Choose your side:

Betz, Mackinlay, Rid

Farrell, Riley

It seemed hard at first

It’s time for serious change in scholarly publishing. In fact a revolution is already under way, it just hasn’t arrived in political science yet. Here’s why we should bring the budding Academic Spring to the humanities and the social sciences.

First the cause of the rebellion: the public is paying several times for research that is then not made available to the public for free. — First the taxpayer is paying our salary, at least partly; then the taxpayer is footing the bill for some of the grants that allow us to publish; third the taxpayer is indirectly funding our libraries to buy back the stuff that we write; and citizens, if you like, are paying for their children to get into our universities in order to be able to read scholarly literature in that library. It doesn’t make sense. Publicly funded research wants to be free. No wonder the system is beginning to crumble, as aptly covered by the Economist and the Guardian.

What needs to change? — Stop charging the reader for articles, and stop printing them. Doing both at once has the potential to improve scholarly debate, and in unexpected ways.

Before making the case for change, let’s quickly consider what should not change. Some of the core features of the current system are fundamentally sound. Consider three of them.

The peer-review process, even if flawed in several ways, remains a powerful and tested system that ensures quality. What’s often slowing down publication is not the peer-review process, but an outdated publishing model. In the case of one of my articles, the peer-reviewers turned around the text in four days (ok, that’s exceptional) — but then it took the journal another 18 months to get it published.

Articles also should remain static and stable, as if printed on paper, not degenerate into websites or posts. Academic texts, obviously, should continue to be professionally copy-edited; of course they should continue to have a standardized DOI number; and they should still have all the things we appreciate about print, like pagination, embedded graphs and formulas, aesthetic appeal, layout, and proper typesetting. PDFs, today’s de-facto standard, are already providing all this and should continue to do so.

Finally not all magazines will stop printing, nor should they. There’s specialized, work-related reading, and there’s fun and luxury reading. The stuff you read on the sunny terrace with your feet up and a cup of coffee, say The New York Review of Books or the Wilson Quarterly, should remain paper-based. But how many people read Terrorism and Political Violence to a glass of red wine and Bach?

You’ve probably heard the usual arguments: open-access means more readers, more transparency, more criticism by peers, therefore more quality-control, faster feedback, and more global justice because poor countries (and poor universities) can access research more easily, and therefore provide better education. These arguments are pretty powerful already. The Wellcome Trust took action, and the UK government as well. But for authors and students, there are even more arguments.

Academic publishing can take a clue or two from blogs and social media. Post (or tweet) frequently, add a personal touch now and then, and your readership will skyrocket. If you apply this logic to academic publishing, the possibilities are amazing. Bear with me.

First, single journals could publish more. Currently the number of peer-reviewed articles published by academic journals is kept artificially low by the outdated idea of having just three or four or six hardbound paper copies per year. Each print issue can only fit a certain number of texts, so even those published in online-first schemes are ultimately just queuing up for future print issues, thus clogging the system. Abolish the bottleneck of the obsolete print issue that nobody reads in print any more anyway, and more articles can be published faster.

Second, single journals would get more readers. If more content — peer-reviewed, quality-controlled, in proper PDFs — is coming online for free, more people would go look more often. Now, why not think outside the box, and get the scholars to add a personal note on the journal’s website about how they did the research, what the difficulties were, an anecdote from the field, and then post this as a short teaser when the article comes out — even more readers would come and click through to the actual research paper.

Third, single journals could become broader. As a result of more content and more readers, some journals could perhaps overcome their narrow specializations. A given journal has to publish a certain number of articles that apply a given theory or methodology per year, just to keep its reputation among highly specialized academic communities. Space constraints therefore result in more specialization. But if a journal can serve several specialized communities with more content at the same time, the boundaries between sub-debates and sub-fields could become more permeable. That would be a hugely valuable service for the academy, and for the public.

“But publishing still costs money,” you will say. Yes it does. But, first, not as much as the existing publishing empires are charging — no other than the Economist recently called their business model a “licence to print money” (Elsevier’s 2011 profit was £768m). Even Harvard said it could no longer afford the rising prices.

Secondly, there are better business models than the current one which rips off the public several times at once. The Public Library of Science (PLoS), a foundation that publishes a number of leading science journals, is funded mainly through fees by the author. That may sound strange at first glance to some, but if you think about it the model is far superior. Third models exist as well.

