Year, Another Debate: Is the Failed States Index Simply Misnamed?
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Every year, there are mixed reactions over the rankings and the efficacy of the Fund for Peace’s Failed States Index (FSI), the eighth edition of which was released in June. But this year, the criticism seems especially intense.
“Failed means there is no way back. Failed means a binary division between those countries that are salvageable and those beyond redemption. It is a word reserved for marriages and exams. It does not belong in a pragmatic debate,” wrote Claire Leigh for The Guardian in June.
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Emmanuel Karagiannis: Mediterranean Oil and Gas Discoveries Could Change Regional Alignments, Global Energy Equation
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“The discovery of gas reserves in the eastern Mediterranean comes at a time when world demand for energy is growing rapidly and many are questioning the reliability of supplies from North Africa and the Middle East,” said Emmanuel Karagiannis, assistant professor of Russian and post-Soviet politics at the University of Macedonia, in an interview at the Wilson Center.The newly-discovered fields contain about 122 trillion cubic feet of recoverable natural gas reserves, 25 trillion of which are located within Israeli territorial waters. “That’s twice the reserves Libya has,” according to Karagiannis. The remaining fields have been claimed by the Republic of Cyprus, the Turkish Republic of Northern Cyprus, Syria, and Lebanon.
Europe currently depends on Russia for most of its gas supplies, so the new fields could provide an “important alternative source for European economies,” said Karagiannis.
The discovery also has the potential to increase stability in the region by serving as an incentive for nations to work together. “For example, Israel and Cyprus have come closer to each other in many respects, including military cooperation,” Karagiannis said. Greece and Israel have also strengthened their relationship, in part due to the historical relationship between Cyprus and Greece but also because the latter could serve as an energy hub to transport gas throughout Europe, he said. “In effect Israel, Greece, and Cyprus could form a new axis of stability in the region.”
“Turkey can also play a significant part in the business of transporting energy resources to Europe,” Karagiannis said, but Syria and Lebanon, the two other countries that lie adjacent to the newly discovered gas reserves, are less likely to benefit in the near future from the find, given their current political circumstances. “It’s very difficult to imagine their participation in the regional energy projects,” he said. Lebanon has tried and failed to sell offshore exploratory licenses twice due to its lack of a state petroleum administration, while the current uprising against President Bashar al-Assad is preventing any progress in Syria.
In part as a result of these political challenges, the gas fields also have the potential to generate conflict in the region. There will be a divide between “haves and have-nots,” explained Karagiannis. According to a report by the Institute for National Strategic Studies, “piping Israeli gas to the RoC [Republic of Cyprus] and then onto Turkey, which could be the gateway to the European market, is unlikely due to current tensions between Ankara, the RoC, and Tel Aviv.” Since the discovery of the fields, “Turkey has already issued military threats against Cyprus in order to stop the gas exploration process that is currently taking place in the Cypriot Exclusive Economic Zone,” Karagiannis said. The Israeli government issued a response to the threat, stating that they are committed to protecting energy infrastructure in the region.
The first new natural gas field in the region is expected to begin full-scale production this year, with two additional fields coming on-line over the next six years.
Keenan Dillard is a cadet at the United States Military Academy at West Point and an intern with the Woodrow Wilson Center’s Environmental Change and Security Program.
Sources: Institute for National Strategic Studies, Noble Energy Inc., Turkish Weekly, U.S. Geological Survey. -
Population Aging: A Demographic and Geographic Overview
›The original version of this article, by Richard Cincotta, appeared on the National Intelligence Council’s Global Trends 2030 Blog. It is the first post in a series on population aging, featuring Jack Goldstone, Richard Jackson, Jennifer Dabbs Sciubba, Ronald Lee, Andrew Mason, Toshi Yoshihara, Elizabeth H Stephen, David Coleman, and Eric Kaufmann.
