The word “refugee” usually conjures up images of teeming tent camps in barren fields, makeshift communities kept far from the rest of society. But there is a growing population of displaced people around the world who have relocated to cities in refugee recipient countries – and who have no foreseeable plans for returning to their home country. Today, urban refugees account for nearly half of the population the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR) works with, a trend that has accelerated since the 1950s. In Latin America, this trend is most pronounced in Ecuador. Colombia’s half-century-long civil war sent masses of refugees spilling over the border.  According to UNHCR statistics, the number of Colombian refugees in Ecuador has reached 180,000 (and some experts even estimate there are as many as 250,000, largely undocumented and unrecognized by the Ecuadorian government).

Refugees trying to integrate into a new society need more than temporary housing and food to tide them over before they relocate. While working in Ecuador on a needs assessment of Ecuador’s refugees, I learned that the greatest obstacle for many of them was finding work to support themselves. Given the weak job market and the prominence of the informal job sector, many of the refugees who did succeed in finding work had to create their own jobs through entrepreneurial endeavors supported by one of the local aid agencies.

One woman I interviewed recounted how she was nearly destitute after the restaurant where she worked was burned down. When no other job materialized, the strong-willed single mother of two took matters into her own hands. She began selling jewelry made out of orange peels, coffee beans and ribbons. She primarily found clientele on the street and sometimes at local events. To succeed, she had needed advice on how to best sell her products and how to source the materials for the jewelry. While she received some help from local aid organizations, high competition and lack of access to capital presented a daily challenge for her business.

So how do aid organizations take this entrepreneurial drive and their own resources to support refugees beyond their first few months of displacement? This challenge might fundamentally change the character of refugee aid organizations, and it is a challenge those organizations must face given the changing urban settlement patterns of refugee populations. This goes beyond policies on how many pounds of food someone is allowed per week and takes the next step, focusing on empowering refugees and helping them on their way to becoming self sufficient.

Emily Ginsberg studies Development Economics and International Business at the Fletcher School, with a particular focus on enterprise growth in developing countries. Prior to coming to Fletcher, she worked with a small conflict resolution NGO in Quito, Ecuador, where she worked with the growing refugee population to identify and address some of the problems left unsolved by refugee aid organizations and the Ecuadorian Government. She also worked with the Business Development team at GlobalGiving, a charity fundraising site that connects nonprofits with donors. Emily holds a bachelors degree in Psychology from Washington University in St. Louis.

Viktor Orban is killing Hungarian democracy.

In 2010, his center conservative Fidesz party won a landslide victory. They had an overwhelming popular mandate to clean up the country after eight years of mismanagement under MSZP, the sclerotic socialist party run by holdovers from Hungary’s communist days. Excitement was real and palpable – Hungarians I knew from all walks of life genuinely believed that Viktor Orban could bring a breath of fresh air to the political system.

But we were soon disappointed. Instead of implementing pro-business reforms or reviving the flagging Hungarian economy, Orban has used his party’s two-thirds majority in Parliament to ram through restrictions on the free press, tax increases on large foreign businesses, the nationalization of private pension funds in a vain attempt to reduce the deficit and, most recently, the introduction of a new constitution enshrining Fidesz’ conservative social values. This constitution also puts limits on the independence of the judiciary and the central bank, which lead the European Commission to announce that it would be taking Hungary to the European Court of Justice.

These are not the changes voters had in mind, and disappointment is reflected in the polls: at the end of January, only 18% of eligible voters supported Fidesz, a more than 50% drop from their election two years ago. More worrisome, however, is that a decline in voter support for Fidesz hasn’t translated into increased support for any other political party. Rather, more and more of Hungarians have no faith in any political party. These numbers signal a return to the general pessimism and distrust of the government that plagued the country two years ago. When asked to choose between the better of two evils, Fidesz or MSZP, Hungarians are choosing not to choose instead.

The only message that seems to be fresh and credible comes from Jobbik, a party that is anti-Roma, anti-Semetic and proudly anti-democratic.

This, then, is the real crisis: faith in the government is so low that the only attractive response appears to be doing away with the institutions altogether. Jobbik appeals exactly to those voters who are disappointed with the performance of Hungary’s elected officials. This disappointment is in the same vein as the malaise that brought Fidesz to power, a malaise that is now returning.

Jobbik is by no means representative of the mainstream view; however, they are representative of an extremely vocal minority. Furthermore, they don’t need to win over a majority of Hungarians, only a majority of those who care enough to vote. In 2010, they gained 17% of the seats in Parliament; the more that apathy eats away at the majority in Hungarian society, the more realistic Jobbik’s chances of increasing power becomes.

As Viktor Orban continues his headlong dash to consolidate Fidesz’ hold on the government, he is also hastening his own demise. By reducing Hungary’s democratic institutions at the expense of bringing in the reforms he initially promised, he is undermining citizens’ confidence in the government’s ability to enact change and fueling support for anti-democratic radicals. Should this nosedive towards total rejection of government continue, Orban might soon find himself forced out of power by those who care less for democracy than he does.

Orban’s track record in office is a chilling reminder that the transition to democracy is not a one-way street and that the European Union needs to be as vigilant of countries inside its borders as it is of its neighbors. Just as they have lent their support to the democratic movements that have blossomed across the Middle East, so they must aggressively reinforce democratic institutions at home, especially in those countries with weak democratic traditions. Unemployment across the continent is rampant, the economy is in crisis and confidence in elected officials is at an all-time low: Hungary is the canary in the coal mine.

“If we accept this text, we are killing ourselves.” These were the words of an ambassador from a small island nation in the final hours of the longest UN climate negotiations in history. “We may be small, but we are not dead,” he continued. With these strong statements, the ambassador sought to rally other countries like his to push back against the weak agreement the conference had produced.

As a negotiator for the Maldives at the 17th Conference of the Parties (COP 17) in Durban, South Africa last November, I witnessed this heated discussion. In the end, it left many of the most vulnerable nations—primarily islands and the least developed countries—quite discouraged. Climate change poses an existential threat to states like Maldives, where the recently ousted president once held a government meeting underwater to symbolize the risks to his country from rising sea levels.

COP 17 was to decide the fate of the only legally binding treaty on climate change, the Kyoto Protocol (KP). Specifically, nations were negotiating whether or not the countries obligated to reduce emissions under Kyoto (the industrialized nations) would sign up for a second commitment period of reductions. Unfortunately, as negotiations progressed, insufficient carbon emissions reduction targets, unmet financial commitments and debates about equity and the right to pollute resurfaced. The conference only reinforced the divide between developed and developing countries. 

Securing a second commitment period for the KP was essential to ensure that there would be no gap after the first period expires in 2013. This was to provide a foundation as negotiations continue for a new treaty that would include obligations for the United States, China and other major emitters currently not obligated under the KP. COP 17 came up short on both fronts.

First, regarding the prospect of a new treaty, countries punted plans a few years further down the line. In 2007, a formal process was launched to negotiate and agree on a new treaty by 2009. It established the “Bali Action Plan” with five key pillars for a new climate treaty:  mitigation, adaptation, finance, technology transfer and capacity building. The subsequent failure to produce a legal treaty by 2009 at COP 15 in Copenhagen left the negotiations severely strained. Then, COP 17 produced the “Durban Platform on Enhanced Action” (DPEA).

