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More thoughts on Collier

10 March 2010 by Mark

My previous post contained little more than an overview of Paul Collier’s recent talk at the U.S. Africa Command, but I wanted to return to a few of the implications it seemed to contain.  Whereas Collier emphasized the centrality of managing specific economic processes to the future stability/prosperity of African societies, I wonder about the viability of frameworks that depend upon extending the same paradigms that have already been pushed to the breaking point in recent decades.  Specifically, the “methodological nationalism” currently at the heart of regional and international institution-building (AU,UN, etc.) seems an odd premise for macroeconomic development in a thoroughly globalized world.  While power plays between dominant actors are of course already well underway in Africa, it is essential for those with the means and/or foresight to shape circumstances to recognize that perhaps the future will resist being managed in any centralized or grand strategic manner.

Collier seemed to make a move in this direction by calling for a “whatever works” approach to development at local levels; capabilities of organizations across the board should be sought out and encouraged, but with a particular view to bestowing accountability upon the national government.  Resources should be centrally delegated, it would seem, but be applied locally.  Thus, distributed capacities are the best way of effecting local progress, but a measure of deference is needed to both bolster central authority AND give government the space it needs to prove its credibility.  Such a situation might create odd tensions in terms of legitimacy, of course, as the argument seems a bit tautological…but the institution-as-process vice institution-as-moment distinction helps overcome that problem somewhat.  Still, this seems to equate sovereignty with legitimacy.

Regarding human rights being “our dialogue”: maybe I was taken a bit by Berlin’s memorials and “Mahnmale” this past weekend, but that notion just doesn’t sit well with me.  Whatever a proper arrangement of resources and increases in real income make possible in terms of security/stability, we should be careful that our policies do not relativize the human condition to a point wherein justice becomes a subset of economic measures.  I mean neither to suggest universal morality (of which I’m increasingly skeptical) nor to advocate cultural imperialism (which is indefensible in practical terms, at the least).  Rather, I wonder if the intended implication is actually that social justice cannot be improved upon absent specific economic processes?  In this case, the value-neutrality of commerce becomes a bit problematic, particularly in light of the financial debacles that developed countries seem to be calling upon themselves recently.

Whether or not categorical ideas of justice are made explicit — in constitutional charters, in common law — it doesn’t seem unreasonable to associate healthy politics with premises that are perhaps less tangible, but no less real, than economic growth.  Thus, I’m certainly not imputing anything to Collier, since I should think his reluctance to make blanket statements about rights implied more nuance than indecision.  At the same time, unquantifiable notions of justice may have a profound impact in their own right on the political culture of torn societies, providing references from which to derive institutions of governance.

Die Würde des Menschen ist unantastbar.  Sie zu achten und zu schützen ist Verpflichtung aller staatlichen Gewalt.

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Paul Collier at AFRICOM

4 March 2010 by Mark

This afternoon, I had the opportunity to swing across town to the not uncontroversial U.S. Africa Command for a lecture given by Paul Collier, author of The Bottom Billion and someone who understands substantially more about African governance and economic arrangements than most of us ever will.  I don’t mean to be hyperbolic, but considering the criticisms that have been directed at American foreign policy, and particularly its militarization, it deserves to be noted that some folks know things and others have plenty of room to catch up.  The talk was particularly intriguing considering its setting, and — at least for me — generated more questions than immediate answers.  I’ll trust that is a good thing.

Major themes, if I can try to summarize, were:

  1. the certain growth in resource extraction across the continent in the coming decade(s)
  2. the primacy of economic factors for addressing insecurity
  3. the appropriate state of government-controlled force in developing and war-torn nations

Specifically, Collier challenged the notion that political solutions should be sought as a first resort to governance problems.  The electoral process is not necessarily associated with legitimacy, accountability, or security, but may in fact exacerbate conflicts by tying electoral victory and defeat to the agendas of warring parties and making constructive political discourse a virtual impossibility.  We should be wary of over-investing in the “magic potion” of elections — a realization towards which the devout liberal democrat may perhaps feel revulsion, I think, but which is crucial to understanding the entanglements of security, economic growth, and political legitimacy.

