Suddenly no one knows anything

D.C. scholars and think tanks have lost any confidence in our existing understanding of development. For example, Blau and Liskey argue that U.S. development efforts have constantly been plagued by thinking in terms of modernization, progress, and solving for the ‘root causes’ of backwardness:

Our review raises concerns about a concept of operation premised on identifying root causes of conflict. The premise that we can know root causes is necessary for social science, but it may not be useful in the real world. Identification and mitigation of root causes that drive conflict may not be reliably attainable. Therefore, basing policy on such a premise may be ineffective and result in confusion and disunity of effort.

And, an upside-down view of governance suggests taking a step back for conceptualization:

This way of thinking about governance and development implies that
donors need to reassess their own role in the process, and their traditional
approaches to managing ‘donor-recipient’ relationships. But the first step
is for them to change their mental models, and to stop viewing the world
through an OECD lens. Without this they will not make the necessary
investment in understanding local political dynamics, or make the (often
uncomfortable) changes needed to their own organisation, values,
practices and behaviour.

It seems the development world has discovered postpositivism and doubt the traditional approach toward development grounded in the Western experience and ‘scientific’ knowledge, and it’s about time. If you take a recent history of USAID management, development firms and agency appear to be overly bureaucratic. Yet, many USAID projects are contracted out to profit and non-profit firms that operate without the same level of organizational discipline. The disorganization goes both ways: field agencies lack coordination with their principals in national capitals and are unable to connect with and empower local institutions. Switching to a network-mode of organization isn’t just about privatizing state functions, but also improving the ability of nodes to connect with each other – both inside, outside, and between national governments. Approaching development problems without understanding the perspectives of those other actors decreases the ability of development agencies to form relationships that lead to the fulfillment of strategic outcomes (the military has offered a solution to this problem in Operational Design). Thinking about development from a postpositivist epistemology stresses an understanding of a society’s unique existing socioeconomic structure and not by applying abstract theory.

Open Skies and Virtual Daemons

I previously reviewed Virilio’s The Information Bomb here, and in the meantime have read War as Cinema and Open Sky. Virilio theorizes about the future and the progression of history from a skeptical position that is both conservative and postmodern, yet nonetheless is grounded in radicalist paradigms. You can taste his disgust of modern society in his work, tinged with a deep fatalism about technology and false advancements it brings to humanity.

The information revolution’s supposed great successes are really a new form of technological slavery for Virilio, one that communicatively unites the entire world and atomizes it simultaneously. The dissolution of time and spatial distance made possible by ‘telepresence’ (I can talk to my girlfriend in Albany from Kansas City using Skype as if we were physically together) effectively destroys the concept of spatial and temporal separation. Everyone armed with an internet connection shares the same global and virtual space-time, united by information exchanged at the speed of light. All spaces become ‘interfaces’, here and there dissolve into a continuous journey, past and future become an ‘eternal present’. Since we culturally travel together at a virtual light speed, we can remain separate and physically sedentary.

‘Cybernetics’ is a curse in Virilio’s writing – it signifies the subordination of human perception to mechanical enhancement that accelerates the transmission of information and resultant actions, yet mediates interaction between the real world and human beings through the cinematic image and the technological transfer of information. In seeking a more ‘objective’ view of the world, we actually create an artificial one whose mechanically accelerated speed prevents us from viewing it in a subjectively direct way unmediated by any perceptual filter. The lack of reflexivity inherent in our cybernetic understanding of the world allows its contradictions to fester – we produce and pursue the immediate objects of our desire for accelerated short-term satisfication and fail to notice how the permanent interface that brings them to us is the seed of the system’s destruction. The fact that the world is now virtually synchronized ensures that these contradictions, or the accidents inherent in the cybernetic world, will transcend localities and become general, global, and universal. It also suggests that our cybernetic understanding of the world will prevent us from learning the true origins of the ‘accidents’ that we produce.

It is this anti-modern and anti-technological philosophical tradition that is reflected in Daniel Suarez’s Daemon. The antagonist is a dead computer genius who creates a low-level artificial intelligence program (the ‘Daemon’ itself) that automatically recruits individuals and synchronizes their actions through virtual competitions to achieve the goals set by the program. The Daemon virtually unites physically atomized individuals in a closed ‘Darknet’ that exploits the hyperconnectivity of a globally networked society. From Virilio’s perspective, the chaos generated by the Daemon itself is inevitable precisely because of the existence of a virtual universality that creates interdependent relationships according to a single cybernetic logic, and is thereby vulnerable to virtual actors who leverage its networked interconnectedness to destroy the system by subverting it to a different logic.

