All posts in category Violent Conflict

Challenges in Measuring Violent Conflict, Syria Edition

As part of a larger (but, unfortunately, gated) story on how the terrific new Global Data on Events, Language, and Tone (GDELT) might help social scientists forecast violent conflicts, the New Scientist recently posted some graphics using GDELT to chart the ongoing civil war in Syria. Among those graphics was this time-series plot of violent events per day in Syria since the start of 2011:

Syrian Conflict New Scientist

Based on that chart, the author of the story (not the producers of GDELT, mind you) wrote:

As Western leaders ponder intervention, the resulting view suggests that the violence has subsided in recent months, from a peak in the third quarter of 2012.

That inference is almost certainly wrong, and why it’s wrong underscores one of the fundamental challenges in using event data—whether it’s collected and coded by software or humans or some combination thereof—to observe the dynamics of violent conflict.

I say that inference is almost certainly wrong because concurrent data on deaths and refugees suggest that violence in Syria has only intensified in past year. One of the most reputable sources on deaths from the war is the Syria Tracker. A screenshot of their chart of monthly counts of documented killings is shown below. Like GDELT, their data also identify a sharp increase in violence in late 2012. Unlike GDELT, their data indicate that the intensity of the violence has remained very high since then, and that’s true even though the process of documenting killings inevitably lags behind the actual violence.

Syria Tracker monthly death counts

We see a similar pattern in data from the U.N. High Commissioner on Refugees (UNHCR) on people fleeing the fighting in Syria. If anything, the flow of refugees has only increased in 2013, suggesting that the violence in Syria is hardly abating.

UNHCR syria refugee plot

The reason GDELT’s count of violent events has diverged from other measures of the intensity of the violence in Syria in recent months is probably something called “media fatigue.” Data sets of political events generally depend on news sources to spot events of interest, and it turns out that news coverage of large-scale political violence follows a predictable arc. As Deborah Gerner and Phil Schrodt describe in a paper from the late 1990s, press coverage of a sustained and intense conflicts is often high when hostilities first break out but then declines steadily thereafter. That decline can happen because editors and readers get bored, burned out, or distracted. It can also happen because the conflict gets so intense that it becomes, in a sense, too dangerous to cover. In the case of Syria, I suspect all of these things are at work.

My point here isn’t to knock GDELT, which is still recording scores or hundreds of events in Syria every day, automatically, using open-source code, and then distributing those data to the public for free. Instead, I’m just trying to remind would-be users of any data set of political events to infer with caution. Event counts are one useful way to track variation over time in political processes we care about, but they’re only one part of the proverbial elephant, and they are inevitably constrained by the limitations of the sources from which they draw. To get a fuller sense of the beast, we need as often as possible to cross-reference those event data with other sources of information. Each of the sources I’ve cited here has its own blind spots and selection biases, but a comparison of trends from all three—and, importantly, an awareness of the likely sources of those biases—is enough to give me confidence that the civil war in Syria is only continuing to intensify. That says something important about Syria, of course, but it also says something important about the risks of drawing conclusions from event counts alone.

PS. For a great discussion of other sources of bias in the study of political violence, see Stathis Kalyvas’ 2004 essay on “The Urban Bias in Research on Civil Wars” (PDF).

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by dartthrowingchimp on May 16, 2013  •  Permalink
Posted in Mass Atrocities, Methods, Uncategorized, Violent Conflict
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Posted by dartthrowingchimp on May 16, 2013

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Kenya: An Ounce of Prevention or a Pound of Overreaction?

On March 4, Kenya held general elections, and nearly no one was killed. That might not sound like a big deal, but lots of smart people had been warning for months that these elections put Kenya at high risk of mass atrocities.

Assuming Kenya stays the course and completes the current election cycle without large-scale violence, the big question for people concerned about atrocities prevention is this: Did all the scrutiny and alarm help to prevent violence that would otherwise have occurred, or did we collectively overreact to the surprise of early 2008 and cry “Wolf!” when none was near?

Line to vote at the Old Kibera Primary School on March 4, 2013 (Georgina Goodwin, AFP/Getty Images)

Line to vote at the Old Kibera Primary School on March 4, 2013 (Georgina Goodwin, AFP/Getty Images)

I emailed this question to Ken Opalo, a Stanford Ph.D. candidate who’s from Kenya and was there to analyze and vote in the elections, and he offered a favorable assessment of the many preventive efforts. “I think the peace crusade actually helped prevent violence by constantly reminding us of the cost of violence,” he said. Ken also credited the Kenyan media for choosing not to air inflammatory political statements and the government for blocking the dissemination of hate speech via short message service (SMS), an important channel of communication . Last but not least, Ken argued that the dynamics of the presidential campaign also played a role. “It also helps,” he wrote, “that one of the most volatile regions in the country—the central Rift Valley—this time round found peace in the political union between [eventual winner Uhuru] Kenyatta and his deputy William Ruto (bringing together Kikuyus and Kalenjins).”