And then: why not be really innovative? Journals could still sell printed matter, for instance a print-on-demand version of articles that the reader could individually select and order, say for single articles or combined pieces from different journals. Think a thematic special issue. And why not offer a truly attractive print issue for subscription, say, a journal’s top-dozen most-downloaded, or most-cited, articles per year in one binding? That would be a must-read for students and scholars alike. I would subscribe to a few of such “best-of” issues, and I’m not subscribing to any scholarly print journal now.

So, Elsevier, Springer, Wiley, Taylor & Francis: it’s springtime. Scholarly knowledge wants to be free. The lettered masses are gathering, icepicks in hand, eagerly squinting beyond the paywall, up to the fortified ivory tower, impatiently asking, What are your suggestions for reform?

The options are either serious reform or creeping revolution — it’s only a question of time. Ok, tenured professors will probably not smash your windows with bricks. But remember Stevan Harnad’s “Subversive Proposal“? The Berlin Declaration? Now even Harvard University is asking scholars to consider resigning from editorial boards. Expect more.

In another classic week for the British government, the austerity games have claimed another badly chosen victim.. that of the mostly affluent and fickle foreign business traveller.. there’s literally nothing a business traveller wants more than to stand cheek by jowl with other fed-up sweaty business travellers for three hours to be badly greeted by a poorly paid, fed up and in dwindling numbers border guard at Heathrow. I mean, it would certainly encourage me to want to come back: wouldn’t it you? Shares in video-conferencing up. Shares in the airports operator, down. But this is being done for security. So it’s very important. Very, very important. Particularly when we have our £20billion sports day to hold in the summer. Best set up some missile sites to shoot down passenger planes too. But more of this later.

The government’s classic week continued to brew up though. The Prime Minister’s text messages to and from the former editor of the defunct News of the World are to be handed over to the Leveson inquiry (cross your fingers and hope for the best!), that best of spoonerisms has been widely accused of breaching the ministerial code (even by former Cabinet Secretary Lord Butler – he of Butler Report fame) and of being a human shield for the PM (which might become an important role as the Leveson train chugs on) and to show that he’s not an unpleasant bloke the PM was atrociously rude to the octogenarian Dennis Skinner. And let’s face it, when you really want to show how tough you are.. you should always go and find the nearest 80year old to be rude to (ummmm). It was a hero’s response, statesman like, composed. What’s that you say? He looked flustered and purple. Oh, that’s the most statesman like look.

But all of this is the Life on Mars version of politics. The lost decade of the 70s is back in. High unemployment, economy on the skids, bad fashion sense, and a government listing badly only two years in. All Cameron needs is a pipe, or a yacht.. the latter more likely than the former one feels.

Under the radar, however, comes the European Parliament’s decision to ratify the Passenger Name Record agreement (PNR)with the US (well, effectively the Department for Homeland Security). To put cards on the table I did some work on this in 2010, and even went to brief some US and EU politicians on it too.. so I have views. Which on that occasion ran to twenty odd pages, an exec summary and a short presentation.. REF Gods, note the potential impact… My problem with this particular agreement was:

Absence of reciprocity – the flow of information was all one way, and there was a blank no to the idea that it would come the other way.

Tradability – my view was that the EU had a valuable commodity (information) and should barter it. Giving it up ‘for free’ was irrational: still is.

Extraterritoriality – the EU had no sensible defence to the extraterritoriality of these or other rules. Only in container scanning has a sensible arrangement been reached where both the EU and the US born the extra costs of this enhanced security. That seems entirely reasonable to me.

Ownership – once the data has been shared the EU has no effective control over it (obviously) nor where it might end up. That’s not to say the DHS would do anything unpleasant or untoward with the information, this is more a civil liberties-privacy point. This data becomes further and further remote from the object behind the data – you or I.

Scope – if the agreement has been pared down to just being that PNR affecting transatlantic movements then I am more content with it than before: a citizen can effectively opt out of the provisions by not travelling across the Atlantic. Previous proposals had included all EU PNR data regardless of its transatlantic qualities or not, that seemed disproportionate to me.

