the moral limits of confronting the bully, and calling his bluff

Gerard Prunier, who, in another life, penned a decent history of Sudan’s Darfur conflict, has published a Luttwakian op-ed in today’s New York Times, calling on the international community to “give war a chance” in Sudan. His argument is a thinly veiled case for supporting South Sudan’s mobilization against Khartoum, and is predicated on the overarching, exclusive preferability of the National Congress Party’s imminent combustion:

The status quo is not working, regardless of what American and United Nations officials might believe. Mr. Bashir recently referred to the black leaders of South Sudan as “insects” and insisted that Sudan must “eliminate this insect completely.” For those who remember Rwanda and the racist insults hurled by Mr. Bashir’s janjaweed militias during their brutal attacks in Darfur, his vile words should be a wake-up call. Indeed, without some moral common ground, “negotiations” are merely a polite way of acquiescing to evil, especially when one’s interlocutors are pathologically incapable of respecting their own word. And in the case of a murderer like Mr. Bashir, there is no moral common ground.

Now, Prunier’s right, on a couple of points: the status quo isn’t working, and Khartoum’s rhetoric against civilian populations in South Kordofan, Blue Nile, and South Sudan has added an additional layer of worrisome intent to the mix of interstate conflict. And, Sudan’s border conflict with South Sudan is posing untenable internal challenges for Khartoum’s stability, but not for the reasons Prunier outlines; the popular consequences of Khartoum’s jingoism are less destabilizing than the persistent threat of security-sector defection, which has eroded the regime’s civilian-sector capacity. Between oil production and export restrictions, the diversion of domestic resources towards military mobilization, and the political costs of fighting a four-front, varied-intensity conflict (Darfur, South Kordofan, Blue Nile, and South Sudan), Sudan’s economy–and with it, Khartoum’s last shreds of domestic legitimacy–is hemorrhaging. So yes, unfettered violence is the way to go, if your panacea-of-the-day happens to be regime change.

Unfortunately for advocates of continuous conflict, both Khartoum and Juba recognize the domestic costs of all-out escalation, and are doing their darndest to ensure that the post-Heglig violence remains below the threshold of maximal instability. Racial bias and political discrimination aside, Khartoum’s domestic incentives for conflict with South Sudan remain constant: an external threat allows the regime to consolidate internal unrest, mitigating popular and elite dissatisfaction. However, as Lesley Warner recently observed, the domestic politics that animate the Khartoum-Juba conflict are the same politics that will prevent its escalation to Prunier’s “point of no return.” Of course, the immediacy of Sudan’s humanitarian crisis–particularly in the border states–makes the human distinction between gradual, sustained escalation and all-out conflict difficult to identify.

Where regime change is concerned, the limited utility of spontaneous, unmanaged political transitions is a conflict resolution cliché, particularly under a “sustainable peace” metric. As Luttwak does, advocates will point to Rwanda, willfully ignoring the grave humanitarian consequences of Kagame’s immediate post-genocide incursions into Zaire’s eastern provinces. In Sudan, there are, of course, indications that the spontaneous, violent fall of the Bashir regime would mean fewer atrocities, but the prospects for an inclusive, post-NCP governance framework are far from certain. Hassan al-Turabi’s periodic jail-time has placed the Popular Congress Party leader out of the limelight, but the Islamist leader remains poised to serve as a kingmaker between the Khartoum hardliners and the Sudanese Revolutionary Front. Without a deliberative, representative process of constitutional development, managed political transition, and negotiated settlement, Sudan has little hope of marginalizing the corrosive influence of hardliners within a post-NCP framework. There are plenty of ways in which Prunier’s vaguely-defined “Sudanese Spring” could manifest itself, and the most likely ones don’t involve a sweeping process of liberal democratization.

A better, more sustainable solution has emerged from Sudan and South Sudan’s technically-savvy middle-class, many of whom experienced the disastrous human consequences of the North-South civil war, which was given many chances. Under the umbrella of the #newSUDANS hashtag, Sudanese and South Sudanese civil society are engaging the unified vision of former SPLM leader John Garang, promoting a normative narrative of social dynamism, political savvy, and economic vibrancy. Rather than focusing on the moral bankruptcy of Bashir, it may be worth empowering new actors, new generations, and new voices, in order to encourage a responsible process of conflict resolution in the two Sudans.

in defense of super-mediocrity: avenging a.o. scott

First, a brief apology: I’m in the midst of final exams, and the otherwise wildly-compelling blog post on technological platforms for atrocities prevention will have to wait till my brain regenerates. An Alyssa-esque pop culture post is the most I can muster:

I just returned from the midnight screening of The Avengers, Joss Whedon’s entertaining, snarky, and flashy culmination (question mark?) of Universal Studios’ four-year, multi-film Marvel Universe blockbuster. After nearly a half-decade of post-credit jitters, I was excited to see the team assemble, and I surely wasn’t disappointed. If you’d like a list, here it goes: 1) Robin Scherbatsky plays a still-Canadian, super-awesome Maria Hill, with a sharp shot to boot; 2) Mark Ruffalo is indisputably the most nuanced of the three Bruce Banners, which is a tough role to fill; 3) The inter-textual banter (Iron Man, to Hawkeye: “Right. Better clench up, Legolas.”); and 4) How great is Captain America?

Apparently, not everyone agrees:

The secret of “The Avengers” is that it is a snappy little dialogue comedy dressed up as something else, that something else being a giant A.T.M. for Marvel and its new studio overlords, the Walt Disney Company. At times — when various members of a game and nimble cast amble in and out of the glassy, metallic chambers of a massive flying aircraft carrier, cracking wise, rolling eyes and occasionally throwing a punch — the movie has some of the easygoing charm of “Rio Bravo,” Howard Hawks’s great, late western in which John Wayne, Angie Dickinson, Dean Martin and Ricky Nelson did a lot of talking on their way to a big and not-all-that-interesting shootout.

That’s NYT’s A.O. Scott, who finds the very notion of the contemporary superhero movie repulsive:

But the genre, though it is still in a period of commercial ascendancy, has also entered a phase of imaginative decadence. (Do you really want to have an argument about this? If so, put on your best oversize metal suit and wait for me at the top of the New York Times building. I’ll be there as soon as I finish beta-testing my death ray. Apologies in advance to any commuters crushed by flying debris.) The latest evidence–though it is unlikely to be the last, with a new “Spider-Man” and another “Dark Knight” looming on the horizon–is “Marvel’s The Avengers.”

