|
James Galbraith:
Again, on behalf of Economists for Peace and Security and the conference organizers and sponsors, I welcome you to this conference, our first conference of Economists for Peace and Security under my tenure as chair of the board and under this name of the organization at what I hope is not the last, I think the first and what we hope will be a biennial series of meetings of this kind. And I’m very pleased to say we have a full program that will be a mixture of immense intellectual diversity and strict discipline with respect to time.
Having said that, I will simply vacate the stage and turn it over to Jurgen Brauer to introduce and moderate the first session.
Jurgen Brauer:
Thank you very much. Being a German, strictness of time is of course quite natural for me. My panelists have assured me that it will be natural for them as well this morning, so without further ado we’ll pretty much go in the order that the program is listing the speakers.
We have Mike Intriligator first, who will speak on “Global Security and Human Security.”
“Global Security and Human Security”
by Mike Intriligator
I might note that Jurgen, our moderator, organized years ago a wonderful conference when he was at Notre Dame, a big conference. What year was that? ’90—that long ago. It was a great conference.
Anyway, I’m very happy to be here. Thanks for the invitation to speak. And my talk is “Global Security and Human Security.” I’m going to use this powerpoint. And I’m going to start with these two concepts of security and discuss them briefly, and then go into a few other things. And then end with a couple of suggestions on how we achieve these concepts of global security and human security.
This is [?] with Fanny Coulomb in Grenoble, the Universite Pierre Mendes France. And the reason we’re working together, just the background, is I presented an earlier version of this paper at a conference in Grenoble. This is the headquarters of our French branch of EPS, Economists for Peace and Security, headed by Jacques Fontanelle.
Anyway, Jacques Fontanelle, who runs our French branch of Economists for Peace and Security, had a conference in March, invited me to speak there, and I gave this paper there, and got into a discussion with Fanny, who’s Jacques’ at Mendes France University in Grenoble, and we ended up deciding to write a joint paper. So this is that joint paper that we did.
Moving ahead. Issues addressed: Threats to the current global system, of which there are many, we’ll see. The nature of global security and the nature of human security, these two different concepts of security, one looking at a broader concept than the old idea, old and tired and I think totally outdated idea of national security, which I think is an outmoded concept. Why is that? Because the world is so interconnected, globalized, that national security is meaningless. You can’t define security up to arbitrarily defined borders. The only proper class of security in my view is global for the planet as a whole. The other concept is human security, looking at individuals on the planet at making sure they have security.
And then current threats to world peace, I want to talk about that. The special threat posed by U.S. nuclear weapons policy under the Bush doctrine of which we heard part of last night in Michael Lind’s very interesting presentation. I mentioned afterward that I’d be going into the same issues here, looking at it from a somewhat different point of view.
And then finally some proposals to secure the world system.
Okay. Threats to the current global system. […?] in 1913. Why especially 1913? Well, one of the areas I work in is globalization. People talk about the current period of globalization, which is a period of globalization; but often they don’t realize that this is just the latest manifestation of globalization. There was an early epoch of globalization that occurred from the Congress of Vienna at the end of the Napoleonic period, in 1815, to the beginning of World War I in 1914. For 100 years, 99 years, we had this period of globalization, in some measures more intense than the current period of globalization—by some measures, foreign direct investments and some other measures. A very active period of globalization.
That period of globalization came to an end because of what I call the “four blows” that destroyed that earlier period of globalization: World War I, the “war to end all wars,” as it was called, which of course it did not do, but at that point the biggest war in human history starting in 1914; the Spanish flu epidemic—misnamed, it had nothing to do with Spain, by the way, but it was a pandemic that killed over 10 million people, more than most of the wars that we’ve fought, and people forget about the influence and importance of that pandemic that occurred in 1918-1919, worldwide pandemic; the Great Depression, starting in 1919; and finally, World War II, starting in 1939 in Europe, and even earlier in Asia. These four blows basically destroyed the whole system of globalization that we had at that point. We had to sort of recreate the whole system, which we started to do right after World War II, and we really succeeded in getting the thing started around 1960. And it’s continued, accelerated, ever since.
Now the Harvard philosopher, George Santayana, wrote a book that was published in 1905, where he said—it’s a wonderful quote—he said, “Those who forget history are condemned to repeat it.” It’s a very important quote, I think. And I think it’s very apt to talk about that in this context, that we could repeat the same situation now as we had in that earlier epoch of globalization. We could have another world war. We could have another Spanish flu epidemic—well, we have this bird flu pandemic […?], there’s a possibility of a pandemic. We could have another Great Depression. We didn’t come to that extent, but we had a regional kind of depression in 1977-1998 East Asian financial crisis that hit not only […?], but it went to the Philippines, Indonesia, Korea, and also […?] to Russia in 1998. So we could have a repeat of all of these things. It’s a real danger, so we may condemned to repeat it, as George Santayana said.
The nature of global security: Now I was the president years ago of the Peace Science Society International, PSSI. Many of you know that or belong to that, have been involved in their meetings, and so forth. And I was the president in 1993, right after the end of the Cold War basically. And I gave my presidential address that year in Syracuse, and it was published the next year in 1994, in CMP, [… Management Peace Science?], which is the journal of that organization. And my talk was entirely about global security and how we have to replace the concept of national security by global security, which I defined as the absence of threats to the vital interests of the planet. I elaborated on that, I talked about the many dimensions of this global security idea beyond the traditional military dimension of security to include the economic dimension, environmental health, and other dimensions of security that are all extremely important and all interrelated; and how the only way to achieve this new concept of global security is through broader international cooperation, including a revitalization of international institutions, starting with the United Nations and its affiliates.
More recently I’ve been working with a group called the Global Governance Group, and we’re dealing with that revitalization of global institutions, starting with the U.N. We had a series of conferences in Athens, starting in October 2004. We had one last year, we have one coming up in November. Last year I gave a talk on security at the conference in Athens. This year I’m giving a talk on the project I’ve been working on, which I’ll come to later, called 50 Manhattan Projects.
Moving ahead. The nature of human security: Human security is sort of the other side of the coin from global security, absence of threats to the vital interests of people, individuals, on a worldwide basis. That concept was pioneered by U.N.D.P., United Nations Development Program, where I quote here, Freedom from Basic Threats to People’s Rights, Safety, or Lives.
I see these two concepts of security as not at all contradictory, in fact complementary, mutually reinforcing. We can’t have one without the other. We need both global security and human security. We need both. They work together, so they’re mutually reinforcing, as I say here.
