Haisley Wert, MSc Development Management candidate, reflects on a recent public lecture from Alex de Waal, Executive Director of the World Peace Foundation and Research Professor at The Fletcher School, about his new book, Mass Starvation: The History and Future of Famine. 

Alex de Waal, Executive Director of the World Peace Foundation and Research Professor at The Fletcher School, squarely addressed dangerous misconceptions about starvation during the lecture “Mass Starvation: The History and Future of Famine”. Hosted by the LSE Firoz Lalji Centre for Africa on the evening of Thursday, January 25th, 2018, he was joined by discussants Clare Short, Former UK Secretary of State for International Development, and Professor Mary Kaldor, Director of the Conflict and Civil Society Research Unit at the LSE. The talk accompanied the recent release of Professor de Waal’s book by the same title.

Clare Short lauded his clarity and resonance in the publication, explaining: “a lot of the [famine] discussion…is so emotional…[that] it’s ignorant… The value of the book is to make discussion much more informed about what causes hunger and famine”. de Waal changes the conversation, escorting starvation (the causal and controversial cousin of famine) into the room and appropriately politicizing it.

Mass starvation, he implored, is the “issue of our time”. Yet, it is conceived of as an archaic misfortune, confined vaguely to the great geographical expanse of Africa. There is the misperception that technology is eclipsing its ravages, as people conflate famine with chronic hunger, ameliorated in the public eye by new food production mechanisms that are boons to swelling, increasingly urbanized amalgamations of populations.

“Just google ‘famine’”, he readily and not-so-rhetorically insisted, pulling up quadrants of images summoned by the search engine. One doesn’t need to scour all corners of the internet to observe that famine conjures images of deserts, atrophied crops, and skeletal subjects. The narrative around famine is abstract and pity-based, rather than empirically-grounded and infuriating. In response, de Waal systematically and substantively unpacks seven main famine fictions in his work. Bookending the collection are two weighty and resolute ideas that redress the problem and reinforce the solution:

Starvation is the problem, and famine is the outcome. It comes from the transitive verb, to starve, which means that humans inflict it upon each other. In fact, the man who coined the word ‘genocide’ focused more intently on rations over gas chambers. We need to shift out attention to the man-made atrocity of the problem.

And, as alluded to, which also served as a pre-Question and Answer parting note:

“We must celebrate the global liberal humanitarian world order…” so that we can uphold it. We have welcomed in the changing time of decreasing autocracy, openness, informational freedom, more democracy, and correspondingly, heightened responsiveness and accountability of publics and governments. De Waal metaphorically contextualized his argument: if the peasant were analogously up to his or her neck in water before, in effect, liberalism has lowered the water level. Small waves could no longer sweep him under. But there is never a moment where democratic values should be taken for granted, as “large rogue waves” are increasingly common and devastating.

Development economist Amartya Sen would take heart in this entreaty. As he wrote in his 1999 piece, Democracy as a Global Value, “in the terrible history of famines in the world, no substantial famine has ever occurred in any independent and democratic country with a relatively free press” (Sen 1999: 7 and 8). This greater call to value civic engagement and uphold democratic duty is practicable on even the level of the individual.

Broadening his case, at the core of de Waal’s argument are seven terse truths that international constituencies need to confront to end mass starvation as a war-implement:

1. Famines are “less lethal” than they have been in any previous time. Although they have instigated over 100 million deaths since 1870, about 40 years ago, this death toll plummeted off a graphic precipice. The consequence of famine now is migration. With a well-enacted and cohesive strategy in action, famines are possible to end.

2. The most “recent leading cause” of famine is armed conflict. Subsequently predominant factors include active political repression and emerging from an armed conflict. These three statuses make up more than 75% of all famines. The remaining quarter or so of famines, that occurred without conflict or repression, are largely featured in the nineteenth century.

3. Famine is not mainly an African phenomenon. Between 1870 and 2010, about half of all famines occurred in China. Only 10% of famines occurred in Africa, as inflicted in the colonial and post-colonial periods, and they are much less severe.

4. Famines are “exceptional and multi-causal”. With the exception of China in the 1950s, in most famines, infectious diseases perpetrate murder in numbers far greater than any other factor. Some famines are directly inflicted by poor governance. Other political reasons, alongside ecological or economic events, can also influence conditions of starvation.

5. Starvation is not caused by over-population. Food consumption is a relatively “small drag on our resources”. As we approach finite boundaries, “the pinch will be felt somewhere else”.

6. Famines are inflicted along four degrees of intention, three of which are anthropocentric. Second degree famines, “famines of recklessness”, where “public authorities pursue policies that are the cause of famine, [of which] they are aware”, have been the most prominent degree of infliction in contemporary times. Mass starvation in Yemen, a result of the Saudi and Emirati blockade (as supported by the United States and United Kingdom) is an example of second degree famine.

7. “There is enough law on the books to criminalize famine”, and the fact it hasn’t been “publically vilified” is a problem of misinformation and apathy. Alex de Waal calls for a commitment where “leaders will not let this occur, and the public will demand this of them”. Clare Short agreed that criminalization of starvation would be critically conducive to its amelioration.

Alex de Waal confronts starvation in a pithy and powerful way, dispelling a pervasive and fundamentally misled public narrative. We must necessarily understand mass starvation as a human-made tool of repression to effectively engineer its demise.

Haisley Wert is a MSc Development Management candidate in the Department of International Development at the London School of Economics and Political Science. The views expressed in this post are those of the author and in no way reflect those of the International Development LSE blog or the London School of Economics and Political Science.

This post first appeared on the LSE's International Development blog.

Credit image: Victor R. Ruiz via Flickr (CC BY-SA 2.0)

Azzam Tamimi explores the likely implications of the Arab Springs' counter-revolutions. This is a chapter in the E-book 'The Future of the Middle East' co-produced by Global Policy and Arab Digest, and edited by Hugh Miles and Alastair Newton. Freely available chapters will be serialised here and collected into a final downloadable publication in the spring.

I had just been appointed a senior lecturer at the UK-based Markfield Institute of Higher Education in the autumn of 2000 when the newly appointed director, Dr. Zaghlul Al-Najjar, summoned me to his office. He spent the first few days of his tenure in office acquainting himself with the academic staff. On that day, it was my turn.

After a few introductory remarks, he handed a copy of my CV over to me and said: “I want you to correct the mistakes in it and then bring it back to me.” Curiously, I flipped through the few CV pages only to find that he had crossed with red ink every single “Middle East” phrase within my CV. Politely, I asked him: “But what is wrong with the Middle East?” He said: “It does not exist, it never existed.”

This, at the time, seemed like a joke. For how could I change the title of my book “Islam and Secularism in the Middle East” or change the titles of some of my papers as well as of the many conferences and seminars I organised or attended? However, the rejectionist sentiment expressed by Dr. Al-Najjar, who is not a political scientist anyway, is shared by many activists and intellectuals of his generation who regard the Middle East a colonial invention. For them, it expressed the vision of the colonial powers of a region that was, for centuries, until the onset of colonialism the very heart of the Ummah, the Muslims’ global community.

In as much as the creation of the Middle East was the product of a change in the global and regional balances of power, another historic change could, indeed, lead to the disappearance of this category and the emergence of a new reality.

The struggle for undoing what colonialism did to this region never ceased. However, reform and national liberation projects aimed at accomplishing this objective have mostly reached a dead end. Reversing the process that saw the creation and consolidation of the mosaic of modern territorial states across the region proved to be a formidable, even near impossible, task.

The elites governing these territorial states seemed to inherit from the colonial powers their contempt for the populations under their rule. Most of these post-colonial entities, notwithstanding the claims of independence, ended up being some sort of feudal properties exclusively owned by Mafias, whether dynasties or some military juntas, that seized absolute control of almost all material and human resources.

As the ruling classes grew richer and richer the ruled, especially in densely populated states, grew poorer and poorer. Dissent, or mere criticism, was always suppressed and brutally punished. The majority of prison populations consisted of political activists and opponents. The two most common features across much of the Arab despotic Middle East were corruption and lack of respect for basic human rights.

When the Arab uprising of 2011 succeeded in bringing down four dictators who tormented their populations for decades in Tunisia, Egypt, Libya and Yemen and seemed to threaten so many others, hopes were raised that a new order was perhaps in the making. Jubilant masses took to the streets in many other places in the hope of bringing about similar changes to their own communities, sending alarm bells ringing in the palaces of horrified kings and presidents. A new Middle East seemed to be in the making.

How would such a new Middle East have looked like?

Well, to start with governments would have been representative of the people and government functions and institutions would have been supervised by, and checked and made accountable to, elected parliaments. There was absolutely no need to reinvent the wheel; representative democracy had already been in place and functioning fairly well for centuries in the West. Indeed, this was what Egypt and Tunisia headed for. Had democratic transition in those two countries been successful and complete, other entities in the region would have enthusiastically followed their example.

