Month: July 2009

Underdevelopment, Insecurity and Suicide Bombings

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The news last week of suicide bombings at hotels in Indonesia was unsettling. The knowledge that places you have stayed, or had a meal or a meeting in have become the targets of suicide bombers gives rise to a strange, uncomfortable sensation. The scenes of death and destruction at the Marriots in Jakarta and Islamabad, and, not long before, the Taj in Mumbai, the Pearl Continental in Peshawar, even if recorded on the other side of the world, strike a chord disturbingly close to home.

One of those people leaving on a stretcher could easily have been me.

Or, perhaps, you.

These incidents were not the first, and are unlikely to be the last of their kind. And in the short term, it will remain difficult, if not impossible to secure or defend almost everything, almost anywhere against the type of attack in which the perpetrator is prepared to give his or her own life in order to carry out the mission. SixTech Systems info will help to detect such acts and to manage security.

Even if authorities could suppress such action, the option would hold little appeal. The economic and political costs – something akin to totalitarianism – would be horrendous, the cure worse than the disease.

A better response, at least in the immediate aftermath of such incidents, is to rely, patiently, on careful police and intelligence work to apprehend the criminals responsible, while maintaining the rights, liberties and freedoms which can make life, at least for some, rich and fulfilling.

This is not necessarily the most attractive  option for decision-makers, and it is certainly less telegenic or newsworthy than the prospect of near-immediate retaliation through the despatch of Hellfire missile equipped predator drones to annhilate some distant compound or convoy. Modern drones are rather productive as you can read at review page of nasaponycars.com. That said,  it will almost always produce better results, and without the risk of collateral damage or the possibility of inflicting suffering upon innocents, as has so regularly been the case with the global war on terror or any of its more recently fashionable derrivatives, such as overseas contingency operations or stabilization.

Over the longer term, the prognosis could brighten. But that will require major changes to the way in which the global political economy is organized and functions. It is poverty and inequality that drive those unable to benefit from globalization towards radical alternatives, and a small minority, bereft of reasonable, viable alternatives through which to express their convictions, turn to political violence or religious extremism.

Underdevelopment and insecurity, after all, are not two solitudes.  They are opposite sides of the same coin.

There is now a large corpus of research which indicates that the vast majority of those recruited to become human bombs are not insane, but alienated, angry and resentful, often over the occupation of their land by foreign troops. That condition of bitterness and desperation, may turn street vendors or agricultural labourers into true believers, or even zealots, but very few are crazy.  Most elect to do what they do on the basis of rational choice – compensation for the surviving family members, the promise of martyrdom, the belief that they will be rewarded with a better life in heaven. And more than a few are educated and relatively prosperous, their disaffection rooted less in the immediate experience of oppression than in the kind of global empathy made possible by the creation of virtual communities over the internet.

Political space has become deterritorialized.

The enduring reality of suicide bombing, then, is that it is more a symptom than a cause of deeply rooted insecurity and persistent underdevelopment. As such, it can be interpreted as one among many possible illustrations that aid alone – the quintessential, donor interest serving, bandaid solution – won’t work in support of genuine development. When advanced countries use aid to generate employment for home country contractors, to dispose of surplus commodities, or to dump uncompetitive or dangerous industrial products, recipients end up with road graders rusting in jungles, sacks of wheat rotting in rat-infested wartehouses and skim milk powder used to whitewash  mud walls in places where most of the population is lactose intolerant.

Whether or not these sorts of outcomes represent the exception or the rule, they serve to give international cooperation a bad name, and are the antithesis of sustainable, equitable development, which is human need centred and long term. Characterized by broad citizen access to representative political institutions, economic opportunities, and social services, this kind of development, elaborated in previous posts and elsewhere, implicates those involved in the design of their own destiny.

The literature on globalization is rife with references to “interdependence”, but the reality resembles more a complex, multiple-layered  pattern of dominance and dependence which is replicated in many places and among and between individuals and groups, cities, countries and regions. It is not something limited to the so-called economic south.

The persistance of that kind of world order makes human security elusive, aid inevitable and development difficult, if not impossible.