In order to overcome the “zero-sum” mentality that pervades conflict-prone societies, mechanisms of legitimacy must be made viable prior to the emergence of a healthy political culture.  This is where Collier’s emphasis on economic growth comes into play (particularly considering the possibilities and risks of the coming African resource boom).  Although I would have liked to hear more about what specific measures are most significant in this regard — public health, mortality, and literacy, for example, were not discussed — a key insight was that “institutions are not events, they are processes.”  Thus, insofar as legitimate commerce, leading to expanded employment of otherwise marginalized demographics (namely: young, impressionable men) — can be enabled regardless of political arrangements, significant steps can still be taken toward reducing conflict and associated traumas inflicted upon civilian populations.

A key signal of a government’s willingness to engage internal politics in good-faith, so Collier, is achieved by significantly cutting military expenditures post-conflict in order to avoid further marginalizing past rivals and reigniting tensions.  While resources can be made available for more constructive purposes in this manner, matters of security initially become the responsibility of external peacekeepers…whose exit strategy, it follows from the above, should be guided by economic rather than political milestones.  Responding to a question on the issue of human rights, Collier was reluctant to accommodate for any more than basic protections.  Using the example of Afghanistan, he warned against imposing too much of an external agenda that is unrealizable and can even be counter-productive: “human rights is our discourse.”  I did not take this to be a surrender to relativism as much as a recognition that certain fundamental rights, as we prefer to understand them, depend on such a variety of factors for their realization that they can hardly be aspired toward independent of the robust institutional mechanisms previously discussed.

At any rate, the extent to which these lessons will inform policy “on the ground” remains to be seen.  Indeed, how much leeway can actually exist within the dense bureaucracy of military programs, operations, missions, and exercises to address decidedly non-military issues?  And more to the point: If legitimacy has a corollary relationship with demilitarization, as Collier seems to have implied, what is the place for such cooperative military endeavors as this American command?  To quote Collier, the pursuit of “gesture politics” is insufficient.  We’ve heard that security comes first, but the experiences of military activism over the last decade alone are reason enough to be wary.  The stated intentions of Africa Command encompass both military and civil-society matters, but the efficacy of the means have yet to prove out against the ends…nor will they be able to in the near term.

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Take your pick

22 February 2010 by Mark

John Yoo:

“What about ordering a village of resistants to be massacred? … Is that a power that the president could legally—”

“Yeah,” Yoo replied, according to a partial transcript included in the report. “Although, let me say this: So, certainly, that would fall within the commander-in-chief’s power over tactical decisions.”

“To order a village of civilians to be [exterminated]?” the OPR investigator asked again.

“Sure,” said Yoo.

David Petraeus:

“I have always been on the record, in fact since 2003, with the concept of living our values, and I think that whenever we have perhaps taken expedient measures they have turned around and bitten us in the backside.”

And there you have it.

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Morality, one way or the other

18 February 2010 by Mark

The New York Times has published quite a head-scratcher of an opinion piece today.  Its concern is with efforts by Western military leadership in Afghanistan to limit civilian deaths, stating that specific policies to restrict the use of air strikes are based on a well-intentioned but immoral lie.  The substance of the piece is hardly more than the usual trope:

  • War is messy – “For Afghan civilians who are dying in greater numbers every year, the fact that fewer deaths are caused by pro-government forces is cold comfort.”
  • Keep all options on the table – “It is only a matter of time before the Taliban see flares and flyovers for what they are: empty threats.”
  • Victory!TM – “Once begun…the goal of even a ‘long war’ should be victory in as short a time as possible, using every advantage you have.”

The real gem, though, is this passage that (one has to assume) was written without malice or contempt:

So in a modern refashioning of the obvious — that war is harmful to civilian populations — the United States military has begun basing doctrine on the premise that dead civilians are harmful to the conduct of war. The trouble is, no past war has ever supplied compelling proof of that claim.

Wow.

There are already more informed dismissals of this kind of thinking in circulation, but it surely requires a special kind of rationalization to causally separate military “success” from dead civilians.  While certain goals can be achieved despite unfathomable “collaterals” and definitions of success can be tweaked to match circumstances, where does one come off calling for the deprioritization of civilian impacts in a conflict that seems to be fundamentally about civilian/military/insurgent/government entanglements?

There are no easy choices left for the coalition presence in Afghanistan, and unwinding what some see as the certain machinations of empire is not only about doing the “right” or “wrong” thing.  Nevertheless, a specific commitment  to limit casualties, even at increased risk, should hardly be so controversial.  It has nothing to do with assuming war can be made “fair and humane” and everything to do with connecting the means of fighting with the purpose of the Western presence in the first place.  There’s enough of a disconnect there already without relinquishing the duties of just combatants toward noncombatants.