What are the current threats to world peace? Well, I see many: international terrorism, which is sort of the analogue today of what we had in 1913, the extreme nationalism in 1913 that led to the onset of World War I. Now we have extremism in the Islamic community, and other communities, leading to terrorism, international terrorism. Civil wars and communal conflicts—extremely important. There was a feeling or belief, when the Cold War ended, that would be the end of world conflicts. And it certainly was not the end of world conflicts, as we saw with the Gulf War, for example, and other later wars. And we’re now in a series of many major wars, civil wars in Sri Lanka, in various parts of Africa, and international wars as well. Probably the biggest war being fought today in the world is the War in Congo, the DRC, the Democratic Republic of Congo, which is an unusual combination of both a civil war and an international war; because there are many other countries that involved, that are on one side or the other of that war. A gigantic war of which we get very little information. It’s not newsworthy; it’s not part of the global news that’s fit to print. They don’t buy the fit-to-print news about the war in Congo; but it’s a huge war. And many other wars, of course, have occurred in Africa particularly, gigantic wars in Cote d’Ivoire, in Sierra Leone, Angola, Mozambique, and other countries throughout Africa.
Genocide is an issue today. Today we talk about Darfur; but the many incidents of genocide in Cambodia, in Rwanda, and many other places. And many others, probably, that we don’t even know about, that are occurring today.
Proliferation of weapons of mass destruction--I use WMD for that.
Initiation of wars by the United States. The United States has played a major role in these threats to world peace in the wars we initiated in Iraq, in Afghanistan, which, at least as far as Iraq is concerned, I regard as a violation of our charter obligations to the U.N. Charter. You know, we criticize, we fought a war against Saddam Hussein because of invasion of Kuwait. We pushed him out of Kuwait—this was under the previous President Bush, George H. W. Bush; but what we did in Iraq more recently, in the last four years, is exactly the same as what Saddam Hussein did in Kuwait: violation of the obligations of the U.N. Charter.
U.S. defense spending. We heard a bit about that last night; but we spend as much as the rest of the world combined on defense. And people are talking about spending even more. [Marty Feldstein?]—this was mentioned last night as well—Marty Feldstein, the former chairman of the Council of Economic Advisors, head of the National Bureau of Economic Research, published an article in Foreign Affairs, a leading journal of the Council on Foreign Relations, suggesting that we have to tremendously increase the defense budget—a shocking argument in my view.
Establish bases worldwide. One of the things we did in Iraq is establish a lot of bases, and we have hundreds of bases, almost a thousand bases in fact, worldwide, in almost every part of the world.
Our doctrine on the use of nuclear weapons is, I regard, a threat to world peace.
A special threat about the [?] of the Bush Doctrine—this president, George W. Bush. Last night Michael Lind was talking about this idea of hegemonic stability, which is an old idea. There are various other ideas floating around about containment, deterrents, and various other things. All of these are outmoded as far as I’m concerned. These are not relevant today. Whether hegemonic stability, the U.S. is the hegemon, or other concepts from the end of the Cold War—containment, deterrents, mutual deterrents, things like that.
Anyway, there were official documents that came out in 2002, in the early stages of the current Bush administration, representing, as I see it, a discontinuous sea change in the international security system. Remarkably, to me, there wasn’t a discussion of this. There [were] no op eds, editorials, or journal articles, etcetera, that reviewed and evaluated these things. But this was a huge change. The doctrine of preemption, which we actually applied in Iraq—Afghanistan was a slightly different matter—but in Iraq we preempted, a total violation of our obligations under the Charter.
Condie Rice, when she was National Security Advisor, published the National Security Strategy of the United States of America that talked about preemption, that we have the right to preempt. People have noted that this is really not preemption, it’s more preventive war; but in any case what we did in Iraq is an example of what she had in mind in that document that she put out in 2002, when she was in the White House as the National Security Advisor.
Other documents that came out the same year, official documents, like the Quadrenniel Nuclear Policy Review, talked about the possible use of nuclear weapons, saying we treat it like any other weapons, nothing special about nuclear weapons, breaking a long-standing taboo against the use of nuclear weapons.
Possible first strike on adversaries’ WMD—we may be doing that today, or tomorrow in Iran, for example.
Global war on terror, Afghanistan and Iraq invasions as the first step. Since global war on terror was Bush’s—He started to talk about a war on terror after 9/11, broadened it into a global war on terror. Many people noted that you can’t have a war on a tactic, terrorism as a type of tactic used in an asymmetric situation, it doesn’t make any sense; but nonetheless, he’s continued that idea and expanded on it to a global war on terror. It’s a never-ending war.
Kant talked about perpetual peace in an essay he wrote in 1795. Many of you are familiar with that Kant essay. It was revived by Michael Doyle and Bruce Russet and other people in the modern period. They talked about the idea of democratic peace. But what we see in the global war on terror is just the obverse of that; it’s perpetual war, not perpetual peace. There’s no end to this war.
Proposal to secure the world system: We need to create a new global system, rethinking our current system. Now the basic concepts of the U.N. are still, in my view, absolutely correct, adequate. The problem is that we don’t have a functioning U.N. system. It’s not working as we’d hoped it would work. But the basic concepts of the U.N., the Charter, saying that you’re not allowed to invade another country, as we did with Iraq, or Iraq did with Kuwait, Hitler did with Poland, and so forth, that this is not allowable under that system, that’s part of the treaty. Treaty obligation is part of our constitution. It was accepted by the Congress as part of our Constitution; but we violated that.
But we have to rethink all of our current systems of global governance. We need close international cooperation. We must prohibit preemption, which is part of the Charter. Global security, rather than limit the U.S.’s hegemonic global—
How are we going to do this? Well, I have two proposals. This is the thing I’m working on with the Global Governance Group, that group that’s based in Athens. They have offices actually in Athens, Montreal, and Paris. And one idea that I had there […?] with EPS of a closer connection between the NGOs and U.N. affiliate organizations.
We regularly participate in the Under-Secretary General for Disarmament Affairs’ conference, the October Disarmament Week that he has. We make presentations, we hear what they think, they hear what we have on our minds. It’s a very useful kind of interchange. Same thing happens in Vienna with the IEEA. They regularly meet with NGOs that are interested in these issues. I think that’s a model of what could be done throughout the U.N. system. All U.N. agencies, whether it’s the World Bank, IMF, or WTO. All of these should have regular meetings with interested NGOs, so we can exchange ideas and compare notes, and so forth. I mean this is extremely valuable.
Kofi Annan, the previous Secretary General, said we cannot operate the U.N. system without the NGOs. NGOs are now playing a role officially in that part of the Charter, for example. I think we have to rethink that whole idea of making NGOs a formal part of the U.N. organization.
The other idea I’ve been working on through the Global Governance Group is, as I mentioned before, 50 Manhattan Projects. The idea is this: That when we were fearful that [?] would develop an atomic bomb, we put together the so-called Manhattan Project. We took the world’s best scientists and engineers, physicists, mathematicians, chemists, metallurgists, whatever, and we basically locked them up in Los Alamos, New Mexico, and said, Forget about everything. Forget about your families, your career, your work, your colleagues, your publications, everything. Forget everything. Do nothing but work on this project. We have to beat Hitler in this race to build an atomic bomb.