Kenyan columnist Charles Onyago-Obbo also believes that reactions to the  helped to avert violence that might have been. In a column entitled “Why Kenyans didn’t run berserk,” he acknowledges that peace campaigns by social groups and the media may have helped at the margins, but he sees the biggest effects coming from sticks and carrots deployed by the Kenyan government. Like Opalo, he credits authorities’ crackdown on hate speech, but he also believes that visible investments in major infrastructural projects in some key regions also had a significant effect.

If we believe that Kenyans became more good-hearted, then to prevent future violence, it would be necessary to preach more peace, hold peace concerts, and keep warning about the dangers of a repeat of 2008.

If we believe that people respond to incentives and symbols of progress, then the correct policy is to build more roads, fix more airports, complete Konza City and start a second one, keep working at political reform, and walk around with a big stick to crack the skulls of hate entrepreneurs.

I am a structuralist; I am in the last camp.

International actors are also claiming some credit. Luis Moreno-Ocampo, the former chief prosecutor for the International Criminal Court, told the Associated Press that the prosecutions he pursued after 2008 “were game-changers that helped prevent a repeat of the deadly rampages following this month’s vote.” Moreno-Ocampo saw his office as an instrument of deterrence, and in this case, he believes it worked.

I emailed Daniel Solomon, a Georgetown University senior who is both a student and advocate of atrocities prevention, to ask him how influential the ICC indictments had been. He agreed with Ocampo that they had some effect, but he described that effect as indirect:

I don’t think there was a substantial risk of violence by Kenyatta’s close affiliates, or by [second-place finisher Raila] Odinga’s: if you look at the financial and political incentives for national-level officials, many are linked to international investments in Kenya’s economy, or to aid flows by Western donor states. This is probably less the case for [members of parliament] who weren’t as internationally prominent, and those are often the officials with the most direct links to paramilitary forces and civilian militias.

As a result, I think we can differentiate between a couple of dynamics, each of which had a unique function in the context of violence prevention: the intergovernmental preparation, which was both public at a national level (high-level diplomatic statements, threats of consequences for violence) and “behind-the-scenes”; and the non-governmental preparation, which was both public at the national level (statements about the ICC, human rights reporting) and “behind-the-scenes” at a local level (it’s hard to assess whether this was marginal, or structurally important). In one sense, it’s hard to draw a hard line between the two, but I’m not sure the non-governmental commentary would have been influential in changing those local MP incentives without an active intergovernmental process behind the scenes.

tl; dr: We were probably crying wolf where the ICC indictees were concerned (notice how that was always included in press coverage, as if that implies something about anticipated behavior), but I think that process—call it discursive, but there was also tangible diplomacy to back that up—helped diffuse the incentives for violence prevention at more local levels of governance/mobilization.

Personally, I also see the Kenyan elections as a success for atrocities prevention. Large-scale violence was a plausible threat; many efforts were undertaken to prevent that violence; and then it didn’t happen. We can’t say with confident exactly which effort contributed how much, but the risk was real, and the interventions that were undertaken were relatively cheap.

Still, it’s not clear how generalizable this success is. In terms of atrocities risk and prevention, Kenya was exceptional in a couple of important ways. First, this was election-related violence, not insurgency or civil war. That meant that the risk was tied to a specific political process with clear milestones and outcomes and was not part of a deeper syndrome of insecurity and mass violence. Second, the Kenyan government was a willing partner in atrocities prevention instead of a perpetrator.

Those two features make Kenya in 2013 very different from places like Syria or Sudan, where state security forces and their fellow travelers are doing the killing and the governments involved reject outside interference. Future attempts to prevent election-related and other “communal” violence might look to this case to try to understand why the Kenyan government was a willing partner and which components seem to have been most effective, but I don’t think there are big lessons from Kenya that can be transferred to more typical cases of concern. To see what I mean, just think about how effective an ICC indictment has been at preventing atrocities in Sudan, or how effective hate-speech monitoring would be at stopping violence in Syria.

Finally, it’s important to recognize that, while relatively cheap, these efforts were not cost free. In a post on the New York Times‘ Latitude blog, Journalist Michaela Wrong argues that self-censorship by the Kenyan media around this month’s elections diminished the country’s democracy.

“Last time,” the media “were part of the problem,” a Kenyan broadcaster told me. “They were corrupted; they were irresponsible. So this time there was a feeling that we had to keep everyone calm, at the expense, if necessary, of our liberties.”

But self-censorship comes at a price: political impartiality. The decision not to inflame ethnic passions meant that media coverage shifted in favor of whoever took an early lead, in this case Uhuru Kenyatta.

That’s an important reminder that policy interventions often entail trade-offs across values we might think of as complementary instead of competing. Democratization and atrocities prevention are both things many of us would espouse, but what’s good for one won’t always be good for the other.

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by dartthrowingchimp on March 18, 2013  •  Permalink
Posted in Mass Atrocities, Violent Conflict
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Posted by dartthrowingchimp on March 18, 2013

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Did Libya Cause Mali?

Did the fall of the Gaddafi regime in Libya cause the ongoing crisis in Mali?

