“On the 10th anniversary of the invasion, we should be hearing a lot more from them — and a lot less from the former American officials and pundits who got it wrong the first time.”—Marc Lynch
one surprising detail about the flood of retrospectives: They have almost exclusively been written by Americans, talking about Americans, for Americans. Indeed, many Iraqis fail to see the point of commemorating the disastrous war for the benefit of the American media.
In What’s Missing from the Iraq Debate, written for his blog on Foreign Policy, Lynch cites some exceptions, including Mark Kukis’s Voices from Iraq: A People’s History, 2003-2009 but argues that books and commentary on the invasion have been very American-centric. American discussions about Iraq have focused on U.S. strategy, often ignoring Iraqi politics and public opinion. Lynch discusses the implications of this:
Myopia has consequences. Failing to listen to those Iraqi voices meant getting important things badly wrong. Most profoundly, the American filter tends to minimize the human costs and existential realities of military occupation and a brutal, nasty war. The savage civil war caused mass displacement and sectarian slaughter that will be remembered for generations. The U.S. occupation also involved massive abuses and shameful episodes, from torture at Abu Ghraib Prison to a massacre of unarmed Iraqis in the city of Haditha. The moral and ethical imperative to incorporate Iraqi perspectives should be obvious.
Question: Some years have passed now since the main conflicts in the Balkans, and interest in them has been overtaken by the wars in Iraq, Afghanistan, and elsewhere. What motivated you to write a book about the ethnic Albanian Kosova Liberation Army and its role in the conflict there in the late 1990’s?
James Pettifer: I had been very involved in the region for many years, as a foreign correspondent and as an academic. The war in Kosova was a success for NATO, in my opinion, and it was in danger of being forgotten as the later and much larger conflicts in the Middle East and with their much more problematic outcomes occupied public attention. And I felt the Kosova Liberation Army was a very interesting organisation, a rare example of a successful insurgency in the Balkans that had attracted outside support. I wanted to try to explore why this was, and above all why a tiny group of people with what many people would regard as an antiquated nationalist ideology were able to be so successful in modern Europe.
Q: You write a good deal about the support the Kosova Liberation Army received from different outside émigré groups, particularly in the United States, Germany and Switzerland. Why was this so important?
JP: The ethnic Albanians in Kosova were (and are still) in a poor landlocked country that few people have visited. Many of them had family members who had been forced to emigrate in order to find work, often after they were thrown out of their normal occupations in the Milosevic martial law period in Kosova after 1989. These people took away with them a strong resentment of Serbian rule, and a determination to help rescue their homeland from it. Switzerland was particularly important. Over 400,000 people of Albanian descent(mostly from Kosova) live there, and Swiss traditions of respect of the rights of political refugees are very important if you are conducting underground political activity that seeks to change the state you have come from in the first place. The United States Albanian Diaspora was also essential to the KLA. These émigrés had long nationalist traditions, and were very active in the wartime period.
In the interview Kara explains how people become trapped and exploited in the system of bonded labor in a desperate attempt to get credit:
Bonded labour, or what’s often called debt-bondage, is a form of feudal servitude, where credit is exchanged for pledged labour. The class in power will often coercively extract and extort far more labour out of the debtor than the fair value of the credit they received. Sometimes an entire family can endlessly work off a meagre loan taken years before. More than half of the world’s slaves are bonded labourers and the products made by them permeate the global economy.
Bonded labor is a particular problem in South Asia where there are high rates of poverty and a caste system which allows the unfair system to persist. In addition to the caste system and poverty, bonded labor also continues to exist and grow because of corruption, social apathy, and the fact that it has become part of the global economy. In the following excerpt from the interview, Kara explains how bonded labor has become part of the global economy, though it is often hidden within its complex processes:
Q: Are there any sectors that seem particularly prone to use the products of bonded labour?
A: Well, yeah. Often times the supply chains for these products can be very complex, so sometimes a company that’s importing goods may not realise exactly what’s going on on the far side of their supply chain. The industries that have the highest prevalence included products like rice, tea, coffee, but also things like frozen shrimp and fish, granite for your counter tops, cubic zirconia, hand woven carpets, sporting goods, apparel, the list goes on and on. Construction is another one, including office buildings for international companies, or major road construction and infrastructure projects.
