Just an asteroid miner's daughter

I do just love it with ethics, international law, and totally ridiculous schemes for outer space coalesce to form a nice little nerd loaf. Take, for instance, this discussion on the ethics of mining asteroids. On the one hand, there's enough metal in those things to build star ships. That's right, star ships! Warp speed and what not.

On the other hand, the glut of materials on earth's raw materials market would basically shutter the economies of entire nations, including some pretty big ones. Is warp speed worth mass starvation? Depends on the particular brand of nasty capitalist you speak to.

Still, mining in space... pretty cool. And the legal discussion around it will also give IR people a nice distraction for the next 150 odd years.

Neoliberalism goes boom

I'll be the first to admit that my grasp of economics and complex theories of capital and class sometimes escape me. I'm just not a theory guy. Anyway, this video is both concise and amusing.

Neoliberalism as Water Balloon from Tim McCaskell on Vimeo.

Hat tip: Africa is a Country

Bass ackwards ways to fight piracy

Friends, today President I Wanna Hold Your Hand's secretary of state, Hillary Clinton, announced the brand spanking new plan for the U.S. government to beat those pirates off the coast of Somalia. Cue shouts of jubilation and nationalistic chants of "3 Amer'kan bullets, 3 dead pirates!"

Here I thought that the Obama administration was doing the right thing by cooling the national jets on this War on Terrrrrrr business, but it looks like they weren't banking on there being terr'ists on boats.

In case you haven't yet figured it out by the tone of this post so far, I think their plan sucks. Just like most of the world's terrorists, these pirates are being driven by economic interests much more so than any sort of ideology, anti-Western vendettas, etc. After nearly 20 years of anarchy, Somalia is an absurdly poor nation, the subject of neglect from would be patrons both foreign and domestic. Food is hard to come by, and it's gotten harder to come by in coastal villages by the mysterious appearance of foreign fishing vessels along a coastline with no organized military force to protect it. That same unprotected coast has also been home to mysterious dumps of nuclear waste. This has made even subsistence fishing a real chore along the coast, which only makes Somalis more dependent on foreign aid, which only continues to exacerbate the alleged lack of local capacity for self rule. Perhaps if all these do-gooder international types really had Somali best interests at heart, they would save some Somali fish for some actual Somalis. Plus, shooting pirates causes the locals to (rightly) resent international intervention even more. Don't think that only Americans get pissed off when their countrymen die in attacks.

I don't want to paint the pirates as heros or freedom fighters, because they're not. They do, however, have a legitimate greivance (or, at least the first lot did -- of course some folks have just joined in for the fun) that perhaps needs to be addressed. The U.S. is right to send representatives to the next donor conference, but donor conferences are silly things that often only amount to grandiose declarations about shit that will be done, rather than, you know, actually doing shit.

Much of the developed world's policy towards Somalia (and Somaliland therein) needs a serious rethink, and just shooting pirates simply won't be part of the real solution.

Kenya: land of 1,000 explanations

As many of you are aware, there's been a bit of turmoil in Kenya since they had some elections that smelled fishy. While apparently most of the violence has calmed down, the situation is apparently still quite tense. But why did things go so bad, so fast, in the first place? I don't have an answer to that question, but I'll gladly point you towards several people who do:

• Joel Barkan says it's basically a question of competing ethnic groups.
• Colin Kahl follows down that path and adds agricultural land scarcity into the mix.
• Stephanie Hanson goes a different route and suggests that the increasingly young Kenyan population is tired cronyism among the older political elite.
• Also in the "it's politics more than ethnicity" camp are Steven Fish and Matthew Kroenig, who argue that the weak national parliament is to blame.
  
• Finally, Aidan Hartley posits that a superficial process of democratization is to blame.
  

This looks like an especially tricky multiple choice test, doesn't it? Lacking any deep base of knowledge about Kenya, its people and its politics, I'm inclined to believe all of these people are right to some degree -- if for no other reason than that taken individually, their explanations are too simplistic to stand on their own.

However, one can piece these varying explanations into a framework that will probably start to sound familiar. The colonial power established a system of governance that favored a particular group(s) over others. With their hands on the levers of economic and political power, this favored group took advantage of more than its fair share of the country's resources. Realizing that this power was so lucrative, those in charge derailed any sort of democratic process for the sake of their own wealth. With checks on executive power effectively eliminated, the economy is plundered until change is demanded from below. Seeking to provide only enough "change" to keep the masses at bay, the elite "opens up" the political process. However, when real electoral competition sneaks in the back door, suddenly the openness ends and the population -- now bigger and younger than it was when this system first came into shape -- becomes quite disgruntled, and so here we are today.

Of course, this is an overly simplistic model too, and one completely lacking in situational context. But it does try to take into account a deeper historical perspective than often gets tossed around the punditocracy. In short, if you're looking for the root of any given conflict, and don't dig any more than thirty years deep, you're going to come up short. Here too, we see how academic biases to certain points of view color the analysis provided.

But this is also a common problem one finds in conflict resolution generally. There are often seventeen or so correct answers to one problem. In Kenya, the key to resolving this crisis will be to figure out which roots to address, and when.

Understanding the intensity and complexity of the Niger Delta

A sadly under-reported African conflict (admittedly, many if not all African conflicts are under-reported in U.S. media) is the ongoing wave of insurgency in the Niger Delta area of Nigeria. The oil rich area has long been a bed of tension, with the oil itself as one of the main drivers of the conflict. In the summer of 2006, I was fortunate enough to be able to participate in a training put on by AU's Peacebuilding and Development Institute, where there were several participants from Rivers State, home to the main city of Port Harcourt and now at the center of recent violence. One of those participants was then a state government minister in Rivers, and I was a part of a working group at that training aimed at developing new peacebuilding initiatives in the Delta region. We've been in sporadic contact since, and it's my understanding that events have overtaken some of the initiatives we considered. I don't know how the April elections affected his job (but I'm reminded to drop him a line).

In any event, a must read article by Michael Watts has just been posted to the Online Africa Policy Forum. He gives an excellent synopsis of the many dynamics in this multi-faceted conflict. Go check it out. Clearly, the Delta conflict poses a tremendous challenge for conflict resolution practitioners, and this is a good way to begin thinking about what may need to be done.