So, to connect up the two parts of this post. You have on the one hand a ratcheting of the security measures regarding travel, both on the domestic border and transatlantically, whilst reducing the money to do so (within the European area) *note though, that this implies the absence of preventive intelligence.. border guarding is like goal keeping, if it’s down to your keeper you’re in big trouble. We should be able to observe an off-shoring of European security to our American cousins, which is not without implication, particularly as – in the case of UK – US  intel relations they’re unsure of the leak-proof-ness of ours courts. For me, this is a re-hash of the old ‘sharing the burden’ vibe in military affairs – if us Europeans are serious about security we have to behave seriously about it. We either have to lay down our own standards and markers and stand behind them, or we comply to US standards (ourselves, not just rely on the US to help us out) and fund them appropriately. It’s exasperating that we have to observe this now in security as we had done in military affairs.

If you don’t learn from history, you’re doomed to repeat it. It’s Life on Mars… but without the cool car..

This spring the Department of War Studies is turning 50, as you probably saw already. To honour the occasion, the Department is hosting a series of conversations throughout the spring under the banner “War Studies at 50.” In these seminars, senior faculty and their guests will discuss the evolution and impact of the work of the Department in their academic and professional communities — with senior officers, political operators, or other outside guests.

The first episode — on The Navy and War Studies – was just published. The discussion features Britain’s two only chairs of naval history, KCL’s Andrew Lambert and Eric Grove from Salford University, a KCL alumnus from the 1970s. Historically it seemed apt to start the series with the Navy, as it was Professor Sir John Laughton who gave King’s College London a leading role in the development of academic naval history in Britain — in the 1880s.

For those of you interested in a bit of history on war studies more generally, we recommend an article by Brian Holden Reid, “Michael Howard and the Evolution of Modern War Studies,” from The Journal of Military History, 2009, unfortunately behind a paywall.

Upcoming episodes include 30-minute podcasts on

• Terrorism, Radicalization & War Studies, with Lord John Alderdice and Peter Neumann
• Norms, Ethics & War Studies, with Chris Brown and Mervyn Frost
• Counterinsurgency & War Studies, with Lt-Gen Jonathon Riley and Theo Farrell
• Cyber Security & War Studies, with Sir David Omand and Thomas Rid
• Insurgency, Political Violence & War Studies, with John Mackinlay and David Betz
• The United Nations & War Studies, with Matthew Preston and Mats Berdal
• The Army & War Studies, with Maj-Gen Mungo Melvin and Brian Holden Reid

And many more …

We recommend subscribing to the Department’s podcast, where a new episodes will be published every Wednesday for the next few months.

The Malayan Emergency is back in the news – again. And once again, bloggers and pundits are invoking this British campaign from the 1950s to say something new about the wars of today. If one were to anthropomorphize the campaign, one would have to feel sorry for the Malayan Emergency: buried only to be repeatedly exhumed and used, in the most simple way, as ammunition for arguments largely unrelated to it. Held up by some as the paragon of counterinsurgencies, it is more frequently derided by others for failing to meet frankly ridiculous standards. All too often missing in this never-ending carousel of a polemic is a genuine interest in the campaign on its own terms.

Exhibit A is the recently penned review of the campaign by Sergio Miller, posted at the Small Wars Journal. To be fair to Miller, he appears to be genuinely interested in the Malayan Emergency and has done some solid research on the case. The text is in many ways good. The trouble is his ‘lede’, or the use to which he puts his research. When Miller titles his article ‘Malaya: The Myth of Hearts and Minds’, he unwittingly or deliberately enters the fray between counterinsurgency proponents (who use the Malaya campaign to validate their doctrine) and counterinsurgency critics (who think the doctrine is frankly suspect). He also picks his side, as dismissing ‘hearts and minds’ and dismissing the Malayan Emergency’s historiography are key hobbies of those who resent the U.S. Army’s adoption of counterinsurgency and want to use the doctrine as a punching bag.

It would be one thing if the article proved that hearts and minds in Malaya was a myth but the author actually ends up arguing something else, leaving some confusion about what is actually being said. First, Miller notes that, at a symposium examining the Emergency, ‘none of the British participants (all military) spoke of winning Malay hearts and minds by military force’ (emphasis in original). But as he goes on to explain, this related to the division of labour in Malaya, which left the police in charge of community engagement. For the Army, ‘There was limited contact with Malay civilians, other than jungle aborigines and Dayaks, used as scouts. Good relations were maintained but this was a matter of pragmatic common sense, not doctrine’.

