FP: The South China Sea Is the Future of Conflict

Robert Kaplan has published an article in the Special Report section of the current edition of Foreign Policy magazine, exploring the potential for conflict within the South China Sea...

A far-reaching, determinedly Realist overview of the developing situation.

This issue of Foreign Policy also includes a link to an evocative photo-essay entitled "Tour the South China Sea". Take a look!

USAF suspends Bible ethics course used to train missile launch officers

Hard to know how to categorise this article from yesterday's Washington Post (read it - draw your own conclusions....):

Air Force suspends ethics course that used Bible passages to train missile launch officers

The Air Force has suspended a training course for nuclear missile launch officers that used Bible passages and religious imagery to teach them about the ethics of war.

The course had apparently been taught by chaplains at Vandenberg Air Force Base in California for more than 20 years, but officials pulled the plug after an article from the liberal Web site Truthout.org appeared online last week.

The group obtained a PowerPoint presentation used in the course that referenced religious figures including Abraham, John the Baptist and Saint Augustine. The presentation also said that there are “many examples of believers engaged in wars in the Old Testament” and “no pacifistic sentiment in mainstream Jewish history.”

David Smith, a spokesman for the Air Force’s Air Education and Training Command, said that the program had initially been designed to “help folks understand why we’re doing what we’re doing. In the missile launch industry, it takes a certain mindset to be able to walk in the door and say, yes, I can do that.”

But he added: “Senior leadership looked at [the material for the course] and said, no, we could do better than this.”

The reversal marks a victory for the Military Religious Freedom Foundation, a watchdog group that provided the documents to Truthout and that has waged a series of battles, legal and otherwise, to preserve the separation of church and state in the services.

Mikey Weinstein, president and founder of the foundation, said his group was approached late last month by about 30 officers, most of them Protestant or Roman Catholic, who said they objected to the presentation. He said he saw the PowerPoint and was astonished by documents that appeared to be using a religious justification for missile launches.


“This isn’t about attacking someone’s faith,” he said. “What it’s about is remembering that in this country … we separate church and state. They don’t do that in other countries. We do that here.”
One of Weinstein’s clients, Damon Bosetti, who served as an Air Force captain and attended missile officer training in 2006, told Truthout that he and his colleagues used to call the religious section of the ethics training the “Jesus loves nukes speech.”

Asked why it might have taken more than 20 years for someone to raise objections to the training course, Weinstein said he suspected airmen were simply scared to speak up.

The Air Force said a new course was to be developed.

WSJ: The New Cold War (Iran and Saudi Arabia)

The Wall Street Journal reports that there has long been bad blood between Iran and Saudi Arabia, but popular protests across the Middle East now threaten to turn the rivalry into a tense and dangerous regional divide:

For three months, the Arab world has been awash in protests and demonstrations. It's being called an Arab Spring, harking back to the Prague Spring of 1968.

But comparison to the short-lived flowering of protests 40 years ago in Czechoslovakia is turning out to be apt in another way. For all the attention the Mideast protests have received, their most notable impact on the region thus far hasn't been an upswell of democracy. It has been a dramatic spike in tensions between two geopolitical titans, Iran and Saudi Arabia.

This new Middle East cold war comes complete with its own spy-versus-spy intrigues, disinformation campaigns, shadowy proxy forces, supercharged state rhetoric—and very high stakes.

"The cold war is a reality," says one senior Saudi official. "Iran is looking to expand its influence. This instability over the last few months means that we don't have the luxury of sitting back and watching events unfold."

Scientific American: The Evolution of Prejudice

Scientists see the beginnings of racism in monkeys

Scientific American has a thought-provoking article, published Tuesday, that may go some way to explaining human propensity towards racism and prejudice:

Psychologists have long known that many people are prejudiced towards others based on group affiliations, be they racial, ethnic, religious, or even political. However, we know far less about why people are prone to prejudice in the first place. New research, using monkeys, suggests that the roots lie deep in our evolutionary past.

Yale graduate student Neha Mahajan, along with a team of psychologists, traveled to Cayo Santiago, an uninhabited island southeast of Puerto Rico also known as “Monkey Island,” in order to study the behavior of rhesus monkeys. Like humans, rhesus monkeys live in groups and form strong social bonds. The monkeys also tend to be wary of those they perceive as potentially threatening.