Now, don’t get me wrong: I appreciate the fine art of film criticism, and Anthony Lane is always a good read. But, at the same time, let’s put the Marvel Universe into a bit of perspective. The Dark Knight films, alongside the Jack Nicholson-plays-a-sufficiently-creepy-Joker Batman, has likely placed an undue burden on the field of superhero cinema. The Long Halloween, which a fair share of the series is based on, is a dark origins story, with an engrossing level of moral uncertainty and individualized, internal conflict. For some, like Scott, who like a smooth complex-comic-to-complex-film transition, it’s worthwhile to engage these dilemmas, draw them out, and place them at the center of the film; for others, like Alyssa Rosenberg, the demigod-to-demigod repartee is more than sufficient.

Alyssa had a great post yesterday on the “Avengers vs. Dark Knight” comparison, with an important point on each franchise’s respective social perspectives on superheroism. The social question is important, but it’s secondary to the superhero’s diverse existential dilemma–that is, who they are, and how they got to be super. With the exception of Captain America, the Marvel story arc is a Sixties-infused of scientific fascination: Spiderman’s radioactive spider, the Hulk’s gamma rays, the Fantastic Four’s peculiar adventures in space. The individual dilemmas are surface-level–compare Tony Stark’s alcoholism with Bruce Wayne’s concerns over the use of violence–except in circumstances of political commentary and discord (see, for example, Marvel’s excellent Civil War storyline). The X-Men are an exception: the Holocaust-inspired themes of racial discrimination, identity conflict, and political exclusion continue throughout, providing the characters, their plot-lines, and their community with a persistent sense of urgency. The Marvel Universe features a tinge of non-humanism, offering brilliant fodder for creativity, but not much by way of essential believability.

All of this means that, in contrast to Scott’s hopes and aspirations, there’s not a lot of cinematic material to work with. If you read through most incarnations of, say, the Avengers, clichéd visions of moral responsibility, national duty, and cosmopolitan virtue emanate from the speech balloons. Even in Civil War, which centers on the Marvel Universe’s civil liberties debate, the political plotline emerges as the complex dynamic, rather than the characters themselves. To remove the simple moral leadership, to complicate the origins story, would be to treat fifty years of character development with disdain. Which explains why, during the trailers, my thirtysomething ComicCon Platinum Member seat neighbor firmly announced his intention to boycott Andrew Garfield’s upcoming Spiderman performance.

what role for obama’s atrocities prevention board?

Yesterday, I had the privilege to participate in the White House’s unveiling of the Obama administration’s Atrocities Prevention Board, an interagency policy mechanism for mass atrocities prevention. The Board is a long-awaited policy achievement for the atrocities prevention community, dating back to the Genocide Prevention Task Force’s 2008 call for U.S. policymaking leadership on genocide and mass atrocities. The Board’s creation headlined the day’s events; however, the administration took the opportunity to unveil a melange of human rights-related policies, including restrictions on atrocities-enabling technology companies, an extended mandate for U.S. military advisers operating in LRA-affected areas, and a first-ever National Intelligence Estimate on mass atrocities risk. Many of the policy proposals appeared wonky and uninteresting, if essential (woo, strategic planning!); others, such as USAID’s innovation grants partnership with Humanity United, demonstrate potential areas for public/private/social sector collaboration on atrocities prevention.

I was fortunate enough to participate on a panel at the unveiling, focusing on grassroots mobilization and the future for atrocities prevention policy. I centered my commentary on “disruptive” approaches to human rights advocacy–that is, crafting grassroots opportunities for new policy narratives, new constituencies, and new strategic partnerships. I gave a brief plug for STAND’s work on diaspora outreach, as well as our nascent forays into civil society outreach in emerging societies and democratizing states. Additionally, I discussed STAND’s evolving theory of change, which I’ve explained on this blog: as I put it, “[i]n twenty years, the effectiveness of our advocacy will not rely on the number of bills we pass, but on the number of our fellow advocates on the Atrocities Prevention Boards of future administrations.” Over the long-term, moral, compassionate participation in U.S. foreign policy decision-making matters, and should remain a priority for grassroots constituencies. You can find a brief summary of my talking points at PolicyMic, where I published a piece yesterday morning. (Also, in the video above, I start speaking at 22:10, or so.)

To its credit, the White House facilitated the active participation of online and offline constituencies throughout the day’s events. Advocates, practitioners, and academics of all stripes offered their two-cents, noting the opportunities and shortcomings associated with the Atrocities Prevention Board’s implementation. For many, the administration’s symbolic chutzpah was too much to handle: at the event, as well as online, Sudan advocates observed the disparity between President Obama’s “Never Again” pledge and the persistence of mass atrocities in Sudan. Syria, too, represents a challenging factor on the policy radar. I remain skeptical of the United States’ continued influence in both circumstances, but atrocities’ ever-present stain on the human conscience raises a critical question: How do U.S. policymakers and human rights advocates balance the implementation of immediate and structural priorities? And, more topically, how can we envision a role for the Atrocities Prevention Board in bridging this seemingly irreconcilable gap?

First, let’s start with the Board’s composition. The Board is a manifestation of the sum of its parts, which may strengthen or hinder the Board’s initial work. As with all interagency bureaucracies, individual leadership, trust, and reliability determines the effectiveness of political decision-making. Judging from Power’s presentation of the Atrocities Prevention Board, the new body is a mixed bag. The State Department and USAID representatives–human-security champion Maria Otero and Don Steinberg, respectively–are both high-level, credible officials, with extensive backgrounds in atrocities prevention work, and high levels of credibility within their individual agencies. Otero is, unfortunately, the only woman on the board, but I was pleased to see her take a commanding role in the subsequent discussion–she has Clinton’s ear, and appears willing to use her credibility to push the atrocities prevention agenda forward. On a related note, the Treasury Office of Foreign Assets Control’s Adam Szubin has an extensive, cross-issue background in sanctions implementation; the administration’s expansion of “smart sanctions” to confront Syria, Sudan, and similar regimes will emanate from Szubin’s office.