In other words, the networked age may have been built by actors who wanted more communications to accumulate information for faster decision-making, yet those same networks can be turned against the cybernetic organizations of the past. This is how Virilio’s ‘general accident’ is reflected in Suarez’s novel. Because they cling to their linear attempts to apply power and make money in the real world through the virtual, we ‘moderns’ can never truly give themselves to the alternatives presented by network organizations – to remake the real world by connecting with it and not simply through virtual mediation, and finally overcome the contradictions of cybernetic progress.

The question that remains is the conditions upon which we abandon the cybernetic drive for information and speed that virtually unites us but physically divides us. We are thus prevented from coming together in real political action to change the system. Can we realize the possibility of transcending our cybernetic perception before the networks we built for acceleration destroy us? Virilio seems pessimistic, and the plot of Daemon seems to support this. It requires forging a new politics that is anti-cybernetic – actors must literally slow down as opposed to speed up, and rethink the relationship between information, interpretation, and action. That is, we need a new interpretation of reality supported by but not necessarily mediated by technology, one forged by interaction in the real world.

Strategic Reflexivity

This was a theme I wrote upon here and with Adam in a paper about Operational Design in the U.S. military. If reflexive and critical thinking is meant to ensure that militaries see problems from all possible angles, it furthers evolution towards what Nagl described as a ‘learning organization’ in Learning to Eat Soup – militaries need to be willing to jettison old approaches towards a problem enshrined in existing doctrine and conceptualize a new vision of the problem’s origins, its current status, and novel solutions to resolve it.

Thomas A. Marks has a new article in PRISM that suggests the U.S. military is not the first to make this realization in the context of combatting an insurgency. He argues that Colombian civilian leadership and the Colombian Army has successfully learned from its previous understanding of the FARC to formulate new strategic and operational approaches that have seriously weakened the insurgency. Out went the dichotomous American typology of conflict involving ‘war’ and ‘military operations other than war’ that was imported from existing American doctrine and practiced throughout state and nation-building missions in the 90s. Instead, the Colombian army, led by Generals Ospina, Mora, and Tapias, developed a new understanding of the war that redefined the understanding of the FARC insurgency as ‘war’ and not simply ‘law enforcement’ in pursuit of peace and order (as envisioned in the war/MOOTW dichotomy). This perspective’s new center of gravity was the legitimacy of the state, and not simply the drug trade (as envisioned by the U.S. in Plan Colombia). These shifts in the understanding of the conflict laid the foundation for new strategic and operational approaches towards defeating the FARC.

Marks argues that these approaches were finally elaborated once the military had a civilian partner in newly elected president Alvaro Uribe. Together, they formulated a new national strategy titled ‘Democratic Security’ to defeat the FARC that identified personal insecurity of ordinary citizens and the absence of the state in large swaths of the country to provide security as the root causes of the conflict . Thus, the new Colombian strategy was one of state building and the strengthening of institutional structures to provide for the needs of Colombian citizens. This necessitated a ‘whole-of-society’ response of which the military played only one part. However, its role was crucial since it was operationalized as counterinsurgency, consisting of offensive operations to degrade the capabilities of insurgents and narcotraffickers and defensive operations to ensure protection of the people, the state, and infrastructure. The Colombian counterinsurgency plan was not simply a top-down reorganization of institutional assets but also bottom-up, as it sought to establish soldados de mi pueblo, or home guards, in rural villages throughout the country. At the same time, Uribe and other government officials regularly held town-hall meetings that enabled them to hear new problems and suggested causes from Colombian citizens. Combined with the reconceptualization of warfare and the shared understanding of the problem formulated by Uribe and the military, Colombia was able to generate an innovative and successful response to the insurgency on both the strategic and operational levels.

What’s interesting about Marks’ description of the Colombian experience is how closely it parallels the tenets of Operational Design – reflexively learn from your environment to reframe your understanding of the problem, and develop solutions on that basis. The key difference, however, is that Marks is clear that the Colombians performed reflexivity not just on the operational level but on the strategic level, recognizing that providing security to the people required expansion of the state structures as a means of regulating existing social structures that caused personal insecurity. Counterinsurgency was just one operational means of achieving that end – although it was important, other political activities had to be articulated and performed to ensure the state’s expansion. And, how Uribe would know how to do this was not immediately apparent. He had to identify what obstacles existed to the expansion of state authority – including organizations outside of the state (such as the FARC) and those actors within it (corrupt politicians, bureaucrats, and military officers with ties to the narcotraffickers). He also had to identify what actions would be seen as legitimate by the people and the how the state and its relationship to society should be reorganized (in terms of the above boundary problems). All these problems are ones of knowledge – Uribe had to learn how to understand the problem and the social structures that caused it, and then act to reorganize the environment in which the problem exists through the expansion of the state. Only once he understood the structural causes of the problem could he formulate his strategy to change it and begin the design and planning of subsequent operations.