A lot of people seem to think so. Number 4 on Max Fisher’s “Nine Questions about Mali You Were Too Embarrassed to Ask” is: “I heard that this whole crisis happened because of the war in Libya. Is that true?” Yesterday on the BBC’s This Week, former U.N. Secretary General Kofi Annan seemed to answer in the affirmative when he described Mali as “collateral damage” from Libya.

The accounts I’ve read from people who closely study the country generally attribute the crisis in Mali to two things: 1) the resumption of armed rebellion in northern Mali in January 2012; and 2) the mutiny and coup that ensued in March. As I understand those experts’ arguments, the scale of the current crisis is due to the intersection of these two. Neither the rebellion nor the coup alone was sufficient to produce the state collapse that is compelling the large-scale international response. If neither was sufficient alone, then both were necessary.

Did Libya’s collapse cause one or both of these events? It certainly seems to have played some role. As proponents of the “Libya caused Mali” line have pointed out, the resumption of rebellion in the north was driven, in part, by an inflow of fighters and arms fleeing Libya after the fall of their patron and purchaser, Moammar Qaddafi. The resumption of the Tuareg’s rebellion, in turn, appears to have helped trigger the military coup. After seizing power, the putschists sometimes identified the government’s weak support for their fight against the rebels as the motivation behind the mutiny that evolved into a coup when it encountered little resistance.

To make strong claims about the importance of Libya to Mali, though, we have to believe that one or both of these things—the rebellion and the coup—would not have happened if Libya hadn’t imploded. Here, I think the assertion that “Libya caused Mali” gets much weaker.

On the fight in the north, a recent Think Africa Press piece by Andy Morgan asserts that the resumption of rebellion had been planned for some time, suggesting that Libya’s collapse was not a necessary condition for its occurrence. “In truth, neither Gaddafi’s fall nor AQIM nor drugs and insecurity are the prime movers behind this latest revolt,” Morgan writes. “They are just fresh opportunities and circumstances in a very old struggle.” Morgan’s account isn’t gospel, of course, but it does imply that rebellion could have and probably would have recurred in the north regardless of Gaddafi’s fate. Libya’s collapse seems to have affected the timing and possibly the strength of that assault, but it doesn’t appear to have been necessary for its occurrence.

The connection between Libya and the March 2012 coup is even more tenuous. Statistical models I developed to forecast coups d’etat identified Mali as one of the countries at greatest risk in 2012 before the coup happened, and that assessment was not particularly sensitive to events in Libya. The chief drivers of that forecast were Mali’s extreme poverty (as captured by its infant mortality rate) and the character of its pre-coup political institutions. One of the models takes armed conflict in the region into account, but it’s not an especially influential risk factor, and the impact of Libya’s civil war on the final forecast is negligible.

This forecast suggests that a coup in Mali was entirely plausible absent the rebellion in the north, and that impression is bolstered by the reporting of Bruce Whitehouse from Bamako in a March 2012 blog post:

The way [coup leader Capt.] Sanogo went on to justify the coup was inconsistent and wide-ranging. His initial responses to questions about his troops’ demands indicated that their primary concerns centered around living conditions, pay, and education and job opportunities for their children. When prompted about insecurity in northern Mali, however, he claimed that this issue “occupied 70 percent of their preoccupations.” (During a later interview, Sanogo again had to be reminded about the rebellion after listing the factors that led to the coup.)

The statements of actors engaged in the politics in question aren’t always (often? ever?) honest or reliable, but in this case they align with the information we get from the statistical model. It really isn’t that hard to imagine a coup occurring in Mali in 2012 regardless of events in Libya.

In retrospect, it’s easy to construct narratives that connect Mali to Libya. What’s harder is to imagine the other ways things might have unfolded and assess how likely those counterfactual histories are. We’ll never know for sure, of course, but I think this quick accounting shows that we could have arrived at something very much like the current crisis in Mali even if the Gaddafi regime had never collapsed. That doesn’t mean events in Libya have had no effect on the crisis in Mali, but it does suggest that the one is not the cause of the other.

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by dartthrowingchimp on January 18, 2013  •  Permalink
Posted in Coups, State Collapse, Violent Conflict
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Posted by dartthrowingchimp on January 18, 2013

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Politics in Space*

What is political space made of, and how can it be represented in statistical models of political processes or behavior?

That question might sound academic (if not psychedelic), but it’s one that doesn’t get the attention it deserves in quantitative analysis of political events.

In recent years, political science has gotten better about considering the effects of physical space on politics, especially in the study of violent conflict. Intellectual trends in the study of civil wars have combined with technical advances in geospatial analysis to encourage observers of conflict processes to be more explicit about ways that things like distance, terrain, climate, and weather might shape where and when violence might occur. (See here for one prominent example.)

The single word that probably best captures the current push on this front is disaggregation. Where the 2000s saw a boom in quantitative studies of civil wars using country-year data to look at the onset and termination of episodes of large-scale violence, a more recent boomlet has shifted the focus to the level of the district and even the locality, sometimes attempting to model the occurrence of the specific events—battles, killings, kidnappings—that comprise those large-scale conflict episodes. The units are getting smaller, but they’re still usually geographic.