Imagine for a minute what would have happened had the three neighbouring countries Egypt, Libya and Tunisia, who had just rid themselves of their dictators, been fully democratic. The people of Algeria next door, followed most probably by Morocco and Mauritania, would have not settled for anything less. One can easily imagine, from then onwards, that the peoples of those ‘democracies’ would have wanted their representative governments to remove the obstacles that were put in place by defunct dictatorships and that for so many decades limited freedom of movement and divided with artificial lines drawn in the sand by the old colonial powers a people who to a large extent spoke the same language, shared the same heritage, hailed from the same ancestry and followed the same religion. One could easily envisage that, within few years, confederations, or federations, or even full unions, would have formed.

Moving to the Arab east, and using a similar intellectual exercise, imagine what would have happened had Syria and Yemen, both of which rose after Tunisia, Egypt and Libya, had become democracies. The young and educated in the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia and the in rest of the ultra-rich Gulf ‘principalities’ would have not settled for anything less than genuine political reform, to say the least. It is no wonder that Saudi Arabia, the United Arab Emirates and the State of Kuwait paid billions of dollars to fund the Egyptian army’s coup against the nascent regime and the arrest of democratic transformation not only in Egypt but also in Tunisia, Libya and Yemen.

Looking farther into the more distant future, had democratic transition been successful, one could envisage the creation of what might have become known as the United States of the Middle East, a formidable power with enormous resources, both human and material, and with considerable potential.

The impact of such transformation would have been unprecedented. It would have been no less significant and history-making than the American and the French revolutions. The emergence of such a magnificent regional power would have immediately put an end to Iranian expansionist and imperial ambitions in the region. It is no wonder that Iran, which today has a regime that claims to have been itself the product of a popular revolution against tyranny, was a staunch opponent of the popular Arab Spring revolutions. The emerging power would not have just been more genuinely democratic but it would have also been Sunni. It would have had the immediate impact of inciting the oppressed peoples of Iran, many of whom happen to be Sunnis or Arab Shiites, to rise and seek emancipation from a Shiite theocracy disguised as some kind of ‘democracy’. Iran’s endeavour to self-promote as the model for the oppressed peoples of Central Asia, Africa and the Middle East to follow would have been dealt a fatal blow. The emergence of a successful Sunni democratic model would have signalled the beginning of the end of the self-proclaimed role of global Muslim leadership by the Islamic Republic of Iran.

On another front, the emerging new regional power would, for the first time since Israel was created in Palestine in 1948, radically tilt the balance in the chronic Palestinian-Israeli conflict, or what used to be referred to in the old days as the Arab-Israeli conflict, in favour of the Palestinians. Arab unilateral peace treaties concluded with Israel at the expense of the Palestinians and without the consent of the Arab populations would, out of necessity, be revisited. It is no wonder that Israel seemed most concerned when the Egyptian people delivered to power, through the ballot box, a leader belonging to the Muslim Brotherhood and why it seemed most pleased when the Egyptian military toppled him in a bloody coup that almost fatally crushed the Islamic group.

So, the success of the Arab uprising would have eventually delivered a Middle East that is free from despotism, free from Iranian influence, free from division and free from Israeli occupation.

The 3 July 2013 military coup against the first democratically elected civilian president in the history of Egypt brought to an end what felt like a sweet dream. Since then, the Middle East has been living through a nightmare.

One may produce a list of reasons why the Arab Spring revolutions ended up in a mess. The most obvious reason has been the counterrevolution. The deep state, representing the interests of individuals and groups that were likely to lose as a result of change and reform, joined hands with regional powers and players, such as Iran, Israel, the United Arab Emirates and Saudi Arabia, that were horrified at the prospect of democratisation succeeding in the neighbourhood as well as with some world powers, such as the United States, the EU and Russia, that feared the rise of Islamic groups to power via the ballot box. While the Russian attitude was not surprising, the betrayal of Middle East democracy by the world’s leading democracy in the West was scandalous.

Not only did this alliance bring to a standstill the dynamic that promised a better future; in fact, it contributed directly to the empowerment of the most radical elements within Middle Eastern societies and to the radicalisation of a large numbers of young men and women who swelled the ranks of ISIS. (From Deep State to Islamic State, The Arab Counter-Revolution and its Jihadi Legacy by Jean-Pierre Filiu; OUP, 2015.)

So far, the cost has been astronomical. Much of Syria is in ruin and nearly half of its population has been displaced internally or forced into exile.

The sectarian conflicts in Iraq and Yemen are pulling both countries toward the same abyss. Libya is already divided and is having its own ‘light’ civil wars while Egypt, which is being led by the coup authorities from one disaster into another, has never been worse.

The countries that funded the counterrevolution and contributed to the mess are showing signs of strain too. This is particularly true in the case of Saudi Arabia, which squandered billions over a series of misadventures from Egypt to Yemen forcing it to impose austerity measures on its own population at home.

Indeed, today, the mayhem prevails across the region and the crisis is only likely to grow deeper for a while. The war on terrorism has invariably only begotten more terrorism and is only destined to generate more of the same so long as political and economic reform is non-existent. All signs indicate that the Middle East will never be the same.

Yet, sometime soon – perhaps in a few years or at most in a decade or two – the next cycle of revolutions will begin. Revolutions that change the course of history usually come in cycles and achieve their objectives when their successive cycles manage to change not only regional and global balances of power but also the mindset and attitude of the people concerned.

Despite the heavy blow suffered by mainstream Islamic movements across the Arab world, most notably the Muslim Brotherhood, they continue to be the most credible and most popular political parties in the Middle East. Leftist, nationalist and liberal opposition groups that initially identified with the Arab Spring and cheered on as its revolutions erupted one after the other soon afterwards jumped ship and joined the counterrevolution when it became apparent to them that free and fair elections were being won by the Islamists in one country after the other.

The repressive measures used to marginalise or exclude the Islamists have always succeeded only briefly. It does not usually take long before they come back and rise once more. The Muslim Brotherhood in Egypt, who won the presidential elections and the parliamentary elections in 2012 were previously almost completely annihilated twice, in 1954 and in 1965, by Egypt’s former military dictator Gamal Abd Al-Nassir. As they bounced back several times before, they will bounce back again simply because their persecution and their steadfastness coupled with their moderate and tolerant interpretation of Islam only add to their credibility and popularity.

The counterrevolution has now all but been fully exposed for what it is, even to many of those who were deluded by it. Wherever one travels in the Middle East today, nothing, not even terrorism, supersedes people's concern about the deterioration in living conditions and the deepening crises at all levels. Many people see terrorism as an outcome rather than a cause whereas they believe the source of all evils to be despotism.

There is one obvious reason why change is inevitable and is definitely on its way. The counterrevolution has made things much worse than what they used to be when the Arab Spring revolutions erupted.

The pressure cooker will once again explode and a new generation of young men and women will take to the streets to resume the dynamic. Just like before, they will look for leadership and will find it nowhere but with those who have been truthful to the cause, those who paid with their lives and wealth, in order to bring about a new Arab dawn.

Azzam Tamimi is a British Palestinian writer on Islamic affairs. His books include: Power-Sharing Islam, 1993; Islamic & Secularism in the Middle East, 2000; Rachid Ghannouchi a Democrat within Islamism, 2001; and Hamas Unwritten Chapters, 2007.Other freely available chapters are serialised here.

Photo credit: Zadokite via Foter.com / CC BY-NC-ND

Hizbullah Khan argues that the recent withdrawal of Us forces will not spell the end of the Afghan government as feared by many.

In April 2021, President Joe Biden officially announced that the United States will withdraw troops from Afghanistan by September 11 to end America’s longest war. The withdrawal will not erase the last 20 years’ hard-won gains and trigger civil war as the US and its allies have achieved significant goals against terrorist groups.

There are several reasons that the withdrawal of US troops from Afghanistan will not reverse the gains and create a vacuum for the Taliban to recapture Afghanistan. The US and its allies achievements have already collapsed the Taliban’s capacity for victory, overthrowing them from power, destroyed Al Qaeda’s training bases, and made a strong Afghan army and democratic system.

Concerns also soared among Afghans in 2014 when the US and NATO officially ended their combat role; more than 100,000 NATO troops were leaving Afghanistan and handing full responsibility for security to the Afghan forces. The Taliban fought for seven years and lost thousands of its fighters but they still don’t control a single provincial capital among 34 provinces.

Furthermore, the Taliban, a force five times smaller than the Afghan security forces, has an estimated 50,000 to 60,000warriors, controlling just 15 percent of rural parts of the country with very small populations. Since 2014, the Taliban has constantly attacked several major cities to constitute a center from which it can easily govern but has failed. The Taliban still has the capacity to conduct high-profile attacks in Kabul and seize some parts of provincial capitals, but they don’t have the power to defeat the Afghan Military and capture the entire country.

Presently, many fear that the exit of US troops could collapse the Afghan government as the Mujahideen war collapsed Dr. Najibullah’s government in March 1992 after the Soviet withdrawal, leading to a civil war. At that time, the West, Middle East, and the majority of the world’s great powers were against Najibullah’s government. However, now most of the world, particularly the great powers including the US, China, and Russia, support Afghanistan’s democratic elected government.