When we get to the national-security oriented institutions, things start to look a little tricky. David Pressman, now at Homeland Security, used to work in Samantha Power’s office at the National Security Council, and one can imagine a rough patch in accommodating a non-human-rights-minded institution. The Pentagon’s leadership on atrocities prevention emanated from the Office of the Undersecretary for Policy, Michele Flournoy, as well as her close adviser on humanitarian issues, Rosa Brooks. However, both are gone, and DoD-Policy’s absence from the Atrocities Prevention Board is notable. I won’t dig into the intelligence community’s role, but suffice it to say that my post on the possibilities and limits of atrocities intelligence still applies.

Next, what will the Board do, and how can we establish standards for success? Judging from the Twitter discussion, a widespread misperception of the Atrocities Prevention Board’s political purpose abounds. The Board can do little to “stop atrocities”; as human rights advocates, policymakers, and scholars have observed, atrocities escalation is a steep slope, and the opportunities for external policy intervention are, in fact, limited. As an interagency body, the Board’s contributions to full-scale atrocities and rapidly escalating conflicts will be limited–as Princeton Lyman observed during his comments, the Sudan policymaking process will continue, with or without the Board’s stamp of approval. There are wheels in motion, so to speak, and the Board’s convening, coordinating, and information-sharing authorities can do little to shift the strategic, political, and intra-organizational dynamics of the moving policy process. As Otero discussed in her comments, you won’t see the Board pushing for the ratification of the ICC’s Rome Statute, or proposing a no-fly zone over South Kordofan (thank goodness), or encouraging the deployment of military advisers to Uganda. Throughout his USHMM speech, President Obama highlighted a variety of policy decisions, but don’t take that as an indication that the Board will play a role in the policymaking process, strictly defined.

As the administration’s fact sheet makes clear, the Board’s real value-added stems from its bureaucratic capabilities, ones which appear irrelevant to the unassuming eye. The Atrocities Prevention Board will encourage the training of diplomats, development practitioners, military officials, and intelligence officers in atrocities prevention strategies; facilitate cross-national trainings of foreign militaries, law enforcement, and peacebuilding authorities; and, where relevant, provide greater support to the distribution and identification of early warning and atrocities risk. The bureaucratic mechanisms within which these processes will operate are unclear–the Board will not receive a dedicated staff, and there was little honest discussion of Congressional cooperation on and support for the administration’s new initiatives. In “responsibility to protect” terms, the Board is a second-pillar initiative, intended to build national capacity, craft training-based partnerships with national governments and local institutions, and strengthen the tools, intra-organizational will, and policy mechanisms through which atrocities are prevented. The institutionalization of atrocities prevention does not refer to the normalization of humanitarian intervention; rather, the Board will encourage the long-term diffusion of human security norms throughout foreign policy institutions.

cover the night with a new book on #kony2012

Tonight is Invisible Children’s “Cover the Night” event, the offline culmination of the controversial social media campaign on Joseph Kony, the LRA’s atrocities, and the movement for peace and human rights in Central Africa. Externally, the action is messaged as a guerilla vandalism operation, geared towards “making Kony famous” worldwide; internally, Invisible Children has messaged the action as an opportunity for “glocalized” human rights advocacy, through which activists engage global issues through participation in local service. It’s not quite my theory of change–which, as I’ve discussed, errs on the side of long-term leadership development–but the public service ethos hardly resembles the “slacktivism” so prominent in public discourse.

Over the past seven weeks, I’ve spent plenty of time pondering Invisible Children’s engagement strategy, the ethics of human rights activism, and varied frameworks for advocacy engagement. I’ve talked to Invisible Children representatives, as well as their critics, yielding important conclusions on their work, the multi-faceted critique, and opportunities to move forward with a conversation on human rights advocacy. As I’ve conveyed through other media forms, I’ve been reasonably impressed with the ways in which Invisible Children has engaged its critics, gradually shifting a corrosive, reactive response into varied forums for constructive dialogue. Policy quibbles remain, as does my perception of the ways in which the organization constructs a “story of us” within its constituency. At the same time, I don’t view this as a contradiction with my prior commentary, and I’ve tried to explain the need for a more nuanced, disaggregated framework for understanding the value-added of transnational advocacy networks.

The digital ink spilled on #KONY2012 abounds, and I won’t address the full spectrum of arguments here. However, the indispensable Kate and Amanda, over at Wronging Rights, have attempted to, and provided the advocacy community with an enormous public service in the process. There’s a lot here, and Kate and Amanda have solicited contributions from a wide variety of policy experts, commentators, diaspora leaders, and advocacy practitioners. In general, the discussion is constructive, and engages the way forward, rather than simply the look back. Here are some of my favorites:

Rebecca Hamilton, author of Fighting for Darfur, on “Learning from Save Darfur”:

The lesson for Kony2012 is that when you build a mass movement quickly on the promise that simple actions can solve complex problems, you risk creating a core of volunteers that will get disillusioned and walk away when, inevitably, progress is slower than you led them to believe it would be. This risk can, however, be mitigated by smart leadership that integrates local activists into the core of the movement.

Teddy “TMS” Ruge, founder of Project Diaspora and a member of the self-described #TrifectaCouncil, on “Africa’s New Status Quo: Connected, Bold, and Vocal”:

As it always does, the Internet exhaled as quickly as it inhaled, and the world returned to its tepid state of being. The normalcy of global injustice; the calculated, unabated global spread of the cavern between privilege and want; the cries for freedom almost matched in octave with the inanity and fervor for the latest gadgetry. In a heart beat, we are back to the bittersweet symphony of humanity’s march through time and space. Except that this time, there is a wrinkle in the fabric of normalcy. African agency is alive, and self-aware. The new normal is an Africa shaped and built by the new storytellers, the technically savvy youth bulge, and the uncompromising entrepreneurs. The new normal is an Africa embracing its role as a global partner worthy of respect and not just a perennial recipient. The question is, did the world recognize what just happened?

and, finally, Jina Moore, a talented journalist and trauma ethicist, on “Ethical or Exploitative?: Stories, Advocacy, and Suffering”:

How storytellers choose to say something betrays a lot about who they are as storytellers. Every moment of every story–even a non-fiction story–is a choice, and those choices tell us something about both the story and the storyteller. As the storyteller makes her choices, she is telling us not only about her subject, but also about herself and her approach. These choices help us decide if we can trust the storyteller.