As I think about where this research might take us, I wonder if we aren’t atoning too much for past sins. The complaint that studies using nation-states as units of observation are naïve to physical geography may itself be naïve to the profound importance of the state as a political space.

Consider coups d’etat, for example. By definition, these events virtually always happen in a country’s capital city, but that’s not because of differences between the geography of the capital and the rest of the country. They occur in the capital city because it is the locus of national political authority, the point in political space that must be occupied to lay claim to national power. A similar logic applies to the location of battles in civil conflicts. Certain areas will have strategic or symbolic value that is unrelated to their situation in physical space or the character or their terrain. It’s not either/or, but we shouldn’t stop thinking about the one because the other is easier to observe and measure.

The good news is that improvements and innovations in analytic techniques are making this easier to do. For starters, researchers are increasingly using multilevel (a.k.a. hierarchical) models to incorporate factors at multiple levels of analysis in a single estimation. While still computationally intensive, versions of these models with unit-specific slopes let us search for general patterns without making the strong assumption that every variable has the same effect in every region/country/city/person/whatever.

Techniques developed to measure connectivity and distance in other dimensions–such as economic distance as reflected in trade flows, or cultural distance as indicated by populations’ languages and religious practices–can also be applied to political relationships. Mike Ward and Peter Hoff, for example, have done interesting work extending concepts from gravity models of international trade to other aspects of international politics, like alliances and membership in intergovernmental organizations.

Also, when designing research, we should remember that we don’t have to include all physical space in every analysis. Sociologists studying the occurrence of protests and riots in the United States in the 1960s and beyond often restricted their analysis to major cities (see here, here, and here for prominent examples). Riots rarely happen in rural areas in wealthy countries nowadays, but social and economic processes occurring in those rural areas may contribute to the likelihood of riots in nearby cities. So, we might look for ways to design studies that take all of those elements into account, and geographic proximity might turn out to be less relevant than many other things.

There’s certainly no grand solution to this problem. More than anything, this is a plea to researchers, including myself, to think carefully about the spatial dimensions of their theoretical models when designing empirical studies to probe or test them. The fact that a lot of data is available at the state level doesn’t mean states are an appropriate unit of observation, but subnational units aren’t automatically better, either. In many cases, it will help to start by conceptualizing the relevant political space and then looking for data that represent important features of it.

* Title shamelessly stolen from Kate Miller-Heidke.

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by dartthrowingchimp on April 20, 2012  •  Permalink
Posted in Statistics, Violent Conflict
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Posted by dartthrowingchimp on April 20, 2012

http://dartthrowingchimp.wordpress.com/2012/04/20/politics-in-space/

Peace *and* Elections in Afghanistan?

Afghanistan is slated to hold its next national elections in the not-too-distant future. Presidential balloting is due in 2014, and parliamentary elections are scheduled for 2015. As it happens, that’s about the same time NATO is supposed to hand over full responsibility for security in the country to the Government of Afghanistan.

The coincidence of these inflection points has some people worried, and it should. For a while now, international interventionists of various stripes have portrayed democratic elections as catalysts of peace in countries beset by civil wars. The thinking goes something like this: Civil wars are really just domestic politics by other means–in other words, fights over governance. To resolve these fights, you need to get to a government that all parties to the conflict consider legitimate. Free and fair elections are the only way to get to legitimate government nowadays; ergo, you can’t get to conflict resolution without going through elections.

In an important recent paper, however, political scientists Dawn Brancati and Jack Snyder argue that elections held soon after civil wars end are more likely to spur renewed fighting than they are to cement the peace. “Bringing quantitative evidence to bear on this heretofore largely qualitative policy debate,” they write, “we find that the skeptics are correct in their central claim: holding elections too soon after a civil war raises substantially the risk of war occurring again.”

This outcome isn’t inevitable, of course. From their statistical analysis, Brancati and Snyder also conclude that “decisive victories, demobilization, and peacekeeping diminish the fighting capacity of former combatants who might otherwise be tempted to return to war when faced with unfavorable election results.” Importantly, they also argue that international actors can help bring about these more propitious conditions, or at least to avoid pressing for the unfavorable combination of unstable peace and quick elections.

International involvement has often pushed for early elections in risky conditions, when recently warring factions remain well armed and able to use violence to contend for power. Indeed, international actors have helped create these conditions in the first place by pressing warring factions to reach settlements before one side has defeated the other. However, international actors can sometimes create conditions that mitigate the risk posed by early elections when they provide robust peacekeeping, facilitate the demobilization of armed forces, back power sharing agreements, and help build robust political institutions. Thus, we argue that international pressure in favor of early elections strengthens peace when it provides these stabilizing instruments, but it undermines peace when it is not backed by effective means to achieve stable democracy.