To figure out whether monkeys distinguish between insiders (i.e. those who belong to their group) and outsiders (i.e. those who don’t belong), the researchers measured the amount of time the monkeys stared at the photographed face of an insider versus outsider monkey. Across several experiments, they found that the monkeys stared longer at the faces of outsiders. This would suggest that monkeys were more wary of outsider faces. ....

.... Overall, the results support an evolutionary basis for prejudice. ....

There's some good news, however:

The fact that prejudice often occurs automatically doesn’t mean we can’t find ways of overcoming its negative effects. For example, there is evidence that when people are made aware of their automatic prejudices, they can self-correct. And when we are encouraged to take the perspective of an outsider, it reduces our automatic prejudice towards that person’s group.

Given that most of the difficult conflicts we face in the world today originate from clashes between social groups, it makes sense to devote time to understanding how to reduce our biases. But our evolutionary past suggests that in order to be effective, we may need to adopt a new approach. Often we focus more on political, historical, and cultural factors rather than the underlying patterns of thinking that fuel all conflicts. By taking into account the extent to which prejudice is deeply rooted in our brains, we have a better chance of coming up with long-term solutions that work with, rather than against, our natural tendencies.

Not a long article: do read it, to get more details on how the experiment was conducted (quite ingenious!) and what it revealed.

CNN Explainer: Tensions between Sunnis and Shiites

CNN has published a basic, but effective, explanation of how ultimately 8th century CE differences between the Sunni and the Shiite brands of Islam can lead to conflict between and amongst Muslim societies. This conflict has manifested itself repeatedly—and to varying degrees—in multiple modern conflicts: the Iran-Iraq War (1980s), the mid-2000s Iraq insurgency, the popular uprising in Bahrain in 2011....

Highlights:

• Sunni and Shiite Islam are the two major denominations of the Islamic faith
• Sunnis make up the majority, with only 10% of the Muslim population being Shiite
• Tensions have arisen in recent years, heightened by events in Iran and Iraq
• There are fears unrest in places such as Bahrain will spark further tensions

In many instances, of course—and as the article points out—Sunni and Shia Muslims do live peacefully side by side. As an important potential and—all too often—actual rationale for division, this religious divide remains important for understanding sources of conflict within identity politics, as emphasised by Unit 4: War, Conflict and Terrorism. Read the whole explainer.

Guardian: Inequality, the new dynamic of history

Two days ago an interesting opinion piece by the economist Kenneth Rogoff appeared in The Guardian's Comment is Free section. Rogoff's assertion?—that global economic forces are creating ever-greater disparities of wealth within societies, amounting to the great policy challenge of our time...

Food shortage rioters and police in Belcour, Algeria.

As the dramatic events in North Africa continue to unfold, many observers outside the Arab world smugly tell themselves that it is all about corruption and political repression. But high unemployment, glaring inequality and soaring prices for basic commodities are also a huge factor. So observers should not just be asking how far similar events will spread across the region; they should be asking themselves what kind of changes might be coming at home in the face of similar, if not quite so extreme, economic pressures.

Within countries, inequality of income, wealth and opportunity is arguably greater than at any time in the last century. Across Europe, Asia and the Americas, corporations are bulging with cash as their relentless drive for efficiency continues to yield huge profits. Yet workers' share of the pie is falling, thanks to high unemployment, shortened working hours and stagnant wages.

Paradoxically, cross-country measures of income and wealth inequality are actually falling, thanks to continuing robust growth in emerging markets. But most people care far more about how well they are doing relative to their neighbours, than to citizens of distant lands.

The rich are mostly doing well. Global stock markets are back. Many countries are seeing vigorous growth in prices for housing, commercial real estate, or both. Resurgent prices for commodities are creating huge revenues for owners of mines and oil fields, even as price spikes for basic staples are sparking food riots, if not wholesale revolutions, in the developing world. The internet and the financial sector continue to spawn new multimillionaires, and even billionaires, at a staggering pace.