Now you may not like the atomic bomb. I’m not entirely fond of it myself; but the fact is, it worked. We put the people together, the right people. It was an international, interdisciplinary group of people. We can repeat that today with all of the major problems that we face in the world. That’s the idea. That’s the talk I’ll be giving in November in Athens at the next meeting of the Global Governance Group. Thank you.
JB:
Thank you very much, Mike. I think that was quite an overview paper, and I would ask you to hold your questions, because the next two papers will hone in on two specific topics that Mike mentioned, and when all the papers are given, I think we will have a good joint discussion where you can address your questions to any or all of the three panelists.
So with that, Maeve Powlick, “Interstate vs. Intrastate Wars in Africa,” a topic of particular interest to me, as I used to live there; so I hope to learn some more. Thank you.
“Interstate vs. Intrastate Wars in Africa”
by Maeve Powlick
I was realizing that this is the first time I’ve ever talked about Africa to people who know anything about Africa, so it should be interesting.
The focus of what I’m going to talk about is really is intrastate wars and looking at some of the interstate elements in these wars. This is because you can understand that both intrastate wars, where primarily the fighting is happening within one country, and interstate wars, such as the U.S. war in Iraq, that they have both intrastate and interstate elements. So there are insurgents in Iraq, and there is involvement of international actors in Sierra Leone, which is the case study that I’m most familiar with.
So what I’m going to talk about is maybe one or two points related to the initiation of conflict, and then specifically I’ll talk a little bit about the role of resources in the duration of conflict. And like I said, the case study that I’m most familiar with is Sierra Leone, and I’m going to pull examples from that; but I would happy to talk more about Sierra Leone if anyone is interested in that in questions.
So in terms of the initiation of conflict, the World Bank literature on conflict which takes a utility framework where a war will happen if it’s rational for there to be a war. And so then you can use this utility to calculate a critical expected duration of war, and it might be negative; we might predict that there won’t be a war. They identify that the main variables that are significant across countries, using cross-country panel data, are income and income growth; ethnic dominance, which is not that there are lots of ethnic groups, but that there’s one ethnic group that makes up between 45 and 90 percent of the population; and national resources. I’m going to talk more about national resources below. But national resources have a quadratic relationship; so low levels of national resources and GDP mean less risk of conflict, extremely high levels mean less risk of conflict, and in that mid-range the risk increases for a while and then it starts to decrease.
And so the main conclusion that comes out of this is that what matters for conflict is whether or not there’s the opportunity for there to be a conflict; that a motive for conflict, a grievance factor, which is measured in the model as income inequality or repressive regime, that these factors aren’t particularly significant across countries. And so what really matters, if we want to predict whether or not there’s going to be a war, is can a rebel group form and fund an army, is it actually possible to create this. And so, for example, this opportunity for conflict can have an international dimension.
In Sierra Leone, I would say that one of the factors that led to an opportunity for conflict was the availability of Liberian mercenaries, who came in with the first wave RUF fighters. And the RUF formed, really, in Monrovia, especially in the jails in Monrovia, and then they came in a wave of invasion with many mercenaries from Liberia. So that opportunity to actually form a rebel army— Ethnic dominance might contribute to that also. If there are enough people who speak their language, it’s easier to form an army; but that opportunity can also have interstate elements to it.
And also I think it’s important to note that motive and opportunity are not completely distinct. Apparently this is something that, honestly, I haven’t read these case studies yet, because it was just published recently, but the World Bank had the second wave of studies that they’ve done where people were doing case studies about conflict; and apparently many of the authors who wrote those also have stated that motive and opportunity aren’t completely distinctly. So [Collier?] and the co-authors who wrote the first wave of studies for the World Bank said that if there’s no opportunity for violence conflicts, then you’re more likely to see political conflict.
And I think the reverse is also true, that if there’s no opportunity for political conflict, you might end up seeing violent conflict. And it doesn’t mean that the violent conflict is revolutionary and addressing whatever political grievances there are; but it might of what you could call rebellious, that the same factors that lead to the motive for conflict could lead to the opportunity for conflict. I can give an example from Sierra Leone, which would be the rebellious youth in the country.
Just prior to the start of the war, the three government schools were abolished. So at this point, there were many young people who didn’t really have much to do. They had very low employment opportunities, they didn’t have access to education, and so their opportunity [cost?] was very low. That meant, on the one hand, they had a reason to be angry. This was a legitimate grievance that they didn’t have very many empowerment opportunities. And then also because they had such low opportunity [costs?], and they didn’t have—Most people’s lives tend to be structured by those main institutions. You’re either in school, or you’re working, or you’re in prison, or you’re in the military. And when the kids weren’t in school, it was much easier for them to be recruited into the rebel army. Anthropologist William Murphy referred to them as lumpen youth. So when the kids didn’t have anything to do, that was the motive, they were angry, but it also was an opportunity; it was a way to recruit them.
I’m thinking very quickly, but I’ll move on to the duration of conflict and to talk specifically about resources. And so I wanted to mention two things: One is I’m going to talk about the diamonds in Sierra Leone, which are a specific natural resource, and, like I said, the natural resources are correlated with the risk of conflict with the quadratic relationship. So I’ll talk about diamonds. And then I’m also going to talk about the channels through which resources flow in countries that are embroiled in conflict, specifically informal economies, like patron-client relationships.
So in terms of diamonds, looking at the role of natural resources in conflict in Sierra Leone, you can’t do that without looking at international actors, because we all know that diamonds are sold through DeBeers. And diamonds were discovered in Sierra Leone in the ‘30s, and since then they’ve been continuously looted by international actors. And so I think that this international dimension of the conflict is really important to remember, because the lootability of diamonds is not just because they’re small, they can be carried, they can be hidden pretty easily; but also because the social characteristic of being looted. The property rights around the diamonds never did an effective job of protecting and making sure that the revenues from the diamonds were really benefiting the people of the country itself.
So prior to the war, the diamonds in a large part of the country were governed by what’s called the Alluvial Diamond Mining Scheme, where a person called the supporter would own the capital, and then they would get a license from the government to mine a certain area, and then they would hire what were called, tributors, people who were called tributors, also sometimes referred to as subsistence diamond miners. So they would get tributors to mind the diamonds using very labor-intensive methods, like sifting through the water—because alluvial diamonds are found in water—so sifting through the water with a pan. And then the tributors would be paid with two-thirds of the carats that they mine. But in order to get any liquid assets from that, they had to sell it back to the supporter. And then the supporter would have to sell it to another middle man, who would sell it to another middle man, etc., etc. And if you look at the chain of value, if you really consider it value, a value added from the tributors all the way to the finished diamond, it’s about nine times the value. So these tributors were barely making a living. The property rights governing the diamonds were one based on looting, one based on the ability of multinational corporations to capture most of the benefits of these resources.