In looking at the content of the Democratic Security policy, its theme is striking consistent with emancipation. It identifies the referent of security as the individual citizen, and not simply the state:

Security is not regarded primarily as the security of the State, nor as the security
of the citizen without the assistance of the State. Rather, it is the protection of the citizen and democracy by the State with the solidarity and co-operation of the whole of society. . . . This is, in short, a policy for the protection of the population.”

Therefore, the state’s exists to protect the people and democracy in a shared struggle with all of society. The ‘security’ provided by the state is defined broadly – the state is to promote and protect human rights, drive sustainable development, and develop necessary infrastructure. Security thus becomes military, political, social, and economic. And, to learn how that security is to be provided, the Colombian state had to reflexively learn how to achieve and fulfill its strategic goal. Colombia has thereby elevated emancipatory politics and reflexive learning to the strategic level and not only the operational level, as is the case with American counterinsurgency doctrine. Our strategy for state-building in Afghanistan and Iraq is much less defined. We have not engaged in a reflexive process that identifies precisely our strategic end state and the existing structural obstacles and relationships that prevent the achievement of it – nor have we realized how some of our ongoing actions perpetuate the existence of structural relationships that cause personal insecurity for Afghans and Iraqis and promote the weakness of state structures.

In short, we have never engaged in strategic reflexivity. It requires that the entire American state and all partner organizations have a shared understanding of the strategic goal and a shared vision of how we will achieve it. Performing counterinsurgency operations is an important part of that strategy, but it is not enough. Every action taken by an organ of the state or partner states – whether military, paramilitary, political, or economic – needs to further the strategic goal. Otherwise, we work at cross-purposes.

Political Inception

The Bank of Kabul is going broke, and Rasmussen wants Karzai and his government to think differently:

“It is essential that they strengthen the fight against corruption,” Rasmussen said Tuesday in an interview with Washington Post reporters and editors. “All these stories about irregularities and corruption are damaging for public support for our presence in Afghanistan.
Equally important, he said, is the need for ordinary Afghans to develop confidence in their government instead of the Taliban and other insurgents.

“He must get this right,” Rasmussen said of Karzai. “And I think he understands it is crucial.”

He says he believes Karzai knows to act on corruption, but it’s actually a public wish – telling him in the most public terms what he thinks Karzai should think.  In this way, this is a discursive act that is the twice opposite of Cobb’s in Inception. Instead of its utterance in the unconscious dream world, Rasmussen speaks in the real awake world. Instead of private speech with a very limited audience, he speaks openly to the world. Rasmussenwants Karzai to have the same understanding of the corruption problem (just like Cobb wants Fischer to have the same understanding about what he does with his company), but simply speaking of the idea as if it were true without preparing the scene won’t make  Karzai believe he is in the same performance. Cobb can manipulate the dream in Inception, but Rasmussen and NATO have not successfully manipulated real life for Karzai.

NATO needs a comprehensive way to stage that performance in Afghanistan and globally.  As a political aim, they need every possible global actor – state and non-state – to treat Afghanistan as if corruption was ‘crucial’ in discursive utterances and economic exchange relationships. Karzai (and the government) socially learned corruption because of relationships that reinforced it as a normal means of exchange and loyalty. Actors who have reinforced this as a way of business include state and non-state actors, including gun-runners and the CIA. The irony is that even within the American government, our nation-building actors and agents are socially working at cross-purposes, and providing incentives (both discursive and economic) that encourage the pillaging of financial institutions contrary to officially stated nation-building policy. We lack our own coherent idea about what we do in relationship to Afghanistan, yet want Karzai to conform to whatever we demand.

First I’ve heard of this

Operationally, I’ve heard very little about what the campaign plan for Kandahar looks like – but things are beginning to take shape. From Ignatius’s latest Op-Ed:

The plan for Kandahar is that U.S. and Afghan troops will establish joint outposts in the city’s 17 precincts and surrounding areas, so that the population feels safe enough to attend the shuras, or councils. The Taliban has responded with a wave of assassinations, and Lt. Gen. David Rodriguez, who is Petraeus’s deputy, said that the offensive will succeed only if local leaders “take risks” and brave the intimidation. That’s a lot to ask of people who mistrust both America and the Karzai government, and it may be the weakest link in the U.S. plan.