This series, Population Aging to 2030, begins with an introductory essay aimed at familiarizing readers with some of the demographic and geographic particulars of this phenomenon, and with several key demographic terms. The term most in need of definition is, of course, “population aging.” -
Visualizing Complex Vulnerability in Africa: The CCAPS Climate-Conflict Mapping Tool
›“Every crisis is complex, and the Sahel is no exception,” wrote USAID Assistant Administrator Nancy Lindborg in a recent Huffington Post article that called for “smarter programming and a coordivenated response” to chronic crises. “A regional drought has been overlaid with instability stemming from the coup in Mali and conflict in the northern part of that country where armed militant groups have forced the suspension of critical relief operations” and led to refugee movement into neighboring countries simultaneously challenged by drought and crop infestation. Understanding the complexity of this type of crisis, let alone visualizing the multiple factors that come into play, is a growing challenge for policymakers and analysts.
Enter version 2.0 of a mapping tool created by the Climate Change and African Political Stability Program (CCAPS) housed in the Robert S. Strauss Center for International Security and Law, based at the University of Texas, Austin.
In collaboration with the College of William and Mary, Trinity College, and the University of North Texas, and with funding by the U.S. Department of Defense’s Minerva Initiative, CCAPS originally launched the mapping tool in March of this year. The map is powered by mapping and data tools from Esri and allows users to view any combination of datasets on international development projects, national governance indicators, incidences of conflict, and climate vulnerability data.
With an intuitive interface and compelling visuals, the mapping tool is a valuable resource for policy analysts and researchers to assess the complex interactions that take place among these environmental, political, and social factors. Advanced filters allow the user to identify a subset of conflicts and aid projects and there are nine base map styles from which to choose.The mapping tool is anything but static. The team is constantly working to refine and enhance it through the inclusion of additional indicators and improvement of the interface. The updated version now includes CCAP’s new Social Conflict in Africa Database, which tracks a broad range of social and political unrest, and their partners’ real-time conflict dataset, the Armed Conflict Location and Event Dataset (ACLED), which tracks real-time conflict data. Impressively, the ACLED data will be updated weekly.
I asked CCAPS program manager Ashley Moran to clarify how the governance indicators work in the model. She explained:The national governance indicators are included in one of four baskets that make up the climate vulnerability model…and represent four potential sources of vulnerability: physical exposure to climate-related hazards, population density, household and community resilience, and governance and political violence. They used the term “basket” since most include several indicators that reflect the full dimensions of that source of vulnerability. The fourth basket includes five national governance indicators and one indicator of political violence.
Moran also shared plans to add more detailed national governance data to the map:We are developing a mapping tool specifically for the climate vulnerability model, which will allow users to see the component parts of the model. It will allow users to re-weight the baskets (e.g. if a user thought governance should have more weight within the model since the government response to climate hazards is key), and it will also allow users to examine an area’s vulnerability to just one or two baskets of the user’s particular interest (instead of all four baskets combined as the tool does now). When we launch this, a user will essentially be able to see the vulnerability model disaggregated into its component parts, so they’ll be able to map just the governance data in the model, if they want.
In the coming months, the CCAPS team will add more detailed historical and projected data on climate vulnerability, data on disaster response capacity, as well as international aid projects coded for climate relevance.
Each of these datasets on their own are a wealth of vital information, but understanding how they intersect and the potential impact of their interactions is crucial to improving our understanding of them individually and collectively and creating responses that are timely and long-lasting.
If you’re in the San Diego area next week, check out Ashley Moran’s presentation of the mapping tool at the Esri International User Conference and the Worldwide Human Geography Data Working Group.
Sources: The Climate Change and African Political Stability Program, The Huffington Post.
Image Credit: CCAPS -
World Population Day 2012: Looking Beyond Reproductive Health
›How should the seven billion or so of us on Earth mark World Population Day? Today, major global players are focusing on increasing access to family planning around the world. But there are other important aspects to population that also deserve our sustained attention.
The links between demography and development have come into the limelight over the last few months, first as advocates decried the last minute removal of reproductive rights language from the Rio+20 outcome document and now as the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation prepares a massive funding push for reproductive health (starting today, not coincidentally).
“Multiple crises – food, fuel, and financial – have caused significant suffering and served as a wake-up call about the need to pay far more attention to the building blocks of sustainable development,” UN Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon says in an address for today. “Reproductive health is an indispensable part of the sustainable development equation.”
The sustainable development connection is fairly obvious. Environmental destruction in some of the most biodiversity-rich parts of the world has complex but significant population drivers, as Wilson Center consultant Laurie Mazur explains:Human impact on the environment is mediated by a host of factors, including culture, technology, institutions, and market forces. And inequitable socioeconomic systems mean that some human beings have far greater impact than others.