So now if you look at the main rebellious groups in the country, the NPRC, the National Provisional Ruling Council, which was a coup against the government in the early ‘90s, the RUF, the Revolutionary United Front, the famous rebels in the country, and the AFRC, the Armed Forces Revolutionary Council, which was another coup against the government that actually aligned itself with the RUF—all of these groups had the same ideology about the diamonds. Whether or not they acted on that in a way that we believe, that’s one thing. But they all said we want to capture the diamonds from the corrupt government influences.
So these international dimensions of lootability, I think, were important in understanding how conflict happened in that situation. And the lack of effective property rights meant that the diamonds were very easy to capture. The RUF had control of the diamonds within about a year. And the diamonds were used to fund all sides of the conflict, which will bring me to the next point:
That one of the ways the diamonds were used to fund the conflict is that the government hired Executive Outcomes, a South African mercenary group, to do a good portion of the fighting, and they paid for a lot of that by mortgaging the diamonds. One African [city seller?] said that it was about $4-5 million per month that was paid with diamond mining right after the war.
So the second point about resources in conflict is the flow of resources through informal channels. In Sierra Leone, one way that this happens is through patrimonial relationships. Patrimonialism is a personalized way of allocating resources. It’s not fair, it’s not equitable, it’s not efficient. It happens where a patron has control over the resources, and then they’re able to dole those resources out to clients, and in return they can get the clients to do things like break the law or risk their lives.
An example of how this happened in Sierra Leone would be through the child soldiers. The anthropologist I mentioned earlier, William Murphy, he has a theory of [clientalism?] as why child soldiers stay in sight. So they might be recruited either through terror, or they might join because they’re delinquent youth, or they might join because they believe in the RUF. There have been focus groups on former child soldiers in Sierra Leone who said that many of them joined because of revenge, that they wanted revenge against the people who had killed their families. But the reason why they stay, according to Murphy, is because they get enmeshed in these patron-client relationships. They have access to resources through the patrons, sometimes for the first time, like maybe even shoes. Some girls in these focus groups have said, Well, I had shoes for the first time in my life. And not only that, but then the clients, the soldiers of clients, were put in a somewhat powerful role because the civilian population who didn’t have guns were in the role of subjects. The client-soldiers were sort of in the middle of this power relationship.
But there’s another way that patron-client relationships are important in the conflict in Sierra Leone that has much more international dimension. This comes from the words of William Reno, who’s an African Studies scholar. What he said—Well, if you look at these countries that are similar to Sierra Leone that have what are often called weak states, a lot of them have hired multinational corporations to perform basic government functions. So in Sierra Leone they hired Executive Outcome to fight the war. They’ve also hired multinational corporations to run the customs, to run the National Development Bank, to run the fisheries, to run the lotteries. And the international lenders support this. There are some examples where the international lenders, sort of in concert with the multinational corporations that were performing these functions set up a deal where they were able to cut the interest rate, or they were able to do a little bit of debt forgiveness, or something like that.
And so Reno has theorized that the reason why this happened is, after the Cold War, the clandestine resources that were coming into countries like Sierra Leone dried up, because the Soviet Union and the U.S. didn’t have the ability to pour so many resources that could then be used to fulfill the needs of patron-client relationships; because if the patrons can’t give the resources to the clients, the clients aren’t going to perform anymore. And so the government of Sierra Leone went to multinational corporations as a way to accomplish something outside of the networks of patron-client relationships. And so it was actually much cheaper to hire a multinational corporation and not have to worry about greasing the wheels of the patrimonial system. And this drying up of resources from the Cold War, Reno says, might be one reason why all of these conflicts in Africa have happened, that now there’s no money to support the patron-client relationship, and one of the symptoms of that is that violent conflict has become much more likely.
So to summarize the basic points that I made are that opportunity and motive for conflict are not distinct, and that both of these can have international dimensions; and that lootable resources such as diamonds are created through international process where they have not only a physical characteristic of being lootable, but also a social characteristic of being lootable. And the informal flow of resources also has international dimension, such as the use of multinational corporations to escape patron-client relationship.
Basically intrastate conflicts have many interstate dimensions, even when there’s no official fighting force that’s from another country fighting within the country that’s embroiled in conflict. And yet in countries like Sierra Leone and the Democratic Republic of Congo, as Michael mentioned, there are international forces fighting within the country. That’s it.
JB:
Thank you very much. The next paper by Alan Kuperman on genocide, another topic that Mike mentioned …
“Genocide”
by Alan Kuperman
Thanks. It’s nice to be here. Thanks to Jamie for the invitation. Thanks to Thea for accommodating my logistical problems. I’m flying off to Europe later this afternoon. And my apologies for having to run out on the conference before it’s over because I would like to hear all the papers.
My topic today is, and on the slide which I think is what I submitted, it does relate to this question of genocide. It relates very much to this question that we just talked about, which is the interrelation between international forces and intrastate conflict.
Now this group, as I’m coming to understand, is left-leaning, I think that’s fair to say; so some folks may not actually like what I’m about to say, not because I’m right-leaning, but because it does go against an element of liberal orthodoxy. And I salute Jamie for inviting me, because I think he knows I’m going to say this. You do want to have a real discussion. You don’t want to have everyone who agrees saying all the same things.
The topic today that I’m going to talk about builds on my recent co-edited book called Gambling on Humanitarian Intervention. And in this book I identify this phenomenon which I call the moral hazard of humanitarian intervention. And the way it works is as follows:
There is an emerging norm of humanitarian intervention which more recently has been called the responsibility to protect. And the notion is that if a sub-state group falls victim to or is under threat of ethnic cleansing or genocide, that the international community has a responsibility to do something about it. And there’s a spectrum of things that the international community can do, ranging from condemnation, to economic sanctions, all the way through full-blown military intervention in order to protect these potential victims.
The problem, or the root of the problem, as I’ve identified it, is that most genocidal violence is actually a retaliation by the state against rebellion. So when you think genocide, don’t think Holocaust, because the Holocaust is the exception that actually proves the more general rule. The Holocaust was a case where the state decided to annihilate a group that had not rebelled. But in the vast majority of cases of genocidal violence, whether genocide or ethnic cleansing, it is a state retaliation to a rebellion by a sub-state group.
And the problem with the emerging norm of humanitarian intervention is that it is like an insurance policy against genocidal violence. As a result, it produces moral hazard, just like every kind of insurance policy does. And specifically in this case, groups will say to themselves, Well, if we rebel all by ourselves, we will suffer state retaliation, so we’re not going to do it. But now that there’s this responsibility to protect, if we rebel and the state retaliates, the international community will come in and protect us and even perhaps give us our own state, as the Kosovo Albanians are about to get. And so this well-intentioned policy of humanitarian intervention may backfire in certain classes in a classic instance of moral hazard.