But there is little difference between Durban’s “platform” and Bali’s “pillars.” The DPEA forms an Ad-hoc Working Group to launch immediate negotiations to produce an agreement “with legal force” by 2015 and coming into effect by 2020. In effect, 2015 is now the new 2009, and 2020 is the new 2013 while all elements (read: pillars) of the Bali Action Plan remain intact. Thanks to this additional delay, scientists advanced the notional “Doomsday Clock” one minute closer to midnight.^[i]

Second, COP 17 proved disappointing with regards to the Kyoto Protocol as well. Sadly, only the European Union has agreed to a second commitment period that will last between five to eight years, which might be just enough time for the new treaty to be established. Canada, on the other hand, has walked away from its commitments to the KP, and Japan and Russia are unlikely to commit. All of this threatens to destabilize the global carbon market (a system of buying and selling earned carbon reduction credits between countries or companies), currently valued at 96 Billion Euros. Without guarantees that all the credits will have a market, efforts to reduce emissions may falter. 

But the world may be in for a bigger surprise when and if a new treaty finally comes into force. Hidden in the COP 17 text in a section on “Long Term Cooperative Action” (paragraph 83), it states that the agreement “defines a new market mechanism” to facilitate the reduction of emissions. This vague reference leaves unanswered many questions about what form such a mechanism would take. Perhaps, though, it will allow for greater flexibility and more enhanced action than the current regime. Critics of the DPEA argue that without a clear commitment to the terms of the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC), the principle of “Common but Differentiated Responsibility” will be lost.^[ii] But a potential benefit of this shift is that it may put developed and developing countries on an equal footing, circumventing the deadlocks that have plagued the negotiations for too long.

One of the primary challenges that junior climate diplomats face is bearing the chaos of the negotiations without sufficient institutional memory that a complicated process like this requires. But perhaps this is the opportune time for new diplomats with fresh ideas to get involved in the process. Indeed, the proponents of the DPEA might argue that its unresolved questions offer a chance to write an entirely new treaty, unencumbered by the twenty years of baggage that have brought halting progress.

COP 17 has come and gone, falling short even though it took up more time than any other climate negotiation. Whether it will be viewed as the beginning of substantial progress to tackle one of the greatest challenges of our time—or as the beginning of the end—remains to be seen. For now, I would leave the Doomsday Clock as is, five minutes to midnight.

[Editor's Note: This article appears in the newly-released print edition of the Fletcher Forum of World Affairs. View the table of contents for the print journal or subscribe now to receive your copy.

The Forum staff and the rest of the Fletcher School community are pleased to welcome Alex de Waal and the World Peace Foundation team to Fletcher. The World Peace Foundation blogs regularly at Reinventing Peace.]

On October 20, 2011, the battered body of the deposed Libyan leader, Muammar Qaddafi, was paraded through the streets of Sirte and Misrata. Although the details of his final hours are in question, some facts are clear. There were at least two bullet holes in the 69-year-old’s dead body, one to the head and one to the stomach. He was shot after forces loyal to the National Transitional Council beat him, leaving him cut and bruised. It is also possible that some of his wounds were the result of a NATO air attack on his 100-car convoy as it fled Sirte, the site of his final stand. While a complete official version of his death has yet to be pronounced, journalists located several eyewitnesses whose testimony, in addition to the brutal video that surfaced first on Al-Arabiya[i], indicate that he was executed after being taken into custody. Reuters journalist Rania El Gamal quoted a local commander who asserted that while the leaders of the Interim Transitional National Council (NTC) wanted to keep Gaddafi alive, that “over-enthusiastic” young fighters executed him.[ii]

And thus ended the 2011 Libyan Civil War, as well as NATO’s mission, “Unified Protector.” It is not shocking that a civil war would conclude with a furious, over-enthusiastic, and young armed force finishing off a leader who had reigned for more than forty years; there are many such examples throughout history and across the globe. But it ought to give pause for reflection on why an international intervention authorized by UN Security Council Resolution 1973 “to protect civilians and civilian populated areas under threat of attack,” used the cover of an humanitarian imperative in order to take sides on an agenda of regime change.

The story of what enabled this chain of events includes three crucial narrative frameworks that inform today’s agenda of “protection of civilians” in conflict. First is a teleological assumption that the occurrence of attacks against civilians will, unless halted or deterred from outside, inevitably escalate towards genocide. Linked to this is the assumption that wherever violence against civilians is deliberate and systematic, the killing of these civilians is the motive of those inflicting the violence. Second is an epistemological assumption that privileges coercive military operations conducted on humanitarian grounds by international forces. Third is an ethical imperative based on the above teleology and epistemology that forecloses the historical and political discussions of how mass atrocities actually end. This essay examines these three frameworks and, based on comparative evidence, provides a counter narrative to the dominant civilian protection agenda by returning to the historical record of how mass atrocities end.

THE TELEOLOGICAL ASSUMPTION

The Holocaust and Rwanda cast long shadows over research and policy discussions of genocide. In the case of the Holocaust, the objective of the perpetrator regime was the eradication of the entire European Jewish population, in line with its extreme anti-Semitic ideology, either by killing or otherwise ensuring their deaths (through slave labor, starvation and other conditions of life). The killing of the Jews was one of the Nazis’ principal aims, to the extent that the program of killing consumed resources that would otherwise have been available to the war effort, and thereby decreased the chances of survival, or at least the longevity, of the Third Reich.

In Rwanda, the Hutu Power regime was informed by a racist ideology and similarly motivated to annihilate the entire Tutsi populace. To pursue this aim, it also diverted military resources from the fight against a rebel force associated with the ethnic identity of the primary victims, the Tutsi.

Genocide in both the cases of the Holocaust and Rwanda halted only with the overthrow of the perpetrator regime. This was consistent with the fact that, for both regimes, extermination was stated policy and a priority that equaled, or surpassed, regime survival. For both, the violence had an essentialist logic: it was pursued for its own sake.

The dominance of these two cases is problematic in the study of genocide or mass atrocities, and acutely so in the development of policy. Much of the literature on genocide possesses an over-determined narrative which begins with the origins of genocide in inter-group discrimination and negative stereotyping, with recent examples using the media to propagate such stereotypes, developing through political exclusion to group-targeted violence and ultimately genocide. An essentialist logic of violence is implied: the perpetrators are seen as desiring the destruction of the target group more than anything else. In its simplest form this is seen as a graduated scale of warnings of genocide that corral the full complexity of conflict and inter-ethnic relations into a one-dimensional slippery slope that leads inexorably to genocide, and reduce the varied instrumental political logics of violence to evil motive alone. These cases model only two possible outcomes: either a completed extermination of the target group or an external military intervention to bring an end to the killing.

In the shadow of this historical legacy, policy debates have been reduced to identifying the warning signs and the point at which warnings and intervention should be triggered, along with establishing the standby military force ready to intervene and the legal regimen under which it can do so legitimately. This is the agenda that has informed today’s civilian protection agenda, as witnessed in debates on humanitarian intervention beginning in the 1990s and continuing with the responsibility to protect (R2P, 2001) and the U.S.-focused Genocide Prevention Task Force (GPTF, 2008). The latter two projects, R2P and GPTF, are also marked by an awareness of the limitations of “genocide” as a framework and a consensus that preventive action is preferable to responding to crises after thousands have been killed.

Genocide is, as legally defined in the 1948 Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide, the commission of specified acts with the intent to destroy in whole or in part an ethnic, national, racial or religious group, as such. Research, policy and activism conducted under its banner have struggled with the strictures of this definition: how would one recognize the requisite intent? What groups are excluded from designated victim groups? What “part” of a whole constitutes a sufficiently significant part that its destruction would pose a serious threat to the group? Additionally, researchers and policymakers recognize that many important contemporary cases of systematic abuses against civilians would not fit this definition, however much it might be stretched.