Q: To what extent does bonded labour a problem of globalisation?
A: The global economy is a powerful force [that creates] demand. A company can scour the globe for under-regulated labour markets in order to benefit from cheap wages. Labour is almost always the highest cost component in a business, so if you can minimise or virtually eliminate labour costs you are saving a lot of money. The global economy does look for and demand and feed on these systems, which stimulates their persistence.
The following video is an interview with Andrew Nathan coauthor (with Andrew Scobell) of China’s Search for Security. The interview was done with China File, a project of the Center on US-China Relations at the Asia Society. (Apologies for the glitch with the formatting; it should be corrected soon):
“The implications of their work are enormous,” said award director Charles Ziegler. “Not only do their findings validate the work done by Gandhi and Martin Luther King Jr., but they shed new light on the political change we’re seeing today, such as the Arab Spring process in Egypt and other Middle Eastern nations.”
The book by Chenoweth and Stephan also won the 2012 Woodrow Wilson Foundation Award for best book published in the United States on government, politics or international affairs.
UofL presents four Grawemeyer Awards each year for outstanding works in music composition, world order, psychology and education. The university and Louisville Presbyterian Theological Seminary jointly give a fifth award in religion. This year’s awards are $100,000 each.
Again, congratulations to Professors Chenoweth and Stephan on this latest honor, and thanks to the University of Louisville and the Grawemeyer Awards judges for recognizing the hard work that went into Why Civil Resistance Works!
“The very best predictor of a state’s peacefulness is not its level of wealth, its level of democracy, or its ethno-religious identity; the best predictor of a state’s peacefulness is how well its women are treated.”—from Sex and World Peace
In the past few days a variety of sources have focused their attention on Valerie M. Hudson, Bonnie Ballif-Spanvill, Mary Caprioli, and Chad F. Emmett’s much talked-about and increasingly influential work, Sex and World Peace. Commentators, activists, and scholars have recognized the importance of the book for the women’s movement as it offers the first real scholarly understanding of the impact of a nation’s treatment of women on its security and relations with other countries.
Radio host, noted feminist activist, and author Robin Morgan interviewed Valerie Hudson for her show on Women’s Media Center Live. In the interview, Morgan and Hudson discuss a variety of topics central to the book, including the ways in which a patriarchal society is not compatible with a healthy democracy.
Hudson begins the interview by discussing her experiences as doctoral student in security studies and how the existence of women was barely, if at all, mentioned. In large part, as she explains, Sex and World Peace challenges this omission by showing the ways in which the security of women is integral to the security of the state.
Valerie Hudson also points to how the treatment of women both in law and in practice influences a nation’s life expectancy rate (for both men and women), food security, and a host of other indicators. Seen in this light, she suggests that India, often referred to as the world’s largest democracy, fails to live up to the ideals of a democratic society due to its poor treatment of women.
Another proponent and admirer for the book is none other than Gloria Steinem, who in a recent talk on the occasion of Ms. Magazine‘s fortieth anniversary praised Sex and World Peace. (She begins her comments on the book at the forty-minute mark.) In particular, she argues that the findings and arguments of the book should play an important role in US foreign policy.
In addition to exploring the system of bonded labor and the lives of those who suffer under it, Siddharth Kara offers ways in which it can be ended. (For a description of the system of bonded, read an excerpt from the introduction.) In Bonded Labor: Tackling the System of Slavery in South Asia, Kara offers ten initiatives to address the forces that promote bonded labor.
These include: legal reform (increase in minimum wages, redesign of land rights, etc.); transnational slavery intervention forces that frees bonded laborers and detains offenders; fast-track courts; elevated scaling and effectiveness of select government antipoverty programs; expanded and free rural education; rural integration and dissemination efforts, including distribution of mobile devices; rapid-response environmental disaster teams focused on alleviating immediate economic and healthcare needs in disaster areas; educational campaigns focused on alleviating social and systemic biases against subordinated castes and ethnic groups.
Kara also describes ways in which individuals can join the fight against bonded labor:
1. Learn about the issue: Read this book and share it with others who are interested in learning more about bonded labor or child labor in South Asia.
2. Financial support: Each of the NGOs discussed in this book is working mightily to tackle various aspects of bonded labor in South Asia. More important, they are reputable and responsible. Any financial or volunteer support you can offer is of tremendous benefit to their efforts.