The e-book, entitled “Beyond Kony2012: Atrocity, Awareness, and Activism in the Internet Age,” is available on LeanPub. In general, I provide ungated versions of PDFs, but Kate and Amanda have invested a significant amount of time, energy, and passion in editing these stories–the book is worth much more than the $2.99 they recommend.

yom hashoah: how mass atrocities end

Today is Yom HaShoah; for my non-Tribal readership, Holocaust Remembrance Day. For global Jewry, Yom HaShoah is a day of mourning, to reflect on the deaths of 5.7 million Jews during the Second World War. In true form, Holocaust Remembrance Day is also a day of communal resilience, inspired by the splendor of a still-vibrant Jewish culture, history, and people, sixty-seven years after its impending destruction. As Jewish life in the United States has become increasingly secularized, Yom HaShoah’s resilience theme has adopted a universal tone. Holocaust Remembrance Day has shifted towards Genocide Prevention Month, applying the moral lessons of the Holocaust to past genocides, future atrocities, and the collective challenge of confronting them.

As I’ve discussed before, the past three decades of public Holocaust memory, commemoration, and remembrance have created an unwavering morality of atrocities response, manifested in the present-day atrocities prevention movement’s ethical posture. However, the texture of Holocaust discourse has transformed. Millennials are two generations removed from the waning community of Holocaust survivors, and compelling stories of humanity’s moral failures are more likely to emerge from former child soldiers in Uganda, youth activists in Bosnia, and genocide survivors in Rwanda. Compare, for example, two liberal-interventionist-minded pieces: the first, by the late Tony Judt, calling for the deployment of a large-scale force to halt atrocities in Kosovo; the second, by Marc Lynch, calling for the implementation of a no-fly zone in Libya. Writing in 1999, Judt draws the often-used comparison between Hitler’s genocidal violence against Central and Eastern European Jewry and Slobodan Milosevic’s atrocities in Kosovo. In Lynch’s moral plea, meanwhile, Hitler is nowhere to be found–the Bosnia/Rwanda/Kosovo comparison, instead, is Lynch’s defining clause. There is a sense that, post-Godwin’s Law, Holocaust comparisons are off-limits, packed away in a moral chart of humanity’s worst atrocities.

Perceptions of the Holocaust’s uniqueness are not confined to the ethical realm–the field of political science and empirical observation, too, spends little time questioning, considering, and probing the institutions, incentives, and organizational characteristics of the Nazi genocide. Jay Ulfelder and Ben Valentino’s atrocities dataset (ungated)–as far as I can tell, the more comprehensive quantitative reckoning with mass atrocities–starts with political repression in postwar Eastern Europe, omitting the varied atrocities against Jewish populations in the “bloodlands” and Central Europe. From a quantitative perspective, the omission of the Holocaust makes sense: as a historical event, the Third Reich’s atrocities are difficult to disaggregate; the dynamics of local, regional, national, and international politics arguably shift during the post-1945 period, due to “revolutions” in international institutions, military affairs, global polarity, and the politics of ideological action; and, frankly, you have to start somewhere, and the aftermath of an unfathomable atrocity is as good as any.

But, from a qualitative perspective, the Holocaust may yield a more instructive guide to atrocities termination than we usually consider. Crafting a case study on atrocities termination and the Holocaust is nigh impossible–with few exceptions, more literature has been published on the Holocaust, Nazi Germany, and the Second World War than any other subject, and the Nazi genocide is more accurately described as a aggregation of infinite cases. At the same time, in an effort to remove the pale of abstraction from our policy understanding of the Holocaust, here are a couple of conclusions on atrocities termination, atrocities intelligence, and Holocaust memory:

Technology is important, but atrocities result from the mobilization of human institutions: In describing the Rwandan genocide, Jeffrey Herbst differentiates between the mass mobilization of Hutu genocidaires, and the Holocaust’s “industrial process” of mass killing. However, as Timothy Snyder has observed in his remarkable revisionist history of mass killing during the Second World War, the Holocaust was both a technological, industrial atrocity and a counter-technological one. That is, death-by-bullets played an equally prominent role in the near-extermination of Eastern European Jewry as did Auschwitz, Treblinka, Sobibor, Majdanek, Chelmno, and Belzec death camps. In six months, between June 1941 and the end of the same year, German Einsatzgruppen, Romanian militias, and local paramilitary forces killed over one million Jews–as Snyder observes, the same quantity as had perished in Auschwitz throughout the war. Human institutions–the Einsatzgruppen, low-level Nazi leadership, local Quislings–defined the Holocaust’s implementation throughout the former Pale of Settlements, in addition to the more-frequently-cited industrial infrastructure of genocide.

Assessing capability and intent is challenging, even after-the-fact: Throughout the past three decades, few historiographical debates have transfixed the Holocaust research community more than the functionalist/intentionalist divide: when did the Nazi regime plan the Holocaust, and why? As with most historiographical debates, the consensus has fallen somewhere in the middle–the “Final Solution,” which began in 1942, was a planned characteristic of the Nazi ideology, but would not have existed in the absence of the Second World War, the political threats and opportunities associated with Operation Barbarossa, and the internal politics of Nazi rule. If historians remain divided in their retrospective assessment of Nazi intentions, one can imagine the challenge of strategic analysis during the atrocity, particularly given the paucity of the U.S. and British intelligence communities during the Second World War. Intelligence existed–particularly through Jan Karski and his compatriots in the Polish government-in-exile–but the scope, scale, and future trajectory of the Nazi genocide remained unclear. As Andrew Exum recently observed, the absence of certainty, combined with existing biases, perceptions, and organizational inertia, poses a distinct challenge for the policymaking process. Strategic uncertainty surrounding atrocities intelligence–an unavoidable characteristic of policymaking institutions–may manifest itself as moral failure, as in the case of the Holocaust.