As I say, I identified this several years ago and put out this book last year, and then the next question is what to do about it? Since moral hazard is something that is not studied in my field of international relations or political science so much, and is much more studied in economics, what I decided to do was to plumb the literature of economics to see, are there any lessons from that which could be applied to my realm. This is the dynamic that I was talking about.
So what am I going to do today? I’m going to speak very very quickly about some examples of the problem, and I don’t want to get caught up here. People always want to get caught up in the details of the cases, and maybe we can turn to them in the questions; but I’ll go quickly through that. Then talk about the strategies from the economics literature, talk about some applications to my field, and then summarize my proposed reform of our policy of humanitarian intervention.
Okay. Bosnia and Kosovo: two examples where there was a armed challenge to the state that provoked a genocidal retaliation. In 1992, the Bosnian Muslims, together with the Croats, against the will of the Serbs and against the will of the Yugoslav state, decided to arm themselves and secede from Yugoslavia. The result, most of us are old enough to remember—my students aren’t, but most of us are—was a hellacious retaliation by Serb forces in Bosnia supported by Belgrade. It went on for three years, somewhere around 100,000 people killed.
Kosovo, even more recent than that, in 1997-98, had this full-blown rebellion by the Kosovo Liberation Army, armed Albanian rebels in Kosovo, and initially a counter-insurgency by Serbia and Yugoslavia, and eventually a full-blown ethnic cleansing campaign in the spring of 1999. Half the Albanian population ethnically cleansed to neighboring states and about 10,000 killed.
Well, why did these groups rebel if they were so much weaker than the state, as the state showed by being able to ethnically cleanse or kill them so easily? It is not some of the answers you might think. They weren’t surprised by the state retaliation. How do I know this? I went and I actually interviewed them. I interviewed the leaders of the Bosnian Muslims, including the President Izetbegovic, including the folks who ran their military, including the folks who acquired arms.
Same thing with Kosovo. I interviewed the KLA, I interviewed pacifists among the Albanians. So everybody was aware of the danger of retaliation. They also did not think that they would suffer any sort of genocidal violence if they would just remain non-violent. So it wasn’t as if, well, we have nothing to lose. They had a lot to lose, and they knew it. They did not expect to win without outside intervention, nor should they have. I mean they had AK47’s against tanks or armored personnel carriers, which is not a fair fight. And they did not act irrationally; that is, they did not act without considering the consequences. They thought about this, they had meetings, they debated it for a long time before deciding to act. So the answer is they rebelled only when they believed it would attract intervention sufficient to achieve their political goals. And they decided in advance that genocidal retaliation against their own people was an acceptable cost of victory. You may not like that, but that’s what they told me. And there’s also documentary evidence, contemporaneous documentary evidence of that.
Some examples of the evidence: Izetbegovic said, “Our tactics were that the international community would defend the country, not that we would.” His foreign minister said, “My main priority was to get Western governments, and especially the United States, involved, because the Serbs had the whole army. Omar [B …?], who was probably the most powerful politician in Bosnia, didn’t get a lot of attention. “The whole goal was to put up a fight for long enough to bring in the international community.”
Similar sort of evidence in Kosovo: Emir [S?], key commander of the KLA, said, “We knew that our attacks would not have any military value. Our goal was not to destroy the Serb military force”--you might have thought it was, but it wasn’t—“but to make the Serbs become more vicious. We thought it was essential to get international support to win the war.” So I won’t go through all the evidence, but suffice it to say I’m convinced, at least, and if you want more evidence, I have other articles, and so forth, on that.
The question then is what to do about it. You might say, Well, I’ll just get rid of intervention. That’s not my idea. In the same way we have moral hazard in all sorts of insurance schemes, and we don’t say, Well, let’s just get rid of the insurance, because insurance a very important social function. The question is how to reform it.
And when I went through the economics literature—[end Side A]—serves a useful function in that regard, too. The four categories of reforms to deal with moral hazard:
The first is cost sharing. So you can think of the deductible on your insurance. The idea is if you have to pay the first thousand dollars, you’re going to be more careful than if they’re going to pay from the first penny. Is there an analogy for humanitarian intervention? I would say no, and the reason is that there’s already a deductible built in; that is, the international community does not intervene until violence reaches a certain threshold. They may say they will, they may say they’re going to do preventive; but we never do. We always wait. So that’s not going to work.
Second kind of cost sharing is, for example, [what] we could get in health care: co-insurance, where, no matter what the cost is, you pay 20 percent and the insurer pays 80 percent. You can think of an analogy here, which is that we’d intervene, but we’d never intervene enough to actually protect everybody, so that the rebels would still pay a price as long as it went. Again, I don’t think there’s a good analogy, an effective analogy, in humanitarian intervention, and the reason is we tried this. We essentially tried this in Bosnia, where we, for three years, did sort of half-hearted intervention and saved a lot of people—people forget that—saved a lot of people with humanitarian aid, but also a lot of people continued to suffer. And in the end, we didn’t have the stomach for this sort of policy and intervened more robustly in 1995.
Third possibility is a cap on insurance, which we do, for example, bank deposit insurance capped at $100,000, the idea is that as costs escalate, then you have to pay part of it. And there’s not an exact analogy, but I think there is a good analogy, or maybe not an analogy, but we can draw a lesson from this, and that is that we should, when we provided humanitarian assistance, we should cap it in the sense of providing it only for civilians, not for rebels. And how would you do that? You would do that by, for example, not creating a safe area. If you create a safe area, then the rebels hide in it. And that’s happened many times. It happened in [Cherbonitzca?]. It’s one of the reasons that there was a genocide later in Cherbonitzca, because it had been used by the rebels as a safe haven—well documented.
Okay, so that’s the first possibility of the four. Second is randomization. There’s two flavors of randomization. One is constructive ambiguity. So [?] Greene talks about this vis-à-vis IMF bail-outs, and says, If you tell people they’re definitely going to get an IMF bail-out, then developing countries are going to be very irresponsible and profligate. What you need to do is say you might get it, you might not get it. Is there an analogy for humanitarian intervention? I would say no, because we already have constructive ambiguity. There is no actual guarantee of intervention. Sometimes we do; sometimes we don’t.
Second kind of randomization is insulation from politics. Kindelberger talks about this. He says, for example, you don’t want to have a single decision maker, because that person would be quite vulnerable to political influence by those who would be the beneficiaries of an insurance payout. So you want to have a small multilateral group do it. Well we already have a small multilateral group known as the U.N. Security Council. But the problem is that states ignore it. So when we couldn’t get Security Council authorization for intervention in Kosovo, we did it anyway under a NATO banner. Moreover, some states just go ahead an intervene just unilaterally, as we talked about earlier. So that’s not a very useful area for analogies.
