Governance
Yemen has now joined the list of prominent theaters in the battle against Islamist extremism. This is no surprise to anyone who had noted its place in governance rankings.
Where next? Here’s the basic list: the 20 least-stable countries in the world, with those in play in that battle in red, and others with large Muslim populations in green.
It’s not that simple, of course, as receptivity to extremism varies widely, and recruitment can go on anywhere, as the apparent Nigerian underwear bomber illustrates, again. But this is a starter list of places that might matter in terms of instability, and where global Islamic groups might look to build safe havens.
Other than Bangladesh, they are all in Africa. Some, such as Sudan and Kenya, could serve to expand existing zones of instability. Others could provide new foci: Nigeria forms the border between West and Central Africa, and has about 60 million Muslims. Recent polling data suggests that about 26 million of these are potentially sympathetic to extremist causes.
The Center for American Progress has released a new report on using technology to fight human rights abuses.
Sarah K. Dreier and William F. Schulz write about how mobile phones, social networks, satellite imagery, and DNA forensics can all be deployed to enhance and protect people’s rights.
Cell phones with photo capabilities convey images of human rights violations at a moment’s notice. Internet social networking tools enable activists to connect with one another and with sympathetic audiences to build worldwide networks for change. Electronic data analysis tools allow for vast amounts of information about human rights crimes to be collected and analyzed.
Among other measures, they call for Congress and the Obama administration to
- “Increase funding for scientific research and technology development that link to human rights.”
- “Increase the effectiveness of satellite imagery to document abuses by updating publicly available mapping databases” and increase “NGO access to commercial satellite imagery.”
- Develop “an ongoing, comprehensive effort to facilitate community monitoring. The U.S. government should commit to making satellite imagery of high-risk locations publicly available on a weekly basis.”
- “Support international prohibition of restrictions on cryptography.”
The authors also suggest that predictive modeling could provide early warning: “Scientists can … use advanced sensing technologies in tandem with predictive studies to identify regions at risk before they explode into conflict.”
Technology does not have to be cutting-edge to be highly useful:
Even a recycled, dated cell phone can be a significant boon to human rights and development. Every voter who believes that she or he has been inappropriately turned away from the polls can report that experience to the groups monitoring election violations.
It is clear from the report that creating more tools that support distributed human rights monitoring will be crucial, so that ordinary people can safely, secretly, and readily send calls, text, and images from mobile phones, which will shortly be truly ubiquitous.
To increase affordability, the report suggests that mobile networks in developing countries should provide “text messaging services to social change projects for little or no cost.”
Beyond the material in this report, use of technology for human rights might also be enhanced by:
- crowdsourced monitoring and research — enlisting remote volunteers to go through documents, monitor visual databases or live feeds, and other tasks (building on some early efforts by Amnesty International and others)
- crowdsourced geolocation tools to fill in more of the holes in global mapping they identify
- use of small, inexpensive UAVs in human rights work and related journalism
- deploying a dedicated NGO satellite — expensive but well within the budgets of, for instance, the Gates Foundation
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The Economist reports that the concept of “responsibility to protect” — the idea that countries have a responsibility and right to protect people when their own governments cannot or will not — is facing increased resistance at the UN.
Smaller Third World countries such as Nicaragua are leading the counterattack, characterizing the notion instead as the right to intervene — and a right which would only in practice be held by the rich and powerful. (Nicaragua’s role is yet another case of history coming back to haunt the United States, which characterized its proxy war on the Central American country in the 1980s as support for “freedom fighters.”)
The responsibility to protect may be crucial in securing a future in which human rights are broadly protected, but it will make only slow progress at best: too many small countries are suspicious that it will be only an excuse, not a principle, and too many more powerful players — including China, India, and Turkey — may be too worried that it might someday be brought up in the context of their own self-determination and human rights issues.
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The response to the removal of Honduras’ president by the country’s military illustrates an important change: democracy is now the norm in Latin America.
This is a stark change from the past, when coups were common and brutal human rights violations were the norm for even ostensibly democratic states. And the clear American response also shows how things have changed; the US was largely indifferent to military rule and human rights violations in the region well into the 1980s (with the exception of the Carter administration), but has since been fairly attentive to these issues (with some backsliding by the Bush administration in the 2000s).