Moral questions aside, external intervention’s effectiveness is rarely clear: Fueled by David Wyman’s historical work on U.S. responses to the Holocaust, a lively discussion has persisted on the counterfactual effectiveness, moral appropriateness, and historical value of “bombing Auschwitz.” As the David Wyman Institute has demonstrated, a broad base of Jewish organizations, including global leadership of the Zionist movement, supported the deployment of U.S. force to halt operations as Auschwitz-Birkenau. Throughout the postwar period, Auschwitz intervention advocates pointed to the release of reconnaissance imagery as an indication of U.S. capacity–and unwillingness–to bomb the Nazi extermination facilities. However, as Richard Levy has controversially observed, the operational and command dynamics of prospective U.S. Auschwitz bombings remained opaque. When considered in the context of Operation Reinhard and the continued perpetration of atrocities against Jewish populations throughout Eastern Europe, the utility of external military intervention–outside the context of the U.S. conflict against Nazi Germany–is not readily apparent.

drinking in hogsmeade

Walter Russell Mead has published a provocative post on the irrelevance of the United Nations, which he labeled “League of Nations, Round Two.” The arguments aren’t new, but Mead’s perspective on international politics generally merits a read. In the post, he describes the weakened global influence of the UN Security Council and General Assembly, the primary organs of multilateral, transnational diplomacy:

The reality is that the UN today is less prestigious and influential than it was in the 1940s and 1950s. There used to be a time when General Assembly votes actually meant something. Newspapers used to report its resolutions on the front page. And the Security Council, on those rare occasions during the Cold War when it could actually agree on something, was seen as laying down the basic principles along which an issue would be resolved.

Hayes Brown, who I recently (and sincerely) described as the Internet’s best UN blogger, has penned a thorough fisking of Mead’s perspective, dismissing his relative lack of familiarity with the sub-organizational, bureaucratic characteristics of UN politics:

In the initial tweet broadcasting this article, the United Nations was referred to as “The League of Nations, Round 2″. While its mission to get more people to click the link and read the article was successful, the premise is entirely misleading and false. The League, with its many structural deficiencies, was unable to prevent the Second World War, while the UN has thus far managed to keep us from a Third, all the while working tirelessly to improve the livelihood of the poorest and most in need. The United Nations needs work, that’s clear to anyone with eyes. But to label it a failure is to ignore both facts and history, something I would expect of a lesser scholar than Mead. I suppose that I have to forgive him; it’s clear from the many glaring errors and falsehoods that he just isn’t all that familiar with the UN.

I don’t have much to add, given Hayes’ extensive coverage of the logical, empirical, and political shortcomings of Mead’s screed. With that said, a couple of points, pertaining to our understanding of the interaction between the UN’s comprising states, its political, humanitarian, and diplomatic agencies, and its global operations. In her research on the effectiveness of UN peacekeeping operations, Lise Howard observes an essential fact of UN deployments: in general, UN missions work, and often in the hardest of places. Corruption and poor management are, undoubtedly, characteristics of peacekeeping missions, but they do not necessarily preclude the success of a post-conflict peacekeeping mission (consider, for example, the appalling reports of sexual abuse by UN peacekeepers in East Timor, Sierra Leone, and Bosnia, all considered “effective” examples of peacekeeping). Howard’s research demonstrates that, in contrast to the stagnating culture that Mead describes, the UN is a learning, dynamic organization, finding new ways to cope with seemingly intractable political challenges.

Like Hayes, I agree with Mead’s assessment of the anachronistic nature of Security Council politics. As Dan Trombly has observed, the Council was established as a mechanism for securing the Great-Power status quo; unfortunately for the Council’s legitimacy, if not for the global South, the status quo has shifted to accommodate a broader, more diverse set of middle-power actors. For external observers of the UN, the need for Security Council reform–through the diffusion of the P5 veto, or the democratization of the Security Council election process–is hardly controversial. But, counter Mead’s assertions, the Council’s paralysis is a symptom of evolution, rather than stagnation. As the “responsibility while protecting” debate indicates, the Council has encountered political and normative divides between traditional powers and emerging states, as well as within the non-monolithic “emerging states bloc.” That Brazil and South Africa, as emerging actors continue to rely on the UN–rather than, say, just the IBSA Dialogue Forum–as a mechanism for expressing political contention, indicates the international body’s continued relevance, in spite of the fits and starts associated with muddled processes of international cooperation.

security sector reform in the drc: is there a role for the grassroots?

Earlier today, a coalition of DRC human rights and conflict resolution organizations–including the Eastern Congo Initiative, the Enough Project, Refugees International, and the Congolese Pole Institute, among others–released an excellent report on security sector reform in the Democratic Republic of the Congo. The report is a valuable addendum to Oxfam’s 2011 study on U.S. security assistance, opportunities for coordination and collaboration between multilateral and bilateral donors, and the way forward for security sector reform policy in the DRC. Most importantly, the new report expands on our understanding of the interaction between the Congolese security sector and internal political will for reform:

But these issues are as much a result of continued failures of SSR as they are the cause–and they do not present a compelling reason to ignore the need for SSR. The fact remains that the Congolese government consistently failed to give sufficient political backing for serious change. Most importantly, it did not take steps to end corruption, ill-discipline and weak command structures undermining reform efforts in the security sector…Many in senior positions in the government and military continue to profit from corruption, either in raking off salaries, taking kickbacks, or involvement in illegal mining, trade or protection rackets.

In addition to its substantive value, the report highlights a number of important characteristics of effective human rights advocacy:

Celebrity activism done right: The Eastern Congo Initiative, founded by Ben Affleck, is well-respected for its emphasis on local ownership and complex solutions to conflict and atrocities in the DRC’s eastern Kivu provinces. Later today, Cindy McCain is speaking at DC’s Wilson Center on the new report, using her prominent public stature to draw attention to a uniquely un-sexy, wonky characteristic of conflict resolution in the DRC. In the midst of, say, Clooney’s stolen-spotlight approach to Sudan advocacy, Affleck and McCain’s reserved, measured concept of celebrity human rights activism is refreshing.

Transparency: While recognizing the critical nature of security sector reform in resolving DRC’s Kivu conflicts, the new report emphasizes the potential for short-term political instability, compounded by the increasingly fitful relationship between Kabila’s Kinshasa administration and FARDC-affiliated units in the Kivus.

Emphasizing new players: As the report notes, the restriction of security sector reform policy to the OECD-DAC donor base limits the impact of coordinated reform strategies, given the increasing prominence, credibility, and influence of China, South Africa, and other bilateral partners on the African continent. In order to ensure the successful implementation of security sector reform, human rights advocates and peacebuilding-minded policymakers will need to reach beyond the traditional donor community to facilitate new bilateral and multilateral relationships.