The communist government also collapsed because major leaders of various ethnicities of Afghanistan were against Najibullah. They included Ahmad Shah Massoud who lead the Tajiks, Abdul Ali Mazari, a famous leader of the Hazaras, and Abdul Rashid Dostum who led the Uzbeks. But today, these ethnicities all support the Afghan government and do not want to be governed by the Taliban.

Moreover, the withdrawal will not provide a void for the Taliban to establish an extreme regime in the country as they did in 1996, as this time the scenario is completely different. The Taliban captured Kabul at a time when there was no elected government; Afghan institutions were entirely demolished during the civil war and there was no army. Today's Afghanistan is much stronger than it was in 1996, with functional institutions and 314,000 Afghan army and police.

Currently, the Afghan security forces are entirely able to secure capital, big cities and territories, but the Communist government in Afghanistan survived for three years after the Red army left, and collapsed abruptly after the cessation of security assistance by Soviets. The US and other international partners provide some  90 percent of the budget for the Afghan army, police, and intelligence forces, collectively known as the Afghan National Defense and Security Forces (ANDSF). Sustaining this security assistance is essential to thwarting a civil war and protecting the international community’s accomplishments.

The Taliban has also lost the argument to justify more conflict. In the past, they argued the presence of foreign forces constitutes an occupation which overthrew their government in 2001 and that they are fighting to expel them. Now that the US and NATO are withdrawing their forces and giving the political reins to the elected Afghan government the Taliban will lose its ideological support on the ground, which will undermine their ability to sustain the war against the ANDSF.

Similarly, the Taliban’s contemporary ideology is too conservative and much less acceptable for most Afghans than in the past, particularly for literate people. Forbidding people from modern technology, sports, elections, and women’s rights will not be tolerated. Their narrative is deeply unpopular when compared twith the present Afghan government’s. For instance, a nationwide poll in 2015 found that 92 percent of Afghans supported the Afghan government and only four percent favored the Taliban.

In this situation, the exit from Afghanistan will not only end the US’ longest war, but also stabilize the Afghan government. Then the Taliban will fully lose the justification of continuing war.

Hizbullah Khan is a political analyst, focusing on war and terrorism in Afghanistan who has published articles with Independent, The Diplomat, The Jerusalem Post, The Globe Post, Asia Times, Dawn, and The Quint. Twitter

Photo by Suliman Sallehi from Pexels

Cornelius Adebahr argues that economic decline rather than the nuclear issue determine life in Tehran on the eve of the Persian year 1392. But a ‘perception gap’ between Iran and the West makes the conflict over the latter apparently insoluble while accelerating the first.

2013 has repeatedly been called a “decisive year” for the international conflict over the Iranian nuclear programme. Not only raising expectations of and pressure on all sides while making an obvious point, this commonplace also very symbolically highlights a source for potential misunderstandings. Because the Iranian year 1391 is just about to end, with 1392 beginning on 21 March – or 1 Farvardin as the date for Nowrouz (New Year) according to the Persian calendar. But rather than bicker about whose year counts as decisive, this observation should serve to illustrate the ‘perception gap’ that seems to separate Iran and the international community.

From a Western point of view, the past year was unparalleled both in terms of action and rhetoric concerning Iran’s worrisome ‘nuclear issue’. Whereas the United Nations’ Security Council has not levied new sanctions since June 2010 (when Resolution 1929 inter alia tightened the existing arms embargo, imposed new travel bans, and froze the funds of the Iranian Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC, or Pasdaran)), both the EU and the United States have increased their unilateral measures towards the country.

In the wake of its far-reaching decision of late January 2012, the EU has put in place an oil embargo against Iran, which took effect mid-last year. Furthermore, it restricted any cooperation in foreign trade, financial services (including insurance), and energy technologies. Pursuant to this, in March 2012 the Belgian company SWIFT disconnected all sanctioned Iranian banks from its worldwide system of electronic financial transactions, thus effectively cutting off Iran from all sorts of international money transfers. Likewise, the US has increased its sanctions pressure over the past year to an almost complete economic embargo on Iran. This includes banning the Iranian Central Bank not only from the U.S. financial system, but also threatening anyone who does business with it.

Going far beyond measures targeting the incriminated nuclear programme and related activities, those bilateral sanctions are now plainly directed at the Iranian government as such, aiming to cut off its revenues from the energy sector and to isolate Iran from the international financial system.

Not surprisingly, the effects of sanctions have been felt far beyond those listed persons and companies denominated as their primary targets. The overall economic decline, symbolised in the continuing slide of the Iranian Rial (losing some 40% of its value in only a week in early October 2012, and more than 60% over the past year as a whole), hurts ordinary Iranians at least as much as those in power. The latest official inflation figure is estimated at 27,4 % – the highest ever published – although unofficial estimates reckon the rate to be at least twice as high, with price increases for some basic products ranging up to 100% over the past year. For the past year, the International Monetary Fund forecast the first economic contraction in Iran in nearly 20 years.

Moreover, in the second half of 2012, a debate reached the international press as to whether the sanctions directly affected the country’s supply with pharmaceuticals and medical equipments – even though these do not fall under any of the international sanctions. Iranian claims to this end, likening their plight – in an unusual comparison to their otherwise despised neighbours – to that of Iraqis in the 1990s, gained credibility when U.N. Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon spoke of “significant” sanctions effects on the human rights’ situation in Iran.

What gained much less attention internationally were statements by leading Iranian politicians blaming homegrown mismanagement and corruption for the dire economic situation rather than international sanctions. Parliamentary Speaker Ali Larijani’s statement to this effect – “80% is mismanagement, 20% is sanctions” – can be directly attributed to his quarrel with the Ahmadinejad government. Yet the criticism of former Health Minister Marzieh Vahid Dastjerdi that the Central Bank simply did not allocate enough dollars for drug imports while providing hard currency for luxury cars, was apparently more to the point: She lost her job, being the only women in the cabinet, two weeks later.

This leads to how Iranians perceived their last year, i.e. 1391. Contrary to the Soviet-style claim of the regime calling it the “year of national production”; it was a year of economic troubles and decline. The summer saw an eruption of ‘chicken riots’, when angry shoppers protested in front of shops which had run out of poultry sold at government-subsidised prices. In early October, a crackdown on moneychangers following the Rial hike sparked short-lived protests near Tehran’s traditional Bazaar. Throughout the winter, the capital made international headlines with a number of ‘smog-free days’, i.e. the closure of schools, universities, and government agencies as a means to battle the increasing pollution. Now, Iranians worry about price increases of pistachios, their favourite Nowrouz snack. These are again mostly unaffected by the sanctions but rather by the pistachio industry’s strategic decision to export the nuts for the sake of gaining hard currency rather than sell them at the domestic market.

So where does this leave the ‘perception gap’? Well, while Western powers might argue whether 2013 was a good year or a bad one with regard to the nuclear issue – after all, sanctions are now ‘working’ and the international coalition against Iran is still broadly intact; but then again, the conflict is still not solved and, instead, the regime keeps increasing its nuclear stockpiles – 1391 was certainly not a good year for Iran or Iranians. An economy in shambles, a middle class further weakened by job cuts and price rises, and no relief in sight.

After a two-weeks Nowrouz recess (certainly less joyous than in previous years), the country will wake up to another boldly named year, which will first of all bring them Presidential Elections in mid-June. The regime – or rather the powers that control everything in this country, including the government – will make sure that ‘the right man’ will win. After two misses with the reformist Khatami elected in 1997 and the populist Ahmadinejad successful in 2005, this means a died-in-the-wool conservative from the inner circle of the Supreme Leader that relies on good connections with the Pasdaran – or the other way around, depending on whether Khamenei or the Guards are actually in charge.

The international community would do well to understand that by focusing merely on Iran and its nuclear programme, the conflict is unlikely to be solved. Indeed, both sides regularly acknowledge that there is not trust between them, which is why any attempt to come to a solution within the “bomb-or-not” frame has failed so far. Instead of asking the regime to surrender, both nationally and internationally, the global powers should broaden the problem to include other issues. Bilateral negotiations between the U.S. and Iran to overcome their mutual impasse is one way, while trying to establish a nuclear weapons free zone in the Middle East is another. Acknowledging that Iran has a role to play in the Syrian endgame would be similarly helpful, as would it be to focus on human rights abuses not only in Iran but in all countries of the Middle East, including the West’s allies.

None of this should take away from Iran’s obligations deriving from the Non-proliferation Treaty as well as the relevant UN Security Council resolutions. The aim remains unchanged: There must not be an Iranian bomb. Yet taken together, such a broadening of the picture should ultimately help Tehran to agree to an eventual compromise that contains more than just ending the punitive measures imposed as a response to the country’s intransigence. Both Libya and North Korea were offered better deals to back down, even though neither currently offers a good example for Iran.