From this, the conclusion could be drawn that the military should not be used to ‘win hearts and minds’; that this is a civilian task. Still, this division of labour was possible in Malaya only because the British had a full colonial presence there, something modern states typically lack when going to war. Thus, the military has become the main muscle of expeditionary operations, where they are forced to chase insurgents all while engaging with the population and honouring other traditionally ‘civilian’ duties. This is a serious conundrum of modern counterinsurgency but it cannot be solved by basing our division of labour on a colonial infrastructure that no longer exists.

The second implication might be that winning hearts and minds did not occur at all, either by the military or the police and that it was therefore irrelevant to the success of the campaign. If this is Miller’s meaning, he ends up arguing against himself. He writes that ‘it was the consistent show of reasonableness that won over the people of Malaya and the problem was still easier once the country became self-governing’. He continues by explaining that ‘Templer’s hearts and minds was first an economic and social policy, laced with political promises that also served a military purpose’. The British gave the local population, even the transplanted communities ‘a good deal, not least because the policy increased employment’.

From all this and other statements in the article, the conclusion that ‘hearts and minds’ is a myth seems somewhat puzzling. A cynic might suggest that Miller used this lede to sell what would otherwise have been a mere account of what happened in Malaya – a far less interesting story to a bloodthirsty audience. I wouldn’t want to impugn Miller in this way. Instead there appears to be some confusion – or at least disagreement – on what hearts and minds really means.

Miller does not appear to see the many examples of goodwill included in the article as proof of a hearts and mind effort; in fact he explicitly excludes them from consideration. For example, Miller writes that ‘units did interact with nearby settlements… and they were assiduous in respecting local custom and making an effort to learn the (difficult) language’. But this, he argues, was not about ‘hearts and minds’ but ‘more “get to know your neighbour” affairs’. Similarly, Miller appears to see no tension between the broader argument of the piece and his anecdote of one officer ‘bring[ing] along the regimental band to entertain the natives before sitting down for a village feast’.

The reader is left puzzled, then, about what winning hearts and minds might look like. The one instance that Miller paints as such is the ‘handing out [of] sweets and other presents’ to local children – ‘the one example’, Miller writes, ‘where it may be stated that the Army indulged in winning “hearts and minds”… If that is the test by which we understand ‘hearts and minds’, I wonder about the utility of our findings. First, what distinguishes handing out sweets from the other, more serious examples of constructive civil engagement in the article? Second, has it not been firmly established by this point that ‘winning hearts and minds’ entails much more than simply ‘being nice’? Assessing the importance of hearts and minds can no doubt be fruitful, but we must first be clear about what is meant by this term.

Miller later refines his argument: the campaign did in fact win hearts and minds, but they were won ‘not by the British but by the Alliance Government’. Again, this thesis seems to contradict the many anecdotes of community engagement in the article but even if it didn’t, what does it matter that support was won by the local government rather than intervening forces? Isn’t that the way it is supposed to be in counterinsurgency, where the legitimacy of the local government is under threat? It would be one thing if the Alliance Government and the British authorities were operating at cross-purposes, but as Miller himself points out, in the process of getting ‘Malays talking to Malays’, ‘the British played an important role facilitating this dialogue and maintaining stability’.

All this talk of hearts and minds leads nicely to exhibit B: a Guardian article detailing recently unearthed Colonial Office files on the Emergency. The article leads with the revelation that the counterinsurgency campaign in Malaya included the ‘elimination’ of guerrilla leaders. Well frankly I am shocked! In a war, no less! Yet on Twitter and elsewhere, this article has been leapt upon to show, again, just how little the British and its partners cared about hearts and minds.

The new files are interesting from a historical perspective and the Guardian should be commended for covering the recovery of these long-lost documents. But on the basis of what we’ve seen so far, these files do not say anything particularly new or surprising about the campaign. Yes, lethal force was used in Malaya, as it always is in armed conflicts. And yes, there were instances of abuse in Malaya, as there are in all conflicts. The question left unanswered by this article is whether abuse marked the campaign as a whole or was an exception to the rule.[1] So to read this article in isolation and to conclude that hearts and minds was a sham, that the campaign was one of terror and abuse and that counterinsurgency doctrine is therefore entirely bogus, reveals a very parochial mindset that says very little about Malaya.