If the report emphasizes the full gamut of policy-related approaches to security sector reform, a crucial element is absent: domestic grassroots constituencies. Engagement on conflict minerals advocacy has developed a broad, grassroots constituency on human rights in the DRC, in addition to the issue-based attraction of consumer activism and mineral extraction in the Kivus. In spite of the passage of the Dodd-Frank amendment, the domestic success of conflict minerals-related policy has stagnated, largely due to a looming Chamber of Commerce suit against the Securities and Exchange Commission’s not-yet-if-ever-released regulations on due diligence and extractive-sector transparency. If the human rights advocacy community plans to keep constituencies engaged in public, rather than private sector approaches to conflict resolution in the DRC, an alternative policy mechanism is necessary.

Security sector reform could be that mechanism. It’s not sexy, and the perceived link between U.S. advocates and conflict resolution processes appears much more diffuse than its conflict minerals counterpart. Despite alleged commitments to security sector reform in previous legislation, the U.S. government has never developed a sustained, engaged approach to the Congolese security sector. The U.S. government’s contemporary model of bilateral security assistance–funded by the Defense Department, and funneled through the State Department’s civilian security offices–is relatively new, receiving legislative sanction under the 2006 National Defense Authorization Act. Last year’s bilateral security assistance to the DRC was largely geared towards counterterrorism programs, with few provisions for training and institutional development in human rights and civilian protection and civilian/military accountability. If counterterrorism policy approaches in West Africa are any indication, counterterrorism is a limited, ineffective policy objective for mitigating conflict and political instability. In contrast to, for example, the United States’ bilateral relationship with Uganda, counterterrorism does not represent the strategic baseline for U.S. government policy. Accordingly, there may be an opportunity to change the game on bilateral security assistance, allowing U.S. advocates to play a part in crafting a more thorough solution to the Kivus’ present security crisis.

Campaign design for security sector reform in the DRC is, as previously stated, difficult to imagine. How do advocacy organizations message civilian oversight and human rights reforms to a semi-captive audience? How can we conceive of a brand to motivate grassroots actors to advocate for legislative approaches to reform? I don’t have good answers to these questions, yet, but you might–I’d love to read your thoughts in the comments.

ending mass atrocities: five-and-a-half lessons from jeff winger

If you didn’t watch Community‘s latest episode–or, worse, didn’t enjoy it–you’re missing something. Between the Ken Burns effect, the raw sound editing, and the cinematography, the episode was a visual masterpiece; add in the usual banter, and you have twenty-one minutes of Paintball-level quality. In addition to the episode’s cinematic value, the Pillows and Blankets motif functioned as an instructive manual for conflict resolution and atrocities termination practitioners. Here’s a brief guide, courtesy of Jeff Winger:

1. Local conflicts are often internationalized, and international conflicts are often localized: At its core, the Pillowtown/Blanketsburg civil war is a localized land conflict, characterized by short, brutal squabbles over small classrooms, former common areas, and stretches of hallway. Its root causes lay in the contested, yet transient identity conflicts between politicized Pillow advocates and Blanket enthusiasts. At the same time, Greendale’s ethnicized conflict is reliant on an international structure of political, economic, and social incentives. The Dean’s obsession with the Guinness record appears to be a sideshow, a system of political objectives imposed by meddling, predatory third parties. However, as the episode’s conclusion indicates, the international element of civil conflict was relevant to individual and collective motives for violence. Elites–Troy and Abed–continue to squabble, but their ability to mobilize civilian communities was highly dependent on the international political economy of warfare.

Political scientists have attempted to explain the ways in which local and international economies of violence operate, with recent works emphasizing the role of local violence in fueling long-standing, intractable patterns of mass atrocity. Indeed, basic conclusions from quantitative datasets indicate that even as international power dynamics shift, local conflict drivers may manifest themselves in conflict duration, onset, and severity. However, local political actors, conflict entrepreneurs, and opposition movements are keenly aware of the international dimension of intrastate war, often exploiting international social networks for political benefit. As in the Greendale civil war, neither the local nor the international dimension of civil war is an expendable element of conflict resolution and atrocities termination policy.

2. Asymmetric intelligence kills: In the Greendale civil war, the worst atrocity events are not caused by the willful deployment of a murderous, industrial infrastructure; rather, they are the result of significant intelligence failures. Philippe Silberzahn, from SCIP.Insight, captures the problem well: policymakers suffer from gaps in intelligence analysis, rather than collection. Greendale’s military operatives have access to broad sources of operational and strategic intelligence–Troy and Abed deploy diverse collection disciplines, including signals and human intelligence, to gauge the opponent’s military actions and political decision-making. However, analytic assumptions and biases cloud the respective military leaders’ understanding of opposing capacities, with perilous consequences for Greendale’s civilians. In contrast to the destructive, overpowering “juggernaut” Troy assesses, Abed’s Pierce-controlled, Michelin Man-like puff-monster is a weapon of limited effectiveness, as demonstrated by its non-decisive, fallible role in the Battle of Greendale. However, assuming a more powerful arsenal, Troy deploys the Changlorious Basterds, a rag-tag, pubescent group of blood-thirsty mercenaries. Troy’s mercenaries wreak havok on Pillowtown, destroying civilian pillow-structure, cutting off essential supply chains, and disrupting the state’s massage-circle-based, communitarian economy.

3. Decisive victory is often an insufficient approach to atrocities termination: The interaction between operational goals and strategic objectives is a crucial prerequisite to an understanding of decisive victory’s potential role in atrocities termination. Political objectives underline their military counterparts–in Clausewitzian form, military force is subordinate to policy. As discussed above, the Pillows and Blankets war has its origins in Troy and Abed’s parallel political objectives: the assertion of territorial control over Greendale’s indoor campus building. Force is instrumental, as are the mass atrocities associated with its use. In the Greendale civil war, force operates at the operational level, intended to strike at Troy and Abed’s centers of gravity–the resilience of the erstwhile-friends’ respective infrastructures and civilian populations.

Before the Guinness withdrawal, Troy appears to hold the upper hand, with the Changlorious mercenaries pummeling Abed’s fluffy juggernaut. However, even if the mercenaries and Blanketsburgian troops reigned victorious, atrocities would likely have continued, with Blanketsburgs’ civilians initiating reprisal violence against their Pillowtownian adversaries. The consequences of the shortest, most seemingly inconsequential atrocities can, in fact, have wide-reaching consequences, due to persistent perceptions of antagonism between Pillowtownian and Blanketsburgian civilians. Decisive victory may eliminate the short-term political incentives for atrocity mobilization, but over the long-term political, economic, and social foundations for conflict onset remain.