If the international community continues to fail to see the conflict also through Iran’s eyes – if only when looking at the calendar – it will remain bound in a power play that it is unlikely to win. A new year should thus be an opportunity for a broader approach to succeed.

Robin Lamb argues that the appeal of political Islam has severly diminished in most countries, but what comes next may not be any better. This chapter first appeared as blog on the Royal Society for Asian Affair's website. It will appear in the e-book 'The Future of the Middle East' co-produced by Global Policy and Arab Digest, and edited by Hugh Miles and Alastair Newton. Freely available chapters will be serialised here and collected into a final downloadable publication in the spring.

Proposition

Political Islam [1] has dominated political doctrine in the Middle East and North Africa (MENA) for the last forty years. But jihadi [2] violence has contaminated its image (but not the faith of most Muslims) and regional support across the Middle East and North Africa is receding in the face of recent experience. If political Islam has not run its course, it is diminished. Its alternative in most regional perceptions is not democracy but autocracy, including military regimes.

Background

The leap in oil prices and revenues during the 1970s transformed the status and influence of traditional Sunni monarchies in the Arabian Peninsula and the Gulf. Among other effects, it generated funding for the spread of Saudi Arabia’s strict and exclusivist brand of Islam across the Muslim world and beyond. At the end of the decade, the 1979 Islamic Revolution in Iran underlined the resurgence of Islam as a political force [3]. The conclusion drawn by Western governments was that political Islam was a key factor in the region and had to be accommodated. This assessment was reinforced in the UK by the imperative of respecting the beliefs of British Muslims in a multicultural society.

Aside from the Gulf states, Morocco and Jordan, early C20th Arab attempts to assert national identity through monarchies presiding over parliaments gave way in the 1950s and 1960s to secular military/security regimes legitimized by Arab nationalism, socialist policies and fake democratic institutions. But first monarchies and then republics failed to deliver economic, social and, in the confrontation with Israel, national satisfaction. Moreover, both parliamentary democracy and socialism were imported ideologies which did not fit easily with the region’s political, economic and (for some) religious traditions. Islam in contrast is home-grown, has a history of past military and intellectual superiority and offers lessons (but rarely uniform paradigms) for government, economy and society as well as personal belief.

The Soviet invasion of Afghanistan in December 1979 followed hard on the heels of the Iranian Revolution and presented the Islamic world with the prospect of another invasion of a Muslim country by an external power. Among other consequences, the invasion attracted foreign fighters from across the Muslim world and in due course enabled Osama Bin Laden, in 1988, to create Al Qaida (AQ). In 1991, a military coup in Algeria frustrated the election of an Islamist government and precipitated a lengthy civil war pitting Islamist irregulars against a military regime. This reinforced perceptions of the power of political Islam, further strengthened by massive growth in political support in Egypt for the Muslim Brotherhood (buoyed by well-funded social welfare programmes) which professed a non-violent, democratic approach to its relationship with government and Western society.

In this it departed from the jihadist ideology developed by Pakistani theologian Abul Ala al Maududi (d.1979) and the MB’s own former ideologue Sayyid Qutb (d.1966). It also set itself at odds with AQ and other jihadist organisations, such as the Gama’at Islamiyya and Takfir wa’l Higra, and attracted their contempt. AQ’s series of spectacular terrorist atrocities culminating in the 9/11 (2001) destruction of the World Trade Centre’s Twin Towers in New York underlined the importance to policy makers of identifying representatives of political Islam offering adherents an alternative to jihad and willing to cooperate with regional governments and external powers. This combined with recognition of the need to avoid feeding into the AQ narrative or giving offence to Muslim populations susceptible to radicalization. The continued presence of US forces in Saudi Arabia after the liberation of Kuwait in 1991 did both which led to the eventual agreed removal of US forces from Saudi Arabia to Qatar in 2003.

Argument

Support for political Islam and jihadism has drawn strength from broader hostility to the West engendered by religious, social and cultural dissonance. This has included divergences on religion and its role in society [4], the norms of social behaviour (confusing some Muslim observers who accuse the West of immorality), the relationship between government and people, freedom of speech and association and the treatment of women. Politically, the Arab world has been offended by past colonial occupations and since the mid C20th by the absence of successful international action to protect the Palestinians from the existential threat posed by Israel to their aspirations to nation and statehood.

More recently, the 2003 invasion of Iraq and international military action against the Taliban in Afghanistan have fed a single narrative myth alleging uninterrupted Western hostility to Islam dating back to the Crusades (1096-1272 AD). The radicalising effect on some Muslims living in Western societies, including young people born and bred in Western countries (but faced with the complexity of reconciling competing cultures as they mature), has been widely reported.

But the Arab Spring of 2011 was notoriously instigated not by Islamist movements but by young people rebelling against repressive regimes. They were motivated by the urge to protest illiberal policies and the absence of economic and employment prospects. But experienced, organized and well-funded Islamist organizations were able to exploit events and fill a vacuum of revolutionary leadership.

In Egypt, the Muslim Brotherhood won power by constitutional means – but failed to follow Turkish President Erdogan’s (then) example of delivering stability, security, control of the military establishment and economic growth before (as now) pursuing an autocratic Islamist agenda. In contrast to the Algerian experience, the military coup which overthrew the MB in 2013 was therefore widely supported, obtained electoral endorsement and has been able to repress the Brotherhood without arousing serious popular opposition. The Egyptian government faces a security challenge from jihadi groups but not an existential threat.

In Libya, the Muslim Brotherhood and its local analogues did not even get as far as electoral success. Elections were held but Islamist candidates were roundly beaten.

They might have expected to do better: before 2011, Libyans provided a disproportionate number of recruits to AQ and the Libyan Islamic Fighting Group (LIFG) was one of the leading forces arrayed against the Qaddafi regime. In the event, although rejected by the electorate, they used their organizational and military strength, determination and battle experience to subvert the result of a succession of elections and impose their will on elected parliaments. But while they could, and did, help frustrate efforts to build a new Libya, they could not assert national control against the strength of opinion and the array of militias ranged against them.

UK and international policy in Libya has been to promote a reconciliation involving all factions to reduce the risk that excluding one could cause the collapse of the political process. Thirty years of accommodation with political Islam and Libya’s story since 2011 have favoured inclusivity. But total inclusivity may now inhibit a successful political process if it gives any veto to Libyan organisations and individuals seen by the rest of the population as having placed political Islam ahead of their more secular and quotidian political and economic aspirations.

Conclusion

In short, the Egyptians have experienced a Muslim Brotherhood government and did not like it. The Libyans never wanted one and have seen the damage the imposition of political Islam by force can do to their own hopes and prospects.

But the Egyptians and Libyans are not the only Muslims to have blanched at regional examples of what political Islam in its extreme form can mean. The atrocities committed by the ‘Islamic State’ in Iraq and Syria (Daesh to give it its – rare – Arabic acronym) have traumatized the people of both countries and caused revulsion among governments and peoples across the region [5]. The Muslim Brotherhood, which had seemed to Western governments – and some Arabs – to be a moderate organization they could work with, has been tarred by association and by its failure in government. It is now one of the targets of the Saudi-led campaign against Qatar and seems to have few champions.

Implications

If Mao saw the revolutionary as a fish in a sea of sympathetic (or enforced) support, jihadism floats on a lake fed by a number of tributaries – doctrinal, financial and fanatical – without which it would dry out. Few of the parties involved in the dispute around Qatar’s foreign and information policy can claim not to have fed that lake in one way or another.

They may exercise plausible deniability. Saudi Arabia may argue that the law of unintended consequences applied when they spread a theology that excoriated fitna (religious discord) and thought itself politically quietist (but is essentially takfiri); Egypt may point out that jihadi doctrine was developed by a political dissident but Sayyid Qutb’s organisation was later rehabilitated and long tolerated; several Gulf countries may claim that funding was provided by private individuals including ruling family members who held no government position but formal and informal state controls failed to stem the flow of substantial funds.

In short, the roots of political Islam are more complex than the perceived misbehaviour of a single actor. But the experience of desolation inflicted by the jihadi extreme has driven most Arab governments and peoples to reject political Islam (but not their Muslim faith) and the risks of parliamentary democracy in favour of the security of military and traditional autocracy. This needs to be taken into account by Western governments in their interactions with the Arab world.

Robin Lamb was formerly British Ambassador to Bahrain and is now the executive director of LBBC. He is also a member of the Council of the RSAA. for the original blog please click the below image:

Photo Credit: Khalid Albaih via Flickr (CC BY 2.0)

Notes

[1] Political Islam refers to the conviction that Islamic precepts should dictate government form and policy; and to the individuals and organizations committed to that end

[2] There is a debate within Islam about the meaning of jihad but I use it in this article as shorthand for the use (and users) of violence in support of the most autocratic and exclusivist (takfiri) variants of political Islam.

[3] And the revival of sectarianism as an unfortunate corollary

[4] At its extreme, political Islam sees democracy as seeking to deny the supreme, unique authority of Allah and therefore tantamount to polytheism (shirk). Western promotion of democracy can therefore be seen as an assault on Islam.