Unfortunately, none of the “favorable conditions” identified by Brancati and Snyder exists today in Afghanistan. For starters, there isn’t yet a peace agreement. It’s possible that a peace deal negotiated between now and 2014 might involve a power-sharing government, but that outcome would actually be in tension with the commitment to free and fair elections. Either the next elections are fair and competitive, in which case the power-sharing deal is essentially dead on arrival; or the power-sharing deal trumps the elections, in which case the balloting is an exercise in wasted spending and dashed expectations. Either way, the two processes seem to be working at cross purposes.

Some observers are already talking about how to put these processes on more complementary tracks. In a recent blog post for Foreign Policy in Focus, writer Conn Hallinan sees a cease-fire, a government of national unity, a constitutional assembly, a regional conference, and continued development assistance as the ingredients most likely to produce a successful exit from this messy tangle.

Hamish Nixon and Caroline Hartzell put more meat on some of those bones in a December 2011 report for the U.S. Institute for Peace, arguing that “any negotiated settlement to the Afghan conflict should involve a set of transitional arrangements to govern the period between the signing of a peace settlement, a cease-fire, and the entry into force of more permanent institutions for conflict management.” That transitional period would involve negotiations over long-term institutions, the form of which would not necessarily be proscribed by the existing constitution. In their view,

A wide range of potential measures could create opportunities among the conflicting parties to share influence, as well as balance that influence with more roles for noncombatants, civilian political actors, and vulnerable groups.

Power sharing and reform are not mutually exclusive approaches to addressing the political dimensions of the conflict. A combination of power-sharing, power-dividing, power-creating, and power-diffusing mechanisms can provide groups within divided societies with assurances that they will not be permanently excluded from state power and resources, while generating more effective and accountable governance and establishing the foundations for a more capable, accountable, and resilient state.

In Afghanistan, this might include clarifying or even redefining the powers of the president, National Assembly, and the courts, modifying the relationship between the central government and provincial and district administrations, or creating and diffusing decision-making authority among new or existing institutions over issues such as appointments.

I don’t know whether either of these approaches would work, and I don’t know what other options might exist. I do know, though, that we should be dubious of the assumption that the upcoming elections will automatically advance the causes of peace and development in Afghanistan, as long as they’re sufficiently clean and well-run.

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by dartthrowingchimp on April 18, 2012  •  Permalink
Posted in Democracy Promotion, Democratization, Violent Conflict
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Posted by dartthrowingchimp on April 18, 2012

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The Ambiguous Morality of Foreign Intervention in Syria

As the atrocious violence in Syria intensifies, more and more people seem to be saying that the outside world–the United States, the United Nations, the Arab League, the “West,” the “international community”–has a moral obligation to intervene, with force if need be, in order to stop the killing there. I don’t think the moral case for intervention is nearly as clear as those calls presume it to be, and I’d like to explain why.

I’ll start with two moral principles. First, murder is wrong. Second, when choosing among various possible courses of action, we should select the one that will produce the greatest happiness without violating any fundamental rights. The first of these principles is virtually universal. The second is more specific to modern liberalism, but I suspect it is accepted by many of the people calling for more forceful intervention in Syria.

Now, bearing those two principles in mind, let’s think about the morality of intervening in the following situations. Assume that there is no police force to call, and that you are better armed than the neighbor in question.

  • Your neighbor is murderously abusing his wife and several children. This is obviously wrong, and you have a moral duty to try to stop it.
  • Your neighbor and his wife are murderously abusing their several children. In moral terms, this isn’t really different from the first scenario, and you still have a duty to try to stop it.
  • Your neighbor and his wife are murderously abusing their children, but your intervention might also lead to the deaths of some or all of the people involved, including your own. For example, some of the children might get caught in the crossfire or be executed by the parents before they can be freed, or you might get killed in the attempt. Aware of this, you might decide to intervene without direct force–say, by cutting off his utilities and supplies–but these actions are not selective and could harm the children as well as the parents. This is a more difficult call. In the worst case, you lose three more lives (the parents and your own), while in the best case, you save several. If you believed the parents are eventually going to kill the children, intervention may still look like the right thing to do, but only if you think it stands a decent chance of succeeding.
  • Your neighbor and his wife are murderously abusing their children, but your intervention might lead to some or all of their deaths, and it will probably start a wider, violent feud among families in the neighborhood. This situation is far more complicated, and it is no longer clear at all that intervention is the best course of action. If you don’t act, several children will die. But if you do act, those children still might die, and so might many other people involved in the ensuing feud. As awful as it sounds, it is be morally right not to intervene in this situation, or at least not to intervene in ways that would set off the wider feud. In this case, action motivated by one moral principle (murder is wrong) would end up violating a second (greatest happiness), and partly through more transgressions of the first.

When I look at the current situation in Syria, I see the last of those scenarios. Foreign military intervention–to include arming the Syrian opposition or attempting to establish humanitarian corridors or “safe zones” without permission from the Syrian government–could save some lives, but it would cost others, and it stands a good chance of starting (or intensify, depending on how you look at it) a regional conflict that could kill many, many more.

