Peace

Gernika-Basque Country, Spain 75 years ago Germany-Italy bombed this sacred Basque-Spanish town, adding state terrorism to the destruction of arms factories. Picasso made the atrocity enter world collective memory forever. As a testimony to the power of art, and memory, the painting was ordered covered when USA tried to make the case that Iraq was producing mass destruction weapons for the UN Security Council. Two kinds of memories serve politics: glories and traumas.

Washington, DC One wonders what the US political leaders want. The incumbent lives in this world, playing an ultra-realist game: extra-judicial executions in maybe 70 countries, drone attacks; minimizing US losses, maximizing direct hits at what he sees as the problem, concrete identified individuals, not concrete unidentified conflicts. He has neither the moral nor the intellectual courage to do that. The challengers, with one exception, are focusing on one issue: down with the welfare state. Ron Paul, the libertarian, adds: down with the warfare state. He has registered Vietnam-Afghanistan-Iraq and the next in line, Iran-Syria, as unwinnable and unaffordable for a bankrupt economy. Young Republicans and others flock to him, but his discourse is too unusual. Warfare, not welfare makes sense. This has to do with the relation to conflict, a three-headed problem: attitude, behavior, contradiction. The USA wants an attitude of love for the USA, military response to evil...

A few days ago I was a participant in a well-attended academic panel on ‘the decline of violence and warfare’ at the International Studies Association’s Annual Meeting held this year in San Diego, California. The two-part panel featured appraisal of the common argument of two prominent recent publications: Steven Pinker’s best-selling The Better Angels of our Nature: Why Violence has Declined and Joshua Goldstein’s well-researched, informative, and provocative Winning the War on War: The Decline of Armed Conflict Worldwide. Both books are disposed to rely upon quantitative data to back up their optimistic assessments of international and domestic political behavior, which if persuasive, offer humanity important reasons to be hopeful about the future. Much of their argument depends on an acceptance of their interpretation of battlefield deaths worldwide, which according to their assessments have declined dramatically in recent decades. But do battlefield deaths tell the whole story, or even the...

Although the impulse to try to end the ongoing repression by the Syrian regime against its own people through foreign military intervention is understandable, it would be a very bad idea. Empirical studies have repeatedly demonstrated that international military interventions in cases of severe repression actually exacerbate violence in the short term and can only reduce violence in the longer term if the intervention is impartial or neutral. Other studies demonstrate that foreign military interventions actually increase the duration of civil wars, making the conflicts longer and bloodier, and the regional consequences more serious, than if there were no intervention. In addition, military intervention would likely trigger a “gloves off” mentality that would dramatically escalate the violence on both sides.

/10/jonathanpower2.jpg”> After the Soviet Union invaded Afghanistan in 1979 and got totally bogged down there was a joke circulating in Moscow. “Why are we still in Afghanistan? Answer: We are still looking for the people who invited us”. Zbigniew Brzezinski, architect of US policy in Afghanistan when he was President Jimmy Carter’s national security advisor, was convinced Afghanistan would become the Soviet Union’s Vietnam. In fact the Soviet Union’s Vietnam has become America’s Afghanistan. There is truth in both these cynical observations. And there are lies, distortions and self-delusion built into the narrative. Only Russia has been more or less honest. Under President Mikhail Gorbachev it decided to cut its losses and withdraw and was open about the reason it did so. Today the debate in the US is contorted.

In his important article in the New York Times, March 17, 2012, James Risen summarized the consensus of the intelligence community as concluding that Iran abandoned its program to develop nuclear weapons in 2003, and that no persuasive evidence exists that it has departed from this decision. It might have been expected that such news based on the best evidence that billions spent to get the most reliable possible assessments of such sensitive security issues would produce a huge sigh of relief in Washington, but on the contrary it has been totally ignored, including by the highest officers in the government.

We all feel desperate watching the horrible killing, feeling the suffering of the bereaved, the whole people. But, what to do? Could it be that the UN, and governments in general, have a tendency to make the same mistake, again and again, of putting the cart before the horse? The formula they use is generally: [11 Get rid of No. 1 as key responsible, using sanctions; then [2] Cease-fire, appealing to the parties, or intervening, imposing; [3] Negotiation among all legitimate parties; and from that [4] A political solution as a compromise between the positions. It looks so logical. There is a key responsible, President Assad, ordering the killing; get rid of him by all means. Then the cease-fire, the fire ceasing; then negotiation, and then the solution emerges. Logical, yes; but maybe not very wise.

The latest occupation crime in Afghanistan is a shooting spree on March 11 by a lone American soldier in the village of Balandi in the Panjwai District of Kandahar Province of Afghanistan. 16 Afghan civilians, including women and children, were shot in their homes in the middle of the night without any pretense of combat activity in the area. Such an atrocity is one more expression of a pathological reaction by one soldier to an incomprehensible military reality that seems to be driving crazy American military personnel on the ground in Afghanistan. The main criminal here is not the shooter, but the political leader who insists on continuing a mission in face of the evidence that it is turning its own citizens into pathological killers.

/10/jonathanpower2.jpg”> Approximately half the people of Africa own a mobile phone. In many African countries phone technology is ahead of Europe and North America. Money can be transferred from the city to an upcountry village. Bills can be paid. In Ghana farmers can receive text messages reporting the price of yams and corn two towns away and thus find the best market without a middleman. In Kenya residents of small villages can receive texts to say when the perambulating doctor will next be coming. In parts of West Africa nurses are storing patients’ data on phones. It may be more difficult to build up fast internet penetration on pcs but in some countries 40% of mobile owners are using phones for email and the internet. The IMF says that the telecommunication sector is adding 2% to Nigeria’s already handsome annual economic growth. Black Africa has come late to the party...

/10/jonathanpower2.jpg”> If it bleeds it leads! The mantra of many a newsroom. In their new book, “Pax Ethnica” two great journalists, Karl Meyer and Shareen Brysac, argue that day in and day out ethnic conflict and tension along religious and cultural lines makes for reliable, if dispiriting, headlines. Journalists regularly play plenty of attention to failed states, sectarian violence and societies at the breaking point. But what about those unsung exceptions, the communities of the world where diverse groups live together in harmony?

It does, even in print; pardon some publicity! You may start at the end with the table of contents, then, here is the book epilogue: Epilogue: Enthusiast E and Skeptic S: Dialogue at a Higher Level E: Well, where are we now? How do you feel? S: A little exhausted. But greatly relieved at one major point. E: Any particular chapter, branch, part of peace theory? S: No, the whole thing. I worried that you would put something belonging to all of us, peace, into a big machine with parameters and then the machine would produce outputs about what to do. Like economists do with something belonging to us, our own livelihood. I liked your distinction between equations and formulas, between mathematics and mathematese. E: Is your worry that reality is so complex that no set of equations can ever mirror it? Like linear equations being inadequate, non-linear equations being...

A new report /02/idazidore.jpg”> We all have a feeling of what peace is. Yet, defining it more precisely is not so easy. It belongs to the category that philosophers have called ‘essentially contested concepts’ – also used about freedom, justice and, say, democracy. Being somehow elusive, perhaps the best we can hope to achieve is intelligent discussions about how to approach peace, rather than defining it precisely. There are those who jump the philosophy, conceptuality and definitions and go directly to quantifying peace. By means of some “indicators” readily available in data bases they put together a composite measure that enables them to rank-order countries. Developing such hit lists – for happiness, development, corruption, etc.- has become a kind of industry in recent years.