Hence, attempts have been made to introduce new concepts or to add ethical weight and policy obligations to a host of vocabularies: the suite of crimes included in responsibility to protect, or R2P, (genocide, war crimes, crimes against humanity and ethnic cleansing), former U.S. Ambassador-At Large for War Crimes, David Scheffer’s “atrocity crimes,”[iii] or the increasingly utilized, yet rarely defined, mass atrocities. Each of these vocabulary innovations attempts to capture the ethical significance and call to action embedded in the term “genocide,” but to loosen its rules to include crimes that involve diverse methods of targeting civilians, motivations short of full extermination, and a broader definition of potential victim groups.

Recent initiatives to formulate UN and U.S. policies agree that the priority should be preventive action, and that mass violence against civilians develops incrementally. However, there are two main difficulties applying these policy frameworks to prevent genocide. First, there is not enough understanding of why, of the many cases that share commonly acknowledged risk factors for genocide or mass violence against civilians, some develop into such violence while others do not. Second, the atrocity and genocide prevention agendas do not offer appreciably new approaches to established response agendas outside of a rationale for armed intervention.[iv]

It should not be surprising that the military response components of R2P and GPTF have garnered the most attention. It is arguable that instead of infusing an atrocities-prevention lens into pre-existing development and democratization programs, these and other efforts to promote early action to prevent atrocities or genocide have unleashed a new and ill-defined paradigm for military intervention. Lacking finely-tuned analytical tools, the shift into a discourse of prevention has the effect of transferring the teleological assumptions of genocide to an even broader array of conditions and cases.

The new vocabularies are perhaps of value in providing a less stringent conceptual framework for analysis of diverse cases of mass violence against civilians, but only if they critically engage the assumptions embedded in genocide.

Jens Meierhenrich has proposed an overall framework for studying genocide termination that challenges this teleology. He argues for disaggregating genocidal acts, campaigns, and regimes. To this, one might add genocidal conflicts to denote conflicts in which the belligerents regularly commit genocidal acts (not in the sense of conflicts which are intrinsically genocidal). These distinctions allow us to identify whether an individual genocidal act (such as an ethnic massacre) is an isolated incident or part of a cluster of such incidents that form a campaign. In turn, we can also determine whether a campaign of genocidal character is conducted in a limited fashion (perhaps in pursuit of a political or military objective), is an intrinsic part of the political project of a genocidal regime, or is part of a pattern of genocidal recidivism either by a single government or successive regimes in a country. This framework immediately allows us to distinguish between different kinds of ending and, significantly, how each implies different policy options.

THE EPISTEMOLOGICAL ASSUMPTION

How do we know what we know about the potential for international forces to end a threat of genocide or mass atrocities? The dominant model for drawing conclusions follows two paths. First, it refers to a very small number of cases in which action was taken and makes general conclusions about what happened and how this might apply elsewhere. Second, it turns to a broader selection of historical cases and shows what was not done. These negative examples are used to demonstrate how “we,” defined as those who might intervene, failed to take adequately robust action, at least not in good time.[v] In this analysis, the dark history of past cases provides a foil for our redemptive future actions. But history offers much more than a mirror to view of our failings or triumphs; the evidentiary record of actual cases demonstrates a broad range of forces—local, national, and regional—that contribute to ending atrocities.

Violence halted by the perpetrators once goals are met

The USSR is the definitive example of violence with an instrumental logic, in which both the beginning and ending of violent campaigns followed political decisions internal to the perpetrator regime. Josef Stalin was able to start and stop his terror campaigns and his deportations by decree. The Indonesian government’s mass killing of members of the Communist party (1965-1966) as well as the Chinese cultural revolution (1966-1976) both follow a similar logic of use of mass violence against civilians in order to suppress ideological and political resistance. A comparable case is the Ethiopian Red Terror (1977-78). The revolutionary government of Mengistu Haile Mariam halted this campaign when it had successfully repressed the urban insurrection that had prompted the mass killings.

In the case of the Nigerian civil war, in which the federal government sought successfully to repress the secessionist region of Biafra, overtly genocidal statements by some generals threatened a post-war genocide. Ultimately such actions did not happen when the army won the war: as soon as the federal army achieved military victory, the killing stopped. Under the banner of ‘no victor, no vanquished,’ the Nigerian government immediately began a process of normalization and reconciliation. This was aided by the fact that, during the war, there had been no consensus within the government on the war aims—some militants were set on punishing the secessionists beyond their military defeat, while others were intent solely on winning the war and restoring Nigeria’s territorial integrity. The latter group won out and the violations that had accompanied the war (and indeed provoked the separatist bid) rapidly ended.[vi]

Colonial and settler genocides are important instances in which the ‘ending’ is defined primarily by the fact that the dominant power—the colonialists—got what they wanted. These cases are varied, particularly in the degree to which the indigenous peoples were able to survive, physically and socio-culturally. Centuries-long processes of expropriation, as well as the removal and destruction of groups through killing, hunger, disease and demoralization, may be said to have ended when the target groups were compelled to submit (or, in the limiting case of Tasmania, when they were eradicated). However, for the victims/survivors, and their descendants, the injustice remains very much alive, as they seek recognition, compensation and reparation. In many cases, the remnant indigenous people retain a tenacious hold of their experience as victims of genocide, which is the basis for them making claims against contemporary governments.

The case of Guatemala is a variant of this, a combination of a settler genocide and a counterinsurgency genocide. The war in Guatemala (1960-1996) was among the bloodiest of Latin America’s Cold War conflicts. Two years in the 1980s stand out as the most lethal phase of the conflict. Between 1981-1983, some 100,000-150,000 Guatemalan Maya were killed by the national armed forces.[vii] As part of a scorched earth counter-insurgency plan that made use of long-standing racist assumptions about Maya and capitalized on their geographic and social isolation, government forces killed, raped, tortured, and forcibly displaced Maya in the rural mountain regions. Beginning in 1983, the army undertook measures to control the survivors, ushering in a second phase of assault marked by a combination of amnesty and intensified militarization of surviving communities. In the worst hit community, Rabinal, 14.6% of the population was killed and 99.8% of the victims were Maya.[viii] Ending this intensive phase of the longer war, occurred only when the military leaders deigned that they had, as Suzanne Jonas quoted a military leader, “killed them enough,” meaning that the Maya communities were brought sufficiently under control.

Elite dissension or exhaustion within the perpetrator regime

Elite dissension or exhaustion recurs as a factor in many of the cases presented. The 1992 military campaign in the Nuba Mountains in Sudan is one such example.[ix]  The ruling National Islamic Front was divided on its war aims, with some extremists (mostly party cadres) determined on the complete socio-cultural transformation of the Nuba people, and a pragmatic group (led by army officers) determined solely on containing or defeating the Sudan People’s Liberation Army (SPLA) rebellion. A combination of the internal politics of the government and ruling party, the exhaustion of the military effort, and growing discontent among the wider northern Sudanese population about the excesses perpetrated during the jihad, led the pragmatic group to win the day. The result was that, when the genocidal campaign of 1992 was ended, it was replaced not by another campaign of comparable ambition, but a nasty low-intensity counterinsurgency. The war continued, associated with ongoing violations, but no further genocidal campaigns. However, Khartoum evidently retained the capability to mount further campaigns of extreme violence, and the logic of the Sudanese political crisis continued to indicate the possibility that it might respond to a new political-military challenge in precisely such a manner.