In other words, a serous values change has transformed a large region, as part of a broader global trend.
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Amnesty International reports that 1,000 women accused of being witches have been rounded up by Gambian security forces, who were accompanied by Guinean witch doctors.
The reason? “The witch-doctors were invited to The Gambia early in the year, soon after the death of President Jammeh’s aunt. The President reportedly believes that witchcraft was used in her death,” Amnesty reports.
This exemplifies dyschronicity — that two places may be greatly out of sync in time — as the developed world last engaged in mass witch persecutions centuries ago.
It also reveals, again, how flimsy governance in Africa is: many countries lack any authority that can be relied on to act with rationality and restraint.
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Somali pirates seizing ships on the high seas and militias driving hundreds of thousands from their homes in the Congo are prime examples of what happens when there is too little government to manage even basic control of a country.
FutureAtlas has a new issue page examining just this issue; see the page for a larger version of this map.
Government effectiveness is crucial because many key 21st century issues — from climate change and intellectual property theft to human rights and terrorism — are decisively affected by it.
The Atlantic recently asked its panel of 40 foreign policy experts about prospects for democracy, publishing the results in March.
One question–do you believe the proliferation of democratic government is inevitable in the long run?–yielded these results:
Skeptics’ comments included these:
- “We seem to have forgotten that democracy is an organic phenomenon–that … it is the outcome of specific histories, cultures, ethnicities, and events.
- “New models quite far from Jeffersonian democracy (China’s ‘Market-Leninism’) could begin to catch the imaginations of transitional societies.”
Someone in the “yes” camp offered this remark:
- “Despite the rise of Islamic fundamentalism, people who are free to choose (as Mrs. Thatcher said) do choose to be free. And the information revolution enables more people to see lives in free countries.”
Image: Racoles (Flickr)
Weak governance and warfare in Africa chronically threaten the continent’s wildlife.
The Washington Post today notes a particularly dire case, the loss of mountain gorillas in barely-governed Congo. More than half of the world’s 700 remaining mountain gorillas are in Congo’s Virunga National Park.
Gorillas in Uganda are doing somewhat better, but their population is still low.
Writing in the Post, James Mann argues that China is increasingly a political model for the world, combining an authoritarian system with successful wealth creation.
He notes that the Chinese middle class is content with or at least acquiescent to the current system, indicating “that a nation’s elite can be bought off with comfortable apartments, the chance to make money, and significant advances in personal, non-political freedoms (clothes, entertainment, sex, travel abroad).”
It is not clear that the China offers a long-term model for authoritarianism, however.
- Political freedom has increased too — the “non-political freedoms” that Mann lists all used to be within the realm of politics and thereby restricted. This pattern continues, and even allows for thousands of protests a year, and — spottily — discussion of issues that fall clearly in the realm of politics.
- Mann suggests that the “business community is hardly independent of the party; in effect, it is the party, linked to China’s power structure through financial connections or family ties.” That in itself is a route to political change: Chinese business interests may be at odds with authoritarianism. For instance, to participate in global stock markets effectively, ever more Chinese will have to have unfettered access to global news flows. Business will have an interest in predictability that militates against arbitrary Party / bureaucratic interferences.
- China’s engagement with the world does constrain the Chinese political system. Consider the current scandal about tainted products. Part of the outcome is likely to be increased transparency to the outside world, and additional limits on the power of connection and money in the economy, replaced by objective criteria partially imposed by the outside world.
- The middle class continues to be trained for a more democratic system, making more decisions for themselves in more spheres, gaining access to ever-broader information streams, and glimpsing more and more alternatives to the present Chinese political model.
Such are the depths of corruption and power-abuse in Africa that a Sudanese mobile phone billionaire is offering an annual $5 million prize to a freely elected leader who governs well and hands over power to an elected successor.
He is thus offering positive reinforcement to oversight and other tools.
Skeptics might wonder if $5 million is enough when you can run off with hundreds of millions if you run a successful kleptocracy.
And, writes a commentator in the NYT, Africa needs more — “It needs a permanent source of political pressure from citizens and business groups — not just general disgust, but advocacy for specific reforms.”