When McChrystal was still in charge, I read that U.S. infantry would be mostly deployed to the outer districts of Kandahar, not directly inside the city. What the above plan sounds like are the similar to the operations used by the Marines in Ramadi in 2006 and in the Surge in Baghdad in 2007. However, I have yet to read about the start of decisive operations that would take place around Kandahar to cut off insurgent lines into the city – again, similar to the Surge. I guess we shall see.

Back Again

Sorry I dropped off the face of the earth. Early this year was consumed with taking a last exam and defending the prospectus. Some of you may have heard I took a training position with the Army’s Human Terrain System. Unfortunately, the gov’t asked me to me taken off the contract because they determined I wasn’t qualified for the position. Mind boggling, considering BAE Systems hired me because they determined I was qualified and I was paid for a month with a hotel, rental, and all expenses. I understand why people hate the gov’t for wasting money – it wasted a whole lot on me. Nonetheless, HTS is a great program and I wish I was still there.

Anyway, I’ll start blogging again since I don’t have much else to do.

Emancipation and Counterinsurgency

Ken Booth’s Theory of World Security is an immensely provocative book that takes new security concepts to their logical conclusion. Traditionally, international relations has defined security in referent to states. This is why realists always talk about ‘national security’ or the security dilemma (as one states increases its power to feel secure, it makes other states insecure which compels them to increase their power). However, new concepts have emerged like human security, which encompasses freedom from want and freedom from fear. Instead of states, the referent of security is individual human beings, and policy should be oriented to providing human security throughout the world. In a perfect world, global peace would result when no human beings felt insecure and therefore had no need for violence.

Booth takes this new conception of security and grounds it in critical IR theory, Marxism, and most importantly, the Frankfurt School’s notion of emancipation. He argues that the production of insecurity is caused by worldwide structures and processes that cause suffering, or those ‘life-determining’ conditions that prevent individuals from being truly free. Thus, to promote human security requires altering those structures, thereby creating what Booth calls ‘world security’ by emancipating human beings from those structural conditions that cause and reproduce suffering. Emancipation itself should be treated as a social practice, one that requires that we critically interrogate existing social structures to identify how they reproduce insecurity. Armed with this knowledge, we must practice emancipation by creating new structures that promote freedom and help human beings overcome their own insecurity. The result is a new social structure Booth terms an emancipatory community. “A emancipatory community is therefore a free association of individuals, recognizing their solidarity in relation to common conceptions of what it is to live an ethical life, binding people together with a sense of belonging and a distinctive network of ideas and support.” Emancipatory communities must also accept and recognize the multiple identities that people may have. In this way, they can provide ontological security`, or a stable sense of Self.

These new approaches to security do not go uncriticized. Most notable is Roland Paris’s argument that human security is really hot air, a concept so broad that it gives policy makers no meaningful guides to action. The same criticism might be applied to world security and the practice of emancipation: what does it mean to change social structures and create a emancipatory community? Aren’t these just abstract concepts that have no relation to events in the real world?

However, real world events suggest that the paradigm shift has actually taken place and that states are reorienting their policies toward human security. In fact, it is already codified in existing military doctrine. “The cornerstone of any [counterinsurgency] effort is establishing security for the civilian populace. Without a secure environment, no permanent reforms can be implemented and disorder spreads.” (p. 42) While FM 3-24 emphasizes physical security, it also stresses that counterinsurgents meet the interests and grievances of the local people by constantly interacting with them and designing operations to fulfill those requirements. (Chap. 3, pp. 97-99) More advanced doctrine, such as Commander’s Appreciation and Campaign Design, reinforces this point by emphasizing how commander’s must design military operations with the widest amount of input possible from all relevant participants:

“An architect or industrial designer has a client, but often they are not aware what the client truly wants. The client may have provided a statement of work, but this is often incomplete—there are things he wants but either forgot to ask or did not know what to ask for. If the client is a committee, say for the construction of a new hospital or the design of a new freeway, there are often disparate needs that must be taken into account in the final design. Designers learn about the problem through discourse with the client in which the designer is constantly questioning his assumptions and probing the limits of his knowledge. Designers simultaneously build an understanding of the problem through the creation of a conceptual solution or design.” (p. 13)

If campaign design is applied to the context of counterinsurgency, then the people become the primary clients of operational commanders. How commanders provide security through an operational plan must therefore take into account the people’s understanding of what it means to be secure and constantly engage the people in discourse and communication that enables both sides to collectively and collaboratively formulate a plan that results in the provision of security. The result is a popular counterinsurgent community in which all actors involved understand the problem of security similarly (that is, they have an intersubjective and shared understanding) and support each other in the production of security. This community itself can be considered a social structure that create social conditions that promotes the freedom of the people and spreads cooperative ideas about the community throughout society. Most importantly, it would meet Booth’s criteria for an emancipatory community in which individual actors share ideas and support each other in a common ethical and moral context.