What’s more, the scenarios I’ve described so far leave out two important elements of international politics that only complicate things further. The first is the problem of opportunity costs–the other things you can’t do once you commit to a particular course of action. Imagine that you’re a doctor, and that while your neighbor is murderously abusing his wife and several children, many other children in your neighborhood are dying from a disease you can usually cure.  What if intervening to stop the abuse meant you no longer had the time and money to obtain and deliver the cure for that disease?

In the real world, there are diseases like malaria and diarrhea that are preventable and curable and kill literally millions of people every year, yet we do not demand that our governments do all they can to stop those deaths. The more of our governments’ resources we tie up in wars, the less those governments can do to address these quiet crises that clearly transgress the second of the two moral principles I outlined at the start of this post: to seek the greatest happiness.

The second added element is time. All of the scenarios described so far involved a single situation, but the real world involves countless situations unfolding over time.

When time is added to the equation, it becomes clearer that what you do now will set a precedent that will affect the future actions of others. On the one hand, intervening forcefully now might deter other regimes from doing similar things in the future, for fear that they will be punished in a similar way. On the other hand, intervening now might lead future resistance movements to believe that they will receive comparable international protection. That belief might encourage them to rise up in strategically unfavorable circumstances, creating more Syria-like situations in a world that is not well prepared to handle them.

It will rarely be clear which way this balance tips, but the fact that a mass killing is happening in Syria so soon after international intervention in Libya shows that it does not lean decisively in favor of intervention. Certainly, the Libyan intervention was not sufficient to deter future atrocities. I don’t know nearly enough about the Syrian opposition to judge whether the Libyan intervention had any effect on their decision-making, but I gather that it might have emboldened some of its elements, especially ones outside the country (for evidence, see the last paragraph of the section called “The Struggle” in this excellent essay).

Taking all of these aspects into consideration, I conclude that the moral course of action in Syria today is not to intervene militarily–by attacking government forces, attempting to establish “safe zones,” or supplying arms to rebel groups. I’ll admit that I’m not 100% certain in this judgment. I hate what it implies for civilians under fire or imprisoned in Syria right now, and I am sure that some reasonable people who accept the same principles will reach a different conclusion. All I’m hoping to do here is to show that the morality of this situation is far more ambiguous than a simple “The killing must be stopped” statement allows.

And, if it were my family that was being killed, I would be screaming at the world to stop it now.

8 Comments
by dartthrowingchimp on February 26, 2012  •  Permalink
Posted in Foreign Policy, International Relations, Revolutions, Violent Conflict
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Posted by dartthrowingchimp on February 26, 2012

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Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde in Burma

Over the past year or so, Burma’s authoritarian government has implemented significant, albeit limited, political reforms. This partial liberalization has won guarded praise from Aung San Suu Kyi, the nation’s leading dissident who is now set to run for parliament in by-elections this spring, as well as Western governments who support her cause. At the same time, the country’s military has intensified its vicious fight against the autonomy-seeking Kachin people of northern Burma. In its efforts to snuff out that uprising, the Burmese military has “committed serious abuses” against civilians, including killing them, using them as forced labor, and pillaging their homes. And the Kachin conflict is just one of several long-running ethnic insurgencies in Burma, none of which is yet resolved.

These seemingly schizophrenic responses to popular demands for reform–releasing prisoners one minute, literally smashing villages the next–has a lot of people wondering: Which of these approaches shows us the real Burmese government? Is the country being run by budding democrats who haven’t quite figured out how break their atrocious habits in the north, or is it being run by tyrannical genocidaires who are using piecemeal reforms as a tactic to trick the rest of the world into ending painful sanctions? In a post on his always-thoughtful Securing Rights blog, Georgetown University student Daniel Solomon put it this way:

The release of Burma’s political prisoners is a symbolically significant effort, essential to effective political reconciliation between Burma’s civilian government and the pro-democracy opposition. However, the real challenge to Burma’s democratization will stem from the regime’s effort to negotiate a political settlement with Burma’s ethnic minority groups. The Karen conflict is a microcosm of a wider issue–Burma’s central government, interested in consolidating political authority and access to the border regions’ natural resource wealth, prefers a Naypyidaw-based, centralized government, while minority opposition groups prefer a federalized system.

From that passage, I inferred that Dan sees the ethnic wars in northern Burma as more fundamental to the country’s future than its constitutional changes, and therefore the government’s counterinsurgency efforts as somehow more revealing of its true nature. That order of priority was echoed in a recent tweet from former State Department spokesman P.J. Crowley, who linked to the New York Times story on the Kachin war with this commentary: “New military action against the Kachin reminds how far Burma has to go to achieve genuine reform. Not there yet.” Meanwhile, Burmese journalist Zin Linn noted for the Asian Correspondent that President Thein Sein had twice instructed the military commander-in-chief to stop the Kachin offensive, but those instructions have apparently been ignored. From that fact, he concluded that the president’s commands are a “deceitful tactic,” “worthless statements intended to satisfy the international community” so it will lift long-standing sanctions.