The point of this post is not to say that winning hearts and minds is strategically decisive, fantastic, and should always take place. Those are separate debates. What is worrying is the hurry with which historical material is weaponised to score points in more recent yet unrelated debates. Of course analytical shortcuts are sometimes necessary but they should always be faithful to fuller accounts that treat the past on its own merits.

By ways of conclusion, let’s quickly deal with one more Malaya-related argument currently in circulation: that the role of Gerard Templer has been exaggerated at the expense of Harold Briggs so as to sell the ‘COIN narrative’. This argument is most often advanced by Gian Gentile and the target is typically John Nagl’s research. I do not understand where this Briggs vs. Templer stand-off comes from but I suspect it was constructed to resonate with the Westmoreland vs. Abrams debate and the separate Casey vs. Petraeus debate in Iraq. In other words, if Briggs can be shown to have been important in Malaya, then Casey mattered in Iraq and the counterinsurgency fanfare around Petraeus can be proved all wrong. This type of historical analysis by analogy is deeply troubling. What’s more, all of the serious scholarship on Malaya (Nagl included) recognises the critical role played by Briggs during his time as Director of Operations. If there is truly a problem with the historiography on Malaya in this regard, let’s discuss it. But let’s be careful so that we don’t talk about Malaya when we actually mean Iraq.

Does the UK have a competitive stance?

Do we know who our competitors are?

Do we know how to disaggregate the interests of – for example – investors from ‘national interest’? Is it conceptually possible to do so?

I was reminded of the seminal European studies thesis by the late and great Alan Milward (the European rescue of the nation state) following a ferocious handbagging from a doyenne of the defence community who thinks I’m too soft Anglo-French defence cooperation. Francophilia is not normally one of the bumper stickers I wear… This Dover was told in no uncertain terms that defence cooperation is a complete anathema: all attempts at cooperation have had a rats in a bag dynamic, of naked competition.. even worse than in open competition. If this is right, it would have reasonably bad connotations for the thinking I did on European defence cooperation in the early 2000s and also for the Anglo-French defence initiatives 2010/2012.

But if we delve deeper into the handbagging, there is a deeper problem that sounds a little like a bad graduate essay:

Can we know what the national interest is?

Is it a fixed concept? (Almost certainly not). Is it determined by a particular set of actors (and here we can be reminded of the Yes Prime Minister scene when Sir Humphrey and Jim Hacker contemplate whether it is set by the US or whether Humphrey’s ‘heretical’ position of it being the Cabinet prevails).. but we could also add ‘big business’ to this list, partly because of financial services accounting for 25% of UK GDP, but also because of the lurid accusations of what 250k buys you in the UK… Lib-Dem fundraisers take note..there is – allegedly – a different path to getting your collective voices heard (hoho). But the answer to the question of ‘can we know what the national interest is’ somewhat tailors any further response. Turned on its head, how do we know that collaboration with French defence industries is against our national interest?

We could impose some arbitrary markers:

Development and maintenance of research capacity

Redefinition of capability, linked to effect.

Do we need to measure against the relativity of our competitors strengths, and the fluidity of this? Probably yes. The Economist two weeks ago had an investment comparator for defence spending, in which the ‘threat’ from the Chinese looked very modest indeed.

Do our competitors have a competitive stance?

This would need to be systematised, but anecdotally the answer is yes. The more pertinent question is why the UK is so uncompetitive. Why do other nations have a clearer sense of their national interest or national purpose? The Americans have the American dream and a set of stable (above religion and other-identity) core messages that the vast majority buy into, whilst if we turn to the French again, there is a stable sense of a divide between the public and private space and what is expected in the public sphere – a set of secular values to be adhered to by all those claiming to be French: a French dream, if you like. Which is why the debates about headscarves has caused them such pain. It has been written ad-nauseum that the UK has no such comparative understanding, nor dream. Indeed, flying the national flag here is popularly seen as being one step short of fascist or ‘terribly working class’… no such problems across the Atlantic.

