by Alex Evans | May 2, 2007 | Africa, Conflict and security, Economics and development
US chat show presenter Jon Stewart’s recent interview with Senator John McCain (here) is interesting for what it says about US perceptions of statebuilding and peace support operations. Towards the end of an interview focused almost entirely on Iraq, Stewart gets one of the bigger audience rounds of applause of the night when he asks McCain with a rhetorical flourish:
How do you quell a civil war when it’s not your country?
Now, what’s really at issue in this debate is not so much the tactics of peacekeeping or peacemaking (though heaven knows the US has made an appalling hash of both in Iraq) nor even the exigencies of immediate post-conflict reconstruction (ditto), but a much longer term set of questions about what external actors can hope to achieve on governance in developing countries. What it really comes down to is this: can donors build effective states?
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by Alex Evans | May 2, 2007 | Conflict and security, Cooperation and coherence, Influence and networks
Wired.com has a piece today saying that:
The U.S. Army has ordered soldiers to stop posting to blogs or sending personal e-mail messages, without first clearing the content with a superior officer, Wired News has learned. The directive, issued April 19, is the sharpest restriction on troops’ online activities since the start of the Iraq war. And it could mean the end of military blogs, observers say.
Military officials have been wrestling for years with how to handle troops who publish blogs. Officers have weighed the need for wartime discretion against the opportunities for the public to personally connect with some of the most effective advocates for the operations in Afghanistan and Iraq — the troops themselves. The secret-keepers have generally won the argument, and the once-permissive atmosphere has slowly grown more tightly regulated. Soldier-bloggers have dropped offline as a result.
And they have a copy of the new rules, too. So much for muddy boots in the information battlespace (see David’s previous post) and the argument – proposed by winner of the US Army Information Operations Proponent (USIOP) essay-writing competition, Elizabeth Robbins – that:
Military blogs written by those in muddy boots… are a combat multiplier in the information domain… Commanders at every level must boldly accept risk in order to support the rewards and warfighting advantage that soldier-authors bring to the information battlespace.
by Jules Evans | May 2, 2007 | Europe and Central Asia, Global system, Influence and networks
The generation of Russians who are now in their twenties have a choice, a really defining choice for their country.
They can either go up the cul-de-sac of chauvinist nationalism, or they can seriously try and improve their country, its economy and its governance.
The Russian government is trying, through its management of Russian TV and through Kremlin-funded youth organizations like Nashi, to channel the nation’s attention away from the quality of its own political governance, and towards supposed threats or humiliations by the likes of Estonia, Georgia, Ukraine, the US, the EU, whoever.
They are trying to turn a war memorial in Estonia into, somehow, the defining issue for Russia’s youth. And for alot of Russia’s youth, even for well-educated young Russians, this IS the defining issue for them – how poor Russia is mistreated by Estonia, how poor Russia faces double standards in the EU, how poor Russia is stabbed in the back by the UK because we let Berezovsky live there, and so on.
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