In the case of East Pakistan/Bangladesh during the war of 1970-1971, divisions among Pakistani government leaders contributed to a considerable lessening of the violence even before the Indian invasion decisively ended the killings. The implication is that the genocidal campaign in East Pakistan was already waning, though it required the invasion to decisively bring an end to the violence targeted at the East Bengali elite. The Indian military victory brought about the independence of Bangladesh and the definitive termination of the prospects of further genocide. However, the new state was itself born in turmoil and did not achieve stability for many years.

Siad Barre’s campaign in northwest Somalia that reached a climax in 1988 is another case in which the exhaustion of the government’s military capacity combined with elite dissension to bring a genocidal campaign to an end. In this case, the dissension took the form of mutinies by military units and militia, unhappy at their own exclusion from power. What began as a counterinsurgency against the Somali National Movement rebels and their sympathizers, and escalated into genocidal onslaught against the Isaaq clan family, turned into the disintegration of both government and rebellion and the replacement of institutionalized armed forces with fragmented clan-based militia. The genocidal campaign ended in anarchy, and the state collapse that followed bred further genocidal campaigns by some of the militia groups that then seized power at a local level. (The campaign against the Bantu peoples of the Jubba Valley, introduced below, is one example, sadly not the only one.)

Victims of violence flee or otherwise resist

An important set of endings occurs through flight and asylum—when the target population gets itself out of harm’s way, or is evacuated. Catherine Besteman’s work on the Somali Bantus is a prime example.[x] During the Somali civil war after 1989, the Bantu populations of the Jubba Valley, long a marginalized and powerless group, were targeted by well-armed militia associated with different military clan factions. Their land was seized, their villages destroyed, and many Bantu men were killed and women raped. Virtually all took refuge in neighboring Kenya. Some tried to return to Somalia but faced ongoing violence. The ultimate solution for many Bantus has been resettlement in the United States. In a sense, the mass asylum of the Bantus is an admission of defeat—they are unlikely ever to return to their homeland. But it is a realistic and humane course of action in the face of desperately limited options.

In some cases, armed resistance by groups identified with the target group has ended genocide. One case is Yoweri Museveni’s National Resistance Army (NRA) in Uganda which ended the massacres in the Luwero Triangle in 1983-1984. The Ugandan NRA succeeded in fighting President Milton Obote’s Ugandan National Liberation Army (UNLA) to a standstill (aided by the death of Obote’s able chief of staff in a helicopter accident). But the overthrow of that regime and the collapse of its short-lived successor, leading to Museveni’s military victory and accession to power, did not bring an end to violence in Uganda. The groups most associated with the perpetration of the Luwero massacres (the Acholi and Langi soldiers of the UNLA) were the focus of a long-running insurgency in northern Uganda and provided the leadership of the Lord’s Resistance Army, which has mounted a campaign of fear across four countries.

Another instance is the military campaign of the Rwandese Patriotic Front (RPF) that ended the Hutu Power’s genocidal regime in Rwanda in 1994. While the RPF victory did undoubtedly bring the genocide to a decisive end, this case is also not unproblematic. Arguably, the RPF invasion in 1990 contributed to the radicalization of elements of the Hutu leadership who endorsed a campaign of mass killing. Moreover, the great majority of the massacres occurred in the first three weeks of the genocide, so that by the time of the RPF victory and the French Operation Turquoise the level of killings had passed their peak. Most important, however, is the observation that although Rwanda has not witnessed genocide since the RPF victory, the consequences of the genocide and the means whereby it was ended include the war in the D.R. Congo, which has included genocidal violence on a large scale. The ending of a genocidal regime in Rwanda in July 1994 has not entailed the ending of genocidal conflict across the Great Lakes region in the subsequent fourteen years, but actually amplified it.

In the case of the Nuba Mountains of Sudan, resistance by the SPLA against enormous military odds—was sufficient to halt a genocidal campaign, which at its peak during the jihad of 1992 threatened the complete socio-cultural eradication of the Nuba people as a distinct group. But this resistance was not sufficient to overthrow the regime or weaken it to the point of exhaustion. Since 1992 there have been at least two episodes in Sudan that arguably qualify as genocidal campaigns (the clearances of the Upper Nile oilfields in the late 1990s and the Darfur counterinsurgency of 2003-2004), and most recently a return to war in the Nuba Mountains itself (in June 2011). Thus, although the Nuba SPLA may have defeated a genocidal campaign, they did not bring to an end conflict involving massive violence against civilians in Sudan.

Interventions waged by interested outside parties

Military intervention has ended genocide and mass atrocities in some cases: for example, Allied powers against Nazi Germany (1945), India against Pakistan in Bangladesh (1971), Vietnamese forces against the Khmer Rouge in Cambodia (1978), and the Tanzanian-led defeat of Idi Amin in Uganda (1979). Saddam Hussein’s massively violent campaigns against the Iraqi Kurds and Marsh Arabs were decisively ended by the U.S.-led invasion of 2003. It is important to note that, in none of these cases, was ending genocide either the main motivation or the immediate objective of the military action, which was undertaken when the regimes in question attacked or destabilized their neighbors or threatened the interests of a great power. In each of these cases, the interventions came very late in the day. In Bangladesh most of the targeted killing had ceased some months before the Indian military intervention that was prompted by the exodus of Bangladeshi refugees into India in the context of long-standing Indian-Pakistani political rivalry and on-off armed conflict. In the case of Cambodia, the Vietnamese invasion was prompted by Cambodian military aggression against Vietnam, and humanitarian aims were entirely secondary to the Vietnamese military action. Although Saddam Hussein’s human rights record was cited as justification for the U.S. invasion, the immediate reasons were associated with fear of his possession of weapons of mass destruction in the context of the U.S. “war on terror.”

In none of these cases did armed intervention bring about immediate stability. There may (or may not) have been an improvement, but no matter how deplorable the regime that was overthrown, the invasion that followed was not a panacea. Germany, along with Eastern Europe, after 1945 was divided; surviving Jews in some previously occupied areas suffered post-war pogroms; and the largest modern population transfers occurred after the war when some 12 million ethnic Germans were moved back into Germany. This is not the equivalent to genocide, but does bear testimony to the instability following the military defeat of Nazi Germany. Bangladesh had a turbulent first few years as an independent nation. Considerable violence followed the Vietnamese victory over the Khmer Rouge and Cambodia did not enjoy peace for many years. Many Ugandans consider the conflict and genocide that followed the defeat of Idi Amin to have been worse than his dictatorship. And following the toppling of Saddam Hussein and subsequent American occupation of Iraq, there was extensive violence against civilians and ethnic cleansing.

Humanitarian interventions?

The war in Bosnia-Herzegovina is often cited as a case in which international armed intervention produced a decisive ending. Although a substantial UN peacekeeping force (often misidentified as a civilian protection force) with a mandate that extended to protecting humanitarian operations was deployed to Bosnia almost from the beginning of the conflict in 1992, it was not until 1995 that international forces truly confronted the Bosnian Serb army. This was only after the key objectives of the Bosnian Serbs—which entailed genocidal campaigns throughout areas they had designated for the Serb Republic—had already been accomplished. But the ending cannot simply be attributed to the NATO bombing campaign. Other key factors include political fracture between the Bosnian Serbs and the Serbian political leadership under Slobodan Milosevic (despite ongoing military aid from the Serbian army) and a counter-offensive by Bosnian and Croatian forces, reorganized and rearmed with international support, that fundamentally changed the military geography and decisively showed that Serb territorial consolidation had reached its limit. The Dayton Agreement negotiated in 1995 effectively ended the war, but in reaching beyond an immediate end to the violence, it established a system of governance precisely based on the political-ethnic definitions and divisions of the conflict. The Dayton formula has thus far proved incapable of re-uniting Bosnia-Hercegovina in any meaningful sense and has therefore cemented rather than remedied the ethnic cleansing of the war years.