[5] Playing into the hands of President Asad in Syria

Talks between Russia and the west have failed. Moscow has described the situation in Ukraine as “intolerable” and “a matter of life or death”. The US president, Joe Biden, has predicted the Kremlin “will move in” to Ukraine.

The impasse was reached when the Russian president, Vladimir Putin, insisted that the armed conflict in eastern Ukraine “looks like genocide”, adding massive pressure to his diplomatic demands. Russia insists it is prepared to deploy unspecified but alarming sounding “military-technical” means to pursue its ends.

The signals are more than clear: after annexing Crimea in 2014 and sponsoring separatist movements in the Donbas, in the country’s east, Moscow is directly threatening a third incursion into Ukraine’s territorial sovereignty, massing troops on the Ukrainian border and also in Belarus, officially for “joint exercises”.

Beyond Ukraine, Russia is putting pressure on Nato and the EU, and attempting to change the international order with this latest round of power politics. Is Moscow bluffing – or is an escalated military conflict likely in Ukraine? If so, what are the chances that Kyiv can resist its more powerful neighbour?

Pressure on Kyiv

A concerted campaign of disinformation deployed through Russian-language media aims to foment unrest in Ukraine. But eight years of war have considerably diminished the power of pro-Russian propaganda and Kyiv took further steps last year by banning pro-Russian media outlets.

Ukraine’s security services have also revealed that several thousand cyberattacks have been conducted from occupied Crimea since 2014. In mid-January, a message calling on Ukrainians to “be afraid and expect the worst” – purporting to be from Poland, one of Ukraine’s strongest supporters – was revealed by Ukraine’s information ministry to have probably been devised by Russia.

Energy security is another important part of this crisis. Moscow’s plans for Nord Stream 2 – a pipeline which is supposed to directly reach Germany through the Baltic Sea – could deny energy to Ukraine, which has already lost control of its coal deposits in the conflicted Donbas. On top of that, Ukraine could lose transit fees equivalent to approximately 4% of its GDP, or US$7 billion (£5.1 billion).

But these are covert measures which must fly under the radar. The fear is that Moscow is backing itself into a diplomatic corner where the use of force is its only way to remain credible.

Military scenarios

Russia has built up sufficient military resources to penetrate into Ukrainian territory. But it’s unlikely to be able to take the whole country and, more importantly, hold it for any significant period, given the prospects of fierce armed resistance from Ukraine. But it has a number of options from which to launch a measured incursion.

East: Russia could easily launch a massive operation from the eastern province of Donbas where it is supporting local militias. The main part of its military build-up is in this area. The problem is that the main cities that Moscow could attempt to seize, Kharkiv and Dnipro, are heavily populated and would be difficult to capture occupy.

South: The Black Sea territories, or Prichernomorie, would be a tempting target for Russian strategists. Seizing this area would cut Ukraine off from its access to the sea and connect Russian forces from Donbas to Transnistria – a Russian-occupied region of Moldova, to the west of Ukraine.

Russia could launch its eastern forces as well as pre-positioned troops in Crimea. Analysts indicate that the coastal defences to the west of Crimea are quite exposed. But Russia would need to seize the cities of Marioupol, in the east, and Odessa, in the west, where the population would most likely strenuously resist Russian occupation.

North: Kyiv, Ukraine’s capital, is less than 100km from the border with Belarus, where Russia has troops conducting joint exercises. Belarus’s president, Alexander Lukashenko – an autocrat who holds on to power thanks to Moscow’s support – recently declared that his country “won’t stand aside if war breaks out”.

West: Perhaps the most surprising direction from which a new invasion of Ukraine could come. The Pentagon recently indicated concerns of a Kremlin false-flag operation coming from Transnistria – a Russian-speaking region of Moldova where Moscow has kept troops since the collapse of the Soviet Union.

Is Ukraine ready to resist?

For eight years, Kyiv has been fighting in the east of the country, beefing up its military and preparing its population to resist. But military sources are gloomy about the prospect of being able to resist for much longer than a week without the help of western allies.

Air defences are weak, but Ukraine has other assets, such as drones provided by Turkey as well as new anti-tank missiles provided by the US and the UK, with the assistance of trainers. Ukraine has also developed its own missile, which is proving effective in the field.

As well as its regular troops, Ukraine has its national guard, a sort of armed national police force. Backed by significant investments and advanced weaponry, it could act as a rearguard against paratroopers or special forces infiltrations.

Meanwhile, Ukraine’s defence battalions now span the whole territory, following the National Resistance Act which entered into force this month. These are civilian units, military trained to use guerrilla tactics against occupying forces.

The Ukrainian population has also been mobilizing in support of the troops since the seizure of Crimea and the war in Donbas. And according to a poll taken in December 2021 by the Kyiv International Institute of Sociology, 58% of Ukrainian men and almost 13% of women declared that they are ready to take up arms. A further 17% and 25% more said they would resist through other means.

In what would be a classic case of asymmetrical warfare, resistance from Ukraine’s population could therefore prove a serious thorn in Moscow’s side.

Julien Théron, Lecturer, Conflict and Security Studies, Sciences Po.

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.

Photo by Maria Orlova from Pexels

The Gulf Monarchies after the Arab Spring: Threats and Securityby Cinzia Bianco. Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2024. 206 pp., £85 hardcover 978-1-5261-7084-2

The Gulf Cooperation Council (GCC) states, considered as islands of stability, were heavily affected by a combination of the game-changing events of the Arab Spring which substantially put into question their existing perceptions of security at home and in the region and led to the emergence of multi-dimensional and multi-layered security issues. Cinzia Bianco’s timely book challenges commonly held pre-Arab Spring narratives and monolithic understandings that saw the GCC monarchies as having shared security concerns – showing how and why their divergences have emerged (p.5). The book meticulously unpacks the threat perceptions and strategic calculus of each GCC monarchy, highlighting their distinct sociopolitical and socioeconomic vulnerabilities (p.20).

The conflictual foreign policies pursued by the six GCC countries in the post-Arab Spring era definitively challenge the argument that there was foreign policy coordination. Rejecting the generalizations and hyper-securitization that characterized the post-Arab Spring discourse, Bianco introduces new concepts and instruments to provide a nuanced understanding of security perceptions at the leadership level in each of the six GCC monarchies to comprehend their policies and positions (p.6). 

The book is systematically structured and divided into three parts: Part One focuses on Bahrain, Saudi Arabia, and the UAE; Part Two on Kuwait and Oman; and Part Three on Qatar, which stands out as a unique case. The book includes a combination of the quantitative (statistics and surveys) and qualitative research methods (interviews and discourse analysis) and the reliance on both theoretical knowledge and empirical data. 

Building on Barry Buzan’s comprehensive concept of security, Bianco theorizes a differentiation between threats and risks (p.183). This risk/threat distinction has allowed for a more nuanced description of how a threat perceived by one state might be perceived just as a risk by another. As Bianco, notes, it is the decision-makers who ‘securitise’ risks into threats with their speech acts based on their security perceptions (p.44).

Additionally, Bianco categorizes threats by nature, type, and dimension to perform an effective threat analysis, going beyond the simple external-internal categorization, which does not fit the post-2011 reality of the GCC states (p.49). Bianco focuses on four dimensions of threat – political, military, economic, and social (p.40). Thus, in this book, Bianco’s contribution to the existing literature is three-fold: a) distinguishing between threats and risks, b) examining the interaction between structural and ontological vulnerabilities and leadership perception, and c) going beyond the traditional dichotomy of external threats (that affect the international interests of the country) and internal threats (having endogenous roots and affect the internal stability of the country), using the term ‘intermestic threats’ (pp.11-12). She explains ‘intermestic threats’ as having a mixed external and internal nature, such as those derived from exogenous motives but having domestic implications, or vice versa. 

The hypothesis presented in the book is that ‘intermestic threats’ were highly prioritized by the GCC leaders, especially those originating abroad or abetted by foreign actors (p.53). These ‘intermestic threats’ are prominent in all six empirical chapters of the book, showing that every GCC monarchy is particularly concerned with them, yet in different ways (p.184). In the decade following the Arab Spring, the actors emerging as catalysts of the GCC countries’ security calculus were Iran - and its allied regional groups - and the diverse constellation of Islamist groups coalescing around the Muslim Brotherhood (p.185). Bianco focuses on two main threats that became catalysts of GCC states’ security perceptions: the ‘Islamist threat’, and the ‘Shi’a threat’. Six case chapters examine how these threats’ external and internal dimensions affect each GCC state’s security perception and strategic calculus. 