Yet, high and protracted unemployment plagues many less-skilled workers. For example, in financially-distressed Spain, unemployment now exceeds 20%. It cannot help that the government is simultaneously being forced to absorb new austerity measures to deal with the country's precarious debt burden. Indeed, given record-high public-debt levels in many countries, few governments have substantial scope to address inequality through further income redistribution. Countries such as Brazil already have such high levels of transfer payments from rich to poor that further moves would undermine fiscal stability and anti-inflation credibility.

Countries such as China and Russia, with similarly high inequality, have more scope for increasing redistribution. But leaders in both countries have been reluctant to move boldly for fear of destabilising growth. Germany must worry not only about its own vulnerable citizens, but also about how to find the resources to bail out its southern neighbours in Europe.

The causes of growing inequality within countries are well understood, and it is not necessary to belabour them here. We live in an era in which globalisation expands the market for ultra-talented individuals but competes away the income of ordinary employees .Competition among countries for skilled individuals and profitable industries, in turn, constrains governments' abilities to maintain high tax rates on the wealthy. Social mobility is further impeded as the rich shower their children with private education and after-school help, while the poorest in many countries cannot afford even to let their children stay in school.

Writing in the 19th century, Karl Marx famously observed inequality trends in his day and concluded that capitalism could not indefinitely sustain itself politically: eventually, workers would rise up and overthrow the system. Outside Cuba, North Korea and a few leftwing universities around the world, no one takes Marx seriously anymore. Contrary to his predictions, capitalism spawned ever-higher standards of living for more than a century, while attempts to implement radically different systems have fallen spectacularly short.

Yet, with inequality reaching levels similar to 100 years ago, the status quo has to be vulnerable. Instability can express itself anywhere. It was just over four decades ago that urban riots and mass demonstrations rocked the developed world, ultimately catalysing far-reaching social and political reforms.

Yes, the problems facing Egypt and Tunisia today are far more profound than in many other countries. Corruption and failure to embrace meaningful political reform have become acute shortcomings. But it would be very wrong to suppose that gaping inequality is stable as long as it arises through innovation and growth.

How, exactly, will change unfold, and what form will a new social compact ultimately assume? It is difficult to speculate, though in most countries, the process will be peaceful and democratic. What is clear is that inequality is not just a long-term issue. Concerns about the impact of income inequality are already constraining fiscal and monetary policy in developed and developing countries alike, as they attempt to extricate themselves from the hyper-stimulative policies adopted during the financial crisis. More importantly, it is very likely that countries' abilities to navigate the rising social tensions generated by gaping inequality could separate the winners and losers in the next round of globalisation.

Inequality is the big wildcard in the next decade of global growth – and not just in North Africa.

Clearly, as students of Conflict, War and Terrorism, this article should be at the top of our reading list—it contains important insights and current examples as to the source of contemporary conflict worldwide. Interesting, too, that Karl Marx makes a prominent return within analysis of the global scene.

State multiculturalism has failed, leads to terror, says Cameron

Busy day in the GlobalGovPol blog office! BBC News Online has a good summary (and video excerpt) of the UK Prime Minister's speech to the Munich security conference regarding the failure of 'state multiculturalism':

David Cameron has criticised "state multiculturalism" in his first speech on radicalisation and the causes of terrorism as prime minister.

At a security conference in Germany, he argued the UK needed a stronger national identity to prevent people turning to all kinds of extremism. He also signalled a tougher stance on groups promoting Islamist extremism.

The Muslim Council of Britain said its community was being seen as part of the problem rather than the solution.

Mr Cameron suggested there would be greater scrutiny of some Muslim groups that get public money but do little to tackle extremism. Ministers should refuse to share platforms or engage with such groups, which should be denied access to public funds and barred from spreading their message in universities and prisons, he argued. ....

.... In the speech in Munich, Mr Cameron drew a clear distinction between Islam the religion and what he described as "Islamist extremism" - a political ideology he said attracted people who feel "rootless" within their own countries.

"We need to be clear: Islamist extremism and Islam are not the same thing," he said.

The government is currently reviewing its policy to prevent violent extremism, known as Prevent, which is a key part of its wider counter-terrorism strategy.

 The transcript of the full speech is available at the Downing Street website.