But what do I know.  I sit at a desk and read books.

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Regarding an information strategy

20 January 2010 by Mark

I’m wary that anything I may write herein will trivialize the catastrophe that frames these considerations.  That, certainly, is not my intention.

As a detached observer of the scenes currently unfolding in Haiti, it is hard not to wonder how on earth the responders at hand will ever manage to return some semblance of normalcy to that wretched, devastated place.  Every step, any step, forward is surely a testament to human decency.  That some sense might be made of the informational chaos unleashed by the earthquake, let’s hope that those organizations in the midst of it all are able to lower their drawbridges to each other just enough.  I take a keen interest in understanding how barriers to trust and cooperation might be overcome, and this situation seems to provide ample cause to put certain organizational/cultural differences aside.

Wired’s Danger Room discusses some of the data and information sharing efforts from the military side (imagery and such) and points toward two distinct “collaborative portals” that the U.S. Southern Command has put in place for the present response effort…two unclassified portals, one “for official use” and one for everyone else — the academics, the NGOs, the IOs, and the non-military U.S. government.  Classified or not, if experience and organizational inertia are anything to go by, it would seem that this represents a certain redundant measure of unnecessary redundancy.  But that’s only a superficial impression.

As it turns out, the tool set being put forward must be enduring a trial “under fire”, so to speak, since development and testing were still underway when the earthquake occurred.  Going live with a system the day after an event seems a bit late to build the trust and working relationships needed during such a time, but circumstances are what they are.  Still, “collaboration” is not a feature.  Either it will occur or it won’t, and those of us with an interest in the matter ought look to enable it where we can and limit the barriers that even our best intentions might put in our way.  From provisioning capabilities to reifying assumptions about information, the paradigms within which we might not even be aware we operate can be wholly unconducive to what needs to be achieved.

The problem of developing and maintaining shared knowledge is one of near immeasurable complexity, and only few will get it right, so I fear that one-offs and ad-hocery still continue to define constructive informational spaces.

Godspeed, the task is too important.

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Der Lebenskunst

8 December 2009 by Mark

Or, To the Art of Life.

I fear that what follows may reveal a level of seriousness either entirely appropriate or wholly insufficient for the purpose of meaningful living.  Of course, I don’t intend to bother with any kind of metaphysical treatments, but rather: Wherein do I find my comforts, my joys and pains, indeed my Grundlagen?  Whence comes my composure, and when do I fail it?  Am I able to rise beyond myself, and for the right reasons?  Perhaps the means of answering such questions are more worthwhile than the answers themselves.

Work has taken me out of town for a while and, absent the usual habits of home, I’ve tried to focus my available time on reading.  And not without consequences.  What is to be made of it, for example, when with each of Clamence’s mounting discrepancies I see the case being built against myself?  Not, of course, in every indictment, but as a thoroughly contradicted being.  Maybe I am too moved by literature, or perhaps the purpose I set as a concern is one of reflection, revision…and ambiguity.  Another way: Who is left to blame for shortcomings when mimicking the “art” rather than nurturing it in one’s self?  I daresay that in so doing, the pieces are all there, though the purpose is not.

Chacun exige d’être innocent, à tout prix, même si, pour cela, il faut accuser le genre humain et le ciel.

Each of us insists on being innocent at all cost, even if he has to accuse the whole human race and heaven itself.

The quote I’ve placed at the top of the page — “Qui, cher monsieur, qui couchera sur le sol pour nous?” — is from the same book, and in it I find a profound solace; who, indeed, will share our burdens, in this lifetime, here and now?  And the answer:

Oui, nous en serons tous capables un jour, et ce sera le salut.

Yes, we shall all be capable of it one day, and that will be salvation.

That said, I continue to find myself reluctant (unwilling? unable?) to attach myself too strongly to any particular line of thinking…if for no other reason but that I’ve found there only the unsatisfying limitations of generalities.  Value, if there is such a thing, has always appeared in the cracks and creases of ideas, in their Gegensätze.  Or rather, if the loss of nuance associated with the realization, the politicization, of thought continues to be a disappointment, “so beweist das nichts anderes, als daß die Politik eben alles verdirbt.“ Along the way, I may have slipped inadvertently into postmodern tendencies, but that seems to be well enough under control.