Each leadership in the GCC viewed these two threats differently with regard to their own stability and security. For instance, Saudi Arabia and the UAE treated Islamism as an ‘intermestic threat’, exhibiting the most hyper-securitized approach. On the other hand, Qatar, a country perceiving virtually no domestic repercussions from the 2011 uprisings, showed no intention of adopting the hyper-securitized positions of the other GCC monarchies. While Kuwait and Oman, the neutral actors of the GCC, opted a hedging strategy between security and stability, and avoided being caught between pro-status quo and revisionist powers within the GCC. While discussing how the GCC states addressed the perceived ‘Islamist’ and ‘Shi’a’ threats, Bianco cites several incidents, offering readers a comprehensive process-tracing analysis. In doing so, she examines how each GCC state historically perceives Islamists, navigates its relations with its Shi’a populations, and broadly manages its relations with Iran.

This book’s findings confirm that GCC security is not a one-dimensional phenomenon but is instead a complex matrix of domestic and regional factors, each playing a distinctive role in formulating the definition, categorization, perception, and prioritization of threats (p.188) One key finding of the book is that GCC states increasingly view each other as potential sources of threats to stability, as evidenced by the 2017 Gulf crisis (p.187). Intra-GCC crises have shown that the sub-regional level of study is no longer sufficient to decode security perceptions in the GCC, and the domestic level is necessary (p.181). As Bianco notes, “the national chapters of the Arab Spring brought to the surface the different sociopolitical and socioeconomic vulnerabilities of the individual countries that, interpreted by the political culture and filtered by the governing systems, accelerated the polarisation of their security calculus, setting the monarchies on a collision course.” (p.181).

Acknowledging that Shi’a and Islamist threats are significant for GCC leaderships and they are ‘intermestic threats’ as they have both internal and external dimensions, it would be better if the book had touched upon the role of intra-ruling family rivalries, which could also act as a domestic threat with external dimensions. Additionally, while discussing the Shi’a threat, the book extensively covers Iran’s role but fails to address Turkey’s role in the Islamist threat related to the Muslim Brotherhood, as Turkey, alongside Qatar, was a notable regional actor ‘securitized’ by some GCC states in the post-2011 era.

Ultimately, this book is a significant contribution to the Gulf Studies literature, offering a rich framework of existing concepts and theories and detailed analysis based on the author’s field research. It is an essential read for scholars and policymakers interested in GCC policymaking as it unpacks the threat perceptions driving GCC states’ behavior, emphasizing their increasingly diverging domestic specificities (p.181). The study’s most valuable contribution is its nuanced understanding of the different facets of threat perceptions in the six GCC states individually through a meticulous conceptualization.

Sinem Cengiz is a Researcher at the Gulf Studies Center at Qatar University and a Non-Resident Fellow at Gulf International Forum in Washington D.C. She is a regular columnist for Arab News and a member of the Women in Foreign Policy Initiative. She is the author of Turkish-Saudi Relations: Cooperation and Competition in the Middle East and co-editor of The Making of Contemporary Kuwait: Identity, Politics, and Its Survival Strategy.

In the first of a series of commentaries on the Justice and Security Research Programme’s emerging ideas, Tom Kirk reports on Alex de Waal’s recent book launch and explores the use of grand political ordering frameworks for interpreting conflict affected regions.

Over the last four years I have been fortunate to work with the JSRP on an ad-hoc basis. At the heart of these engagements has been a lively, and at times tense, discussion about exactly what it is that an inter-disciplinary group of econometricians, anthropologists, activists and academically-orientated development practitioners can add to understandings of governance in regions where the state appears to be absent or weak, and ongoing conflicts frustratingly intractable. In partial answer to this, the consortium has gradually coalesced around an agreement that ground level, vernacular, perspectives of the everyday provision of security and justice can tell us much about ‘real’ or everyday governance, and the creation of public authority in such places. The next, and perhaps harder task, is to move beyond these, albeit fascinating, localised descriptions to say something generalizable for an audience of policymakers.    

Thus it was with great interest that I sat down to listen to JSRP Research Director, Alex de Waal, launch his new book ‘The Real Politics of the Horn of Africa: Money, War and the Business of Power’. Indeed, although I am not an Africanist, the promised discussion of Alex’s idea of the political marketplace ensured that anyone with an interest in supposedly ‘fragile states’ or comparative politics should take note. Although I have not yet had the opportunity to read the book, in what follows I try to summarise Alex’s talk, and why the framework he presents fits into, and encourages, honest ways of talking about politics in such places.

Whilst Alex has been developing his idea of political marketplaces (see here, here and here) for some time, he chose to begin his talk with visualisations of changing patronage networks in the Horn. What was immediately clear is that the nature of patronage has changed since the 1970s from a few spatially bounded networks to a plethora of more diverse, overlapping and border-straddling networks (see slides from Alex’s talk). At the same time, Alex pointed out that, since independence analysts have been largely unable to talk of civil wars in the region. Instead it is characterised by low-intensity conflicts that spill from one sovereign state to another and back again.

In the words of one of Alex’s informants, holding onto power and securing a measure of stability in the Horn requires ‘having the political budget needed for the political market’. Put another way, the ability of leaders to avoid destabilising levels of violence and to remain in power, is a function of their ability to buy off rivals and incorporate them into rent-seeking elite coalitions. Whereas in the 1970s the Horn’s leaders could purchase loyalty through symbolic gestures such as medals, titles or positions or land grants, the monetisation of patronage has meant that leaders increasingly require large cash budgets in order to be successful patrons or, failing this, the ability to grant local elites licenses to extract resources or taxes in remote, often border, provinces. However, the contemporary ease with which both money and goods can move within countries and across borders has meant that patronage networks have become more pervasive, more competitive and less likely to be bounded by political imaginations.

It is for this reason that Alex argues we must not see political marketplaces as relics, or as difficult to remove traditions from the region’s distant past. Rather they are well orchestrated, often globally connected, modern political ordering systems, with a logic that analysts and policymakers would do well to heed. Indeed this is where Alex’s ideas dovetail with those of other JSRP members. For example, Mary Kaldor’s exploration of war economies within which aid is diverted to provincial elites, whilst those same elites continue low-level localised conflicts or criminal enterprises that justify that aid, is explicable as an attempt by a leader to placate potential provincial rivals with foreign resources. Similarly it also sheds light on the importance of state-like tax regimes that Kasper Hoffmann and Koen Vlassenroot identify as bound up with the provision of security and justice in parts of the DRC. In this sense, a framework such as Alex’s can help analysts and practitioners to theorise the wider drivers of observed governance processes and conflict in difficult places.

However for the framework to become a theory amenable to further scrutiny, it arguably requires some measure of predictive power. Other frameworks, such as North, Wallis and Weingast’s extensive depiction of ‘political settlements’, have attempted to uncover the conditions for patronage-based political arrangements to become developmental. They focus on (i) the establishment of rule of law among elites; (ii) the adoption of perpetually existing organizations; and (iii) the political control of the military (with others testing this hypothesis). However, at least in his lecture, Alex was much more ambiguous about what it takes for such systems to incubate developmental outcomes. Instead he talked of leaders’ abilities to navigate the turmoil and unpredictability of the Horn’s politics, all the while incentivising provincial elites to keep violence to a minimum.

Nonetheless Alex’s framework provides a useful rationale as to why the money that foreign interventions or new exportable resources bring often disrupts carefully negotiated political marketplaces, with elites using violence to renegotiate their share of rents (click the cartoon on South Sudan for a great example). This stark warning goes some way towards helping outsiders understand why their best intentions may have the opposite effect in places such as the Horn. It also suggests that those wishing to engage political marketplaces should seek partners with fine-grained local knowledge of the networks, alliances and rents that give them some modicum of stability.

In sum, the political marketplace’s solid, intuitive and simple core message should be accepted by, and prove useful to, policymakers. Indeed I suspect the materialist central tenant – ‘follow the money’ – would have many a non-expert nodding in agreement and ring true among the Horn’s ordinary citizens, not just the elites that Alex has spent decades analysing. It also does not fall foul of any tests of normativity or culturalism, and provides a solid pointer to those confused as to where to start. Yet, perhaps most importantly, it gives policymakers a way to think about how global processes and interventions are linked to the messy politics and frustratingly intractable conflicts they find in such places.

Thomas Kirk is a PHD candidate at the London School of Economics and Political Science. Thomas’ research interests include social accountability, and security and justice provision, with particular reference to Afghanistan, Timor-Leste and Pakistan. Thomas also is interested in the application of technology for monitoring and evaluating development programmes. This post firist appeared on the JSRP blog.

In the fifth of this series of podcasts with UN and other aid leaders making change happen on the frontline, I talked to Panos Moumtzis, who now leads the GELI programme, about some top influencing he did in a previous job as UN Humanitarian Coordinator for Syria.

Duncan: Welcome to GELI stories. I’m with Panos Moumtzis who in 2018 was the UN Humanitarian Coordinator for the Syrian response, based in Amman. He has a really interesting influencing story around persuading one of the warring parties to stop using children. Panos, welcome.