The popular counterinsurgent community should be understood as only a temporary solution to the problem of long-term governance and the creation of state institutions that are seen as legitimate by the people. Initially, social structures may exist that divide the people and reproduce insecurity by fueling ethnosectarian violence or sheltering criminal networks. These structures reproduce conflict by promoting conflicting identities between groups that do not accept each other’s existence and take conflict between them to be an established fact of life. To overcome these structures requires building social connections between the people that allow them to work together with a common understanding of security that collectively identifies and eliminates threats to the community. Counterinsurgents thereby broker relations between people that overcome their conflicting identities and create political and social space for each group to accept and recognize each other. As counterinsurgents broker these connections by putting common ideas about security into practice, otherwise conflicting groups are provided opportunities to learn that they too share ideas about security, and in fact their identities do not have to be conflictual. Instead, groups can exist within a single shared identity, one that is defined by ideas about security that are realized by the social conditions created by counterinsurgents and which reflect the common ideas about security held by the people.

Ultimately, this requires that counterinsurgents must foster indigenous institutions among the people that put their ideas about security into practice, and this process begins with the formation of the popular counterinsurgent community. Once the people and counterinsurgents share ideas about security, they can jointly practice these ideas with the participation of the people. As participation grows with the popular counterinsurgent community and indigenous security institutions gain strength and become sustainable, then counterinsurgents can begin to leave the newly unified popular community. This can be considered an idealized example of emancipatory practice.

One last note: emancipation should be considered a relative term, and not absolute. In reality, no human beings are completely free from social structures, and this is true even in democratic societies which still reproduce some form of suffering. Thus, when I speak of emancipation, I really mean relative emancipation; the new structures produced by counterinsurgents will provide more freedom to the people, yet their very existence restricts freedom in one form or another. Absolute emancipation and freedom from suffering is impossible, but significant improvements and relative emancipation resulting is social stability and institutional legitimacy is possible.

Neomarxism and Thomas Barnett

I think I mentioned my turn towards Marxism lately, particularly Neomarxism in International Relations. This scholarship involves the three-volume work of Immanuel Wallerstein and Christopher Chase-Dunn. I want to briefly summarize neo-Marxist theory and then draw links to Thomas Barnett’s work.

Neomarxists begin from the fundamental assumption of historical materialism: the history of the modern world is driven by the capitalist pursuit of surplus value through the exploitation of labor divorced from the means of production. As capitalism creates new exploitive relationships between the bourgeoisie and the proletariat, it ultimately creates contradictions that bring down the entire system in a socialist revolution.

Whereas Marx conceptualized his theory in terms of a single society (drawn from observations of Great Britain), Neomarxists study the entire capitalist world-system as a single unit of analysis, with specific attention to the historical evolution of the system leading up to its present form. Of particular importance are the contradictions created by the relationships between states that lead to their rise and fall within the global capitalist system. Thus, Wallerstein shows how capitalism emerges from feudalism through the death of the Hapsburgian bid for world-empire and the decline of the commercial Italian city-states, such as Venice and Genoa. While these survived the wars of the early 16th Century, political economic supremacy gave way to the United Provinces of the Netherlands, the first hegemonic nation-state to possess a comparative advantage in a series of commodities (herring, wooden ship-building). Thus, the Netherlands becomes the first hegemonic state in the capitalist ‘core’ and exploits several ‘peripheries’ and maintains a favorable division of labor. In this way, the political apparatus that is the Dutch ‘state’ creates opportunities for the Dutch bourgeoisie to amass a surplus of capital. The construction of a favorable market requires a strong state, and this historical period sees the increasing strength of the Dutch Republic. At the same time, political organizations in the peripheries remain weak and are made dependent upon relationships with the core state. This is the political dimension of hegemony in a capitalist world-system.

However, all hegemonic states eventually decline as their comparative advantage in a set of commodities gives way to rising hegemonic states and their development of a comparative advantage in new commodities. In this way, ‘core’ status within the world economy shifts from one state to another as rising hegemons discover new and more efficient modes of production. The Netherlands declines in the late 17th Century and gives way to England, whose industrial mode of production and comparative advantage in textile production propelled it to the core of the capitalist world-economy and the incorporation of new peripheries into the world-system, namely New World colonies and Eastern Europe, particularly for foodstuffs imported by England. The terms of state strength, England experiences increasing state strength and the formation of a globe-spanning Navy and colonial administration while Poland remains a weak constitutional monarchy.  Real power remains in the hands of feudal aristocrats who import their agricultural products to the core. The industrial ‘development’ of core states and the feudal ‘backwardness’ of peripheral states are thus interrelated phenomena of the global capitalist system.

