In a New York Times op-ed earlier this week, retired U.S. general James Dubik reiterated the need for some sort of post-conflict peacekeeping force in Libya:

If Colonel Qaddafi falls, the United States and NATO will have a responsibility to help shape the postwar order, including providing security to prevent a liberated Libya from sinking into chaos.

The responsibility for security, reconstruction and nation-building will likely fall to the United Nations, which would mean deploying a multinational peacekeeping force in Libya, including troops from the United States, NATO and Arab nations.

The case for a peacekeeping force is hard to argue with, as Bruce Jones, Jake Sherman and I pointed out on the Foreign Policy website earlier in April.  But I doubt that Leon Panetta wants to begin his time at the Pentagon by ordering U.S. ground troops into Libya.  And while I did suggest at the start of the war that European peacekeepers might be an option, the EU’s proposals for sending a small humanitarian force have stalled.  The idea that relatively impartial non-European powers like Brazil and India could deploy excites more objections than enthusiasm.

So who’s left?  One idea that is kicking around, as I note in a new article for Abu Dhabi’s The National, is an all-Muslim or all-Arab peacekeeping force.  It’s not a 100% original notion:

In 1987, Muammar Qaddafi had one of his many bold strategic ideas. As the Iran-Iraq war dragged on, he proposed the dispatch of an Islamic peacekeeping force to end the conflict. He suggested that Algeria, Indonesia and Nigeria could supply troops.

The Iranians dismissed the idea, which promptly died. But nearly quarter of a century later, with Qaddafi and his foes locked in indecisive combat, some strategists are asking if Arab and/or Muslim peacekeepers could now be deployed in Libya.

While French, American and British aircraft have led Nato’s campaign over Libya – and the European Union has approved military operations to deliver aid – Western officials fear that a follow-on stabilisation mission would be costly, open-ended and dangerous. Islamist terrorists have killed Spanish peacekeepers in Lebanon and UN staff in Algeria, while French commandos have skirmished with Al Qaeda in the Maghreb. Sending sizeable Western forces to Libya could look like an invitation to further attacks.

By contrast, a largely Arab or Muslim force might have greater legitimacy – or at least present a politically problematic target to Al Qaeda and its affiliates. This view isn’t confined to worried Western analysts either. Last month Farhan Bokhari, a Pakistani commentator, argued that Libya shows the need for the formation of a “pan-Islamic peacekeeping force” ready to intervene in emergencies in Muslim countries.

Is there a real chance of such a force deploying to Libya?

Read the rest of the article to find out…

Which is the title of a presentation I’ve just given at a conference on global health and the MDGs in Copenhagen.   The powerpoint’s not up yet, but the main points were:

1. The MDGs should not be confused with an ’8 commandments of development’.  They’re criticised for not saying everything there is to say about development, but this is missing the point.  They represent an international agreement on some joint actions and responsibilities which reflect an understanding of what the main problems were in the late 1990s and where international cooperation could usefully be part of the solution. A post-2015 agreement should do the same, for a different era of development.

2. The MDGs have created a new incentive structure for donor governments in particular, and so have distorted behaviour. Some would argue, for example, that the focus on increasing the numbers of children in school has been at the cost of the quality of education – but numbers were the MDG target, so that’s where the money and the attention went (to be fair, it’s not just the MDGs that focused on quantity over quality – just about every other education campaign and report did the same).  Any post-2015 agreement would do this too – that’s the point of it.  The question is what actions, and by who, we want to incentivise.

3. A post-2015 agreement will be delivered through different aid architecture.  The world can’t be divided into rich donor countries and poor recipient countries any more – most poor people live in countries that are both donor and recipient, or neither.  So the politics of agreeing it, and the structure for implementing it, would have to be different. 

4. And the problems we face are different.  To take just two examples, poverty is increasingly urban, so development’s rural bias will have to go, and diseases are increasingly of the non-communicable kind  (heart disease, diabetes and the like), rather than the infectious diseases that were the focus of the MDGs (not that these have gone away).

5. And our understanding of what ‘development’ is and how to measure it has changed, informed by the ideas of ‘wellbeing’ or of ‘multidimensional poverty’, among others.  We have new ideas about instruments to help bring it about - with social protection perhaps the most current example.  The importance of politics looms much larger in development thinking than in the 1990s – though we probably still don’t quite know what to do with that insight. 

So it’s complicated. It was always complicated, but the more we know the more complicated it seems. Out of this tangle (hence the string – I’m feeling  rather literal today), a post-2015 agreement would need to have the same simplicity and political power as the MDGs, if it’s to be an agreement that governments can use with electorates, NGOs with governments, journalists to their editors and so on.