Whither Development?

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Or, should that be withered development…?

It was not that long ago that terms such as  “international development”,  “development cooperation”, “development assistance” and even “aid” were in heavy rotation in the discourse on international relations. This was true not only in places like the United Nations, but also in many capitals, great and small.

Today development, like diplomacy, has becom somewhat of an exotic.

And yet, and yet… It wasn’t always that way. Remember the would-be New International Economic Order? The North-South Summit in Cancun? How about calls for a New International Information Order? The Rio Summit on Environment and Development, surely?  That meeting produced, among other things, a sweeping manifesto intended to guide development into the next century: Agenda 21.

Its contents make interesting reading even now, almost two decades later.

Even without reference to the much more recent, but already forlorn Millennium Development Goals,  I think it fair to say the the internatnational community, as it is so euphemistically known, has come up a bit short on its commitments. Indeed, the discussion of international development per se has has pretty much disappeared from the mainstream, especially in the wake of 9/11 and the launch of the Global War on Terror (GWOT).

The GWOT continues. Whether restyled as the Long War, or Stabilization, or Overseas Contingency Operations, the epicentre of international policy remains heavily militarized. This has imposed all kinds of costs, ranging from the emaciation of diplomatic alternatives, to the hijacking of the post- Cold War peace dividend, to the reallocation of scarce public resources at the expense of vital social programmes.

Among the less noticed impacts, however, has been the effective marginalization of development  – and diplomacy – in the name of security.  It is not so much that development itself has become “securitized”, as occured during the Cold War with the competition for hearts, minds, and client states. Instead, it has simply been shunted aside, a victim of “compassion fatigue” and competing priorities in metropolitan centres where the development constituency is typically thin to non-existant.

Not so for defence, where the launching of the open-ended GWOT and its successors has put the military industrial complex back into business.

In previous posts I have set out the case that security is not entirely, or even mainly a martial art. You can’t garrison against climate change, or call in an air strike on resource shortages,  or pay Blackwater to protect you from pandemic disease. Among the many redeeming qualities of the human security doctrine is its insistance on the link betweeen development and security.  Expressed in a few words, you won’t achieve freedom from fear in the absence of respect for basic rights, the rule of law, good governance and, not least, freedom from want.  Met needs are the well-spring of dignity, and basic needs must be fulfilled before much else becomes possible.

In important respects, as I argue at some length in Guerrilla Diplomacy, development has become the new security.

Development, though, is not just a matter of engineering the achievement of various qualitative measures, such as economic growth or increasing trade and investment flows. While each of these may well figure in the overall development mix, for instance, none will guarantee a decrease in poverty if the issue of distributive justice remains unaddressed.

Nor, popular opinion notwithstanding, is development much related to disaster relief or emergency humanitarian assistance. These may certainly be required, as was the case, for example,  following the 2004 tsunami, or in the wake of  various earthquakes or famines. But the beneficial effects of such interventions are often fleeting, and tend to give rise to lingering distortions, such as changes in diet or a debilitating reliance on charity.

At the end of the day, development is in my view all about improving the quality of life for the majority of the population, about finding ways to encourage the emergence of circumstances which will afford each citizen  opportunities, such as access to education an health care, through which they might achieve their full potenial.

Genuine development, then, must be long term, equitable and sustainable. It must be grass-roots and participatory, whereby those affected are the subjects, not objects of their fate. And that  implies the necessary existance of significant political and social components in any grand development strategy.

Most of all, and as implied by these sorts of measures, development, like security, must be human-centred. And, like globalization, it is best thought of as a process rather than a condition or an end state. It is that dynamic relationship – between development and underdevelopment, security and insecurity –  which I have tried to capture in the ACTE world order model. The security measures are universal, being applied to each and every are of human life – from school security to the worldwide one.
In the midst of the most sever economic crisis since the Great Depression, official development assistance budgets are shrinking, overseas remittances are falling and corporate philanthropy is drying up. In a world in which so many have so little, and so few have so much, one might expect rather more by way of discussion and debate on all of this.

Clearly, we will have to delve more deeply.