At any rate, I sat alone at dinner this evening, reflective, contemplative — and at the next table an old man, alone, hunched over his bowl of soup.  The symbolism nearly ended me.

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Consolidation

30 November 2009 by Mark

A tendency that I continue to find somewhat puzzling — and hopefully it’s only an error in perception, but I seriously doubt it — is the evidently sincere notion held in certain places that undirected community interactions and willing cooperation across levels of organization can somehow be bundled and consolidated into singular activities, platforms, programs, etc.  It’s a tendency that assumes one size really does fit all, despite all claims and experiences to the contrary, or rather that there’s one solution to the problem…which may actually be the case if you have the luxury of framing your own challenges.

I’m going to venture, though, that most organizations (i.e. outward-facing organizations, in the sense that I’ve discussed on a number of occasions) do not enjoy an exclusive mandate or jurisdiction over the spaces within which they find themselves.  Thus, answering questions you’ve asked yourself is a fundamentally different process than coming to terms with the multiplicity of interests at play in an open system or environment, and leads to results betraying more flawed assumptions than the best intentions are willing to acknowledge.  A first assumption along that path, I dare say, might resemble a belief that *you* are so uniquely positioned to catalyze shared purpose among your associates that you can somehow avoid the same pitfalls and missteps encountered by everyone else who has tended toward similar hubris.

When it comes to growing partnerships and sharing responsibility for more just societies, the assumptions, processes, and tools set in place to realize these aims play a critical role in defining the nature of the relationships we seek.  In that regard, the outcomes that can be expected from non-hierarchical interactions are not just products of mutual intentions but of the conscious/subconscious/unconscious boundaries that arise in the process of social and technical design.  I’m only in a position to speculate, but it seems that many easy questions are often preferred to a few hard ones…the hardest perhaps relating to your own significance in a space that has slipped beyond your grasp.

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This post is not about “football”

17 November 2009 by Mark

Well, my intention with this post is to talk about something towards which I have a pretty inflexible disposition, in order to make a different point altogether.  First, though, in order to brace myself for the passionate responses this might elicit, it seems appropriate to come clean about all the bias I know to be bringing to the matter, and acknowledge that there is likely much more besides.  I will attempt to briefly contrast two forms of football, the American and the Rugby version (never mind the Association’s game…), and then see where that leads.

Regarding personal biases then, I should say that I consider a rugby match to be, in some way, a moral affair, i.e. that it is a venue for morally good sport, somehow distinct from the basics of athletic contest.  Gadamer wrote:

…the variety of mental attitudes exhibited in playing various games, and in the desire to play them, is the result and not the cause of the differences among the games themselves.  Games differ from one another in their spirit.

In my experience, this “spirit” in rugby adjudicates itself harshly, honestly, and — yes — justly.  I could expect of no one to share my sentiment, such as it is, on faith — since that is how I offer it.  And yet, mere aesthetic preferences seem generally insufficient to account for the devotion of the sport’s adherents.  That something similar could be said of any sport, on behalf of every fan, I am well aware…but remember, I want to dispense with my own prejudices!  Also, my dabbling in the gridiron game beyond high school (walked on, quit) does not speak in favor of objectivity.

At any rate, the sporting news — and ongoing debate — that triggered this present riff is concerned with a certain decision made by a certain coach that, for my purposes, highlights the critical differences between these two footballs.  In the stream of statistics, analysis, and talk — oh, how America has mastered the art of sports talk — a flood of noise entirely out of proportion to the two minutes of play it concerns, the essence of the game (or at least of this particular game) becomes that of a solitary chess master, calculating the risks and rewards of every move.  In this intentionally negative light, I see where most of my interest was lost.

My point, though, is slightly different.  The art of American football, so to speak, lies in the nearest possible approximation of a fundamentally unattainable design — in every play, along every route, in the timing of every run, pass, and block.  Insofar as the collective executes against the design, the game is realized.  Rugby, in this comparison, is vastly more fluid.  Its art is discursive, fundamentally imperfect, a constant negotiation of individual decisions against a shared goal with only limited room to accommodate design.  Each sport, then, depends upon, and is a product of, a series of affordances (enforced by rule, enabled from within, or based upon expectations) that become indistinguishable from, and indeed are essential to, the “spirit” of the game.  Thus, it would be quite unrealistic to assume the constitutive order of the one to be in any large measure transferable to the other, whatever similarities may at first seem apparent.