4. Unfortunately, so are negotiated settlements: Jeff and the Dean’s first negotiation round is a classic demonstration of a political “commitment dilemma,” an essential hazard of third-party policy intervention in intrastate wars. In contrast to the second round of negotiations (see point 5), external actors perceive few incentives for credible participation in multi-party negotiations, as demonstrated by the Dean’s half-hearted plea for Jeff’s mediation, as well as Jeff’s persistent cynicism. In the context of the first round, the lack of strategic consequences, instability spillovers, and human tolls create a non-permissive environment for preventive diplomacy. With few incentives for participation, Jeff and the Dean create a diplomatic space for status quo mediations, based on an unsustainable ceasefire, rather than inclusive, transformative mediation between Pillowtown and Blanketsburg.

Jeff’s settlement provides amnesty for political elites, with no punitive measures to coerce a mutual peace. Almost instantly, the negotiations fall apart, with Troy and Abed returning to solidify their divisions, stake out separate territories, and escalate atrocities against opposing civilian populations (Troy’s “all tomato” to Abed–easily the episode’s best pun).

5. Political elites respond to the darndest things: In his second round of negotiated talks, Jeff attempts to coerce Abed and Troy towards peace, providing them with dusted-off, imaginary “friendship hats,” which symbolize the restoration of long-standing, ultimately unshakeable camaraderie. Innovative conflict resolution strategies are frequent characteristics of civil war termination; indeed, the best approaches respond to unique contexts, allowing for flexibility, adaptability, and nuanced response. My favorite example: as late as 1994, Afonso Dhlakama, the leader of the guerrilla movement RENAMO, threatened to withdraw from Mozambique’s first post-conflict elections, damaging the country’s already-fragile political stability. In response, the international community sponsored a UN-controlled, $14.8 million trust fund for RENAMO’s elites, in order to provide personal incentives for political participation. As a short-term strategy, the trust fund worked, and Mozambique conducted the first of a succession of successful national elections.

5.5. No one likes Britta: ‘Nuff said.

does advocacy work? (part 2)

Editor’s Note: This is the second part of a two-part series on advocacy effectiveness and typologies of human rights mobilization. Check out the first part here.

Internal Policy: “Bureaucracy” is a more concise, common title for “internal policy advocacy,” as the chart suggests. Bureaucratic decision-making is the most effective and frequent form of advocacy, for a variety of reasons. In contrast to external policy or “naming and shaming,” bureaucratic policy processes occur amongst people who have power, rather than between the powerful and the powerless. Additionally, internal policy advocacy yields resource distribution, political-will mobilization, and related, consequent results of the policy process. The impact of internal policy advocacy occurs in the short-term, resulting from a meeting, a memo, or a stroke of a pen. In general, bureaucratic processes take weeks, even months, to filter through the complex decision-making system; however, internal advocacy processes are instantly effective or ineffective, determined by an individual’s ability to persuade and coerce the collective institution.

As James Wilson observes in his essential work on the bureaucracy of public administration, dynamic, complex organizational cultures define the ways in which policy develops, managers interact with subordinates, and organizations prioritize individual perspectives. Within government bureaucracies, individual credibility, relationships, and incentives for decision-making determine the impact and effectiveness of the advocacy process. Advocacy effectiveness is a human process, determined by the strength of human relationships: If a State Department Policy Planning staff member falls out of favor with the Policy Planning director, there are few incentives for the staff member’s particular policy to materialize, beyond its inherent value.

External Policy: External policy advocacy occurs between advocacy elites and policymaking officials. If the intelligence community provides a constant stream of non-policy expertise, external advocates provide the policy counterpoint. The U.S. civil service is a peculiar beast: with the exception of the Pentagon, the Central Intelligence Agency, and a couple of other government bodies, most government employees receive relatively few years of professional and leadership development training, particularly in comparison to counterparts in the British Commonwealth. Civilian responsibilities are increasingly outsourced to contractors in the private sector, many of whom are embedded in government offices. With the exception of a few, uniquely technocratic offices (Special Envoy to Sudan Princeton Lyman’s office is one), policy-makers and government institutions rely on a broad base of external support to craft policy, direct the flow of information, and, in the case of the legislative branch, develop legislation. Most Congressional staffers have neither the time nor the interest in directing legislative development process on foreign policy issues beyond Iraq, Afghanistan, Iran, and a small set of counterterrorism and proliferation issues. Accordingly, external policy advocates play a decisive role in identifying what gets to the table, how it’s delivered, and how Congressional officials and policy-makers can amplify its importance.

In contrast to internal processes, the effectiveness of external policy advocacy operates over the medium-term. There are, of course, human elements: who has the Hill contacts in which office, who gets a meeting with an envoy or an ambassador, and which reports policymakers read. The development of organizational credibility occurs gradually, and depends on an organization’s ability to demonstrate its comparative advantage in policy expertise and on-the-ground information resources. Standard operating procedures and security restraints frequently limit the reach of diplomats, intelligence officers, and other public information resources; external policy advocacy relies on the strength of information networks to bolster its effectiveness.

“Naming and Shaming”: In the interest of length, I’m going to link to two valuable resources on “naming and shaming,” causal mechanisms, and effective advocacy. Murdie and Davis, and Krain have both authored important quantitative analyses of human rights advocacy and “naming and shaming” strategies. I discussed the former yesterday; the latter addresses the impact of “naming and shaming” on the severity of genocides and politicides, finding an inverse relationship between “naming and shaming” efforts and atrocities severity. As the chart above indicates, and theoretical research confirms, “naming and shaming” impacts the reputations of atrocity regimes, as well as those of by-standing governments. However, according to Murdie and Davis’ excellent assessment, the presence of existing, on-the-ground political forces–civil society mobilization, political pressure–determines the institutional impact of “naming and shaming” strategies.