So, what we seem to have are a multitude of disparate lines that all seem indicative of a loss of sense of value or national interest, but with no overarching sense. Nothing to tie these lines up. And to be clear these lines might include:

Unregulated investment access to UK markets

Loss of counterespionage capacity (be it this year or many – see Independent)

Shrinkage of defence industrial capacity

Interference with and shrinkage of research capacity

Reframing of educational quality into matrices that have the effect of degrading standards, and thus our future competitiveness.

Use of management matrices – degrading all public service delivery

Inability to project a unified set of goals – ‘a dream’.

Fracture of elites and the ordinary citizen

Reframing of the social contract – re: austerity and localism.

And all of these are, I think, connected to the notion of having a competitive stance. Of understanding what makes the UK competitive in the international system. Because from this lay-person’s perspective what we appear to be seeing is a fracture of the elites (be they political, economic or the concentric circle in between), from the ordinary citizen, which is domestic concern but has been partly driven by how the UK has performed or interacted in this ‘increasingly globalised world’. And then similarly from this lay-person’s perspective, we have what would seem to me a process of managed decline. It is most starkly seen in the defence sector, which is on a steeper curve than decline implies, but across the board of manufacturing (now only 8% of economic output) and other areas of activity.

To skew Milward’s claim, if the EU and modern forms of globalisation are the rescue of the national state… they left the UK behind. The first step in addressing it, is to conceptually accept that this is the case, and then for there to be a proper effort in understanding what competition means and how the UK can compete.

Due to sleep deprivation, it took me a while to work out why John Humphrys was talking about Liberia on Radio 4′s Today Programme this morning (reason: he was broadcasting from there). One of the responses to this came from Richard Dowden, Director of the Royal African Society. As Dowden is a bit of a heavyweight in commentary on African affairs, his sometimes scathing remarks are worth mulling over:

For the past ten years many African countries have been growing at rates we in the West can only dream about – thanks largely to an emerging middle class, mobile phones and China’s demand for its raw materials. Now our businesses are following the Chinese into Africa looking for its fabled wealth. Africa is now a place for investment. Liberia may not be the best example of this, but wherever you go you will find “old” Africa and “new” Africa close by. As Mali heads into civil war, its neighbour Senegal holds a good election and changes its president. But our news editors cannot comprehend that complexity of Africa – that it can be both poor and disease-ridden and rich and dynamic at the same time, sometimes in the same village. To be a proper news story and fit into the outdated news agenda, it has to be one or the other.

The thrust of Dowden’s argument is that Humphrys is trotting out the same old tropes about Africa and not really explaining anything. In fact, no-one does, which I’d largely agree with. Mostly, his argument boils down to two things: Africa is typically depicted as a bad and dangerous place, and Africans usually have to put up with the suggested solution of parachuting aid/aid workers in to solve problems that they are depicted as being unable to solve themselves. On the latter point, yup, he’s bang on the money. The former point, however, strikes me as a bit of a straw man argument, when considered in comparison to the way mainstream media depicts pretty much everything outside our fair realm.

A lot of the problem, as I see it, comes down to respect. Humans tend to like being respected. We like to see ourselves as important creatures and the things that we do in between birth and death as having some semblance of meaning. Herein lies the punchline to The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy, in which our entire planet is summed up as ‘Mostly harmless’. Given the expansive nature of the universe, such a definition makes sense, a galactic empire might warrant some detail, but a bunch of apes clinging to a rock and barely able to make it to the moon and back, let alone prevent the demolition of our little space rock would, in Douglas Adams’ view, warrant the ‘mostly harmless’ tag.

To bring this back from the realms of comedy sci-fi, the reason Africa gets the opposite treatment is the same way that most of the world gets the opposite treatment: danger is important. There are differences, I mean, the whole ‘BRIC’ tagging tends to erase Chechnya, the Naxalites, and Uighurs from our perception of Brazil, Russia, India and China, in search of a simple narrative of who gets to run the planet. But really, when we think about it, we tend to get a bad picture of the entire outside world. America – war in Afghanistan, religious nutters angling for President, mid-west tornado etc. Germany – Big bad Merkel stomping on European democracy, Greece – Unemployed people, Spain – Unemployed people, Italy – Unemployed people and Berlusconi (regardless of current political status), France – French people.* I think, on balance, the world as presented by the mainstream media is biased against anywhere outside our own borders. If Africans happen to think their presentation in the British mainstream media is bad, please spare a thought for Argentina, who make the news in relation to the Falklands and little else, with maybe a blip when they defaulted on their debts almost a decade ago. That’s a country of about 40 million people, and the only thing we really care about is their intentions towards a rock in the south Atlantic.