Third of the four: regulation. And there’s two flavors of this, ex-ante-regulation; ex-post-regulation. Ex-ante-regulation is what, for example, we do with bank deposit insurance, where we say you only qualify for insurance if, before the failure, you have been observing reserve requirements and interest rate requirements. Is there an analogy for humanitarian intervention? I would say yes, and that is, if you are a group that was not rebelling and you fall victim to genocidal violence, then we will definitely come in and help you. But if you are a group that rebelled, and thereby provoked the violence against your own group, then we are not going to intervene, certainly to help the rebels, unless the state retaliation is grossly disproportionate.
Second flavor is ex-post-regulation. The idea here is that it’s how you act after the failure that determines whether or not you get a bail-out. So for example, IMF bail-outs, we say to the country, well, you have to reduce your budget deficit, reduce your balance of payment deficit, all sorts of austerity, in order to qualify for bail-out. Is there an analogy with humanitarian intervention? I would say yes, and that would be that once the violence starts, we would say to rebels, we’re not going to help you unless, number one, you lay down your arms, and two, you reduce your goals from something grandiose, such as independence, a new state, to something like greater human rights, or a greater degree of autonomy.
Last of the four categories: other methods. This is a catch-all basket. One is risk-based premiums. You know this: If you get in a couple of car accidents, your rates go way up. There’s not a perfect analogy for this; but the idea behind this is good. The idea behind this is that we incentivize low-risk behavior, as opposed to incentivizing high-risk behavior. Right now, the humanitarian intervention regime is exactly backwards. If you engage in low-risk behavior of non-violent resistance, you get no reward, we ignore you, you don’t make the newspaper. If, on the other hand, you rebel and start a civil war, and then there’s retaliation of ethnic cleansing and genocide, then you are on CNN, you’re on the front page of The New York Times, and you get all sorts of assistance—sanctions against the state, and perhaps military intervention. So currently we incentivize high-risk behavior. That’s not a very good idea.
So how would you incentivize low-risk behavior is you would pour international resources not into helping rebels, but into helping non-violent groups. How would you do that? You would, when there’s a non-violent group with a legitimate grievance, then you’d put very harsh pressure on the state and say, hey, this is a legitimate grievance, and they’re not using force. Now we’re going to sanction you unless you meet their grievance.
The two others: limit guarantees. Since I’m running out of time I’m happy to talk about these in questions if you want; but the idea here is that there’s moral hazard for insurers as well, because if insurers are insured themselves, then they’re going to be less responsible about who[m] they offer insurance to. That’s where you have, in fact, exactly this: a limit on the guarantee to bailing out insurance companies. What would the analogy be? The analogy would be the U.N., for example, as an intervener, we would say, You only get this much money to intervene. If you go for an extra intervention, we’re not going to pay for it. So once there were a limit on the amount of resources that could be spent on intervention, presumably the U.N. would be smarter about where they intervene and only give it to the most deserving folks. Unfortunately, there’s not a great way to see that happening, because we’re not going to cap intervention resources; it’s not the way the U.N. works.
And the last one: mutual liability. This is a very interesting one theoretically, but not in practice. Imagine if you could say to all of the potential victim groups of genocide and ethnic cleansing, Here’s a certain amount of money. You tell us which groups are most deserving. That would be, I think, very interesting, because then they would, I think, be very careful and make sure not to reward provocateurs, but only to reward the innocent victims.
Okay, so to summarize: My proposed reform of humanitarian intervention is as follows: First of all, don’t help rebels unless the state retaliation is grossly disproportionate. Secondly, use international resources instead to pressure states to address the legitimate grievances of non-violent groups. Third, which is, I think, fourth here, aid civilians in ways that don’t inadvertently aid rebels. And how would you do that? Through aid corridors and through refugee and displaced person camps that are policed to exclude rebels. And the last one, which is the third here, is that since I’m not so pie-eyed as to think these recommendations will actually be embraced anytime soon, assuming we are going to help rebels, which I think we will, we should be prepared for the state backlash. We’re always surprised. Okay, we’re going to help the rebels to overthrow a state, or to secede to get their own state, and then we’re shocked, absolutely shocked, that the state uses genocidal violence against them. We shouldn’t be shocked, and so we should prepare for it, and say, before we do that, before we help rebels, before we pressure a state to acquiesce to rebels, we should provide a preventive peacekeeping deployment. Thanks very much.
JB:
I think economics is a great science when non-economists can use what we do and actually apply them. Great paper. All three of them actually. Thank you very much for staying within the time limits. We have 15 minutes for questions. So anyone who has a question or two, come forward, ask them, and tell us whom you want to answer the question.
Q:
I have questions for Alan. I think it was an interesting presentation, but I don’t agree with the way you describe genocide. I mean, genocide is not just a retaliation against a rebel group. That is the problem. It’s a retaliation against the civilian population who may or may not have nothing to do with the rebel group. I take the example of Rwanda, for example, where the Tutsi minority living in the entire country had nothing to do, or almost nothing to do, with the invaders coming from Uganda. Nevertheless, they were exterminated. So it was not a retaliation; it was a whole genocidal ideology behind it, who [sic] had nothing to do with just retaliate. Because if the state wanted to save itself, or wanted to win the war, they would have attacked the rebel group. They didn’t do that. They attacked the defenseless civilian population. And I think there is an argument for humanitarian intervention, and it has nothing to do with your presentation. It was a genuine argument for humanitarian intervention, because the civilian population was targeted, which had nothing to do with the rebel attack.
AK:
As you know, I’ve written a book on Rwanda. I also have an interesting on Rwanda in the Journal of Genocide Research from 2004. And I think it’s historically inaccurate to say that the genocide had nothing to do with the rebellion, with the rebel invasion. In fact, it had everything to do with it. The only time you see violence in Rwanda by a Hutu against Tutsi over the last 40 years is when there are rebel incursions into Rwanda, whether it’s in the ‘60s, with the [?] invasions, or whether it’s in the 1990s with the RPF invasion.
Now you’re right that the state is attacking innocent civilians, as opposed to attacking the rebels, but that’s my point. That is my point. That is what states do. Mao said that the rebels are the fish that swim in the sea of the civilian population. That means if you’re doing counter-insurgency and you want to kill the fish, you have to drain the sea. And so that’s what’s happening. That’s what’s happening in Rwanda, that’s what happened in Southern Sudan, that’s what’s happened in Bosnia, that’s what happened in Kosovo, and that’s what’s currently today happening in Darfur. My whole point is that is the predominant paradigm of genocidal violence—not that these people deserve it. Of course they don’t deserve it. This is my point and why in my prescription to try and make this distinction between the rebels and the civilians, there’s a principle [?] dynamic. The rebels are willing to fight until the last civilian is killed of their own group.
And the whole point of my 2004 article on Rwanda was that it was based on interviews with the RPF. And I said to them, Did you expect the innocent civilians, the Tutsi of Rwanda, to be punished for your invasion? And they said, Yes, we expected it. We debated it, and we said, is it worth it to invade, since we know our own brethren in Rwanda will be killed in retaliation? And we decided yes, it’s worth it. You can’t make an omelet without breaking some eggs.