To make a long historical story more relevant to contemporary events, the 19th Century saw competing capitalist European states industrialize and all gain colonies, thereby spreading the capitalist world-system across the entire globe. British hegemony ends with the challenge posed by Nazi Germany’s bid for world-empire, and hegemony then passes to the United States whose power peaks in 1945. We have been in decline since then, and given the economic turmoil of the past year, it should be clear that our hegemony is finally slipping away. The contradictions of our capitalist economy have collapsed on themselves and we are no longer at the center of the capitalist world-economy. This is obvious given the last twenty years of American capitalism. After the Wall fell, we created capitalist relations throughout the East with the onset of a new commodity, namely information. This led to capitalist overinvestment and speculation that could not be met by the consumption of information products: hence the dot-com bubble at the turn of the millenium. Instead of truly facing our own contradictions, we created new ones by lowering interest rates and exploiting two much older commodities: real estate and finance capital. The story is still the same. We exploited these commodities to the point at which their consumption could no longer support the massive amount of investment needed to sustain this economic system and the bubble collapsed, except this time that bubble was our entire economy. Hence, 10.2% official unemployment. The Empire State, formerly the center of late 20th Century capitalism, is now broke and the federal government faces massive budget deficits. Whether or not we experience complete social disorder as predicted by John Robb is a possibility, depending of course on how we deal with our own contradictions.

Whereto from here?   The short term answer is that hegemony shifts to a new state with a more efficient mode of production and more profitable comparative advantage. The most obvious answer is China, or at least some other state that can manufacture goods more cheaply or develop new technology permitting the exchange of a new commodity (maybe energy, maybe information, etc). New semiperipheral states thereby increase in state strength and become core states, while older Core states seek to guard their economic and political stability via protectionism and socialist concessions to the proletariat, if they can afford them (universal education, universal health care). Yet, the same contradictions will lead to the decline of future core states and the rise of new ones which exploit new peripheries and control their weak states. Instability within the global system is thereby continually reproduced if the logic of the system is left unchanged.

However, there are moments in world history where agents (in this case, capitalist states) reflexively realize how their own actions reproduce instability. In weak states, such instability takes the form of terrorism and insurgency which can become global forms of political violence (see 9/11). At this reflexive moment, core states purposefully establish new relationships with peripheral states that are not exploitive but are mutually reciprocal. If true, then reflexive core states must develop a grand strategy to recognize the right of peripheral states to engage in capitalist development on their own terms, and encourage the development strong peripheral states that can propel themselves into the semi-periphery. As core states conceptualize a reflexive grand strategy, they do so as a means of resolving the contradictions created by their own participation in the global capitalist economy.

This is why Thomas Barnett’s grand strategy is so important. He argues that the United States should ensure that globalization engulfs the entire world-system. However, he also recognizes that capitalism creates in own instability within weak states that can only be resolved with strong bureaucratic institutions. Therefore, reflexive core states (America) must purposely support state-building throughout the world. Neomarxist terms are also deeply embedded his entire vision of grand strategy.  Core states are considered ‘the Old Core’, semiperipheral states are considered the ‘New Core’, while peripheral weak or failed states exist in ‘the Gap’. To resolve this contradictions Barnett calls for the creation of System Administration, or the SysAdmin, a bureaucracy that regulates the capitalist world-system by creating conditions that permit the emergence of strong states in the periphery, thereby ‘sealing the Gap’. The new relationships between Core and peripheral states becomes less exploitive and more reciprocal as each recognizes a ‘right to capital’ and the ability to regulate capitalism within its own borders.

I am not saying that the emergence of the SysAdmin will resolve all contradictions within the global capitalist economy. Far from it, as capitalism will produce new ones. However, the SysAdmin does work to create new state agents that jointly regulate the capitalist world- economy. This has already begun to happen with the emergence of the G-20, as the executive committee of the global bourgeoisie, including both old and new Core states (I think Barnett has said something to this effect, so it is not my terminology). If the G-20 acts reflexively, then it can jointly manage the contradictions produced by global capitalism  and support of strong states in the periphery, leading to a ‘new’ new Core whose states are recognized by all other states as having a right to make decisions about their participation in global capitalism. In this way, a reflexive international state system overcomes capitalist contradictions by developing the bureaucratic capacity to reproduce itself.

