World War E - the latest joint GlobaLab and SurfaceCut gadget to brave the world - is a very healthy baby, having screamed and kicked its way straight at the heart of several interesting conflict and technology-related issues. Topics covered so far include:

• The Russian electronic war against Estonia (twice)
• Cyber-activism from Africa to China
• Electronic trench wars in the Caucasus
• The defeat of Baghdad’s most notorious blogger
• The opening of the encryption front
• China’s technological military upgrading
• Global Guerrillas’ brave new book on e-war

That’s only in a week. Brace for more soon!

And if it’s conflict theory you’re into, check out this video of Paul Collier’s 2006 lecture at the Royal Economic Society on the causes and consequences of conflict in Africa. Excellent stuff.

Peace.

I promise I won’t let this go to my head, and I promise if I win I won’t give a 2-hour weepy thank you speech dressed in a pink frock, but you should all know that GlobaLab has received its first Blog nomination (blogination?), courtesy of David Weman down at A Fistful of Euros.

The award - appropriatedly named The Third Annual Satin Pajama - is in the Best New Weblog category, one of the most prestigious ones, I think you’ll find.

So dear GlobaLabers, if ever you’ve enjoyed this space of reflection on globalisation and all that goes with it, show your love by clicking here!!

The Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) recently announced its intention to open membership negotiations with Chile, Estonia, Israel, Russia and Slovenia. In addition, enhanced engagement with a prospect of membership will be offered to Brazil, India, Indonesia, China and South Africa. Finally, it confirmed that candidates for future enlargement include the remaining EU members: Bulgaria, Cyprus, Latvia, Lithuania, Malta, and Romania.

The event was hardly picked up by the mainstream media, perhaps because few people know - or care about - what the OECD is or does. As Wikipedia explains:

The OECD is an international organisation of those developed countries that accept the principles of representative democracy and a free market economy. It originated in 1948 as the Organisation for European Economic Co-operation (OEEC), led by Frenchman Robert Marjolin, to help administer the Marshall Plan for the reconstruction of Europe after World War II. Later its membership was extended to non-European states.

This is an important shift in global politics, for those of us who still thought that the rise of the rest - in the words [PDF] of Alice Amsden - was going to leave the world unchanged. The OECD plays an important role in setting standards and norms amongst the world’s most powerful nations. Just like those Old Boys’ Clubs in London, where deals are struck amongst oversized men in suits over glasses of port, it offers one of those informal settings where politicians and businessmen can engage without the pressures of the media and of rioting crowds outside their windows.

Away from the public spotlight, and cocooned by their privileged status, OECD members have so far been able to reach important agreements on various political and economic issues, confident in their shared beliefs in the power of the market and of democracy. These informal agreements norms have - no doubt - framed the way other, more important decision were taken inside the WTO, UN and other multilateral bodies. Those left outside the club have had little choice but to grin and bear. But what happens when the club of the world’s super-rich opens its doors to countries until yesterday listed as ‘developing’?

Sure enough, by most standards these countries are not the Congos and Burmas of the world, but rural poverty, primary education, public health services, infrastructure and many other human and economic development indicators are still significantly lower than those of Western Europe and North America. Indonesia, for examples, ranks 108th in the UN Humand Development Index, below a country like Turkmenistan. Yet, there is no doubt that - from an economic perspective - the OECD’s decision was correct: these are the countries that will dominate the economic landscape of the XXI century.

But what about the political perspective? An incongruence jumps immediately to the eye. The OECD is committed to the principles of representative democracy and free market economy, yet it is opening membership negotiations with a country like Russia and laying the ground for similar talks with China, neither of which can be said to hold these two principles too close to their hearts. Is the OECD ready to betray its mandate to ensure the nouveau riches don’t start another club on their own? Or are the new entrants underestimating the efficacy of soft power and normative-compliance pressure in institutional settings? Hard to say, at this stage. But surely one prediction is easy to make: the OECD won’t be a quiet gentlemen’s club for much longer. Expect rowdy meetings in the years to come…

Juan Freire posts two interesting videos on the subject of self-organising systems. In particular, these videos deal with traffic self-regulation based on crowd behaviour in two very different contexts, India and Russia. He had previously presented similar scenarios in Vietnam.