3. Contact lawmakers: For those of you not living in South Asia, do not forget that you purchase products every day that are potentially touched by bonded and child labor in South Asia. Demand that your lawmakers do more to ensure that corporations do their part to certify that their supply chains are not tainted by these exploitations. For those of you living in South Asia, do all of this and add to it direct campaigns to your lawmakers to ensure that they combat bonded labor more effectively, employing the kind of initiatives described in this book.
4. Contact corporations: any company that sources raw materials or low-end labor in South Asia must be pressured to investigate and certify that their supply chains are free of slave labor of any kind; consumers must also demand that companies whose products they purchase ensure that this kind of investigation and certification becomes a regular aspect of their operating model.
“[Cost-benefit] analyses can be skewed and the resulting resource distributions out of whack if policymakers determine their objectives on the basis of the instruments at hand rather than determining which instruments they need on the basis of their objectives.” — Jennifer Morrison Taw
Defense spending is an important issue, particularly with discussion of the national debt and balancing the budget driving this year’s presidential election. In her post today, Jennifer Morrison Taw addresses defense spending from an unusual angle, asking how our defense budget impacts our foreign policy choices. Professor Taw, an assistant professor at Claremont McKenna College and former policy analyst at the RAND Corporation, where she focused on counterinsurgency, counterterrorism, and peacekeeping, is the author of Mission Revolution: The U.S. Military and Stability Operations.
The city of San Bernardino, California, recently went bankrupt. Now the citizens are debating where to make cuts that will allow for the town’s healthy future. One vocal faction led by a charismatic Dutch ex-patriot is calling for cuts to all non-essential services – including parks and libraries – so that resources can go to boosting police presence. The logic is: increasing policing reduces crime, which entices the middle class back into town, thus promoting growth. Several other groups of residents have put forward a very different approach. They want to scale back police and firefighters’ salaries to free up funds to put into paying for other public services. These people would prefer to emphasize quality of life over security, believing that the latter will follow the former.
This debate is replicated time and again on a much larger scale. It is at the foundation of competing counterinsurgency strategies, represents a crucial decision for nation builders, and underlies most countries’ allocation of their domestic resources, including our own. It is also at the heart of the question of how the U.S. can best promote its interests internationally. In this context, the question becomes: to what extent do we invest in the future over the long-term, hoping to divert crises with development programs and diplomacy, and to what extent do we prepare our defense capabilities to respond to contingencies when they do arise? It is pretty obvious how this equation has been worked out to date: in a very typical division of resources, the 2012 U.S. defense budget accounts for about 20 percent of the total annual budget and about 4 percent of the overall GDP; the spending on the State Department and the U.S. Agency for International Development together account for only 1 percent of the total 2012 budget. (more…)
“Siddharth Kara’s exploration of bonded labor in South Asia is perhaps the most ambitious and reasoned treatment of this form of slavery in the modern era…. This is a must read for all that want to better understand the trajectory of the global economy and its influence and impact on labor.” — Randy Newcomb, President/CEO, Humanity United
Throughout the week we will highlight aspects of Bonded Labor: Tackling the System of Slavery in South Asia and we are offering a FREE copy of the book to one winner.
To enter our book giveaway, simply e-mail pl2164@columbia.edu with your name and address. We will randomly select one winner on Friday at 1:00 pm. Good luck and spread the word!
For more on the book: read an excerpt from the introduction, Read and watch Siddharth Kara’s reports for CNN’s Freedom Project, follow Siddharth Kara on Twitter
“Nonviolent resistance of some sort is almost always possible, and armed uprisings are never inevitable. Instead, violence may be a method people choose because they don’t know there is a realistic alternative.”–Erica Chenoweth
In a recent essay for CNN’s Global Public Square, Erica Chenoweth summarizes many of the findings in their book and argues that civil, nonviolent resistance is far more successful than violent uprisings. Chenoweth and Stephan reached their conclusion after analyzing 323 different social campaigns from 1900-2006 ranging from the Indian independence movement of the 1930s and 40s to to the Serbian movement to overthrow Slobodan Milosevic in 2000. In analyzing their findings, Chenoweth and Stephan concluded:
Countries experiencing nonviolent uprisings are much more likely to emerge from the conflicts democratic and with a lower risk of civil war relapse compared to places where insurgencies were violent. And we suspect that in most cases where violent insurgency has succeeded, a well-executed nonviolent campaign may have been equally successful.
