The morning sessions were quite good, but the problem the old school (sitting behind and to the left of me) had was that most of the presentations were just scene setters. Paul Cornish, on the other hand, said they were more like undergraduate lectures on international security.
We aren’t able, it seems, to move beyond talking about the big trends, poles of power and the possible or probable impacts of global risks on societies (now or in the future). Instead, we get stuck discussing how difficult it is to reform the institutions that make up the international architecture – while revelling in conversations about food security and resource scarcity because they’re relatively new and fashionable issues and there is no baggage (or at least not quite so much baggage) attached to them.
Next month I’m talking at a Chatham House conference on security and defence futures. I’m meant to be critiquing the British government’s new national security strategy – but given that it apparently won’t be published for another few weeks, I’m going to opt for setting out some potential routes forward instead.
Back to the Hague and the afternoon sessions were ok. I chose the workshop on risk management processes and made three mediocre points:
– We can be more imaginative in the risk management process
– We need to pay more attention to the possible risks rather than focusing solely on the probable ones
– We should build and develop more comprehensive scenarios as part of the risk management process. At the moment, the majority focus on specific events or issues.
Final thoughts:
– Black swan event: Being offered milk at lunch
– Conference fact: The Dutch have one word for safety and security: Veiligheid (neat)
– Realpolitik: I learnt that the European Commission created a Critical Infrastructure Warning Information Network (CIWIN) in 2003 to facilitate exchange of information on shared threats and vulnerabilities and appropriate counter-measures and strategies. Not only did it get a poor reception from member states, but some even refuse to use it. The Commission also wants more information on ‘near misses’ which can inform their work and share them with member states. Get this: Officially the Commission can’t ask a member state for that information (they have to go through various back doors). Mad, isn’t it? No incentive to share information means that member states don’t: what’s in it for them?
Mysterious goings on in Turkey, as a shadowy group of arch-nationalists with alarmingly close links to the army and government is arrested for conspiring to murder those less patriotic than themselves. Among their key targets was novelist and Nobel Laureate Orhan Pamuk. Pamuk recently escaped a prison sentence himself, having been accused of insulting the Turkish state by speaking out against the Armenian genocide. The group is also suspected of involvement in the murder of ethnic Armenian journalist Hrant Dink in Istanbul last year. Indeed, soon after Dink’s funeral a right-wing extremist who was implicated in the shooting warned Pamuk to “wise up.” Do not be surprised if it emerges the group was also behind atrocities attributed to the PKK.
One of the conspirators, the former major-general Veli Kucuk, is the first officer for decades to be questioned by police. Progress? Perhaps not – the same weekend as the arrest of the ultra-nationalists, a political science professor was given a fifteen-month suspended sentence for criticising their hero, Ataturk.
Strange Maps is fast becoming my favourite website: it’s the only blog I’ve ever come across where I’ve scrolled all the way back to the beginning to read every post. Here’s a small sample: a fascinating religious map of the US, shaded according to which denominations command majorities in each county.
I’m not allowed to blog about the session I am currently in for reasons of commercial confidentiality (which raises a point about how we share information on risks on a practical day-to-day basis – which is what the presentation is about).
However – we had an awesome discussion in the break. According to people present we need to be aware of two things in the near and medium term (Alex has blogged on some of this before).
1) We face a food shock like that of the energy shock in the 1970s
2) The bio-fuels market is set to drop – big time. Lots of people are going to lose a lot of money.
By now, we’ve all read enough horror stories to know that we have to exercise restraint in what we post on Facebook or Friends Reunited. But are we sufficiently attuned to the risks of You Tube and camcorders in cellphones?
Before you answer that question, you may wish to view this engaging film of David Gergen* shaking his booty like it ain’t no thang on a Davos dancefloor. As David Steven and I have been known to observe, we’re all of us always engaged in public diplomacy, whether we realise it or not…
* Foreign Policy Adviser to Clinton, Bush Sr, Reagan, Ford and Nixon; Professor of Public Service, John F Kennedy School of Government, Harvard University