The case of Kosovo in 1999 is an important anomaly and precedent, in which NATO’s military action was intended to avert an impending genocide.[xi] The circumstances of this case remain highly controversial: while it is clear that Serbian government-aligned forces carried out systematic atrocities and forceful deportation of Kosovo’s ethnic Albanian population, some researchers have questioned the role of the Kosovo Liberation Army, alleging that it provoked an escalation of violence in order to bring about an international military intervention. It is also evident that ethnic cleansing did not cease with the NATO military occupation, the difference being only that on this occasion it was the Kosovars who forcibly expelled the Serbs.

The above is but a sampling of cases one might examine to better understand the local, national and regional forces, the political contexts, and the range of circumstances possible in the ending of mass atrocities and genocide.

QUESTIONING THE ETHICAL IMPERATIVE

On June 17, 2009, General Scott Gration, U.S. Presidential Envoy for Sudan, stated that Darfur was experiencing “remnants of genocide,” and thereby touched off a bitter disagreement within the Obama Administration, notably with U.S. Ambassador to the United Nations Susan Rice. Two days earlier, Rice had described the situation as “genocide,” and earlier that month President Obama had used the words “ongoing genocide”.[xii] Journalists’ accounts of the disagreement used the adjective “furious” to describe Rice’s response to Gration’s comments.

Empirically, there is no question that military campaigns that might qualify as potentially “genocidal” had ceased in early 2005, possibly earlier.[xiii] By 2009, the violence showed a distinctly different pattern of multiple sources of threat, and mortality rates in the refugee and displaced persons camps were largely back to normal levels.  Yet there remained an enormous, vulnerable population of displaced civilians whose way of life had been irretrievably changed, and who remained insecure and fearful. The government retained the capacity and will to conduct large-scale campaigns of violence against civilian groups. What, precisely, had “ended” and what was “ongoing”? How would the answer to these questions frame the policy options that leaders might entertain?

On October 19, 2009, the debates within the Obama Administration were patched up with the announcement of a new Sudan policy. They retained the Bush Administration’s use of “genocide” to describe the situation, while taking no position on whether it had ended or was ongoing. The policy consisted of three simultaneously—and apparently equally weighted—priorities: a “definitive end to conflict, gross human rights abuses, and genocide in Darfur,” implementation of the 2005 Comprehensive Peace Agreement between Sudan’s North and South, and efforts to ensure that Sudan would not again become a haven for terrorists.

The debate between Gration and Rice was neither simply semantic nor was it purely a disagreement over policy options. It related to a question that neither policy experts nor researchers have adequately engaged: how does one recognize when genocide or mass atrocities end? This question, let alone the equally, if not more complicated, question of how such violence ends has been caught up in the normative assumption about how they ought to end (i.e. international armed interventions that rescue the innocent from certain annihilation).

The ethical imperative announced in this “ought” has produced at best confused policies and at worst policies that aggravated the likelihood that atrocities would occur. When the question of response is translated into the application of an unassailable ethical imperative, too frequently differences in the political and historical contexts of mass atrocities are ignored. The lines are then drawn in the name of separating the good from the bad, obscuring what knowledge is needed to provide the basis for effective policy. Study of the full array of contexts, actors, and measures for engaging potential or actual mass atrocities are thereby foreclosed.

An optimal ending of mass atrocities—including the rescue of vulnerable civilians, the punishment of perpetrators, and a just reconstruction of the state to address the conditions that enabled violence to occur—rarely, if ever, is achieved. But perhaps even more dangerous than the failure to achieve such endings is the way its very conception blocks understanding of what actually has been (and might be) achieved. Actual endings are suboptimal. There is no celebration for any example where thousands (if not more) are brutally murdered. But when we pay attention to what forces have played an actual role in ending violence, we can better understand how to interact with complex situations, what instruments might achieve which specific goals, and what can realistically be expected in terms of ending mass atrocities when this goal is clouded by other agendas.

Some endings are the successful completion of a genocidal campaign, called off when the perpetrator regime is consolidated or when the political landscape alters such that the political rationale for mass violence against civilians is reduced. Other endings occur when the genocidal regime is removed from power, through successful resistance or invasion, or is fought to a standstill. Possibly, these endings may prefigure another configuration of mass violence, carried out by members of the former target group against their erstwhile oppressors. This was the case in Uganda and has continued to be a pattern throughout the Great Lakes.

Some endings are simply respite—a gap between genocidal campaigns conducted by a regime with an intact apparatus of mass violence. Such a regime may have an enduring genocidal ideology (and hence motive) or may have other political or military objectives that translate intermittently into genocidal intent and genocidal campaigns. In cases of respite—such as the settler-colonial genocides, Stalin’s Soviet Union and Saddam’s Iraq—a genocidal campaign can be re-started at any time, against the same or different target groups. The Sudanese case is a variant of the latter, in which the government responds violently to diverse threats, sometimes with mass violence against civilians and sometimes not.

Another important distinction is between asymmetric and symmetric conflicts. Where there is a clear dominant power, such as an imperial state that is involved in repressing relatively powerless minorities, the conflict is asymmetric. In these circumstances the state may possess the capacity to start and stop genocidal campaigns. It is the clear victor and determines the outcome from start to finish. By the same token, a dramatic change within the ruling elite of that state can lead to a decisive end to genocides, as was the case with Stalin’s death. Where conflicts are more symmetric and there is no such dominant power, as in the ethnically-defined state and sub-state polities common in central Africa, the prospects are different. In such cases, the ending of one genocidal campaign may be the occasion for the targeted group to mobilize to mount a counter-genocide against its former oppressors.

The concept of a “genocidal regime” implies a state with sufficiently institutionalized machinery to be able to plan and implement genocidal campaigns in a centrally-directed manner. While this is axiomatically the case for Nazi Germany and also holds for many other cases under discussion (notably Rwanda, Guatemala and Saddam Hussein’s Iraq), it is not the case for the D.R. Congo and Somalia. In these two cases the state has either collapsed entirely or cannot exercise basic functions including fielding an army. It is also questionable whether the concept of a genocidal regime holds for a number of weak and fragile states including Uganda (especially during the 1980s), Burundi, and possibly (controversially) Sudan. In such cases, “genocidal conflict” is a useful term that designates a dysfunctional political system in which political groups (often ethnically defined) pursue their objectives using violence, which often becomes sufficiently extreme and group-targeted that it qualifies as genocide.

Current models for weak and fragile states identify these countries as deviations from a Weberian norm of institutionalized political authority—they are defined by what they are not. Such analysis fails to pay attention to what actually happens in such countries, and how some of them successfully avoid or resolve conflict, despite not building strong institutions. It is preferable to analyze such countries in terms of the political processes which actually lead to certain outcomes.

One framework, proposed by Alex de Waal in his analysis of Sudan and its neighbors to the west (Chad and Central African Republic) is that of a “political marketplace” that functions in accordance with socio-cultural rules and dispenses patrimony. [xiv] Under this framework, provincial elites (in command of local constituencies that are usually ethnically-defined) seek to maximize the price of their loyalty, while metropolitan elites (in government) seek to drive down the price of such loyalty. This political marketplace is managed using violence, in times of both peace and war—with the result that the distinction between peace and war becomes blurred, and “peace agreements” may not actually lead to an end to violence. Knowing the rules of the political game, the Sudanese elites are remarkably civil among one another even while violence is the order of the day in the provinces. Occasionally an insurgent or a governing elite attempts a “game changer” that is liable to unleash a round of violence, amplified by an order of magnitude. It is in such cases that genocidal violence is most likely to occur. De Waal identified six episodes in the Sudanese civil wars since 1983 in which such game changers have been attempted. This implies that ending genocidal campaigns in Sudan is, initially, a matter of stabilizing the political marketplace, to be followed by an effort aimed at addressing the structural conflict in Sudan that causes both chronic violence and recurrent genocidal campaigns.