A tough call.  What are the choices?
- keep the MDGs with an extended timeline (not appealing – rather a missed opportunity to reframe the ideas and incentives for a different world)
- keep the structure, but with (some) different targets and a new timeline (this would all depend on keeping the targets within manageable limits – a shopping list approach wouldn’t work for anyone)
- a new structure – possibly framed around global public goods or some other principle (the least likely politically, though in some ways the most apprppriate)

Or of course, nothing at all.  It’s perfectly likely that attempts to reach international consensus around shared responsiblity for a set of defined poverty problems will be too difficult and will be quitely dropped.  Before we get too deeply into a technical discussion on the what and the how of any new agreement, maybe we should remember that any agreement at all may well be the real prize.

Fancy a go?

Finally, campaigners have found the villain they’ve been looking for on speculation and food prices. Watching them saddle up and prepare for battle is likely to be reminiscent of the air cavalry scene in Apocalypse Now.

Throughout the rollercoaster ride on food prices of the last few years, one of the most hotly contested issues has been that of the role of financial speculators in driving higher food prices or in catalysing greater price volatility. Some politicians (especially French ones – see this year’s G20 agenda) have jumped at the chance to paint the financial sector as the baddie; campaign groups like WDM have also jumped on the issue. Unfortunately, though, most of the evidence is far from conclusive. Homi Kharas at Brookings puts it like this:

Almost all serious studies have come to the same conclusion: the volatility inherent in the food marketplace causes speculation, not the other way around.

Similarly, when the International Food Policy Research Institute did an analysis of the issue, their results weren’t exactly decisive: the strongest they felt able to put it was that speculative activities “might have been influential” in pushing prices up. Among independent analysts, the broad consensus has been that financial speculation can add some ‘froth’ to the market, and perhaps cause a degree of additional volatility at the margins – but it’s a long way from being the main driver of food  price inflation or volatility.

Which is disappointing, if you’re an NGO, because speculators and financial traders make for a great campaigns bad guy. But now something pretty interesting has emerged.

Over the last few weeks, Glencore – a Swiss-based commodity trading firm – has been preparing for its initial public offering (i.e. the public floatation of its shares). Although you may not have heard of Glencore – it’s pretty publicity-shy – it’s a huge player in the sector. With revenues last year of $145 bn and a potential market cap after the IPO of $73 bn, Glencore will be the largest public offering on record in London, and once public it’ll be one of the largest companies in the FTSE 100.

Over the weekend, Glencore disclosed to UBS, one of the banks underwriting its floatation, that it made a major speculative bet on rising wheat and corn prices during the early stages of last summer’s Russian drought – which was in many ways the starting gun on the current, post-financial crisis food spike. So what? Here’s the key point, from the FT’s write-up this morning:

As it bet on rising prices, senior traders at the Swiss-based company publicly urged Russia to impose a grain export ban. Moscow acted a few days later, triggering a grain rally.

Now that, if true, is a whole different story. For while the evidence isn’t conclusive that speculation causes food inflation or spikes, no-one is in any doubt about how damaging export bans are. Back at the height of the 2008 spike, export bans were the factor that turned widespread unease into outright panic, and sent prices to record highs in a vicious positive feedback loop. The Russian export ban last summer, meanwhile, fired the starting gun on the current food spike, which took food prices to new record levels – and once again hammered nearly a billion poor people around the world.

So does the charge stick? Here’s the key passage from an August 3 briefing note last year from Glencore:

“From our point of view the [Russian] government has all the reasons to stop all exports.”

Is that “urging”, as the FT has it? I don’t think the FT’s charge is unreasonable. Glencore is a major player in commodities markets. Its analyses get noticed, and acted on – including by governments. And the fact that it hasn’t until now disclosed its own major long position in wheat at the time looks dubious at best – at worst, like straight-up market manipulation, with undernourished people picking up the bill.

Glencore itself is now saying that that the note was just the personal view of its author, not a formal company position. It also claims that Russia’s export ban “did not particularly help our business”, since grain it had already bought got stuck in the embargo, meaning it had to buy more grain elsewhere to meet its obligations, at higher prices.

But arguments like these are unlikely to cut much ice with campaigners (and note that Glencore’s form of words doesn’t say that they actually made a loss). And with Glencore very much in the spotlight ahead of the IPO, and both speculation and export bans firmly on the 2011 G20 agenda, there’s hardly a shortage of campaigning opportunities…

I’ve been struck by a lot of thought provoking stuff in the Economist over the last couple weeks on China suggesting greater global risks in the near future due to three things (health warning – I am not a China expert):

1. China’s reserves (aka 50% of the global imbalances)

These continue to grow: China now has $3 trillion which enough to buy the debt of struggling debt-laden, Portugal, Ireland, Greece and Spain AND have enough left over to buy Microsoft, Google, IBM and Apple AND all the real estate in Manhattan and Washington AND the 50 most valuable sports teams or alternatively China could buy all the gold in the world plus all US military equipment and have a $1trillion to spare.

(more…)

Over at Mint, my colleague W.P.S. Sidhu reflects on the BRICS summit in Sanya, where the big non-Western powers were in a non-interventionist mood…

While the categorical assertion in the Sanya Declaration that the BRICS “share the principle that the use of force should be avoided” is commendable as a tenet, ruling out the use of force under any circumstances cannot be a viable policy option. Indeed, at the regional level all the BRICS countries have resorted to force at one time or another when other means of persuasion have failed. India’s interventions in Bangladesh, Sri Lanka and the Maldives are evidence of this pragmatism.