As Juan points out, what makes self-organising systems so interesting is precisely their unpredictability:

We could attempt to build a new theoretical model based on the “Russian anomaly” (different cultural standards, or the fact that a ruleless crossing in a country where such a thing is quite common is not quite the same thing as a ruleless crossing where such a thing is an exception). Or we could resort to more banal explanations: the vodka effect.

The post recalls a Wired article published a few years ago about Hans Monderman, the traffic engineer whose counter-intuitive logic on traffic regulation is conquering the Europe: Build roads that seem dangerous, and they’ll be safer.

I have certainly noticed this to be the case in London, where 4,171 people were killed or seriously injured in road accidents in 2004, compared to 346 people in Rome. Everyone knows Rome has a terrible traffic, but - unlike London’s - it tends to self-regulate itself. If you jaywalk in Rome, chances are people will insult you, your mother and your whole ancestry, but you’ll survive. In London, bus drivers wouldn’t even bother touching the brakes, simply because they are ‘in the right’ and you are not on a pedestrian crossing.

Perhaps the explanation lies not, as Juan suggests, in the vodka effect, but in the stark legacy of societies accustomed to self-organise themselves, versus societies that have been living for centuries in highly-centralised socio-political and cultural systems.

Just because managing 3 blogs really isn’t enough, Jon at Surface Cut has asked me to join him in the creation and running of World War E, Dispatches from the Network Society.

This new blog will look at the changing nature of international realtions, power politics, activism, conflict, development cooperation, human rights, environmental degradation and more random stuff exclusively through the lens of new information communication technologies and informatic network systems.

I think it’s a boy…

Joss Whedon - writer, director and creator of the popular series Buffy the Vampire Slayer - recently posted an appeal on Whedonesque. I am reproducing it here because I think it is one of the most moving appeals for women’s equality I have ever read.

Let’s watch a girl get beaten to death

This is not my blog, but I don’t have a blog, or a space, and I’d like to be heard for a bit.

Last month seventeen year old Dua Khalil was pulled into a crowd of young men, some of them (the instigators) family, who then kicked and stoned her to death. This is an example of the breath-taking oxymoron “honor killing”, in which a family member (almost always female) is murdered for some religious or ethical transgression. Dua Khalil, who was of the Yazidi faith, had been seen in the company of a Sunni Muslim, and possibly suspected of having married him or converted. That she was torturously murdered for this is not, in fact, a particularly uncommon story. But now you can watch the action up close on CNN. Because as the girl was on the ground trying to get up, her face nothing but red, the few in the group of more than twenty men who were not busy kicking her and hurling stones at her were filming the event with their camera-phones.

There were security officers standing outside the area doing nothing, but the footage of the murder was taken – by more than one phone – from the front row. Which means whoever shot it did so not to record the horror of the event, but to commemorate it. To share it. Because it was cool.

I could start a rant about the level to which we have become desensitized to violence, about the evils of the voyeuristic digital world in which everything is shown and everything is game, but honestly, it’s been said. And I certainly have no jingoistic cultural agenda. I like to think that in America this would be considered unbearably appalling, that Kitty Genovese is still remembered, that we are more evolved. But coincidentally, right before I stumbled on this vid I watched the trailer for “Captivity”.

A few of you may know that I took public exception to the billboard campaign for this film, which showed a concise narrative of the kidnapping, torture and murder of a sexy young woman. I wanted to see if the film was perhaps more substantial (especially given the fact that it was directed by “The Killing Fields” Roland Joffe) than the exploitive ad campaign had painted it. The trailer resembles nothing so much as the CNN story on Dua Khalil. Pretty much all you learn is that Elisha Cuthbert is beautiful, then kidnapped, inventively, repeatedly and horrifically tortured, and that the first thing she screams is “I’m sorry”.

“I’m sorry.”

What is wrong with women?

I mean wrong. Physically. Spiritually. Something unnatural, something destructive, something that needs to be corrected.

How did more than half the people in the world come out incorrectly? I have spent a good part of my life trying to do that math, and I’m no closer to a viable equation. And I have yet to find a culture that doesn’t buy into it. Women’s inferiority – in fact, their malevolence — is as ingrained in American popular culture as it is anywhere they’re sporting burkhas. I find it in movies, I hear it in the jokes of colleagues, I see it plastered on billboards, and not just the ones for horror movies. Women are weak. Women are manipulative. Women are somehow morally unfinished. (Objectification: another tangential rant avoided.) And the logical extension of this line of thinking is that women are, at the very least, expendable.