It is disturbing to note that in the Great Lakes, Balkans, and Trans-Caucasus, members of many ethnic groups articulate a version of history which emphasizes how they were historic victims of genocide, and how the inevitable response to this victimhood is to organize to inflict similar violence on the former perpetrators. These histories become self-justifying and self-fulfilling charters for genocidal violence. Interventions at any level in such cases need to be attentive to the layers of historical arguments and how they are deployed for political purposes.

The contemporary project of preventing genocide—a modest aim of stopping only the most heinous crime against humanity—has become fused with much more ambitious goals of decisively resolving conflict and achieving transitional justice. Because genocide is defined as uniquely evil, we tend to infer that the response should be the establishment of a new regime, with ethical credentials commensurate with the horror that preceded it. This is an historical naiveté. Our approach eschews arguing from ‘ought’ to ‘is’, and instead addresses the complexities of real politics and develops a rich comparative evidence base. Rather than deriving analysis and policy from universals drawn from moral impulses, it seeks practical responses in the details of particular circumstances. Such an approach promises not only to be truer to reality, but also to provide the tools for more practically effective policies for prevention and reaction that should achieve better results.

The latest edition of the Fletcher Forum of World Affairs print journal ships soon. You can subscribe now to get your copy. The current edition, Volume 36:1, features the following pieces.

Interviews

Radhika Coomaraswamy
Protecting Children in Armed Conflict

In her role as the Under-Secretary-General, Special Representative for Children and Armed Conflict, Radhika Coomaraswamy discusses the ongoing challenges of keeping children from being victims or perpetrators of violence. Reflecting on the previous successes and current focus of her efforts, Coomaraswamy discusses the way ahead in making child protection more robust and respected. She ultimately emphasizes the role of the international community in ensuring that impunity is not tolerated for those who use or target children in conflict.

Features

Dr. Zbigniew Brzezinski
The Global Need for a Revitalized United States

Dr. Zbigniew Brzezinski emphasizes the need for a broader American strategic vision that entails short-term economic sacrifice for long-term revitalization, and embraces collective, global self-interest. He illustrates a vision of an economically revitalized United States, leading and uniting a broader “West” that includes Turkey and Russia, and mitigating inter-Asian conflicts as a necessary power. Ultimately, he calls for the United States to fulfill the expectations of Alexis de Tocqueville, who wrote that the United States uniquely embodies the principle of “self-interest properly understood.”

Alex de Waal, Jens Meierhenrich, & Bridget Conley-Zilkic
How Mass Atrocities End: An Evidence-Based Counter-Narrative

By returning to the historical record of how mass atrocities end, this essay examines three crucial narrative frameworks that inform today’s agenda of “protection of civilians” in conflict. The evidentiary record of actual cases of mass atrocity demonstrates a broad range of forces—local, national, and regional—that contribute to ending atrocities. Based on comparative evidence, the authors provide a counter narrative to how mass atrocities end and the dominant civilian protection agenda.

Eric Schmitt & Thom Shanker
Terrorism, Counterterrorism, and the ‘New Darwinism’ of American National Security Policy

Veteran security correspondents Eric Schmitt and Thom Shanker argue that although the United States continues to strengthen and refine its counterterrorism capabilities, terrorist organizations morph and evolve in response. This mutual and competitive evolution pits the two against each other in a race that has no guarantee of ending in success. Schmitt and Shanker take a look at national security history and the strategy of “new deterrence” to question whether any counterterrorism strategy can end this evolutionary race to destruction.

Katrina Burgess
Migrants, Remittances, and Politics: Loyalty and Voice after Exit

In the past 35 years, many developing countries have experienced rising out-migration and democratization. Katrina Burgess explores how the restructuring of the global political economy has affected these trends and how their convergence has increased the incentives and opportunities for migrants to influence politics and governance in their countries of origin. Examining the nature and mechanisms of migrants’ political involvement back home, Burgess concludes that their engagement is likely to make a difference, given their vast numbers and billions of dollars in remittances. However, Burgess also shows that migrants’ influence can have varied consequences for the quality of democracy.

Craig Cohen
National Security on a Budget

As national debt skyrockets and government budgets shrink, the defining feature of American foreign policy over the next decade will be the tightening fiscal environment.  Craig Cohen examines how dwindling resources may affect the policy and efficacy of the Department of Defense, Department of State, intelligence community, and USAID, questioning the likelihood of American decline. Because traditional supports during tight times (such as strengthening ties with allies and falling back on international institutions) are of little value in today’s geopolitical and economic climate, Cohen argues that the United States’ challenges are great but workable. The key will ultimately lie in mapping and managing risks.

Joy Gordon
The American Embargo Against Cuba: The Challenge of Extraterritoriality

Dr. Joy Gordon explores the multifaceted impact of the American  embargo on Cuba’s political economy. Her examination of Cuba’s engagement with companies located in third countries, international organizations such as the United Nations  and World Trade Organization, and the international banking sector reveals the embargo’s true effects. Gordon ultimately concludes that Cuba has been adept at circumnavigating the embargo by effectively using its diplomacy skills and engaging heavily in international banking and trade.

Georgiy Voloshin
Ensuring Security in the Eurasian Balkans: Kazakhstan and Central Asian Security

After two major terrorist attacks in 2011, Kazakhstan can no longer maintain the myth of stability that long-time president Nursultan Nazarbayev had so carefully curated. Instead, this one-time “island of regional security” is now struggling to quell the same extremist violence and ethnic tensions that have weakened its neighbors, Kyrgyzstan and Uzbekistan. Georgiy Voloshin investigates the implications of conflict in Kazakhstan: Will Nazarbayev’s new laws limiting Muslim religious rights hinder or help? Could China and Russia step in? What are the United States’ interests? Voloshin recommends a balanced, democratic approach to terrorist threats and exhorts American aid and diplomatic action.

Alec Ross joined the State Department in April 2009 after coordinating hundreds of policy advisers for the Obama campaign. He is in charge of developing the concept of 21^st Century Statecraft, using communication technologies and social networks to help governments connect with their constituents and help build American leadership. He is also spearheading Civil Society 2.0, a program to train grassroots organizations around the globe in how to use Web sites, text messaging campaigns and other new tools to reach out to their communities. Alec visited the Fletcher School during the fall semester of 2010. One year later, he spoke with us about his job, the limitations of new media tools for governance, and how the Arab Spring is changing 21^st century statecraft.

MHL: How have you been lately? I know you’ve been traveling like wild.

AR: I’ve been great. I think I’m having as much fun as anybody in government.

MHL: Why’s that?

AR: Because I’ve got a really cool job. I love what I’m doing.

MHL: What’s the best part of it?

AR: The best part of it is you are faced with really tough challenges and, in what is historically a somewhat risk-averse environment, I’m encouraged to think completely out of the box.

MHL: Yes. That’s something I had wanted to ask you about. If you could say a few words about your work before working for President Obama and ultimately coming to the State Department— about some of the differences between how innovation works outside of government versus in government?

AR: Innovation itself – you know, the roots of innovation are similar wherever they come from. However, the actual implementation of innovation is significantly different between the public and private sectors.