On Friday, Hannah Gurman, author of The Dissent Papers: The Voices of Diplomats in the Cold War and Beyond appeared on Fox News. Among other issues, Gurman discussed such notable dissenters as George Kennan and John Brady Kiesling, who objected to the Iraqi invasion. She also discussed how the level of dissent has and has not changed during the Obama administration and in light of Wikileaks.
In The Dissent Papers, Hannah Gurman explores the overlooked opposition of U.S. diplomats to American foreign policy in the latter half of the twentieth century. During America’s reign as a dominant world power, U.S. presidents and senior foreign policy officials largely ignored or rejected their diplomats’ reports, memos, and telegrams, especially when they challenged key policies relating to the Cold War, China, and the wars in Vietnam and Iraq. The Dissent Papers recovers these diplomats’ invaluable perspective and their commitment to the transformative power of diplomatic writing.
In the interview, Betts discussed how his approach to national security has changed since the end of the Cold War and the collapse of the Soviet Union. While he saw himself as “hawkish” on military and national security issues during the Cold War, he feels recent, overly aggressive policies have been misguided and costly. Betts argues that the threat of terrorism, while serious, does not approach the magnitude of what the United States was confronting during the Cold War. Thus efforts such as the war against Iraq have been counterproductive.
Richard Betts also responded to questions about a variety of other current issues, including Obama’s policy in Afghanistan, which he supports as the “least bad alternative” in a difficult situation; Iran, which he recognizes as a serious threat but where the policy of sanctions and deterrence must be followed rather than “preventive war.” He also discusses U.S. options in North Korea and Syria.
Betts views preventing terrorists from getting the nuclear bomb as the most crucial issue confronting the United States. However, he also argues that the U.S. must work very hard to build a stronger relationship with China to prevent a Cold War-like situation from developing.
The salon will be hosted by Michael K. Busch, who teaches in the departments of political science, international studies and the master’s program in international relations at The City College of New York. In addition to Busch’s discussion with Gurman interested readers are invited to submit their questions in the open, online discussion.
Gurman’s book provides a fascinating history of dissent in the state department focusing on such legendary figures as George Kennan, the “China Hands,” George Ball and others. Gurman explores the overlooked opposition of U.S. diplomats to American foreign policy in the latter half of the twentieth century. Her book recovers their writings and not only provides a history of dissenting voices in the State Department but also explores the role of dissent itself in the age of wikileaks.
Yesterday, CNN.com published “Afghan War Is Not Over Yet,” by Stephen Tankel, an assistant professor at American University, a non-resident scholar at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, and the author of Storming the World Stage: The Story of Lashkar-e-Taiba. In this article, Tankel takes a detailed look at the unsettled political situation in Central Asia after President Obama’s announcement of the “irreversible” plan to withdraw US troops from Afghanistan. Tankel sees a great deal of uncertainty that must be resolved and a wide variety of challenges that must be be met before any successful withdrawal can be effected.
He first questions the efficacy of the Afghan National Army in maintaining stability:
The Afghan National Army is already taking the lead in regions with roughly 75% of the population, with U.S. and other NATO troops acting as support. However, this does not include the most contested areas in the south and east, where Afghan forces are slated to assume responsibility by next summer. Serious doubts persist about their readiness to do so.
Despite significant training efforts, the army’s level of competence remains in question. It lacks many of the support functions needed for war fighting. The army will remain dependent on international forces for these capabilities and on the international community for financial assistance, expected to cost at least $4 billion a year.
In conjunction with her recent article in Foreign Policy, Valerie Hudson, author of Sex and World Peace, posted maps that dramatically depict the difficult conditions suffered by women in certain parts of the world.
The maps focus on discrepancy in education, inequality in family law/practice, governmental participation by women, child marriage for girls, maternal mortality, women’s physical security, polygyny, son preference and sex ratio, and trafficking in females. Much of the data and research that informed these maps come from the Women Stats Project, which includes more data to understanding the linkage between the situation of women and the security of nation-states.
