'The Unwanted' a graphic novel by Joe Sacco at guardian.co.uk
'40 Things You Need to Know About the Next 40 Years' at smithsonian.mag.com (I, for one, welcome the rule of our new jellyfish overlords...)-->thanks to openculture.com for the link!
'Humanitarian Design vs. Design Imperialism: Debate Summary' by the Editors at designobserver.com (a really good digest of the online debate about humanitarian design and whether it is a form of imperialism)
And just in case you've ever wondered what the Earth might look like if it stopped rotating, you can find answers at popsci.com
'Barcelona Rebels Against Tourist Invasion' by Giles Tremlett at guardian.co.uk
'The Art of War: Deleuze, Guattari, Debord, and the Israeli Defence Force' by Eyal Weizman at mutemagazine
'Report of the Special Rapporteur on Extrajudicial, Summary, and Arbitrary Killings: Special Report on Targeted Killings' by Philip Alston at the United Nations Human Rights Council
'Ten Things that Terrify Right-Wingers' by Joshua Holland at truthout.org
'Is NATO to Blame for Russia's Afghan Heroin Problem' by Simon Shuster at time.com
As mentioned on GamePolitics.com, earlier this week, the UK's Channel 4 put together an interesting report on the use of Predator drones by the US Army. Many of the key issues are identified and discussed:
the legality of drone strikes
the appropriateness of the recourse to technological solutions for political problems
how (military) technologies become gendered and tied to conceptions of honor
the problem of proliferation (if you think this is far fetched, check out the DIY Drone community who build kit for recreational/non-military purposes)
But what is perhaps most fascinating is the claim that drones are changing military culture and tactical doctrine to the point where they are now referred to as 'Army crack'.
Given that drones are a dual-use technology that also allow for the overt and covert use of force, what might it mean for understandings of modern warfare--or the popular identification of war itself--if the US military is indeed 'addicted' to the use of drones? Moreover, what happens to our spatial understanding of war-fighting when combat can be initiated and completed by individuals situated thousands of miles away from the theater of operation? Will actions traditionally considered to be acts of war become recoded as something else? What will be the political consequences of such a recoding?
These are but some of the questions that continue to motivate my project on assassination and targeted killing...
Many thanks to my colleague Martin Coward for alerting me to this story.
Last week, Gil Kerlikowske, the top drug adviser to the Obama administration, claimed that the American government has ended its 'war on drugs'. Yet, as he made these comments in Ireland, a bloody battle was being waged on the streets of Tivoli Gardens in Kingston Jamaica.
Gunfights between the security services and residents, mass arrests, and reported extra-judicial executions were taking place in an ill-fated attempt at to capture Christopher 'Dudus' Coke, an alleged drug kingpin. The operation, initially resisted by the Jamaican cabinet, was eventually undertaken to fulfill the request made by the American government to extradite Coke to the United States to stand trial on an assortment of charges.
As Maxine Williams has outlined in the Guardian, the political and legal situation in Jamaica is complex. To make sense of what has taken place, most media outlets have focused on Coke's close ties to the ruling Labour party, the absence of a government presence in these estates, and the desire of the Jamaican government to regain control of them. More critical observers, like Ben Bowling, have been quick to point to how American drug prohibition encourages the establishment of transnational drug cartels, endemic corruption, and levels of violence that are necessary to sustain this underground economy.
But there is another policy dimension to the US drug policy that allows one to understand what is taking place here and to see that the war on drugs is definitely not over. As I mentioned in a previous post, the war on drugs is deeply embedded into the institutional infrastructure of the United States. And one of the most effective mechanisms has been the Certification Process for Major Drug Producing and Transit Countries
and accompanying Presidential certifications under Section 489 of the
Foreign Assistance Act.
As I explained,
These procedures are supposed to be used to monitor
whether other nation-states have been complying with counter-narcotics
obligations--or doing their best to meet them-- as laid out in the 1988 UN Drugs Convention.
Foreign governments that are determined not to be meeting these
obligations lose their eligibility for most forms of American economic
and military assistance and an obligatory 'no' vote by the United
States in six multilateral development banks. This entire process with
the American government serving as prosecutor, judge, jury, and
executioner and the potential sanctions it generates provide a form of
political leverage that no administration will want to lose. And
meeting the obligations of the UN Convention requires a vigorous law
enforcement response to illicit drugs issues meaning that wars on drugs
will continue elsewhere.