When I was working as a social entrepreneur at my NGO, there was very little barrier between inspiration and implementation. It is a more open, frictionless environment where you are unbound by long procurement processes. The organizations are built to move fast, and private sector entrepreneurship is not as consensus-bound as public sector innovation. Having said that, one of the wonderful and important things about innovation in government is that when you get it right and you get it done, the impact can be of fairly significant scale. Further, I think that a lot of government innovation, by the nature of the appropriate role of government, can take place in domains where private sector innovation would be extremely difficult, for example, in the security domain. In the security domain, NGOs might be able to do things at the edges. But as a very practical matter it’s very rare to see a private sector entity, be it for-profit or not-for-profit, be able to do projects that collaborate with the military, intelligence community or law enforcement at any sort of significant scale.

MHL: Right. That makes a lot of sense. Are there any initiatives specifically along those lines that you’ve been part of recently?

AR: You know, this is at the core of much of what we do. I guess one thing that I would point to is thinking about how we can leverage mobile networks, newly lit-up mobile networks in the developing world for the purpose of enhancing security. Again, NGOs have the capability of doing this, but as a very practical matter if you are going to achieve, number one, collaboration and coordination with law enforcement, and number two, significant scale, it helps to be able to work with government.

MHL: Absolutely. This brings me to my next set of questions, which have to do with the Arab Spring. What we’ve seen are citizens, netizens, really seizing on the new tools available to them to spread information about how they believe governments should change. What are some of the similarities and differences between how governments use tech and social media for 21^st century statecraft and how opposition movements use some of those same tools?

AR: That’s a good question. I think that citizens using connection technologies for the purposes of exercising dissent have an explicitly different goal in mind than governments undertaking diplomatic activities using those same tools. What I believe is that the one shared trait that both governments and revolutionaries have to account for and can both benefit from is how connection technologies disrupt geopolitical power. A lot of people talk about presumed transfer of power from West to East and North to South, on a geographic basis. Whether that is true or not, what I think the far more profound transfer of power is from hierarchies, like the nation-state and large institutions to individuals and small institutions. So for a government, what we are seeking to do essentially is keep pace with the rate of innovation and attempt to adapt to a world in which citizens are increasingly connected and increasingly powerful. For citizens in the Arab world to use connection technologies for the purposes of organizing dissent, these are tools that they can use to their great advantage because the nation-states, the governments are implicitly disadvantaged by the transfer of power to newly empowered citizens.

MHL: Right.

AR: So for government it’s really about trying to keep up, and for citizens it’s about getting ahead.

MHL: I agree, and it makes me wonder: in an ideal world, even for states as developed as the United States, how innovative, how cutting edge, should the government be? If you were able to keep up fully with the trends of the times is that the ideal goal? And what are the risks of using new technologies before we really fully understand how they work?

AR: Government can innovate. So if you look for example at what the State Department did with the Text Haiti campaign, we built a mobile giving program the likes of which this world had never seen before. That’s evidence that government can innovate, and it can innovate successfully.

That said, it doesn’t have to be the goal of government to be at the head of the pack. But what a government has to be able to do is adapt to what has been proven to work in the private sector and adapt it for its own purposes. Now having said that I think people oftentimes diminish the role of government innovation. I mean, GPS is something that was a government innovation. The Internet was born in a defense lab, out of DARPA. So government has historically been both an engine of and a supporter of innovation. But I think that innovation is such today that with individuals and smaller firms being able to innovate, I don’t know that it has to be the goal of the United States government itself to innovate but rather to understand and appropriately capture the innovation of others.

In terms of risks, which you asked about, I think the far greater risk is to be on the outside looking in. Perhaps government can’t lead, but if it is unwilling or unable to follow then it is decreasingly relevant and decreasingly powerful.

MHL: I agree. This makes me wonder about the other direction of the learning curve. We see here that governments do and will always have a lot to learn from the private sector, from NGOs and from individual citizens who innovate. What about the other direction, particularly looking at the Arab spring. Can these same tools that people used to tear down governments – can they use them to build up new governments? Can resistance movements generate the same revolutionary passion using social media to build up states? You talk often about how what the U.S. government is trying to do is make ourselves more approachable – because we have all of these white men in white shirts with red ties that people don’t have a chance to connect with. How can you use the tools used in the Arab Spring to make government exciting and move forward?

AR: Look, it’s difficult. And I am hopeful but not optimistic. I think that these tools have proven powerful for the purposes of exercising dissent. But as I see countries transitioning into elections and to governance, I see their uses contributing as much to the stratification and dissent within society as it does to consensus building.

For all of my enthusiasm about 21^st century tools, I think we have to be clear-eyed and recognize that historically the Internet has empowered the political edges and it has disadvantaged moderate voices. The Internet is not a particularly effective medium for consensus building. I wish that were the case. Perhaps in the future it will help to strengthen moderate voices and there will be tools to help develop consensus and compromise, but at this point what I think it does is amplify voices at the edges.

And it doesn’t matter whether these are democratic voices or extremist voices or others, but the Internet is very good at amplifying the purists within any given political movement. Having said that, I do think the United States has to — in the face of the difficulties and the challenges that this presents, I do think that we cannot just curl up into the fetal position.

MHL: Right.

AR: We have to make the highest and best use of the talents, tools and resources we have at hand to try to make these tools used toward productive ends. So for example, you’ve heard we’ve had very encouraging communications with the Libyans and the Tunisians regarding how they would like for their governments to become more citizen-centered, transparent and participatory. If we’re able to see this through, obviously some of our technologists and innovators from both the public sector as well as civil society in the United States can contribute greatly to this end. So I’m hopeful, but it’s hard to be optimistic.

MHL: Well, and it begs some questions even about our own system. This is a very challenging new area. It makes me wonder about the question of democracy and foreign policy specifically, in the United States — not even just in these newly forming governments in the Arab Spring states. You’ve said yourself that the Internet offers our government new opportunities to connect with American citizens and use it as a platform to explain as well as to take in new information. How much can these new media enable us to incorporate citizens’ voices in foreign policy decision-making and where do you draw that line?

AR: I don’t know. I mean, look, if you’re at all familiar with me and my work you know I’m pretty plain-spoken and I would tell you if I had an opinion. I don’t think, despite my affinity for things digital, I don’t think you can crowd-source foreign policy. I do think there are techniques, important things to account for – ways to better listen to people, tools that can take advantage of the connectedness of citizens. It may not be for the purposes of creating direct democracy in foreign policy but perhaps we can leverage the connectedness of citizens to help build anti-kleptocracy programs. Everybody with cell phones can name and shame shakedowns as they occur. I think that there are ways of incorporating citizens – and the intelligence and connectedness of citizens – into the foreign policy domain, but I do not think it is advisable to crowd-source foreign policy.

MHL: Wherever the line does fall, it’s a very delicate question.

AR: And I don’t think you can — you know, one way in which I’m considerably more moderate than many of my peers is I question the extent to which you can Wiki a treaty and other forms of transnational agreements. You know, call me old-fashioned, but I do think that I will have to be proven wrong before I believe that can work.

MHL: Sure. And there are other countries that probably view us as taking risks that their own governments wouldn’t be comfortable with in terms of incorporating public opinion. Some of the initiatives that we have where we’re providing new technologies to people, empowering people who are impoverished, connecting them to education via new technologies like in the Haiti example — are there governments that are suspicious of our attempts to go into their countries and work with their citizens?

AR: Yes. There is in many cases considerable hostility toward this agenda. There are governments that seek to maintain the control within their societies through their citizens’ connectedness who take exception to 21^st century statecraft.