I actually think Dowden is wrong. News editors can comprehend the complexity of Africa, as they can comprehend the complexity of just about everywhere. The point is that they don’t care. News editors have one story: interesting. If it isn’t interesting or noteworthy, it doesn’t get a look in. The reason the Daily Mail is currently kicking arse in the UK is that they’ve figured that people are more interested in celebrity bikini pictures than foreign affairs. That news agenda again: interesting. How stories usually get there is by being ‘good’ or ‘bad’. This isn’t an attempt to ‘fit’ a continent to a news agenda, it is a simple selection process by which bland stuff that most people won’t bother with gets tossed out the window.

The problem is that people take offence when other people don’t care, or rather, only care about the bad bits. I think it’s an unfair criticism. Personally speaking, I don’t have time to keep up to date on the ins and outs of every country in the world. No-one does. That’s why we create little mental baskets like ‘Africa’ to describe a continent as diverse as, well, any other continent. South America has a ton of indigenous peoples, the Spanish/Portuguese barrier and so on. North America does, too, at least when the Americans don’t try to reduce it to Canada/USA/Mexico. Anyone trying to classify ‘Asia’ as a monoculture would rightly get laughed out of whichever room they were speaking in, and Europe is pretty diverse as well. Context, the enemy of strategists everywhere, works both ways. I lived in New York for a couple of months last year, and the only time the UK came up on the news was when the royal wedding happened – so much for the ‘special relationship’. Countries at peace, but struggling to get by, aren’t going to make the news on a regular basis – there will always be a war, or a flood, or a cute panda bear or tiger out there to bump them off the mainstream agenda. So really, it doesn’t matter if poor and rich are living in the same village, just as it doesn’t matter that Chelsea and Westminster haven’t managed to deport all their non-millionaire residents to zone 6 in London, news organisations in search of a story will always tend t0 grab onto one or the other, regardless of proximity. Just wait until western companies start outsourcing to Africa en masse and these countries replace India in the ‘they took our jobs’ stakes/popular imagination, then Dowden will have some really biased reporting to contend with.

*NB – a joke, made by someone from France’s implacable foe/ally/EU bedfellow. Please don’t shout at me for it.

James Corum passed on a call for papers put out by the International Society of Military Sciences. The conference will be in Kingston, Ontario, at the Royal Military College of Canada, and it will be about “balancing” domestic and international security. The call only alludes to a budgetary balancing act, given ever tighter constraints on defence spending practically everywhere.

But arguably the conceptual balancing act between internal and external security is even more pressing, and more interesting, that tight purses would imply: think counter-insurgency, drone strikes, special forces raids, cyber attacks, interventions in uprisings, the evolving shape of extremism and militancy, lone wolves, subversion, even deterrence and political violence — all scenarios in which internal and external security needs to be balanced, balanced conceptually, politically, operationally, legally. Expect some of the most interesting and most important future questions in the discipline to be about drawing and redrawing that line.

And in that context: here’s another call, by the Gerda Henkel Foundation, this time for proposals, “Security, Society, and the State.”

Tim Stevens has written a quick piece over on his blog about the popular confusion between ‘cyberwar’ and ‘drones’. Since Tim is researching concepts associated with cyber warfare and I am researching bits and bobs associated with drones, we often find ourselves rolling our eyes at the same pieces of mis-informed commentary. For some reason, everything to do with computers gets labelled ‘information warfare’ and dumped in the same intellectual box, even though IW is out of use, a point Tim makes quite eloquently.