I try to think how we got here. The theory I developed in college (shared by many I’m sure) is one I have yet to beat: Womb Envy. Biology: women are generally smaller and weaker than men. But they’re also much tougher. Put simply, men are strong enough to overpower a woman and propagate. Women are tough enough to have and nurture children, with or without the aid of a man. Oh, and they’ve also got the equipment to do that, to be part of the life cycle, to create and bond in a way no man ever really will. Somewhere a long time ago a bunch of men got together and said, “If all we do is hunt and gather, let’s make hunting and gathering the awesomest achievement, and let’s make childbirth kinda weak and shameful.” It’s a rather silly simplification, but I believe on a mass, unconscious level, it’s entirely true. How else to explain the fact that cultures who would die to eradicate each other have always agreed on one issue? That every popular religion puts restrictions on women’s behavior that are practically untenable? That the act of being a free, attractive, self-assertive woman is punishable by torture and death? In the case of this upcoming torture-porn, fictional. In the case of Dua Khalil, mundanely, unthinkably real. And both available for your viewing pleasure.

It’s safe to say that I’ve snapped. That something broke, like one of those robots you can conquer with a logical conundrum. All my life I’ve looked at this faulty equation, trying to understand, and I’ve shorted out. I don’t pretend to be a great guy; I know really really well about objectification, trust me. And I’m not for a second going down the “women are saints” route – that just leads to more stone-throwing (and occasional Joan-burning). I just think there is the staggering imbalance in the world that we all just take for granted. If we were all told the sky was evil, or at best a little embarrassing, and we ought not look at it, wouldn’t that tradition eventually fall apart? (I was going to use ‘trees’ as my example, but at the rate we’re getting rid of them I’m pretty sure we really do think they’re evil. See how all rants become one?)

Now those of you who frequent this site are, in my wildly biased opinion, fairly evolved. You may hear nothing new here. You may be way ahead of me. But I can’t contain my despair, for Dua Khalil, for humanity, for the world we’re shaping. Those of you who have followed the link I set up know that it doesn’t bring you to a video of a murder. It brings you to a place of sanity, of people who have never stopped asking the question of what is wrong with this world and have set about trying to change the answer. Because it’s no longer enough to be a decent person. It’s no longer enough to shake our heads and make concerned grimaces at the news. True enlightened activism is the only thing that can save humanity from itself. I’ve always had a bent towards apocalyptic fiction, and I’m beginning to understand why. I look and I see the earth in flames. Her face was nothing but red.

All I ask is this: Do something. Try something. Speaking out, showing up, writing a letter, a check, a strongly worded e-mail. Pick a cause – there are few unworthy ones. And nudge yourself past the brink of tacit support to action. Once a month, once a year, or just once. If you can’t think of what to do, there is this handy link. Even just learning enough about a subject so you can speak against an opponent eloquently makes you an unusual personage. Start with that. Any one of you would have cried out, would have intervened, had you been in that crowd in Bashiqa. Well thanks to digital technology, you’re all in it now.

I have never had any faith in humanity. But I will give us props on this: if we can evolve, invent and theorize our way into the technologically magical, culturally diverse and artistically magnificent race we are and still get people to buy the idiotic idea that half of us are inferior, we’re pretty amazing. Let our next sleight of hand be to make that myth disappear.

The sky isn’t evil. Try looking up.

-joss

My great friend Paul, who is always looking for new ways to tackle the challenges of development, has started a new blog, looking at the implications and applications of trying to do sustainable development, especially from a private sector perspective. A very exciting new addition to the blogosphere.

Here’s his first entry, A Mining Adviser’s View of Global Warming. A taste of things to come:

Climate Connections is a series now on National Public Radio done in cooperation with National Geographic: “How are we shaping the climate. How is climate shaping us.”

I enjoyed this story on a mining adviser, environmentalist and government advisor. (Also a friend of mine!)

Another considers “carbon charge” on Chinese imports at the border. Also on China, a story on the impact of coal in China. 5,000,000 miners! According to the BBC, anywhere between 5,000 (official) and 20,000 (independent groups) are killed each year. Another BBC story quotes the People’s Daily saying 17 miners die a day. The size and scale put many issues in a different perspective.