JB:
I should maybe ask those who come forward to briefly introduce themselves.
Lucy Webster:
Aside from being on the board of EPS, I’m also the director of something called the Center for War Peace Studies, and one of my colleagues is particularly interested in weak and failed states, and particularly in Cote d’Ivoire. But I would love to get hold of Alan’s paper. I don’t know if maybe we could even put it on our website. It seems absolutely marvelous.
But my question is, how would you apply your recommendations to the situation in Darfur?
AK:
Just on the paper, it’s currently under revision. There’s a journal called Global Governance, so once that’s all settled and copyright issues are all taken care of, if they let me, I’m happy to have it posted here as well.
On Darfur, I wrote an op ed, a couple of op eds, one in The Washington Post and one in The New York Times, about a year ago on this very question. And the way that I would apply this logic to Darfur is exactly as described in my presentation. There is this mis-impression in the mainstream media that this is a genocidal regime in Khartoum who just woke up one day and said, We want to kill all of the African tribes in Darfur. And it just ain’t so. The violence started in 2003, when the rebels attacked army and police posts. It’s well documented—not that life was wonderful in Darfur; but it wasn’t wonderful for the Arabs or the Africans. It never has been, just as life was never wonderful for the Serbs or the Albanians in Kosovo, which is likewise the poorest part of the country.
So what to do about it now? My concern is that all of the pressure has been one side. All of the pressure is against the government, all of the sanctions are against the government. There’s a nominal indictment of one rebel leader; but all of the pressure really is on the government. And what that does is say to the rebels, let’s keep fighting. The longer we fight, the more pressure on the government, the better deal we’re going to get. So this pressure, this Save Darfur movement, which is so well-intentioned, is actually having this perverse consequence of perpetuating the war and perpetuating civilian suffering.
So what I would do is to say there is a peace agreement out there, a Darfur peace agreement, May of 2006. Who signed it? The government signed it. It doesn’t get a lot of kudos for that, but the government signed it, and one rebel group signed it; but the main rebel groups have not signed it. So really where does our pressure belong? On those who signed the peace agreement, or those who haven’t signed the peace agreement. On my opinion, on those who haven’t signed the peace agreement. Our pressure should be on the rebels. We should be saying to them, you need to get with the program, sign the agreement. If you sign it, and then the government keeps attacking you, then we’ll come help you.
Winslow Wheeler:
Hi. I’m Winslow Wheeler from the Center for Defense Information. Thanks, all of you, for three excellent presentations.
I’d like to ask Ms. Powlick and Professor Kuperman about a technological development in rural warfare, insurgency, forced emersion warfare, whatever you want to call it. That technological development is the AK47 and the RPG, rocket propelled grenade. Unlike the stinger, they’re cheap, they’re simple, they’re available in thousands in the case of the RPG, hundreds of thousands; and it seems to me it changed the nature of modern insurgency from the Maoist type where you’d start out with homemade weapons and steal a few from the police, from the incompetent armed forces, and you’d have this slow buildup. Instead you’ve got this instantaneously available inventory that puts you on a pretty level playing field. I disagree with Mr. Kuperman that RPGs [?] all over the place, armored vehicles are as vulnerable as ever to even the most base insurgent.
So I guess my question is, there are a lot of dimensions of warfare, but it seems to me that this is an important one that needs to be understood and addressed in some way. I’m not quite sure how, because arms control is not going to deal with it effectively. But I wonder what your views are about those issues.
MP:
I can respond to that in relation to child soldiers, which is that I don’t know very much about the availability of these weapons, but they’re also apparently pretty light. And so in Sierra Leone, for example, the availability of AK47s as light guns was something that enabled them to use child soldiers. Under the memoir that came out recently called Long Way Gone: Memoirs of a Boy Soldier, he talks about this pretty graphically. He was a boy who was recruited into the government forces, which was very common, and he would talk about how the 10-year-old boys could hold a gun. The six- and seven-year-olds had trouble, and then eventually they’d be able to hold it up straight.
So not only does the availability matter, but also simply the fact that it can be used by a child, I think, is really an important factor in […?].
JB:
Peter Singer, by the way, at the Brookings Institute has a book on that very topic. Alan, go ahead.
AK:
Now we’re in my field so now I feel more comfortable than talking about economics. Certainly you’re right that the proliferation of light arms has had several significant impacts. One is child soldiers. Secondly, I think it’s easier to recruit on the basis of money as opposed to on the basis of ideology; so there may be a thinner level of support amongst the people. But onto your specific point, which is that it makes this, in a sense, more of a fair fight—and that I’ve mischaracterized it by saying an AK47 isn’t very useful against a tank. My point wasn’t that, if you’re trying to do a disciplined counter-insurgency, that it’s easy. That’s not my point. My point is that if you want to do genocide or ethnic cleansing, it’s very easy with tanks against AK47s, very very easy, and in fact the violence is remarkably quick. So in Kosovo, 850,000 Albanians, one-half of the ethnic Albanian population of Kosovo, was cleansed in the first week or two in Kosovo. So if you really want to get serious about this, these pea-shooters really aren’t very useful weapons for defending against genocide and ethnic cleansing. They are useful, as we’re seeing in Iraq, if you’re trying to do a disciplined counter-insurgency. If you’re not willing to kill innocent civilians in large numbers, then an AK47 RPG can be rather effective.
So actually what I would say is that the consequence of this proliferation of AK47s, RPGs, and so forth, is maybe that it makes genocide and ethnic cleansing more likely, because it’s the only effective response from the state. And as Alex [DuVal?] calls it Darfur, with the arming of the Janjaweed and so forth, is counterinsurgency on the cheap. To do a disciplined counterinsurgency is incredibly expensive, as we’re finding out in Iraq.
JB:
We have two more people to ask questions, and then we go into the coffee break where I’m sure we can continue the discussion.
Judith Reppy:
I’m Judith Reppe. I want to ask my two questions. And it follows on the small arms question. With respect to your prescription for more U.N. involvement, I think one of the most interesting things that happened with NGOs at the U.N. has been the role of the National Rifle Association, and that just points to a more general problem. When you say, let’s have more NGOs at the U.N., how do you expect that to work out when you could have, for instance, groups like the Rifle Association or other agencies, groups like People Opposed to Family Planning, and so on, calling the shots?
MI:
Well, of course, there are a great variety of NGOs with many different purposes, sometimes at cross-purposes […?], you’re absolutely right about that. I’m saying that the agencies that operate within the U.N. system should have access to all those. They may disagree with some of them, they may ignore some of them, they may accept some of them; but it there should at least be some dialogue, some way of getting in on the transmission [?] ideas. They may be ideas we’re not comfortable with—NRA, or something like that—but at least those ideas should be out there, and there should be a way of getting them into the hands of the people who could use those ideas, even if they reject those ideas. So I’m not at all worried about groups that have a very agenda than my group, and this group, let’s say. I’m not worried about that.