Grassroots: As I’ve discussed in previous, post-#KONY2012 pieces, our present-day understanding of grassroots international human rights advocacy is misguided. Consider the field: a broad spectrum of international human rights organizations operate in the United States, mobilizing local, regional, and national constituencies in support of a more compassionate, moral foreign policy. Give me a state, and I’ll name a respective network of activists for peace and human rights in Sudan. Add in the broad proliferation of diaspora organizations, social networks, and professional constituencies from conflict-affected states, and you’ll find hundreds of informal institutions advocating for a rights-based approach to U.S. global leadership. Suffice it to say that, in the midst of international political tumult, U.S. national security threats, and regional stability concerns in sub-Saharan Africa, Southeast Asia, and the Middle East, domestic human rights advocates have a hard time getting a foot in the door. Congress–the most direct entry-point for domestic advocates–may fund U.S. foreign policy ventures, but the executive branch defines the distribution of financial resources, human capital, and political attention.

In organizing strategy, as in military affairs, victory is the core element of successful mobilization, organization, and implementation. #KONY2012, popularly perceived as the pinnacle of grassroots mobilization, hasn’t changed that basic fact. Over the past month, political decision-making has not become more democratic, nor has social media empowered a greater role for activists in foreign policy mobilization. Grassroots actors–from “slacktivists,” to lobby-day participants, to community leaders–have been instrumental in the release and co-sponsorship of bipartisan LRA-related legislation; however, their impact has not been causal, strictly defined. Short-term impact by grassroots actors is endogenous to successful external policy advocacy; the development and encouragement of anti-LRA policy and legislation relies on advocacy elites, rather than popular mobilization. Grassroots advocates play a role, but their participation in external policy advocacy processes determines the success of political will-building initiatives.

More importantly, grassroots mobilization around international human rights impacts the long-term trajectory of U.S. foreign policy. The chart is misleading, leaving little space for dynamic interaction between varied forms of human rights advocacy. In reality, grassroots human rights advocacy affects the eventual diffusion of human rights norms within policy-making administrations. Effective grassroots advocacy is a civic practice, providing youth leadership with the opportunity to think about the world, engage in policy discourse, and prioritize a moral decision-making framework. If internal policy advocacy is the quickest, most effective mechanism for human rights mobilization, the goal of grassroots human rights advocacy must be to change that equation, as well as its quality, across generations, rather than within them.

does advocacy work? (part 1)

International Studies Quarterly‘s March issue includes an insightful article on advocacy effectiveness, human rights policy, and “naming and shaming.” The authors, Amanda Murdie and David Davis, assess a new dataset on advocacy effectiveness, noting the contextualized impact of “naming and shaming” practices by human rights organization, including Human Rights Watch and Amnesty International. Murdie and Davis’ findings are largely intuitive–mobilization works, so long as enabling conditions increase the target’s vulnerability. The authors provide an important assessment of the contextual foundations for impact-oriented human rights activity:

First, we introduce a new data set of HRO [human rights organization] naming and shaming by third-party actors that cite HROs. By doing so, we highlight the value of using events data to study non-state actors. This data set does not rely on the workings of one HRO but instead utilizes an existing events data framework to examine how multiple HROs are theoretically argued to shame, through international newspaper reports…

Our findings underscore the importance of the reputation mechanism through which improvements in human rights occur. We find that the effects of HRO shaming are not conditional on economic vulnerability; instead, HRO shaming works when either third parties join in efforts to pressure the state from abroad or when HROs are able to help increase domestic mobilization from within the state. These findings indicate that vulnerability to HRO shaming is not all materialistic in nature; states can be vulnerable to HRO shaming without high dependency on aid or foreign investment. We feel these findings support Risse and Sikkink’s (1999:6) contention that their theory is ‘‘generalizable across cases irrespective of cultural, political, or economic differences…’’

The empirical findings of this paper show that HROs can have an impact on human rights even without being able to enter a state domestically. This is important, as mentioned, because of the growing number of states that restrict operations of civil society within their borders. As shown above, we find that the majority of the conditional effect of HRO shaming comes ‘‘from above.’’

You can read the rest of the (ungated) paper here.

From a broader perspective, much of the comparative politics literature on transnational advocacy networks has centered on processes of sub-state political and social change, including norm diffusion within and between states, socialization opportunities, and tangible mechanisms for materialistic pressure. Finnemore and Sikkink, Carpenter, and Ron, Ramos, and Rodgers have demonstrated the effective role of transnational advocacy organizations in mobilizing political will, through sub-state agenda setting and political will-building. In contrast, blogosphere commentary has identified gaping holes in the effectiveness, impact, and utility of human rights advocacy–see, for example, a popular set of posts on “badvocacy” and the “Love Actually rule” of value-added activism. Beyond the unhelpful discussion on the comparative advantages of blogging and social-science research, the academia/blogosphere gap raises important questions about our definition of advocacy, our effectiveness metrics, and the ways in which we can better the various facets of the international human rights project.

International human rights advocacy is a diverse community, containing a broad, heterogeneous intersection of individuals, political actors, and organizations. Effective advocacy operates through a “theory of change“–that is, an understanding of the ways in which mobilization will change the world. The “theory of change” approach to advocacy mobilization relies on a core assumption of organizational and organizing theory: in order to achieve a goal, activists, actors, and community leaders need a strategic framework to ensure the effective distribution of institutional resources towards getting stuff done. Theories of change operate within political, social, and economic contexts, rather than in a vacuum. On the local level, theories of change are easy to identify: the chair of the Los Alamos Board of Regents relies on his Episcopal Church for political support, so encouraging the Church to endorse an environmentally responsible procurement policy may yield positive results. On the international level, theories of change are more complicated; pushing aside individual, bureaucratic, and inter-organizational dynamics, transnational advocacy networks operate in a complex, anarchic system, which is inherently anti-democratic, hierarchical, and non-transparent.

With varied, inconsistent theories of change in play, our perceptions of international human rights advocacy require a bit of disaggregation. In a recent post on typologies of political violence, Rachel Strohm used a chart display to outline the interaction between government and opposition mobilization categories. I found the visual compelling, and have tried to replicate the tactic below. I identify four types of international human rights advocacy (internal policy, external policy, “naming and shaming,” and grassroots mobilization), and create a framework through which these advocacy types impact the policymaking and foreign policy decision-making process.

Now that you’ve finished perusing my chart, check back tomorrow: I’ll feature explanations of the ways in which internal policy advocacy, external policy advocacy, “naming and shaming,” and grassroots mobilization influence the policymaking process. In the meantime, what do you think? If you’re a practitioner, does this mesh with your experience in the human rights advocacy field? If you’re a scholar, how does this advocacy typology stack up to your understanding of transnational advocacy networks and the foreign policy-making process?