Month: July 2013
Peace Picks July 8-12
A computer crash delayed this week’s abundant edition, but here it is:
1. The Failed States Index 2013 Launch Event, The Fund for Peace, Tuesday, July 9 / 9:00am – 11:30am
Venue: University Club of Washington DC
1135 Sixteenth Street, N.W., Washington, D.C. 20036
Speakers: John Agoglia, David Bosco, Edward T. Cope, Kate Thompson
The Failed States Index (FSI) is a leading index that annually highlights current trends in social, economic and political pressures that affect all states, but can strain some beyond their capacity to cope. Apart from the impact on their people, fragile and failed states present the international community with a variety of challenges. In today’s world, with its globalized economy, information systems and security challenges, pressures on one fragile state can have serious repercussions not only for that state and its people, but also for its neighbors and other states halfway across the globe.
Linking robust social science with modern technology, the FSI is unique in its integration of quantitative data with data produced using content-analysis software to process information from millions of publicly available documents. The result is an empirically-based, comprehensive ranking of the pressures experienced by 178 nations. The FSI is used by policy makers, civil society, academics, journalists and businesses around the world.
Register for the event here:
http://fsi2013.eventbrite.com/
Share this, I'll really appreciate it:
Snowden right and wrong
Let me first concede on the main factual point: the National Security Agency (NSA) has been doing what Edward Snowden alleges, and then some. I have long assumed that NSA collects all electronic communications in the US, as well as any they can manage to intercept abroad. I doubt this is limited to “meta” data. We’d all do best to assume that it includes everything you or I transmit by electronic means.
Of course the companies that transmit this data for us–your phone company or Google, for example–already have it all. But there is a big difference between government collection of this data and the companies’ presumably indifferent transmission, even if Google uses it to send me bespoke ads. Neither Google nor Verizon has any real incentive to use the stuff in order to limit my civil liberties, only my advertising. Nor do they have the means. Read more
Share this, I'll really appreciate it:
Polarization
Last night’s massacre in Cairo has disputed origins, but the effect is all too clear: polarization. The Muslim Brotherhood will harden its stance against any “interim” government appointed by former chief justice (now acting president) Adly Mansour. The Salafist Nour party, which had previously indicated it was willing to play in the military’s political game, is now opting out. Commentators will worry about civil war, or Egypt following Syria’s path.
I suspect the real danger is less organized military conflict and more chaotic breakdown. Egypt is on the best of days a difficult country to govern. Now its foreign reserves are dwindling, government revenue is collapsing, and subsidized commodities are growing scarce. Tourism has already evaporated. The mostly poor and at best semi-literate population is not going to be patient with anyone in power. They want bread, if not butter. Read more
Share this, I'll really appreciate it:
Inclusion is difficult
That’s clear enough from this morning’s news that the Salafist Nour party appears to have vetoed the already announced naming of liberal/secularist Mohamed ElBaradei as prime minister of Egypt’s interim government. It is also apparent from the New York Times account of President Morsi’s fall, which included multiple efforts by the Americans and the army to convince him to broaden his government and include more of his opposition. It was good advice then, and it is good advice now.
But it is difficult. The basic problem is that Egyptians have not yet agreed on the rules of their political game. Morsi rammed through an Islamist-leaning constitution, approved in a referendum, that the army has now suspended. The Nour party, seeing an opening, has endorsed the coup and will want to take advantage of the interim period to try to ensure that the new constitution the army has promised will lean even more in the Islamist direction than Morsi’s ill-fated version. ElBaradei is unlikely to let that happen, as he is a devoted secularist and constitutionalist, albeit one who was apparently prepared to ride to power on the back of a military coup. Read more
Share this, I'll really appreciate it:
ElBaradei should not make Morsi’s mistakes
If Americans remember Mohamed ElBaradei at all, it is for his stubborn and ultimately vindicated resistance to the George W. Bush administration’s claims that Iraq was acquiring nuclear weapons. ElBaradei was then Director General of the International Atomic Energy Agency, with which he shared a Nobel Peace Prize in 2005. While an important figure on the secular/liberal part of the political spectrum since the February 2011 revolution, he polled poorly and withdrew as a candidate in the 2012 presidential election that Mohamed Morsi won. ElBaradei said it was a mistake to elect a president before revising the constitution. He wanted a more inclusive, slower process. He then founded the Constitution Party, with his eye on the 2016 election.
Now ElBaradei is to be prime minister of an interim government resulting from this week’s military coup. He faces no lesser challenges than Morsi did. The economy is in a tailspin. The government’s coffers are empty. Security is deteriorating. Rival demonstrations are clashing in the streets of Cairo, Port Said and other major cities. Plus he faces the enormous resentment of the Muslim Brotherhood, which rightly claims Morsi had democratic legitimacy that ElBaradei lacks. Read more
Share this, I'll really appreciate it:
Yemenis in DC
I spent a couple of hours with visiting Yemenis earlier this week, focused on the current national dialogue. This was not a cross-section of Yemeni society. These were well-educated, mostly mid- to upper-level bureaucrats who certainly know what people in Washington want to hear.
The vision they projected is not reconstruction but rather building a New Yemen: a single (but not overly centralized) civil state, stronger provincial and local self-governance, stronger protection of individual rights. Three hurdles seemed foremost on the Yemenis’ minds:
- fuller integration of the south;
- security for the population;
- international community engagement. Read more
RSS - Posts
