by Alex Evans | Feb 20, 2008 | Cooperation and coherence, Influence and networks
And so to Network Weaving, a blog by and for people who use network mapping tools. Network mapping folk like nothing better than to, y’know, network, and so it was clearly with a swing in his step that blogger Valdis Krebs went off to the 28th annual conference of the International Network for Social Network Analysis. [Not Institute; Network. Obviously. Duh.]
But all was not well. If there’s one thing that social network analysts need in order to stay happy, then of course it’s adequate wireless network access. But at the conference hotel, Valdis found, the wi-fi was definitely substandard. Now as Valdis explains,
Hotels are used to dealing with disconnected customers — hotel guests who do not know each other. They can tell these guests anything. Since most guests do not talk to each other, nothing is verified, no action is coordinated. In terms of social network analysis: the hotel staff spans structural holes between the guests — occupying the power position in the network.
But the hotel had reckoned without the networking capacity of INSNA members. “When INSNA arrived”, Valdis continues with evident satisfaction, “the hotel guests were no longer disconnected — many people in INSNA know each other and after initial greetings started to talk.” What do you suppose they talked about? Ah, yes:
The conversation soon went to the lack of connectivity in the hotel — no one could get a connection out of the hotel to the internet. Not only did everyone discover they were having the same bad experience, but they discovered they were receiving the same lie from the hotel staff — “everything is fine, no one else is complaining”. Being lied to made “being disconnected” all the more infuriating.
But the hotel clearly had no idea of who it was dealing with.
Soon “emergent clusters” of INSNA members went to the front desk as small groups and started demanding better service — after all we were being charged for WiFi.
The emergence was clearly too great for the hotel manager, who “became overwhelmed by the coordinated action and soon went into hiding and refused to talk about the topic”. Now, I know what you’re wondering. How had the network topology changed? Well, Valdis explains, what was actually happening here, was that “power dissipates when people in a hub-and-spoke network [a.k.a. hierarchy] start to talk to each other”, and “learning begins”. And he’s helpfully provided a White Paper explaining how it all works.
Oh, you think this stuff is nerdy? Then you haven’t been paying attention to Colombia…
by Charlie Edwards | Feb 20, 2008 | Influence and networks, UK
Two days, two very similar broadsheet leaders. Yesterday The Times called for a national security strategy that narrowly defined ‘security’ (read defence), today the FT calls for strategic thinking on national security (read defence). Without some background knowledge both these pieces seem sensible enough but you wouldn’t expect us at Global Dashboard to give you the news without some insightful analysis…
To understand why these two pieces are so important one must turn our attention away from Pennington Street and Southwark Bridge and instead look to Whitehall and 10 Downing St, for it is here that the battle over the national security strategy is taking place.
The development of a UK NSS has been a very bruising affair with ownership of the document passed between senior mandarins on a regular basis. The first draft, I am told, was too focused on defence and traditional threats to the UK, while later drafts added new challenges and risks. Still no one could agree – let alone the Prime Minister who sat on the document and continues to do so.
So some bright spark thought of the idea of writing a second, alternative national security strategy. And so that is what has been done. So Cabinet Ministers now have not one, but two national security strategies on their desks. One (let’s call it NSS Alpha) is a traditional, 1990s security/defence focused strategy (big concerns: terrorism, proliferation, and rogue states) the alternative (NSS Bravo) also includes those threats but plkaces them in context with other global risks, the threat from organised crime, cyber warfare, migration, climate change and also focuses on ‘human security’ and the individual citizen (because as Kissinger, I mean Alex, has pointed out before the nation state is on the wane).
It can’t be easy for Cabinet Ministers to decide which National Security Strategy to go for (especially if they are focused on an area like Transport) so my guess is senior officials and/or No.10 advisers have begun to brief the papers on their preferred option (watch out for the Guardian and Sun soon).
by Richard Gowan | Feb 20, 2008 | North America, Off topic
Readers of this blog will, almost by definition, be well aware of the thoughts of Mr. Alex Evans on global risks, resilience, the new dynamics of international cooperation and so on and so forth. So they’ll be pretty used to this sort of stuff:
I think we face three challenges currently: The disappearance of the nation-state; the rise of India and China; and, thirdly, the emergence of problems and challenges that cannot be solved by a single power, such as energy and the environment. We do not have the luxury to focus on one problem; we have to deal with all three of them or we won’t succeed with any of them.
Yeah, yeah, give us a break. Except those sentiments don’t come from Alex but from, er, Henry Kissinger in a remarkable new interview with Der Spiegel Online (the best English-language news source on the web that nobody knows about).
Old Mr. Realpolitik hasn’t exactly turned that cuddly. He has wise things to say about how the Bush administration gives European governments an easy excuse for avoiding hard questions on foreign policy – and weird ones on Bush himself:
SPIEGEL: Isn’t German and European opposition to a greater military involvement in Afghanistan and Iraq also a result of deep distrust of American power?
Kissinger: By this time next year, we will see the beginning of a new administration. We will then discover to what extent the Bush administration was the cause or the alibi for European-American disagreements. Right now, many Europeans hide behind the unpopularity of President Bush. And this administration made several mistakes in the beginning.
SPIEGEL: What do you see as the biggest mistakes?
Kissinger: To go into Iraq with insufficient troops, to disband the Iraqi army, the handling of the relations with allies at the beginning even though not every ally distinguished himself by loyalty. But I do believe that George W. Bush has correctly understood the global challenge we are facing, the threat of radical Islam, and that he has fought that battle with great fortitude. He will be appreciated for that later.
SPIEGEL: In 50 years, historians will treat his legacy more kindly?
Kissinger: That will happen much earlier.
But back to the whole “problems and challenges that cannot be solved by a single power” malarkey. I’ve just returned from a week in the UK talking about Managing Global Insecurity, and although there were a lot of interesting conversations involved, I was struck by the deeply-embdedded European assumption that U.S. policy-makers just don’t get the twenty-first century risk agenda or concepts like human security. Well, piffle. As I noted late last year in a short piece for the Stanley Foundation, the whole presidential campaign has been shot through with this sort of thing:
One of the most prominent foreign policy themes of pre-presidential debates has been the need to get UN troops to Darfur. Hillary Clinton has “an aggressive plan to support public schools in developing countries” while Mitt Romney’s anti-jihad strategy centers on a “Special Partnership Force” that will win over foreign communities and leaders through “humanitarian and development assistance and rule of law capacity building.”
Such proposals leave outside observers scratching their heads. Ask the average anti-American to name the pillars of US international policy, and they’ll pick two: military power and unbridled capitalism. But the country’s leaders-in-waiting are promoting social democratic goods like public schooling and development aid. Is the US turning into a gigantic Sweden?
As I said at the time, no, not really. But think back to Super Tuesday. Here’s the key foreign policy paragraph from Obama’s speech that night:
And when I am President, we will put an end to a politics that uses 9/11 as a way to scare up votes, and start seeing it as a challenge that should unite America and the world against the common threats of the twenty-first century: terrorism and nuclear weapons; climate change and poverty; genocide and disease.
And here’s the equivalent from Clinton’s speech the same night:
I see an America respected around the world again, that reaches out to our allies and confronts our shared challenges – from global terrorism to global warming to global epidemics.
And now the McCain-supporting Kissinger is in on the act. I’m off to go and watch the primary results roll in from Wisconsin – but if these guys are even semi-serious, the Europeans may find they’re behind the ideological curve in 2009.