In the latest National Drug Control Strategy Report, Jamaica is listed as a major drug transit or drug producing country, though it was not given as dire an evaluation as Burma, Bolivia, or Venezuela. Thus, I suspect that political pressure exercised through this mechanism--as much as any desire by the state to gain de facto control over areas like Tivoli Gardens--has also influenced the decision of the Jamaican government to conduct military operations against its own citizens at the request of a foreign state.
Currently, Jamaica is facing a budgetary crisis that has required the intervention of the IMF. It has been estimated that this coming fiscal year, nearly 62% of government spending will be used to service the national debt. American financial support through USAID Jamaica--as documented in the 2010-2014 USAID report-- is not a decisive factor enabling government spending overall but would be a key contributor to the security services budget at a time of cutbacks. Similarly, the recent Inter-American Development Bank plan to approve a $600 million loan to Jamaica is significant, as is the fact that the United States is the largest shareholder (30.1%) out of the 48 member states. An American no-vote based on Section 489 provisions might have put that loan in jeopardy, something of which the Jamaican government would have been acutely aware.
Jamaica then appears to be going through a process similar to that experienced by Colombia in the 1980s and 1990s. It was at this time when the United States resorted to a variety of incentives and coercive measures to get members of the Medellin and Cali cartels extradited to face charges in American courts. Extradition requests led to spectacular acts of violence and human rights violations on the part of cartels and the Colombian security services, greatly contributing to human insecurity experienced by ordinary Colombians. And in the end, successful arrests, extradictions, or eliminations of key underworld figures did nothing to stem to tide of cocaine entering the United States.
Four decades later, despite proving to be a failure as a tactic, the front-line of American counter-narcotics policy is still being exported--along with the associated costs in violence--through pressures enabled by extradition requests. The drug war and its coercive practices rage on in Jamaica, despite the claims of the Obama administration that its own rhetorical reference point has changed.
The shocking raid by Israeli commandos on the Free Gaza Movement convoy has sent waves of shock, anger, and disbelief around the world. There is a lot that can be said and speculated upon as to why the Israeli government would have pursued this high-risk/low reward course of action when there were other options available (e.g., anything from letting the ships go through to sabotaging them before they left Cyprus). And the increasingly erratic and high profile actions of the Israeli security services signal to me that either Binyamin Netanyahu--always a fairly shrewd political operator in the real politik tradition whatever else one might want to say about him--has begun to rapidly lose the plot himself or that he has completely lost control of the military. If one is interested in the peace process moving forward, neither is a particularly welcome development.
But beyond these issues, what strikes me as interesting about the raid is the battle that is being fought to control the narrative that emerges, that is the way that the raid becomes understood within a complex pastiche of related incidents and events in the region.
What is important here is that unlike many of the debates and disagreements that are sources of
political friction in the region, this is one where many of the 'facts'
of the incident are
shared. Everyone agrees that Gaza is a space of conflict and
contestation within a larger thematic of (geo)political conflict. Everyone agrees
that the flotilla was attempting to break the
Israeli blockade.
Everyone agrees that the ship was carrying humanitarian materials bound
for Gaza. Everyone
agrees that Israeli commandos attempted to board the Mavi Marmara in
international waters. Everyone agrees that civilians were killed and
injured during the attempted raid. For the most part then,
commentators, the Israeli government, and the Free Gaza Movement are in
relative agreement over the characters involved, the backdrop, the
plot-line, and the theme of the story. Thus, the areas of the narrative
open to contestation are in terms of who gets to play the narrator and
what will count as the acteme, that is the aesthetically significant
decision that propels the story forward. In the aftermath, the Israeli government has understood quite astutely where it has room to maneuver and focused its efforts accordingly.
What we see is the Israeli government exercising a two pronged media offensive. The first has been to be proactive and to seek out media engagement. This is a longer-standing part of Israeli statecraft. Israel has always been adept at seizing the role of the narrator in order to shape the narrative conveyed in major mainstream media outlets in order to cast reasonable doubt and/or plausible deniability, and/or convey a sense of victim-hood as required depending on the actions it has undertaken in any given situation. And the detention of flotilla participants was--and is-- a part of this strategy. It is not so much about punishment, debriefing, or deterrence. Rather, detention is a crucial part of limiting as much as possible eye-witness testimony as to what transpired on the Mavi Marmara to Israeli approved sources for 24-48 hours following the raid.