In my mind, one of the most interesting differences between the two fields is the fear of autonomy. Thanks to James Cameron, we know that machine autonomy will give rise to the end of civilisation as we know it, war against the machines, two decent films and some ropey sequels. Programs designed to autonomously parse information from the ‘real world’ are considered incredibly dangerous when attached to a weapons system that could deliver lethal effects. On the other hand, autonomous self replicating computer viruses are a fact of life in the computer world. If you run a computer attached to other computers, it will get infected. Even the USAF had this problem with air-gapped systems. We take one autonomous programme/system as the harbinger of doom, while we have quite accepted the other. We wake up in cold sweats about Schwarzenegger yet accept the fact that we will never, ever, live in a world free of harmful self-replicating computer programmes. The advent of Stuxnet doesn’t change that basic fact about the electronic world, for all that I’ve read on the matter, including some half-baked ideas about controlling ‘cyberweapons’, I haven’t yet encountered someone silly enough to advocate the elimination of computer viruses in the same way that people talk of eliminating robotic weapons systems. The difference in advocated solutions strikes me as odd, because the ‘nightmare scenario’ of something Stuxnet-ty causing a nuclear meltdown seems far worse than autonomous drones. Maybe people haven’t quite accepted that robotic weapons systems are already here and also here to stay.

Oh, and by the way, if war ever does go completely robotic (probably not going to happen) – my money is on South Korea for world domination in the latter half of the 21st Century.

This week’s furor about Peter Cruddas, co-treasurer of the Conservative Party, offering the opportunity to suggest policies in exchange for cash is unlikely to die down for quite some time.

But I’d like to play devil’s advocate for a moment and propose a (possibly slightly far fetched) counterpoint: why shouldn’t we let parties accept policy suggestions in exchange for donations?

We live in a democracy, in which politicans secure power through means of a popular vote, a vote which depends on the government’s ability to deliver what the people want. If they deliver it, they stay in place. If they don’t, they get voted out.

Let’s imagine for a minute an alternate history in the Cruddas Saga, in which three imaginary things had occured:
1. The newspaper representatives had genuinely been potential donors.
2. That Peter Cruddas did indeed have the power to arrange donor input into Tory policy committees.
3. That the donors had signed up and then provided an idea to the policy committees to consider.

If the idea put forward  had been discriminatory, partisan or simply self-serving, then the Tory party would have been nuts to pick it up: their existence in power relies on winning elections, and to do that you need popular support. Advancing an unpopular policy is a sure way to lose support. If however, in a fit of madness, the Tories had decided to accept the bad idea and run with it, then the system’s safety net would have kicked into gear - the policy would have reduced their popularity and decreased their chances of being re-elected. Alternatively, if the idea had been a good or selfless one that resonated with the people, then fine - the people’s will would still have been served (and we got the good advice for free no less!).

Of course, the obvious rebuttal is to argue that the added money provided by political donors would allow a party to mask or gloss its actions through publicity and – dare I say it - propaganda. But this represents an overly pessimistic view. Positive marketing can only go so far – if I’m waiting on a station for a train and it’s running late, it doesn’t matter how many adverts the rail provider plays about their high quality services, I’m still stuck fuming on a station and I’m going to be hacked off.

For those who aren’t yet convinced, consider this – America pumped billions of dollars into supporting Chiang Kai-shek’s Nationalist regime in China between 1945 and 1949. But no matter how much money they spent, they were never able to persuade the Chinese public that the regime was not corrupt; that inflation was not rife; that the party was not going to lose the war; and that generally the country was going in the right direction. Money given directly to a ruling party does not guarantee popularity amongst its people.

The model that scares me more is the one where donors offer money directly to the public in exchange for votes (“Vote for my candidate, and I’ll build your community an ice rink. Vote for the other candidate and you’ll get nothing”).

We saw an international relations versus of this in the 2000 when the West offered up the Serbian people a deal: Vote Slobodan Milosevic out and we’ll lift our economic sanctions. Vote him in again, and we’ll keep on squeezing you until the pips squeak. The Serbs promptly voted Milosevic out (okay, there were other reasons too – but the economic…’incentive’…certainly helped!).

So, no, I’m not really afraid of donors being allowed to suggest ideas to party policy committees in exchange for money – any party that follows a policy of accepting and running with ideas that fail to serve the wider country will quickly find themselves voted out of power. The very institution of democracy protects us.

I’ll start worrying instead when the donors turn their attention to us and start offering us cash or other incentives in exchange for our votes directly.