As one injured miner explains in the NPR story:

Those rich Chinese in the Eastern Provinces, they pay lots of money for our coal. But they have no idea about the price we pay. Our bitterness is their happiness.

A dear friend, commenting on another dear friend’s blog, sums up my feelings about Mr Blair’s departure:

“I haven’t seen the speech but from your description he was doing what he does best - emoting to order. The man is a genius at capturing exactly the right emotional mood for any occasion.

I’ve seen him speak in the flesh at a number of different occasions, to very different audiences. Each time he was able, in a Clintonesque way, to say exactly what was right to a potentially hostile interest group. Brilliant.

As to whether or not that makes him a great leader - I have my doubts. He has done some good things: there has been a modest redistribution of wealth, although nothing like enough to reverse the massive accretion of wealth that the richest are accumulating. Some social policies (notably gay equality) are much more equitable - though there was a long fight to get even that.

But he has presided over a decade when social mobility has actually declined - yes, it is now harder to break out of your class than it was under John Major. He has pissed away gazillions on public services without proper reform (have a look at the railways, or the NHS, or even Defence). He has left the House of Lords incompletely reformed (why the Hell do we STILL have hereditary legislators?!). He has failed to deal with the rest of the constitutional issues (West Lothian Question, creation of a proper Supreme Court). He has done almost nothing to retore local government. He has failed dismally to do what he promised with the EU - to “put Britain at the heart of Europe”. He has presided over a corrupt regime (stopped the prosecution of BAE over the bribes scandal, forced Tanzania to use aid money to buy totally inappropriate kit from … BAE, Bernie Ecclestone & Formula One exemptions, Cash for Peerages… this list is way too long to be complete, but you get the idea).

His style has shifted from consensus to autocrat (you can hear how his vocal ticks have changed to reflect this. In the early years his speech was peppered with “you know”, to bring you along; now his speech is full of “look”, a word that encourages no opposition and makes it clear you’re a numpty who doesn’t understand his greatness).

There have been some good (and brave) foreign policies - Kosovo, Sierra Leone. But they are totally overshadowed by the disaster of Iraq.

What pisses me off most is the wasted opportunity. The great things he did in his early days were mostly the policies of his predecessor. His fantastic speech to his new cadre of Labour MPs when he was first elected PM - “We are the servants now” - was a brilliant moment that promised a new dawn, but how hollow that sounds now. Him, a servant?

[…]

And I can’t believe I didn’t even mention the erosion of civil liberties, the encroachment of the state into every area of our lives (”sleepwalking into the surveillance society”, as the Information Commissioner put it), nuclear power, nuclear weapons…

AND his pathetic response to climate change (”you can’t ask people to give up long-distance holidays”…).

Damnit, I’m going to be thinking of annoying things all day now!”

Re-Public - the sharply-named on-line journal on the latest and hottest trends in contemporary politics - has a whole new issue on Wiki Politics (they had already produced one earlier on), with contributions among others from Ward Cunningham on the rise of gift economies, Paul Hartzog and the wiki-fication of politics and Kingsley Dennis on wikis as expressions of collective intelligence.

Their core argument? While they are unsure about whether ‘the use of these new collaborative tools (wikis, blogs, forums, mailing lists, podcasting, and videos) can really transform the ways politics are practiced‘, they recognise that ‘they produce a particular form of political participation - horizontal and equitable - which operates on the basis of the principles of decentralisation and openness‘.

The Washington Post writes about the decision by the Chinese Foreign Ministry to send a military engineering unit to help strengthen the overtaxed African Union peacekeeping force in Darfur:

[extract]

In recent weeks, the Darfur crisis has become particularly sensitive in China because of suggestions in the United States and Europe that people should boycott the 2008 Beijing Olympics to demonstrate opposition to Chinese policies in Sudan. China, which has deep economic and military ties there, has been widely criticized for failing to bring strong pressure on the government to persuade it to accept a large force of U.N. peacekeepers in Darfur.

The ties include large oil purchases and extensive arms sales, which the human rights group Amnesty International charged recently have been continuing despite U.N. calls for an embargo. Jiang, the Foreign Ministry spokeswoman, declined to respond to questions about the Amnesty charges. But she said China’s arms sales to Sudan are strictly controlled, include only conventional weapons and do not violate U.N. regulations.

What implications for a Chinese military presence in Africa?