MHL: The next thing I wanted to ask you is about lessons for the future. This position that you’re in now was created for you and I imagine it will continue into the next Administration. So two questions there. What should the future of government innovation look like? Should it be a larger department, should it be one person with a staff? And the second question: If you were to teach a course for people we knew were going to be the future ambassadors of the United States, what would you say they really must know about 21^st century statecraft?

AR: So the first thing is, to the extent that innovation can be incorporated into the traditional bureaucracies, that is all for the better. You know, it was by design that I worked in the Secretary’s office, and I don’t think you necessarily want to silo off innovation and make it a department or something like that. In 2011 and going into 2012, I am obsessed with institutionalization. Part of what that means is that within the traditional arms of the bureaucracy you build in innovation and innovators, rather than just building a new silo. A friend of mine, Andrew Rasitj – to quote him, ‘innovation is not a slice of the pie — it’s the pan.’

To answer your second question, if I were to teach a course on this – first of all, I do teach a course on it. I teach America’s diplomats, from the A-100s — from the 23-year-old diplomats to a rising ambassador. Is your question about them or about undergrads?

MHL: Not undergrads, but diplomats close to getting started on the ground. I’m about to enter the Foreign Service and I have a lot of questions about how the Foreign Service should reform, so specifically on the question of innovation and how to use tools: what can foreign policy leaders do to adapt their more traditional skill sets to meet these new challenges?

AR: The first thing you need to do is make sure the Foreign Service exam reflects that — make sure the Foreign Service exam optimizes for the diplomats we want for the future. Two, it’s not necessary that everybody become social media savvy, but they all need to understand the foreign policy context behind connection technologies.

MHL: I see.

AR: I now teach every rising ambassador at the Foreign Service Institute, and I tell them that you don’t need to become a Twitter user or a user of other forms of social media yourself, but you must be sophisticated about the information environment in the country in which you are serving. If you don’t take this on yourself, you need to empower and protect people in your embassy who do understand it and who you are unleashing to engage within it. You are ceding power, you are reducing America’s influence and you are therefore less capable of maximizing our interests in a given country.

Alec Ross Full Bio: 

Alec Ross serves as Senior Advisor for Innovation to Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, where he is tasked with maximizing the potential of technology and innovation in service of America’s diplomatic goals and stewarding Secretary of State Clinton’s 21st Century Statecraft agenda. In this role, Alec helps ensure America’s leadership and advances the State Department’s interests on a range of issues from Internet Freedom to disaster response to responding to regional conflicts.

Previously, Alec served as the Convener for Obama for America’s Technology, Media & Telecommunications Policy Committee and served on the Obama-Biden Presidential Transition Team.

In 2000, he and three colleagues co-founded the nonprofit organization One Economy and grew it from modest origins in a basement into the world’s largest digital divide organization, with programs on four continents.

He was named the 2010 Middle East/North Africa Technology Person of the Year, cited by the Huffington Post as one of “10 Game Changers in Politics,” named a “game changer” as one of Politico’s “50 Politicos to watch” in 2010, and named one of 40 under 40 leaders in international development.

Alec has served as a guest lecturer at numerous institutions including the United Nations, Harvard Law School, Stanford Business School, the London School of Economics, and a number of parliamentary bodies. His writing has appeared in publications including the SAIS Review of International Affairs, the NATO Review and the Hague Journal of Diplomacy.

Alec started his career as a sixth grade teacher through Teach for America in inner-city Baltimore where he lives with his wife and their three young children.

In September 2010, Japan was forced to unconditionally return the captain of a Chinese trawler that collided with two of Japan’s Coast Guard ships near the disputed and uninhabited Senkaku (or Diaoyu) Islands.  Despite Japan’s initial efforts to resolve the issue through the legal process, China unleashed a salvo of aggressive economic and nationalistic tactics.  Unresolved territorial disputes are among the key issues — along with China’s continued military growth, a resurgent Russia and a provocative North Korea — that create a balance of power that is not necessarily in Japan’s interest.

Over the last two decades, regional threats to Japan have increased while Japan’s economy, and consequently its defense budget (held to less than 1% of GDP), has declined.  According to Japan’s 2010 defense white paper, China’s defense budget has increased by 368% over the last ten years, while Japan’s defense budget, constrained by a public debt twice its GDP, has fallen by 5%.  In light of these challenges, the US-Japan Alliance remains as critical an anchor for security in Pacific Asia as ever before.  However, the cloud of the declining powers settling over both the US and Japan obscures the strategic path ahead.  To move forward, what is necessary is a strengthening of the Alliance and a renewal of its objectives, with particular emphasis on Japan’s contribution for regional and global security.

Need for Airpower, not a Wallflower

Hot scrambles by Japan’s fighter jets to intercept incursions into Japanese airspace—mainly from the Chinese and Russian militaries expanding their reach—more than doubled in the last ten years.^[i] The Japan Air Self-Defense Force (JASDF) prides itself on the ability to intercept these territorial incursions. However, an aging fighter fleet of Vietnam War- era F-4s, the periodic grounding of F-15s, and most recently the loss of many modern F-2 aircraft from the Great East Japan Earthquake (GEJE) have hindered JASDF pilots. Adding to the malaise are the ongoing bureaucratic delays in decision-making to procure a replacement for the next generation of fighter jets.  Japan has currently narrowed its choices down to three aircraft—Boeing F/A-18E/F Block II Super Hornet, Eurofighter Typhoon, and Lockheed Martin F-35A.  But the government’s lackluster effort to select a replacement is more than a decade overdue and a procurement decision must be made soon.

Not to be a Wallflower anymore?

Well known for its financial contributions to international security over the last few decades, Japan has shown a slow but steady trend of increasing deployments and engagement. Starting with peacekeeping operations (PKO) in Cambodia in 1992, the Government of Japan has cautiously dispatched Self-Defense Force (SDF) troops to other locations such as Rwanda, the Golan Heights, and even Iraq.  The newly elected Prime Minister, Yoshihiko Noda, is now considering sending troops for the UN PKO mission in South Sudan.  Along with these seminal dispatches of SDF personnel, there are improvements in capabilities to extend supply lines and support operations abroad.  These are the same capabilities needed for humanitarian assistance and disaster relief operations.  Such training and experience has likely paid dividends during the recovery efforts of the GEJE where Japan underwent the largest mobilization of Japanese troops since World War II.

The Hard Place – and the Way Ahead

Japan is facing economic, environmental and security challenges on a scale that arguably has not been witnessed since World War II.  An aging society with increasing debt and domestic political turmoil further exacerbates Japan’s woes.  Domestically, the brave rescue and recovery efforts after the GEJE have dramatically elevated the image of the SDF in Japan.  As the SDF gains more public support, political support for increasing the defense budget (via relaxation of the self-imposed 1% restriction) may also gain favor over budget slashing.

Dealing with reduced defense budgets in the face of increasing threats requires innovative thinking in the US-Japan Alliance.  To sustain security for the region, focus must return to critical but often overlooked elements of the US-Japan defense policy realignment talks involving the sharing of roles, missions and capabilities.  Efforts in areas such as cooperative procurement and integration of operations can ensure capability gaps are filled to optimize both nations’ defense budgets by avoiding costly redundancies in procurement and organizational structures.

Japan has an extremely professional and capable Self-Defense Force that has served proudly in the aftermath of domestic disasters.  Despite current and future challenges, as a regional and global power, Japan can and should do more to contribute to security and stability operations throughout the world.  Japan has tough choices to make.  In security, answers lie in the effective use of the SDF and in further integration in the US-Japan Alliance.