The second prong of the media offensive is that the Israeli government is now targeting new media through the immediate release of footage of the alleged events via You-tube. The release of footage compliments the attempt to monopolize the role of the narrator by attempting to shift the acteme from the action of raiding the Mavi Marmara to what individuals on the Mavi Marmara allegedly did when they were boarded with hostile intent in international waters. What makes this shift particularly powerful--if successful--is that unlike claiming that the cargo contains weapons or that some members of the Free Gaza Movement are Al Qa-eda agents, it is non-falsifiable now and into the future. That is, it would be difficult--though not impossible-- for conclusive evidence to the contrary to emerge that would fatally undermine this narrative structure once established.
And while the shift in narrative won't convince anyone already opposed to the occupation or blockade, this isn't the audience that Israel is trying to reach. Rather, their media offensive is aimed at convincing their soft supporters to continue to accept Israeli policy--and the government's perspective-- in the region. It is also aimed at making condemnation from close allies--such as the governments of the UK, the United States, and Canada--difficult to articulate publicly without getting uncomfortably drawn into a discussion of the minutiae of the incident.
So, as tragic, problematic, imprudent, and miscalculated as the raid may have been, Israel is conducting a far more reasoned media campaign in response. Thus, those who wish to question the moral, legal, or political legitimacy of Israel's actions in this incident better devote some effort to contesting the structure of the Israeli narrative that is beginning to take root as the de facto starting point in the media-scape.
'France's Pupils to View Cinema Classics in the Classroom' by Lizzy Davies at guardian.co.uk
'Why Middlesex Matters' by Jon Protevi at timeshigher.co.uk (or why it is an unwise decision to close the highly regarded philosophy department at Middlesex University)
And last but not least, 'The Coalition: Our Programme for Government' (see paragraph 1, p. 35 for the true priority) available here
At the danger of committing a shameless act of self-promotion, I thought that the following conference would be of interest to the chasingdragons readership. I'm very humbled to have been asked to give a presentation by the
conference organizers. More importantly, I'm looking forward to meeting
other early career scholars who are working at the intersections of
critical social theory and the politics of security.
Call for Papers
'Security Studies as Critique': The Third Annual Graduate Conference in Security Studies
Department of Politics and International Studies, University of Warwick
Keynote Speakers: Dr. Kyle Grayson (Newcastle University) and Columba Peoples (University of Bristol)
June 24-25, 2010
Over the past two decades the field of security studies has become ever more concerned with critique. For those sympathetic towards critical approaches to security this is a development to be applauded, with critical security studies being built upon a prevailing dissatisfaction with ‘traditional approaches’. Critique has been a vital part of the broadening and deepening of the field: opening up new possibilities for thinking and practising security; showing the promise of opportunities for transformation; helping scholars understand the numerous flaws of previous approaches. Critique has helped to enliven the field, and maybe even to humanise it. Yet perhaps we should now turn to the matter of critique itself and ask to what extent it has come to define the field of security studies. It may well be the case that critical security studies has become too absorbed in critique, too focused on trying to devalue neorealism, so much so that by continually comparing itself to ‘traditional approaches’ it only serves to tighten the neorealist grip on international political thought. Moreover, it is possible that the intellectual integrity of critical security studies is compromised when understandings of both ‘security’ and ‘critical’ are so hotly contested. Whereas some authors would happily embrace an ethos of critique, others argue this is an unsatisfactory and intellectually self-indulgent way to engage with the profound matter of security and suggest a need for reconstruction. After all these years of questions, what is now the role of ‘critique’ in security studies?
We invite you to join us for a friendly and collegial graduate conference. Bursaries for travel and accommodation will be available. We encourage papers from research students addressing, but not limited by, any of the following questions:
How useful and relevant is the traditional/critical distinction in security studies?
To what extent should security studies be normatively driven - whether under the leitmotif of emancipation, resistance or liberation? What is ‘critical’ about critical approaches to security? What is ‘traditional’ about traditional approaches?
To what extent have critical approaches to security posed a challenge to contemporary power relations? How much should be expected? Are critical security studies, more provocatively, merely enmeshed in what Foucault termed the ‘great warm and tender Freemasonry of useless erudition’? What is the relationship between theory and practice in traditional/critical approaches?
How successful have critical approaches been at traversing the analytic spectrum from meta-theory to ‘real world’ empirical analyses? Are traditional approaches more successful in this endeavour and if so why?
What is the relationship between the different critical approaches to security? Are they incompatible? Are they synergistic? Are certain approaches more conducive to the ‘critical’ project’, however that is defined?
Please send abstracts of no more than 250 words to pgsecurityconf@warwick.ac.uk by 30th April, 2010.