Panos: Thank you. In the Syrian context at that time, about maybe half the country was controlled by the government and the other half were non-state actors. In my capacity as a regional humanitarian coordinator, it came to my attention through the protection cluster and humanitarian actors on the ground that in the northeast of Syria, one of the non-state actors, the Kurdish force, was using children – young boys primarily, age 8, 10, 12 – in the armed forces. So we put our heads together to think what could we do in order to ensure the protection of the children who clearly should have been at school, not with the soldiers. We devised a strategy and started working first more at the technical level on the ground, with the immediate counterparts who facilitated access and managed checkpoints and so on, trying to influence them to stop the recruitment of these children.

Duncan: So what were the children being used for?

Panos: The children were used to man checkpoints. They were armed – they were these kids, really, with a Kalashnikov standing on checkpoints, (there were quite a lot of checkpoints!). Some of them were used for cooking, for cleaning, for support roles within the armed forces. Clearly there had to be an intervention with the leadership of the armed forces. We devised a strategy together with UNICEF, Save The Children and a couple of other actors for how to best impress upon the Kurdish armed forces to stop this practice.

I actually had a number of meetings with their leadership. It was highly sensitive because, first of all, the country is divided. With our exchange with them, we were not bringing any official recognition or political message – it was really about disarmament of the children. Of course, we were worried that an outside group would look at the engagement with the United Nations as sending a political message. We were also very aware that the government in Damascus would have been very upset; Turkey would not have been happy with this engagement with them. We were highly driven by the protection of the rights of the children. These children should not be there.

I was approached and I engaged with the senior leadership of the non-state actor group and actually I found them quite responsive – they asked to meet in Beirut. I wanted to make sure it was a discreet meeting, so we were in a hotel on a level two basement in a conference room … I didn’t want any pictures, I wanted just to have a conversation. We identified on their side there was a woman who was in charge of humanitarian action and we also wanted to meet the military guys. We found that they were quite receptive and at the same time we looked into who could have influence over them. We looked into countries that they were in contact with and asked them also to engage and this was really the coalition countries that were operating in the north east of Syria, so it was also a military to military conversation, pressing upon them the principles that they had to adhere to.

Duncan: So this is the Americans, the Brits, the Europeans who were with the Kurds in this fight?

Panos: Yes – I met the military leadership of the coalition and they were all very sympathetic and supportive and said actually this is something we can do. At the time a coalition of Western countries were operating in that area and they had an engagement with the Kurdish forces. That discussion went back and forth for six months, until finally they said they were willing to sign an agreement on disarmament. Then it became an issue who would sign, it came to me, we also had the UNICEF special envoy who agreed to do so, and an agreement was signed. And it was quite interesting to hear back from my colleagues that really it was quite rapid; they stopped seeing children at checkpoints, and we followed up also with them and they said all kids under 16 were all returned back to their families and were no longer with them.

Duncan: So what did your bosses say?

Panos: It was a decision that we took on the ground, but I alerted my bosses and I think it was understood, including UNICEF at the highest level, that it was a child protection issue, and there was an agreement to go ahead with it. There was also communication with everybody on all sides of the conflict to say that this was going to happen. It was a successful outcome to a very politically sensitive discussion. I needed to take the decision to go ahead with it, which wasn’t without risks. The risk whenever you deal with a non-state actor, with an armed group, first of all, is that they need to behave and honour a principle, in this case the disarmament of children. Secondly, the host government in Syria, who is all the time concerned about their sovereignty and respect for their state. And then the neighbouring countries, tensions, sensitivities, there was a Kurdish group within Turkey, within Iraq, so there were quite a lot of risks involved. But we took the risk, the calculated risk, to go ahead and do it, because it was the right thing to do.

Duncan: How did you minimise the risks? Was there anything you could do in that situation, rather than just hope they didn’t notice?

Panos: No, we proactively informed everybody that this was what was happening.

Duncan: So you told Syria, you told…

Panos: Yes, we said that we’re concerned about the protection of the children and that it’s something that was happening. There was information sharing about this happening and of course they were not happy with it. And even after the signature took place, there was a letter of complaint. I think it was to UNICEF primarily. But for us, it’s absolutely worth it because the reason we do this job is really to be able to speak up on people’s rights, on vulnerable people’s rights, whether it was questions related to women or girls, or in this case with children. There, we really needed to intervene and to do the right thing. In the work we do, we’re guided by values, which means that there are situations where we have to push the boundary, we have to push the line, and ask everybody to show respect.

Duncan: I mean, this seems wonderful, first of all… I mean a real success story… but basically everybody was very well behaved.

Panos: It wasn’t as straightforward as that because first of all within the Kurdish leadership, it wasn’t until we reached the very top that the decision was made. The lower levels were unresponsive and it took a few months before we were able to get to the top to have these meetings. Then they said ‘Absolutely, we want to be a responsible armed force’. I think it was also the time where they still wanted to be seen as part of the war on terror forces, and they wanted to adhere to these principles in a political context where they were arguing that there had to be political change and so on.

Duncan: So did you make those arguments? Did you say this is how modern armies fight? They don’t use children?

Panos: We have what we call the civ-mil collaboration – civilian to military exchange, and we have some trainings we offer as humanitarians to armed groups around the world in terms of giving awareness on principles around humanitarian work – partiality, neutrality, independence – and then we inserted there principles related to protection of children in this case, and UNICEF was part of that, so we really asked them to adhere to this.

Duncan: Did you offer them that training then?

Panos: Absolutely and this was done through the civ-mil collaboration –  I mean it’s a training we offer around the world to armed groups in order to make sure that humanitarian work is respected, and we were very happy when this happened.

Duncan: Panos Moumtzis, thank you very much!

The Global Executive Leadership Initiative - GELI - is a leadership development programme designed exclusively for top-level leaders from the United Nations, NGOs, and the Red Cross and Red Crescent Movement. Global Policy's Tom Kirk facilitates it alongside Duncan.

Photo by Ahmed akacha

This post by Oxfam’s Richard Stanforth and Magnus Corfixen first appeared on Oxfam’s Views and Voices blog.

Why are Oxfam and other humanitarian organisations not welcoming calls for corridors, pauses and so-called “safe zones” to address the humanitarian catastrophe in Gaza? Richard Stanforth and Magnus Corfixen explain – and set out why a ceasefire is the only credible solution.

Many in the international community including the UK are pressing for a “humanitarian pause”, while others have called for “humanitarian corridors” and so-called “safe zones” in Gaza. You may be surprised to learn that Oxfam and many other humanitarian organisations are not joining them. Why?

Here, we’ll explain what these terms mean and why they will not be anywhere near enough to effectively address the desperate need for aid in Gaza.

What is a humanitarian pause?

Many members of the international community including the UK are pressing for a ‘pause.’ This is effectively a temporary ceasefire in the fighting for a short period that may be designed to allow people to leave a conflict area, repairs to be made, or bring in humanitarian relief or other supplies.

What is a humanitarian corridor?

Humanitarian corridors mean those involved in a conflict declare that a particular route will not be targeted and is off limits. That could be for a short or long period. Sometimes just one side (for instance, a government) may declare they will observe a humanitarian corridor; sometimes all groups will agree to a corridor. The corridors are meant to allow safe passage and the escape of people not fighting (“civilians”), including the wounded and sick. They are also meant to make it easier and safer to transport of goods, especially essential humanitarian supplies such as water, food, fuel or medicines (More detail on these corridors and how they are used on the ICRC page here.)

What is a safe zone?

A safe zone is an area (as opposed to a route above) that those involved agree is off limits to attacks. Sometimes external groups may oversee security in a safe zone. For example, some of the demilitarised zones in Syria were controlled by the Turkish Army; in other places UN peacekeepers have overseen the security of these. Armed groups or government forces may be in the zone but they are not supposed to conduct any fighting in it. Even a “demilitarized” safe zone, does not mean there will be no armed groups.

So why do Oxfam and other agencies argue so strongly that a full ceasefire is the only real solution? Here are four big problems with pauses, corridors and safe zones.

1. International law means we shouldn’t need pauses or corridors in the first place

A key point to understand is that we should not need humanitarian corridors, safe zones or ‘pauses’ in fighting simply to get life-saving aid to and protect civilians.

That’s because international humanitarian law makes it illegal to target civilians, or deny humanitarian relief supplies including food, medicines or water. It is also illegal to destroy what are called ‘objects indispensable to the survival’ of civilians such as food warehouses, food trucks or water networks. The creation of safe zones cannot be used to label everything else a legitimate target.

Gaza, the West Bank and East Jerusalem are recognised as an occupied territory by the UK government, EU, and UN including the International Court of Justice. Israel is what is known as an ‘Occupying Power’ under international humanitarian law and therefore unlike Egypt has a legal obligation to ensure the welfare of the population in Gaza including the provision of relief supplies. That means, if the rules of war were followed, civilians would be protected and supplies available throughout Gaza. Using the Israeli crossings into Gaza, Erez and Kerem, Shalom could allow hundreds of truckloads to cross each day, along with thousands of people.