The point of all this is not that Barnett is a Neomarxist. . However, his grand strategy is consistent with the long-term rise and demise of the world-capitalist system. Neomarxists don’t believe that capitalism will end in a grand moment of revolution, but through a process of incremental steps in which capitalism is tamed by global political organization. Thus, the long-term outcome for Neomarxists is the emergence of a democratic world-state, one that can regulate global capitalism according to the collective action of all of humanity. If this is the outcome (some non-Marxists using a constructivist teleology even say it is inevitable), then the formation of a System Administrator is one significant step in the eventual formation of a world state. It is the administrative kernel whereby humanity begins to tame capitalism and check its own contradictions by building regulative state institutions across the globe. And, if states can reflexively recognize each other and paradoxically transcend their own boundaries (like the European Union), then the long-term development of the world state becomes something other than a mere utopian fantasy.

So whither capitalism? Absolutely, before it withers us. But whence the SysAdmin? Whence a reflexive grand strategy? Time will tell, but hopefully sooner rather than later.

To be an imperialist

The lack of blogging is due to the start of the semester, studying for a major exam, and writing a prospectus. Since Friday night I ignored that stuff and played Empire: Total War until the sun came up, and periodically reading Patrick Jackson’s Civilizing the Enemy: German Reconstruction and the Invention of the West. In between long conversations with roommate and good friend Onur Bilginer and reading Jackson’s book, I posted Steve “is civilizing the enemy” onto Facebook (the bane of my destruction), to which Ortho replied “you sound like an imperialist. I could blame this on the fact that in Empire: Total War, my Prussian Empire is currently building a mitteleuropa centered on the conquest of the Austria. However, given the fact that I pretend to write about counterinsurgency theory, a Freudian slip is more likely.

It is an established argument against intervention that the result is imperialism, and that all capitalist states have engineered political conditions in other territories to create favorable economic outcomes. In Europe, this mostly took the form of colonial imperialism, while the American tradition is more recently characterized by covert action against ‘sovereign’ states.(see Iran 1953, Guatemala 1954, Chile 1973). While labor-intensive (occupational) forms of imperialism concurred prior the assumption of global capitalist hegemony (the Spanish-American War), one could argue that imperialist practice and the violations of sovereignty have been revived with Afghanistan and Iraq. One could even say it never really had a historical pause if we include the failed intervention in Vietnam (where where a legitimate state could never have emerged out of the development program of the United States), the eternally ongoing intervention in Bosnia (where a ‘Bosnian’ people cannot exist because of the consociational institutions we coercively imposed). From a Marxist perspective, The United States has sought to build states in those nations that are pliable and quiescent to a global capitalist organization of labor, and renounce any claim to regulate, in their own territory, the organization of citizens into workers. This condition is essential to a democracy since most of the population is composed of workers. If they are the majority, they should vote their class interest and check the bourgois impulse to bend over backwards for capitalism (creating a ‘natural ‘market’ through deregulation). Intervention is a imperial way of dominating the structure of their institutional regulation of capital, and interventions have failed most disasterously when the institutions we impose have no cultural content and no legitimacy.

It is interesting to apply this relationship to imperialism/capitalism and intervention to Iraq and Afghanistan. Generally this begins with common refrain that ‘we invaded for oil’ or ‘natural resources’. Which is true in a way, because the ‘we’ is not the United States but capitalism – the US will never control the means of production of those resources. Instead, it will be Chinese companies, which are heavily investing in oil and natural gas in Iraq and Afghanistan. Yet at the same time, the states we are attempting to build are structured to be democratic, and ideally should permit groups called ‘Iraqis’ or ‘Afghans’ to regulate capitalism’s organization of their labor and resources. There is an inherent tension then between indirect incorporation of those states in global capitalism and the indirect creation of democratic institutions that can self-regulate their economies. Most importantly, and contra to traditional imperialism, we have to recognize the particular and subjective value of those institutions to Iraqis and Afghans, and thus give sovereignty real meaning. In doing so, we socially construct the boundary between Self and Other (the US and Iraq/Afghanistan): we refrain from judging their mode of ‘civilization’ by comparing it to ours and instead empathically recognize their common normative value of democracy because we both accept each other’s subjective interpretation of democracy. This avoids the purely instrumentalist (and immoral) form of intervention that treats other nations as objects that must subjected to capitalism. In a purely political sense (in terms of ‘violating’ sovereignty), this is still imperialism but only in the short term, as the long-term goal is to support an  intersubjectively recognized (by all other states in the world) sovereign institution that no longer requires direct or indirect intervention. This would be devoid of selfish conceptions of identity and value structures that is characterized by the exploitative relationships between core and peripheral states. In this way, the phrase ‘civilizing the enemy’ is completely wrong. By restraining ourselves from treating others as objects, we really civilize ourselves.