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Narratives

10 November 2009 by Mark

Coverage of the commemorative activities of the fall of the Berlin Wall, now twenty years ago, has been surprisingly insightful.  Surprising, because the meta-narrative of the thing has surely been solidified well enough to fit decently into any Western (liberal, democratic) tale of societal progress, etc.  While it is of course disingenuous to assert the inevitability of the Eastern bloc’s collapse, the appeal of the Drumbeat of Freedom is sometimes too compelling to resist, and goodness knows what all mythologies We, the Victors of the Cold War — and They, the Losers — have been confronted with to explain just the tail end of the 1980s.

Somewhere slightly below Reagan running a credit line the Soviets couldn’t match, or Gorbachev damning his regime with the irreconcilability of glasnost, perestroika, and the Dictatorship of the Proletariat, fits the story of the people’s discontent and the rise of Walesa’s unions.  His sentiments on the occasion (which of course also contribute to a certain Great Man history with a protagonist in his own image…and of course in that of his Holy Father) seem an indictment of the stories we like to tell of our History:

The politicians always told us that the Cold War stand-off could only change by way of nuclear war. None of them believed that such systemic change was possible. They now express gratitude to the people for having made the changes possible, but at the same time they present themselves as the fathers of German reunification. In truth, they were only accidental fathers of the fall of the Wall — forced into action by the masses.

It was, then, quite appropriate that the German Chancellor should observe of and to those in attendance at the old Bornholmer Strasse border crossing that each would have “eine lange Geschichte . . . über seinen Beitrag zur Freiheit.”  If there is something bigger in this story, I have difficulty seeing it, the thing to be reduced to a single historical thread, unwound and untangled to show its “true” meaning, separate and unique among all others.  There’s freedom, of course, from paranoid systemic control, but can we ever speak of it in absolute terms?  Are we not left with “this is better than that”, yet in a very real sense?  I’ll have to think on that one.

In the meantime, anyway, here’s a Berlin tune from a band I’m really digging these days:

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Tangentially Nobel-related

30 October 2009 by Mark

Earlier this month, the Nobel memorial economics prize(s) awarded to Ostrom and Williamson caused a bit of a stir, and for a variety of remarkable reasons, not the least of which is Ostrom’s career being ostensibly limited to the political sciences.  Reflexively hailing the merits of analysis whose influence stretches beyond traditional disciplines over “pure” research may ring superficial, but not because doing so is the conceit of prevailing preferences for multi-(everything).  Rather, embracing such a qualitative distinction seems to reinforce ideas that the noumena of human philosophy can be compartmentalized according to some defined range of subjects that must in turn be transcended for the sake of holistic knowledge.  By my limited understanding of these things, the governance phenomena that the two recipients have been both witnesses to – and also advocates of – do not raise issues of specialism vice generalism, but rather offer context between and among traditional constructions of knowledge to pursue the fundamental questions: What is, and what can and ought be?

Now, with that preliminary tangent in mind (and out of the way), I’d like to snatch out of context a brief phrase from Ostrom’s “Stockholm whiteboard seminar” which I came to by way of the indispensable Global Dashboard:

We’ve got to have institutions that match the complexity of the systems that are involved. . . Build enough diversity to cope with the diversity of the world . . . so that you don’t try to have a uniform top-down panacea that’s predicted to cure everything and instead of curing it, kills it.

What is being challenged here, it seems, is a certain tendency to think that our interactions with circumstance can somehow be reduced to their purest, most significant form…and then managed in a linear, efficient fashion — by directive — with a minimum of repercussions to be contained.  Along such lines, where the reaction of the world, the Other, bears little resemblance to the plan envisioned, missteps were surely made in distilling the essence of the problem and not in the fundamentally misguided premise of the solution.

The orchestration of policy and governance arrangements that refuse to be bounded by existing governmental, organizational, or economic capabilities will increasingly require a certain release, a freedom, from our designs in favor of a willingness, and readiness, to embrace substantive contributions from outside “normal” channels of power for their own sake and on their own merits.  When we recognize the need to go “beyond” – beyond the discipline, institution, nation — it is a recognition of the insufficiency of our constructs rather than of the knowledge itself.

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