JB:
I think the NRA is perhaps using its influence specifically for lobbying purposes rather than for discussion of policy purposes at the global level. Maybe that’s what you’re aiming at.
MI:
Well, they lobby at all levels, the national and international.
Lloyd Jeff Dumas:
I’m Lloyd Jeff Dumas. First of all, I want to say that I certainly agree with the idea that encouraging non-violent revolution is a good idea, as opposed to violent revolution; but I don’t agree that non-violent revolutions are not reported or not given attention. It certainly wasn’t true in the case of the Orange Revolution, in the case of the revolutions that changed things in the Philippines, the revolutions in Eastern Europe. There have been lots of reports of non-violent revolutions, so I think they have gotten attention.
I want to also make a comment about, I guess it was the first of your solutions, which was not to provide humanitarian aid unless the government response was disproportionate.
AK:
Grossly disproportionate.
LJD:
Grossly disproportionate. I cannot imagine a situation in which genocide is not a grossly disproportionate response to a rebel group.
And I want to just make one other quick comment. The comment that people made that you interviewed who said, It was an acceptable price to have a genocide against out people, are first of all talking after the fact—
AK:
No, not in some cases, but okay—
LJD:
And talking after the fact, it means they’re saying, What I did in order to say it was a horrible thing was either I was too stupid to see this possibility, or I was too, how can I put, I just didn’t understand the situation. And I don’t think people are likely to admit to that. So that’s another part of the consideration, that you may not be getting an accurate report from people saying that.
The other thing is the genocide by definition is directed against the general group of people. So if it’s directed against a general group of people because a few people who belong to that group decide to form an army and attack, why does that, or how does that justify not intervening on behalf of all the other people who had nothing to say about this when the rebels started to attack? They just happened to be part of the same ethnic group.
AK:
You’re saying this sort of violence is always disproportionate. Well, think about Kosovo in 1998. Kosovo in 1998, the KLA launches a rebellion, they’re shooting policemen, they’re shooting innocent Serbs. Thousands of ethnic Albanian émigrés are rushing into the country, millions of dollars of aid are going to the KLA, and the KLA is really mounting a full-blown insurgency. Over the course of the year, 1998, the Serb police, Yugoslav army conducts a counter-insurgency in Kosovo, and over the course of that year approximately 1,000 people were killed, approximately 1,000 people over the course of the entire year of counter-insurgency. Was that grossly disproportionate as a response? Now these folks were sometimes targeted intentionally, but it seems mainly were collateral damage, as we call it when we do it, in efforts by the Serb and Yugoslav forces to wipe out the KLA. In my opinion, that is not grossly disproportionate. If you take a look at the number of people the U.S. has killed in Iraq, it’s much much higher. The people we’ve killed in Afghanistan, much much higher. So unless we’re being grossly disproportionate, and most people don’t say that, then I don’t think the Serbs were in 1998.
And so that’s my point, is that in 1998, the Serbs were trying their best—they weren’t extremely capable; they’re not as disciplined as we are—but they were trying their best not to slaughter civilians. And their reward for trying was that we came in and bombed them for eleven weeks. And my point is that that’s not a very good lesson to set, because it tells any disgruntled group, all you gotta do is provoke the state, and then the international community will come in and help you.
Secondly, on the question of were people lying to me: In any time you do this sort of retrospective field research, that’s a risk, and so what you have to use what my dissertation advisor at MIT set as polygraphs. How do you know if they’re lying or not? And one way is certainly to triangulate, talk to people who supported the policy, then talk to people who opposed the policy, and if you can, get any paper documentation, if you can, get transcripts of speeches that were given at the time, and especially if you can get accounts from different sources about the same events.
So for example, in Rwanda, multiple sources said, We had a meeting. We took a vote. In fact there was a vote of the worldwide membership of the RBF prior to the invasion of Rwanda saying, Should we invade Rwanda given that there will be retaliation against Tutsi civilians within Rwanda. So when I have that sort of evidence, then I think that I’m actually getting the true story, unless there’s a vast Tutsi conspiracy to try to sell this as a line. First thing.
Second thing is that if I were going to lie to protect myself, I would say, I just didn’t expect that the state would be so brutal, I never thought they would actually target civilians; because that would make me not look stupid, and it would make me look not immoral too, and heartless. But if I say, Yeah, I know they’re going to kill my civilians; I just didn’t care, that doesn’t really make me look good. So if I’m going to lie, that’s not the way I would lie. So those were a couple of the polygraphs I used in my field research.
Last point: Isn’t there a distinction between the followers and the rebels, and shouldn’t we always intervene to help the followers? I’ve tried in my prescriptions to—I agree with that in theory, and I’m trying to figure out how to do it in practice. The way I would do it in practice, as I say, is to try to provide aid in the way that only goes to civilians and not to rebels. How do you do that? Well, if you say a certain area is a safe area and we’re going to do a no-fly zone, that helps civilians and rebels. I think it’s a very bad strategy. I think it’s a bad strategy in Darfur specifically for other reasons; but it’s a very bad strategy in general in that it provides a safe haven for rebels.
So how then can you help civilians without helping rebels? My argument is that you want to have places where civilians are alone, without rebels. And the way you do that is you have refugee camps or displaced persons camps that are policed around the perimeter with peacekeepers, or with private military corporations if you can’t get contributors for peacekeepers. I’m not averse to privatization if necessary, but the idea is that you have an entrance and an exit to the camp, and nobody gets in with a weapon, and the food comes in and helps those who don’t have weapons. Now could rebels stash their weapons, run in, get fed, and leave? Yeah, but that’s a de minimus sort of problem, and that wouldn’t bother me. And so I would do corridors, where aid trucks can come in, or flights can come in, and then camps that are just for civilians, and the rebels who started this thing are on their own. I really really don’t want to help them.
MI:
Alan, your paper and mine are connected because the responsibility to protect that the U.N. adopted is a corollary of the U.N.D.P.’s idea of human security, which is part of my paper. So my question to you is this: Was it a mistake to enunciate the responsibility to protect? Was that a mistake to announce that?
AK:
I think the responsibility to protect, the problem with it is that it takes no account of moral hazard, so it’s like saying we will give you a million dollars if your house burns down, regardless of whether you set it yourself, and regardless if your house is only worth $100,000. Would that be smart? It’s well-intentioned. We want to help people who have suffered. It’s very well-intentioned. But if we had a policy of giving a million dollars to anybody whose house burned down, we’d have a lot more houses burning down. So yeah, I think it was a mistake to enunciate it in the way it was enunciated, but not because it was done out of anything but the best of intentions.
JB:
Well, I think that was a fascinating opening session for the day. Thank you very much, all three of you. And we will reconvene at 10:45, if you check your watch, so that the next panel can get started on time. Meanwhile, let’s have a discussion over coffee. Thank you.
|