“Often, the value of biodiversity becomes apparent only when it is lost,” Mazur continues. “For example, with the global decline of honeybee populations, growers can now calculate the monetary value of pollination services that were once provided for free by nature. ‘Bee pollination is worth $190 billion,’ said Pavan Sukhdev, a Yale environmental economist, in an interview with Bloomberg. ‘But when did a bee ever send you an invoice?’”
But some generalizations can be made. We live on a planet dominated and transformed by human activity. As we have become more numerous, we have also become more adept at altering ecosystems for human use, replacing species-rich natural landscapes with simpler monocultures.
In other areas, population drivers threaten more basic scarcities: food and water, which in turn impede development and cost human lives. Some of the most successful efforts to address these relationships have combined women’s empowerment, family planning, and basic health interventions with site-based conservation and livelihood efforts.
But besides reproductive rights, there are other important aspects of population that deserve attention on this day.
The demographic dividend – a concept that marries population dynamics and development economics – requires more than just fertility decline to take effect in countries. Economic and social policies that prepare and enable young people to enter the workforce are just as important.
And the Arab Spring helps illustrate the complex relationship between population and democracy. “Among the five countries where revolt took root, those with the earliest success in ousting autocratic leaders also had the most mature age structures and the least youthful populations,” writes Wilson Center consultant and demographer Elizabeth Leahy Madsen. The work of fellow Wilson Center consulting demographer Richard Cincotta shows that countries with very young age structures are prone both to higher incidence of civil conflict and undemocratic governance. What happens next in Egypt, Libya, Yemen, and Syria will further test the connection between youth and democracy.
In South Asia, Madsen finds that as Afghanistan and Pakistan’s political circumstances have become more entwined, their demographic paths are more closely parallel than expected. “For Afghanistan, given its myriad socioeconomic, political, cultural, and geographic challenges, this is good news. But for Pakistan, where efforts to meet family planning needs have fallen short of capacity, it is not,” she writes in the first issue of the newly re-launched ECSP Report, “Afghanistan, Against the Odds: A Demographic Surprise.”
In more developed countries, population aging is a concern. At the Wilson Center last year, economists Andrew Mason and Ronald Lee explained the challenges that those on the other side of the “demographic divide” will face in the near future. From 2010 to 2015, 85 countries are projected to witness the largest absolute increase in history of their populations aged 60 and over, straining public welfare systems and reducing labor forces. It’s not the “catastrophe” that it has been portrayed to be in the media, they said, but like many demographic issues, it is a challenge that will require planning for.
These connections demonstrate the wide importance of population dynamics to understanding how the world works today. Demography is the study of us – all seven billion of us. Demography affects – and is affected by – economics, political stability, health, the environment, food security, foreign policy, development, and conflict. Let’s not overlook that breadth on this World Population Day 2012.
For more, be sure to read some of our additional resources from the recent archives:- Food Security in a Climate-Altered Future: More Than a Supply Problem
- Taming Hunger in Ethiopia: The Role of Population Dynamics
- Uganda’s Demographic and Health Challenges Put Into Perspective With Newfound Oil
- New Surveys Generate Mixed Demographic Signals for East and Southern Africa
- In Building Resilience for a Changing World, Reproductive Health Is Key
- Demographic Security 101 (video)
- Yemen: Revisiting Demography After the Arab Spring
- Hania Zlotnik Discusses Latest Changes to UN Population Projections (audio)
- Book Review: ‘World Population Policies’
- Tunisia’s Shot at Democracy: What Demographics and Recent History Tell Us
- Joel E. Cohen on Solving the Resource-Population Equation in the Developing World (video)
Photo Credit: UN Day Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon with students in October celebrating the seven billion mark, courtesy of Eskinder Debebe/UN Photo. -
Hania Zlotnik Discusses Changes to Latest UN Population Projections
›Former UN Population Division Director Hania Zlotnik spoke recently at the Wilson Center discussing last year’s highly-publicized UN world population projections and explaining the methodology behind the figures. “The latest projections are very special,” she said, adding that “we think that this methodology is a lot better than what we had before.”