I wonder, though, if attempts to view these two streams of behavior through a single lens obscure more than they clarify. Burma’s reform process will inevitably be multidimensional, because governance is multidimensional. Democratization lies on one dimension, centralization lies on another, and ethno-nationalism arguably on yet another. Democratization is about the expansion of a government’s accountability to its citizens. Democratic states vary widely in the extent to which they centralize power, from the genuine federalism of the United States to the highly centralized administration of the French Republic, and one end of that spectrum is not obviously more liberal or democratic than the other. Existing democracies also vary widely in the extent to which they recognize ethnic “communities” as rights-bearing groups and provide legal opportunities to advance demands for national self-determination. These three dimensions are interrelated in their concern for popular sovereignty, but they do not and need not move in lock step.

If that’s right, then I’m not sure it’s helpful to presume that decentralization represents the only just and liberal outcome to Burma’s ethnic wars. Without question, it is deeply illiberal to respond to demands for autonomy or even independence with mass atrocities, where punishment is collective, disproportionate, and indiscriminate. It is not inherently illiberal, however, to reject demands for decentralization or autonomy, and it is arguably more liberal in the classical sense of that word to reject attempts to link citizenship to ethnicity than it is to accept them.

I also agree that it’s reasonable to look to the government’s treatment of the communities entangled in these insurgencies for clues to that government’s direction and intentions. That said, I don’t think it is sensible or even particularly helpful to presume that both streams of behavior flow from a single “character,” or even a common strategy.

What if these seemingly contradictory tracks are the twin results a house divided? It’s quite possible that actions on these different fronts are being led by different factions within the Burmese government. Maybe civilian leaders intent on liberalization are driving reforms at the center while military leaders committed to maintaining the country’s territorial integrity retain control over counterinsurgency. Maybe civilian and military elites have both split into “soft-liner” and “hard-liner” camps, and the two are wrestling for control while we scratch our heads over their seemingly incoherent behavior. I don’t know which of these is true, and I get the sense that very few people do. Based on my knowledge of other reformist episodes in recent history, however, either of these scenarios seems more plausible to me than a narrative in which a ruthless and unified cadre outfoxes the world.

This question isn’t academic. On the one hand, foreign governments and international activists have every right and reason to demand that Burmese forces immediately stop committing atrocities. On the other hand, if the Burmese government is internally divided, then conditioning rewards for political reform on specific responses to the country’s ethnic insurgencies could push liberalizers into a confrontation with their internal rivals before they’re strong enough to win that fight. If soft-liners are competing with hard-liners for the upper hand in this process, they will gain powerful allies over the next several months as political parties and civic groups mobilize in response to reforms at the center and even, hopefully, win seats in parliament. I don’t see any simple answers to this moral dilemma, but I do believe we’ll grope our way toward more effective responses by avoiding policies that tightly link conditions on the two dimensions and the assumptions of organizational and strategic coherence on which those policies would be based.

3 Comments
by dartthrowingchimp on January 23, 2012  •  Permalink
Posted in Democratization, State-building, Transitions to Democracy, Violent Conflict
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Posted by dartthrowingchimp on January 23, 2012

http://dartthrowingchimp.wordpress.com/2012/01/23/dr-jekyll-and-mr-hyde-in-burma/

How Not to Help a Popular Uprising and Stop Mass Atrocities

More than 5,000 people have been killed and many thousands more detained and sometimes tortured since a nonviolent uprising began in Syria in March 2011. The regime’s sustained brutality in response to this popular challenge clearly deserves to be called a mass killing, and the killing machine so far shows no signs of abating.

Most people can’t witness atrocities on this scale without at least thinking about what might be done to stop them. That impulse has already led foreign governments to take a number of concrete actions to try to punish the perpetrators and protect Syrian civilians. The United States, the European Union, Canada, Turkey, and (most significant) the Arab League have all imposed tough sanctions on the Syrian regime, and those sanctions seem to be taking a real toll. In late December, the Arab League sent a team of observers to Syria to monitor the government’s treatment of nonviolent protesters. So far, that mission seems to be having little or no effect, but the mere fact of an Arab League mission to stop one of its member governments from killing its own people marks an important shift in the region’s international relations.

What hasn’t yet happened, of course, is direct foreign military intervention, at least not at any significant scale. Some elements of the Syrian opposition have called on foreign powers to establish a “no-fly zone” or “safe zones” in the country, and some commentators have called for a “Libyan-style liberation” with U.N. backing, but China and Russia so far have spoiled attempts to pass a Security Council resolution that would legitimate that kind action.

Of course, the absence of a U.N. resolution doesn’t mean that more forceful intervention can’t happen. In fact, according to a recent report by Josh Rogin on his blog for Foreign Policy, the Obama administration is already “quietly preparing options” to provide more direct support to the Syrian opposition. “After imposing several rounds of financial sanctions on Syrian regime leaders, the focus is now shifting to assisting the opposition directly,” Rogin writes. Among the options reportedly under consideration are…

…establishing a humanitarian corridor or safe zone for civilians in Syria along the Turkish border, extending humanitarian aid to the Syrian rebels, providing medical aid to Syrian clinics, engaging more with the external and internal opposition, forming an international contact group, or appointing a special coordinator for working with the Syrian opposition (as was done in Libya).