India’s stance on interventionism is one topic of a new paper just out from CIC by Nitin Pai of the Takshashila Institution. Nitin focuses on India’s policy towards weak states in its region – including Afghanistan, Nepal and Burma but also Pakistan, Bangladesh and Sri Lanka – and argues that New Delhi faces a “paradox of proximity”. The  fact that India is so close to these weak states means that it has (i) strong reasons to be involved in their affairs but (ii) even stronger reasons to be cautious. This is why India’s interventions in Bangladesh and Sri Lanka, decades ago, remain exceptional:

Domestic politics, fear of military overreach and bureaucratic factors moderate boldness and circumscribe policy innovation. They have also forced New Delhi into a pattern of reacting to developments. Other than the peace process with Pakistan, India’s political leaders have shown little interest in stewarding bold departures from extant neighbourhood policy. Changes in New Delhi’s policies have been incremental even in the face of momentous changes in the countries of the region.

So while Sidhu emphasizes India’s “pragmatism”, Nitin highlights its “cautious prudence”.   For those used to U.S. debates between idealism and realism, a contest between pragmatism and prudence may seem rather low-key.  But a measured rise to superpower status may well be more sustainable than a meteoric ascent.

If you have young children, then you will of course be familiar with In the Night Garden, a TV show on CBeebies which goes out each evening just before bedtime.

But what you may not have realised is that the show is in fact a complex and highly sophisticated metaphor for international aid architecture.

Here, then, is a summary of my observations, with input and advice from a range of experts on Twitter. (more…)

And now for a special preview of The Future - courtesy of XKCD (who add the following caveat in a pop-up: “Not shown: the approximately 30,000 identical, vaguely hysterical articles titled ‘WHITE PEOPLE IN [THE US/BRITAIN] TO BECOME MINORITY BY [YEAR]!’, which came up for basically any year I put in”):

H/t @AlanWray

A tweet to warm Richard Gowan’s heart:

The links is to Richard’s article on ‘the scramble for Europe’…

The 2011 World Development Report is now out, and a must-read for anyone who’s interested in how conflict and state fragility affect international development – and what can be done to prevent them.

But I’m especially pleased that WDR puts the World Bank’s support behind the idea of an integrated World Resources Oulook, an idea set out in Globalization and Scarcity. Here’s what the WDR has to say on the subject in its concluding section:

Knowledge about the impacts of food, energy and resource shocks is limited. Rising global demand for food and energy may impact fragile and violence-affected states severely. New analytical efforts are an important first step in understanding this phenomenon. One forward step would be for the relevant agencies – the World Bank, UN Energy Programme, International Energy Agency, and others – to work together on a World Resources Outlook, bringing together the multiple reports and analysis already undertaken by these agencies independently.

Such a report could give policy makers the valuable integrated analysis they currently lack. It could examine the state of scientific knowledge about the availability of key resources, including oil, food, water, and potentially land, together with how climate change will affect each of them; the economic dimensions of resource availability, including the risk of price spikes, inflationary trends, and how resource prices interact with wider trends in the international economy; and vulnerability to scarcity trends among poor people and regions affected by violence. Without such analysis, the risk of unintended consequences from policy may remain unaddressed – as with biofuels, where the possible food security implications of measures to promote energy security were inadequately considered.

With the Bank now openly backing the proposal, as well as implicit buy-in from the governments on the World Bank’s board, who sign off the WDR prior to publication,  there’s now a real possibility of this report actually happening – an outcome that would not only give policymakers a joined-up overview of scarcity issues that they currently lack, but would also create crucial interoperability between agencies in their single issue silos, by forcing them to collaborate on a joint output.

So what happens next? Well, next summer’s Rio 2012 summit would provide an ideal opportunity for member states to commission such a report, if they wish - watch this space.

Tom Friedman in the NYT today:

Syria, Libya, Yemen and Bahrain, countries fractured by tribal, ethnic and religious divisions, would have been ideal for gradual evolution to democracy, but it is probably too late now. The initial instinct of their leaders was to crush demonstrators, and blood has flowed. In these countries, there are now so many pent-up grievances between religious communities and tribes — some of which richly benefited from their dictatorships while others were brutalized by them — that even if the iron fist of authoritarianism is somehow lifted, civil strife could easily trample democratic hopes.

Could anything prevent this? Yes, extraordinary leadership that insists on burying the past, not being buried by it. The Arab world desperately needs its versions of South Africa’s Nelson Mandela and F.W. de Klerk — giants from opposing communities who rise above tribal or Sunni-Shiite hatreds to forge a new social compact. The Arab publics have surprised us in a heroic way. Now we need some Arab leaders to surprise us with bravery and vision. That has been so lacking for so long.