2. Corridors and pauses are fragile and often ignored

Examples of humanitarian corridors that have been declared include in Ukraine and Syria in recent years. In Ukraine, civilians were allowed to flee a steel works in Mariupol. But very often corridors are often called for but not implemented or agreed. For example, President Putin claimed attacks into Damascus stopped the implementation of a humanitarian corridor in Ghouta in Syria.

There are also no specific laws governing humanitarian corridors or safe zones: they are voluntary agreements. Sometimes declarations are made by just one side, or established with minimal standards, and are therefore extremely fragile. Different sides may declare or agree that an area is de-militarised but so often the corridors and safe zones are not respected by those fighting in a war, putting civilians and humanitarian workers at risk.

3. They may even put civilians at greater risk

Oxfam’s experience in conflicts around the world is that these measures can sometimes put civilians at greater risk.

In wars, civilians and soldiers alike are often unable to access credible information. Rumours and misinformation spreads that this road or that “safe zone” has been declared a demilitarised area, but that is often not true, leaving people walking into a warzone believing it is safe. Governments and armed groups may take advantage of corridors to move personnel or military supplies, actually fuelling the conflict. Armed groups or governments may hide troops/combatants among civilians in supposed safe zones. Sometimes a corridor may be declared for a particular time period but, when this expires, again civilians can be confused and end up caught in the violence.

4. History makes Palestinians in particular fear talk of safe zones and corridors

Palestinians have a history of being displaced since Israel was founded in 1948. Many Palestinians were forced to flee their homes to other countries or the West Bank or Gaza. Then in subsequent wars in 1967 and 1973 many Palestinians were forced to move again. Palestinians in Gaza fear that talk of forcing them into humanitarian corridors and safe zones are really an attempt to remove them permanently from their land to a new location, as has happened throughout their history – and in particular push them into Egypt. For humanitarians, a ceasefire is the only solution that works

There are no corridors, pauses or safe zones in Gaza yet anyway, with no safe passage even for the small number of trucks entering through the Rafah crossing from Egypt. But, even if humanitarian corridors are declared, Oxfam is concerned that the continued bombing and rockets will make it virtually impossible to distribute any aid through a fragile and narrow corridor.

Given the scale of need, we must establish a proper, broad aid operation in a safe and peaceful context. That means far more than handing out small amounts of aid through Rafah under bombardment: instead Gaza needs a co-ordinated effort that meets the urgent needs of all of its people, including the particular needs of women and vulnerable groups.

That is why we are calling for a ceasefire to end the violence and deaths of civilians in Israel and Palestine – that means stopping the violence for good rather than a temporary ceasefire or a “pause” or a corridor, which might take just as long to negotiate but will not have anywhere near the same impact. Such a ceasefire will also be an essential precursor to peace talks and addressing the root causes of the conflict

Right now, bombs are constantly falling across Gaza, with the BBC estimating that, at times, six bombs/missiles are hitting Gaza every minute. This is a massive concern not just for civilians but also for brave humanitarians who will have to deliver aid inside Gaza. The UN agency for Palestinians (UNRWA) reports that they have lost more than 70 of their staff in the past three weeks and the toll on local Gaza organisations who are taking the lead will be high.

Even if more trucks cross into Gaza it still does not address the fact that Gaza is under constant bombardment, further crippling the delivery of much-needed humanitarian assistance. Roads across Gaza have been damaged; there is little availability of warehousing; and the fuel, needed to ensure that the aid supplies can reach those most in need, is nowhere to be found. All this makes humanitarian assistance not only dangerous but also logistically impossible.

World leaders must secure a ceasefire, as that is the only way to deliver the aid Gaza so desperately needs. Without a ceasefire we will be putting both humanitarian agencies and civilians at further risk.

How can Oxfam, our partners, national organisations and other humanitarian agencies be expected to deliver aid as bombs continue to fall?

Read the open letter to the UK government calling for a ceasefire from Oxfam, Action Against Hunger UK, Christian Aid and CAFOD. You can join the call for a ceasefire here (outside UK) and here (UK)

More on Oxfam’s Gaza response and our position on the conflict here:

Those in the UK can also contribute to the appeal at the above link. If you’re outside the UK, you can support the appeal here

At least 39 people have been charged following the riots in Brazil’s capital earlier in January. Not only is it the latest mockery to strike the world’s democracies, it is a warning to all of us in the Global South of what’s to come.

The recent violence in Brazil cannot be divorced from another conflict – the war on Mother Nature.

Some Brazilian indigenous activists have even claimed the violence – which included the destruction of centuries-old artefacts - is akin to annihilation the Amazon rainforest experienced for years under former President Jair Bolsonaro.

It is not a coincidence the turbulence occurred one week after President Lula resuscitated a 1 billion Amazon fund - which included several executive orders to prevent deforestation and protect indigenous rights - creating the first-ever position of Minister for Indigenous Peoples.

Lula’s opponent Bolsonaro – a climate change denier now conveniently holed up in Florida a couple hours from his ally, former US President Donald Trump - notoriously operated off a laissez-faire attitude to the Amazon rainforest. He was responsible for laws which encouraged illegal extraction activities, side-lined minority communities, and saw deforestation levels reach 14-year highs. Moreover, only this week, President Lula accused Bolsonaro of committing genocide against the Amazon’s indigenous Yanomami community, which have been desecrated by malnutrition and disease linked to illegal mining and deforestation activities. While who is behind the Brazil insurgency remains unclear, reports indicate that interest groups from the Amazon (farmers, truckers etc) used crowdsourcing platforms like Pix to fund the rioters.

The behind-the-scenes players who funded Bolsonaro’s campaign were the big business elite, including the powerful Brazilian agribusiness lobby, as well as European and American-led corporations/business owners, who profit from the destruction of the Amazon – and its indigenous peoples. But instead of talking about the roles that American investment group BlackRock, or British agricultural firm, Cargill, play in funding the deforestation of the Amazon, Western pundits have been quick to use the riots to further their own agenda. Liberal media compared the events to the storming of the US Capitol on January 6th, while commentators like Tucker Carlson used the riots as proof of a ‘rigged election.’

But is anyone talking about the West’s role in all this? Because this reality isn’t only confined to Brazil.

Across Africa, and the entire Global South, major corporate interests from the Global North override the needs of local indigenous communities. The same trend exists in my home of Gambia, as well as many other African nations, where political instability and environmental devastation go hand in hand. For example, although various countries from the Global North, including the US, UK and the European Union, pledged billions to protect the Congo rainforest in 2021, the DRC still experiences some of the highest rates of illegal deforestation in the world. The very same countries who pledged to protect it demand raw virgin wood, rubber, and other commodities which are then sourced through illegal means.

This pattern contributes to resource strains, and land wars, which spill into geopolitical and national security issues. Environmental concerns are even fuelling an increase in extremism; Boko Haram and ISIS are both organizations that use climate-related societal unrest to recruit new members.

Indeed, the West’s insatiable consumption patterns are evidence of a larger legacy of green colonialism – one which is proliferating today in conflict zones across the Global South. And if we cannot trust our own politicians, or the West, to do what needs to be done to protect the climate and secure supply chains, then who can we trust?

To answer this question, I took part in Duke University’s ‘Youth Interfaith Leaders Fellowship on Climate Change,’ a first-of-its-kind program in partnership with Faith For Our Planet (FFOP).   

I was one of thirty Fellows, who all originated from twenty countries, invited to participate in the week-long fellowship which saw industry-leading experts, academics, and scientists gather to discuss how young people of faith can use religious networks to pursue tangible climate action.

FFOP, which was founded by the Secretary-General of the Muslim World League, Dr. Mohammed bin Abdulkarim Al-Issa, is a global interfaith climate NGO. It has held events from The Gambia to London with the goal of targeting problem areas in the Global South (and Global North) with solutions-oriented, grassroots approaches.

Indeed, across the Global South we have come to rely on a vast network of moral and faith leaders. These networks are invaluable resources when it comes to climate change activism. Religious institutions are often the most trusted authority in the Global South and they are invaluable for galvanizing the on-the-ground changes which are crucial to long-term environmental sustainability.

As the world collectively pursues more climate action, initiatives like FFOP’s will become all the more important. 

Ultimately, Brazil’s problems are all of our problems. Until the West sits up and takes notice, what we witnessed in Brazil could very well become the norm for countries across the Global South.

Abdoulie Ceesay is the Deputy Majority Leader of the National Assembly of The Gambia. As a Member of Parliament, he serves on Committees for education, trade, youth, human rights, and constitutional matters. Ceesay is also a member of The Gambia’s delegation to the African, Caribbean and Pacific (ACP) states – for the EU Parliamentary Assembly. He is also the founder of the Help Foundation Gambia, a charitable organization. Ceesay also serves as Secretary for The Gambia Parliamentary Youth Caucus.  

During his first term in office, he was involved in successful efforts to pass a new anti-corruption law, an access to information law, as well as a bill encouraging women enterprise. Ceesay was notably profiled in international media in 2018 as one of the young Gambians entering politics following the long-time dictator Yahya Jammeh. His political career has been reported on in publications from the United States to China. 

Photo by Rifqi Ramadhan