Finally, I mean to describe this reflexive form of ‘imperial’ action as an ideal-type, that can be compared to modes of ‘imperial’ action as practiced by the United States. It has only occurred in rare moments in history, and it may be true that it is happening to some extent now. Special thanks to Onur, with whom these ideas were developed as part of a reflexive solution to the dialectical tension between capitalism and democracy.

Back to the Classics

August was a ridiculously busy month (no vacations here), hence no blogging. In the meantime, Mr. Elkus has a great piece up at SWJ Blog. Rather than conceptualize new ways of thinking about war, complexity, and politics, we should recognize that these elements have always existed and our technoscientific way of thinking have also prevented us from seeing this:

Current insurgent and terrorist challenges have broken the carefully imposed (but wholly unsustainable) binary between defense and politics. It is temping to ascribe this cognitive dissonance to the maxim that insurgency and terrorism are overwhelmingly political forms of warfare. But this oft-held view denies the overwhelmingly political character of conventional engagements. It would be more accurate to state that conflict against non-state forces casts the
political dimensions of conflict into sharper view, and in doing so exposes some of the weaknesses of technoscientific thinking.

In American thought, Adam shows how this binary has generally been derived from realism and rational utilitarianism, the generally accepted paradigm of International Relations until the 1990s. During that time, this paradigm was challenged by critical IR theory, which seeks to rethink the foundations of International Relations and derive ways seeing the world that are novel yet timeless, and more grounded in classical political theory R.B.J. Walker exemplifies this trend. In Inside/Outside (written in 1993), he challenges the then dominant realist interpretation of Machiavelli’s The Prince, which expects that all states (and their Princes) will use power without regard to morality, and only with respect to their individual need to survive. Instead of Machiavelli-the-archrealist, Walker presents Machiavelli-the-republican, whose use of force (war/defense) is intimately related to his political condition. Walker uses Machiavelli’s discussion of the uses of fortresses in Chapter XX of The Prince as illustration, which argues that fortresses are only a useful form of defense if the prince in question is afraid of his people and incurs their hatred. Instead, the greatest fortress that produces the best defense is the people. (Walker 1993, 38) This same theme exists in Chapter XIX, in which Machiavelli argues that the Prince who has the loyalty of the people should not fear any conspiracy, as they will not support it. However, any action (including the use of force) that has the effect of turning the people against the Prince makes him vulnerable, and thus must fear everyone including the people.

Thus, Adam is absolutely right to say that the link between politics and defense has always existed: it is a theme that emerges in the early modern period with Machiavelli. In fact, the very notions of complexity and uncertainty that are central to the contemporary discourse on defense are fundamental to Machiavelli’s work, who instead uses the term fortuna. At best, fortune gives us a 50/50 chance of being successful in a chaotic world, and to cope with it one must be adventurous and not rigid in one’s plans (The Prince, Chapter XXV). Yet, such flexibility does not imply that an ‘ends justify the means’ approach to force is necessary, as American realism has argued. In his same discussion of Machiavelli’s understanding of fortesses, Walker points to two of Machiavelli themes, that of virtu and its fundamental connection with fortuna.

The first involves the direct connection he makes between military affairs and the idea of civic virtu, between the qualities of skill and courage, virility and virtuousity, and the requirements of citizenship with the political community. While it is true that the virile warrior may be required to engage in conflict outside the community, the qualities represented by the warrior, the man of virtu, are presented first and foremost as the qualities necessary for effective participation and citizenship within the community.

[The second theme] concerns Machiavelli’s insistence that political affairs, whether these concern fortresses or princes, must be understood and judged ‘according to circumstances’…[T]he virtu of a prince is understood in terms of a capacity to respond to fortuna, to the capricious bitch goddess who is ‘the arbiter of one half of our actions’. (Walker, 1993, 38-39)

In this sense, what Machiavelli does in the Prince is to provide

advice about how to prepare for the coming of fortuna: establish institutions, create respect for laws and customs, secure the support of the people, create an armed citizenry; above all, expect change to occur…[P]olitical life calls for the special skills appropriate for confronting fortuna: the skills of civic virtu, prudence and caution, the capacity to generate a lasting and stable order in the midst of temporal flux and contingency. (Walker, 1993, 40)

Again, these are precisely the same principles contemporary defense discourse on counterinsurgency emphasizes: the need to win the hearts and minds of the people (practicing virtu as a means of participation in a community) and the postpositivist belief that we must continually frame and reframe our perception of reality to inform us about what new actions to take or not to take in a chaotic and uncertain world (prudence and adventurism, both being necessary to deal with fortuna). Thus, while we may be moving into a new technoscientific paradigm (one that Bousquest calls chaoplexity and is defined by the concept of the network), we should remember, as Adam tells us, that this new paradigm has really always existed and must be anchored in the classic works of politics and war.