Current Affairs
Vol. 2 No. 2 | Summer 2015
Current Affairs
Nonviolent Struggle Versus the Islamic State:
A Strategic Perspective
Alia Braley & Srdja Popovic | 07 August 2015
Attacking terrorism at its root, through slow and incremental cultural change, will pay off in the end, but this process is a difficult sell to those facing IS now. Such a long-term view neither benefits the people struggling to survive each day under IS’s murderous and authoritarian reign, nor does it equip the international security community concerned about IS’s immediate threat to regional stability. There is another solution. If what is needed is a relatively rapid rearrangement of social conditions that would cut off IS’s critical sources of power, then there may be no better route than collective nonviolent action undertaken by Iraqi and Syrian civilians. Collective nonviolent movements have been shown to be more effective than violent movements, even against highly violent or authoritarian opponents. Such a movement might take a page from IS’s own book, and tap into the same sources of power that have been indispensible to its success. After all, IS did not attract an army of nearly 30,000 fighters and capture a cumulative swathe of land larger than the United Kingdom merely because it had weapons. IS has flourished by successfully filling at least two critical power vacuums within Iraqi and Syrian society. It has seized upon a powerful narrative during a time of turbulence and confusion, and it has delivered necessary human services in places where the state has proved incompetent. However, a nonviolent collective movement of Syrian and Iraqi citizens could fill these power vacuums much more convincingly than IS, and in so doing, cripple IS’s power in the short term and impede the growth of new terrorist movements in the long term...
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Policy
An Excerpt from the Upcoming Book -
Borderless Wars: Civil-Military Disorder and Legal Uncertainty
Antonia Chayes | 10 August 2015
Drones. Global data networks. The rise, and eventual primacy, of non-international armed conflict. All things the framers of the Geneva Conventions could have never fully conceived when doing their noble work in 1949; all things that rule warfare in the world today. So, how do we legally employ these new tools in these new circumstances? In her latest book, Antonia Chayes, former Under Secretary of the Air Force, explores the current legal underpinnings of counterinsurgency, counterterrorism, and cyber warfare, rooting out the ambiguities present within each realm, and telling the narrative of how these ambiguities have come to shape international security today. The grounded and creative solutions that she offers in terms of role definition and transparency will provide crucial guidance as the United States continues to navigate the murky modern military-legal landscape. This excerpt is a chapter from Borderless Wars: Civil-Military Disorder and Legal Uncertainty forthcoming in 2016 from Cambridge University Press.
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The role of seapower in nurturing American security and prosperity has long been exaggerated, if not wholly misrepresented. Throughout the nineteenth century, the nation’s first generations of leaders exhibited a healthy skepticism toward free trade and the maritime hegemony of the British Empire. By focusing on domination of the country’s littoral space during the Civil War, the U.S. Navy succeeded in shielding the Union from European interference. It was not the assumption of the British mantle that safeguarded the nation; rather, U.S. preeminence was secured by rejection of maritime overreach. Strong anti-British tariffs and industrial protectionism were the cornerstones of sustained commercial growth and genuine national independence. The unique problem with seapower, even in the contemporary period, is how easily we can glorify it. We love the sea, and mighty ships, and we tend to flaunt what we love, but this relationship has no place in a grand strategy that acknowledges the limited historical contribution of free trade to the American economy.
‘Free Trade’ and the Global Status-quo Dilemma
The climax of the nineteenth century movement for free trade was undoubtedly English Radical parliamentarian Richard Cobden’s success in persuading Imperial France to abandon its protectionist system in favor of an open trade agreement with Great Britain in 1860. This, he argued, would do more to stabilize frayed relations between the two powers than any other diplomatic act since their temporary—and now distant—alliance against the Russian Empire during the Crimean War (1853-1856). Emperor Napoleon III agreed; he hoped the agreement like nothing else would demonstrate his good intentions to the ‘shop-keeping’ English, even as both sides raced to build seagoing ironclads and Britain frantically set about fortifying its dockyards. Prime Minister Lord Palmerston, however, hardly forgave the French their naval and imperial ambitions. Mutual prosperity was also strategically undesirable. “Free Trade enriches & strengthens the Nation which adopts it,” he wrote to Lord John Russell, the foreign secretary, “and the richer & stronger France becomes the more dangerous will she be as a neighbor unless she sees & knows that we cannot be attacked with a chance of easy Success.”[1]
A commitment to global maritime trade and defense was, even then, double-edged. “Thou knowest that all my fortunes are at sea,” states Antonio in Shakespeare’s The Merchant of Venice,[2] reflecting both the enormous economic potential and the vulnerability of investments upon the often treacherous sea. British Professor Geoffrey Till quotes Antonio in concluding his textbook study, Seapower: A Guide for the Twenty-First Century, emphasizing the wealth borne upon the waves, and highlighting its multiplication under conditions of unrelenting globalization.[3] That same process has generated a gradual convergence of private enterprises and state-centric interests, creating new systemic considerations such as the stability of the global market and global finance. The choice confronting today’s leading naval powers—especially the United States—is how to balance competitive national needs against cooperative ones shared with other members of a global community. At present, this dilemma has been resolved by assigning America’s navy the role of protecting and preserving the status-quo order on the assumption that open markets are in everyone’s interests; as affirmed in the Victorian ‘Free Trade’ mantra preached by Cobden and John Bright’s ‘Manchester School’ of economics.