What accounts for such improvement? Zlotnik said it has a lot to do with greater availability of data. “The UN has been…mandated by governments to produce population estimates since the 1950s,” she stated, and they have refined their projections process over the years based on an increasing record of data and identification of some “patterns that can inform the future.”Former UN Population Division Director Hania Zlotnik spoke recently at the Wilson Center discussing last year’s highly-publicized UN world population projections and explaining the methodology behind the figures. “The latest projections are very special,” she said, adding that “we think that this methodology is a lot better than what we had before.”
What accounts for such improvement? Zlotnik said it has a lot to do with greater availability of data. “The UN has been…mandated by governments to produce population estimates since the 1950s,” she stated, and they have refined their projections process over the years based on an increasing record of data and identification of some “patterns that can inform the future.”
The increasingly large dataset accumulated during this process is particularly important because of what Zlotnik called “inertia” in population change. “There’s something called ‘population momentum,’ where the population changes on the basis of how many people have already been accumulated on the planet,” she explained, pointing out that many of the people included in the UN’s population projections for 2050 have already been born.
This inertia helps make population projections fairly accurate, but last year’s projections differed from previous efforts in two significant ways.
First, the UN Population Division provided projections not just to 2050 but also to 2100. These more long-term projections estimated an end-of-century population of more than 10 billion – notably higher than previous reports, which had predicted that population would stabilize mid-century at around nine billion.
Second, the underlying methodology used shifted from a deterministic to a probabilistic approach that, according to Zlotnik, does a better job capturing variability in each country’s fertility rate over the next century. “Essentially,” she explained, “a model was developed for every country that takes into account the past path of fertility change [and] also takes into account changes that have happened in other countries…Then [it] does a simulation for the future for every country, in which 100,000 paths are projected, essentially by throwing dice, and then the central path of those 100,000 is used to project the future.”
Zlotnik cautioned that projecting so far into the future is an inexact – albeit necessary – science: “Of course, as we go further into the future, the numbers are more subject to uncertainty. But [the long-term projections] help us give people a better feeling of how important it is to change trends from here to 2050, so that we ensure that, at the end of the century, the number of people on the planet is sustainable.”
“In order to make sure that the population projections made by the United Nations [are realized],” Zlotnik said, “it’s very important that fertility continues to decline, and especially that fertility decline happens in the countries that still have very high fertility.”
“Fertility decline happens in many ways,” she continued, “but the immediate reason why fertility can be reduced is that more people use modern methods of contraception.” -
Jennifer Dabbs Sciubba, The Huffington Post
Global Threats Exist, But Also Many Global Demographic Opportunities for the United States
›July 3, 2012 // By Wilson Center StaffThe original version of this article, by Jennifer Dabbs Sciubba, appeared on The Huffington Post.
Events like the Arab Spring gave birth to a generation of demographic converts in the national security community. Many are now convinced that demography matters because demographers today can clearly show how youthful population profiles in the developing world could lead to conflicts over the next 20 years – a major concern for policymakers.
Too much focus on demography and conflict, though, means policymakers miss opportunities for cooperation.
We are used to thinking of the wealthy and stable “Global North” and the poor and tumultuous “Global South,” but a demographic divide within the developing world is emerging, a third category of states that are growing older, more urban, more prosperous, more peaceful, and active in international affairs. These states – particularly India, Brazil, and South Africa – represent opportunities for building U.S. and world security.
Even as it maintains its longstanding relationships in Europe and elsewhere in the developed world, the U.S. should be more assertive in seeking partnerships with India as both a counterbalance to China and as a global security partner in addressing piracy and terrorism and in distributing international aid.
Continue reading on The Huffington Post.
Photo Credit: Tahrir 2011, courtesy of flickr user Denis Bocquet. -
What Are the Most Important Factors in the Failed States Index?
›Last week, the Fund for Peace issued its eighth annual Failed States Index (FSI). The index gives 177 countries a score between 1.0 and 10.0 for 12 indicators, ranging from the legitimacy of the state and the security apparatus to demographic pressure and uneven development (high being bad, low being good – see full descriptions of the indicators here). But which of these indicators has the biggest impact? We did a quick analysis of the Failed States Indexes published from 2006 to 2012 to show which of the indicators correlate most with a high score. (We skipped 2005 since the roster of analyzed countries was significantly smaller.)