I’m a political scientist, not a foreign-policy pro, but my understanding of the politics of authoritarian rule tells me that this kind of prolonged mumbling about maybe intervening, a little bit, sometime soon might just be the worst thing a foreign government can do to try to help an opposition like Syria’s.

The basic problem is that a mumbled threat from a powerful adversary can be scary enough to provoke a response without actually doing anything concrete to help the opposition it’s meant to support. For one thing, fear of future intervention can prod the regime to kill faster in hopes of ending the uprising before any intervention can happen. In what economists call a free-rider problem, hopes for foreign intervention can also lead opposition groups to husband their own resources, thereby diminishing the chances that the revolution will succeed without substantial foreign support. Under certain conditions, the hanging threat of intervention can even give rebel leaders “an incentive to engage in the kinds of provocative actions that make atrocities against their followers more likely in the first place.” To a foreign government hoping to protect civilian lives and catalyze the fall of a dictatorial regime, none of these is a good outcome.

My point here is not to make the case against international support for Syrian opposition groups, although I do have serious doubts about the immediate and long-term effects of foreign military intervention [as discussed in this subsequent post]. And lest there be any doubt: attempts to establish a “no-fly zone,” “safe zones,” or “humanitarian corridors” in Syria would necessarily involve large-scale and risky military operations.

Instead, my point is that vague threats of future action are probably doing more harm than good, so they should stop. Cheap talk may be just that for the talkers, but it can actually be pretty costly to some of the bystanders. For foreign governments that want to see the atrocities against Syrian protesters end, it would be better to hurry up and make a credible threat of decisive action, or to signal clearly that the international cavalry isn’t going to arrive any time soon.

4 Comments
by dartthrowingchimp on January 4, 2012  •  Permalink
Posted in Foreign Policy, Protests and Popular Uprisings, Violent Conflict
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Posted by dartthrowingchimp on January 4, 2012

http://dartthrowingchimp.wordpress.com/2012/01/04/how-not-to-help-a-popular-uprising-and-stop-mass-atrocities/

All Good Things Do Not Always Go Together

A story in today’s New York Times describes how the site of a massacre of dozens of alleged Gaddafi loyalists in Surt was scrubbed before evidence required for a careful investigation could be collected.

It appeared to be one of the worst massacres of the eight-month conflict, but days after it occurred, no one from Libya’s new government had come to investigate. The interim leaders, who declared the country liberated on Sunday, may simply have their hands full with the responsibilities that come with running a state. But throughout the Libyan conflict, they have also shown themselves to be unwilling or incapable of looking into accusations of atrocities by their fighters, despite repeated pledges not to tolerate abuse.

There’s a sharp tension in Libya right now between demands from external forces for the NTC to police rights violations and the NTC’s own need to expand its circle of loyalty. The NTC just isn’t powerful enough to impose its authority across Libyan territory, so it will have to try to induce compliance from disparate militias by offering gains from cooperation. Even where clearly warranted, investigations and trials of rival militias’ members are more likely to push those groups away than pull them in.

In short, the NTC simply can’t please both constituencies–foreign patrons calling for instant hierarchy and domestic militias seeking a share of power–at the same time. Unfortunately, all good things do not always go together.

2 Comments
by dartthrowingchimp on October 25, 2011  •  Permalink
Posted in Revolutions, State Collapse, State-building, Violent Conflict
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Posted by dartthrowingchimp on October 25, 2011

http://dartthrowingchimp.wordpress.com/2011/10/25/all-good-things-do-not-always-go-together/

Not Everyone Likes Obama’s Atrocities Prevention Board

Last week, I blogged about President Obama’s new directive identifying the prevention of mass atrocities as a “core national security interest” and establishing an Atrocities Prevention Board to develop and coordinate the administration’s responses to situations where mass killing may occur (link). On Foreign Policy‘s web site yesterday, Celeste Ward Gventer offered a dissenting view on this initiative (“Interventionism Run Amok“). She worries that the prioritization of atrocities prevention as a “core national security interest” will pull the U.S. into more military interventions in complex conflicts it mistakenly views through the narrow lens of humanitarian concerns, and, to make matters worse, that those interventions will be ineffective.

I suppose that outcome is possible, but I gather that the point of the president’s Board is precisely to avoid that fate. With more lead time, more coordination, and more creative thinking about ways to discourage atrocities, I think the president hopes to help shrink the odds that future conflicts will turn toward mass killing so that the question of U.S. military intervention does not even come up. In corporate-speak, I think the goal is to try smarter, not harder. The president’s initial reluctance to intervene with force in Libya and the early rejection of U.S. military action as an option in Syria tell me that this administration is looking to avoid gunboat preventionism, not to embrace it.

1 Comment
by dartthrowingchimp on August 11, 2011  •  Permalink
Posted in Forecasting, Violent Conflict
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Posted by dartthrowingchimp on August 11, 2011

http://dartthrowingchimp.wordpress.com/2011/08/11/not-everyone-likes-obamas-atrocities-prevention-board/

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