From the first steps on its path toward economic prosperity, however, the United States was never reliant on far-ranging seapower. When the U.S. Naval Institute was founded in 1873, not a decade had passed since Rear-Admiral John Worden, soon to be its second president, had commanded the U.S.S. Monitor during the fateful Battle of Hampton Roads of March 1862.[4] In the intervening years, the Civil War ended with Union victory, slavery was abolished, and the U.S. Navy swelled to over 600 warships, including 82 ironclads built and building—the world’s largest, most powerful naval force purpose-built to fight in coastal waters. The Royal Navy might have floated a stronger core of battleships-of-the-line, capable of fighting the next Battle of Trafalgar (1805) on the high seas, but the Union Navy was far more effective in brown waters. The monitors forfeited blue-water range for maximum concentration of tactical capabilities—heavy guns and thicker iron armor. Beyond enforcing the continental blockade of the Confederacy, it had participated in coastal assaults and combined operations with Union Army forces. Equally important was the U.S. Navy’s strategic role in coastal defense against European blue-water navies—more than a match on the high seas, but vulnerable near the American coast.
But by 1873, American seapower had clearly decayed and reverted to its pre-war capabilities, as much as American national ambition had introverted. Commodore Foxhall Parker complained in the first issue of the Institute’s Proceedings (1874) how the navy could not perform fleet maneuvers. For one, there was no ‘fleet.’ The monitors were the only armored combatants to speak of in an age of iron, and they dragged the rest of the formation down to 4.5 knots. The remainder of the navy, composed of wooden steamships, were armed with antiquated 9-inch Dahlgren smoothbores—outclassed and outranged by the Royal Navy’s heavier, rifled, and shell-projecting guns. Only the use of spar-torpedoes might spare the country painful embarrassment. “And in truth, what reliance could be placed upon our torpedo system afloat for either offence or defense?”[5] American men-of-war would be shot to hell by modern (i.e., European) ironclads before they could even get their clumsy torpedoes close enough to their targets. Parker could only express his hope that “the great Republic will awaken from her lethargy ere long, and once more put her strength upon the deep.”[6]
But as Craig Symonds warned in 1982, an “overcommitment to seapower can be as dangerous a policy decision as an undercommitment.” “A good case can be made,” he wrote, “that the American policy of virtually ignoring the country’s maritime frontiers in the two decades after Appomattox was a reasonable one.”[7] In the end, America’s continental development, from reconstruction to railroads, allowed it to trump the European empires as they spiraled into the great collision of the First World War. In both global conflicts of the twentieth century the industrial resources of the United States allowed it to swing the military balance of power in its favor.
The Monroe Doctrine vs. ‘Imperial Defense’
Symonds – and Palmerston’s – sentiments echoed not only the concerns of Alexander Hamilton in the latter 18th-century but also those of early 19th-century American protectionists like Henry Clay and Henry Charles Carey who saw free trade as nothing more than economic vassalage to the Bank of England and an informal (far more insidious) British Empire. If Clay and Carey were correct and early globalization efforts went hand-in-hand with British naval supremacy, then controversial nation-building measures like the Morrill Tariff — enacted during the Secession Crisis of 1860-1 — are what saved Abraham Lincoln’s conception of the United States as “the last, best hope of earth.”[8] Indeed, in aligning with the British the new Confederate States’ Constitution (Article 1, Section 8) specified “no duties or taxes on importations from foreign nations be laid to promote or foster any branch of industry” in the strictly slave-grown, cotton-exporting business of the South.
The myth today, propagated by arch-imperialist Winston Churchill among others, is that the Monroe Doctrine was “safeguarded” by the Royal Navy throughout the nineteenth century because America had no navy to speak of.[9] Who else would keep Old World monarchists from re-establishing their colonial empires in the New World? But the United States never shared Churchill’s interpretation of the relationship; indeed, in 1823 Secretary of State John Quincy Adams first rejected the offer of British ‘protection’ in the sense used by British Foreign Secretary George Canning. “It would be more candid, as well as more dignified, to avow our principles explicitly to Russia and France,” he stressed to Monroe’s cabinet, “than to come in as a cock-boat in the wake of the British man-of-war.”[10]
It is a misguided belief that maritime trade has always aligned historically with democracy; “maritime dominion” has never been correlated with the “triumph of the free world,” as some naval enthusiasts claim today.[11] This purported relationship ignores mid-Victorian British contempt of democracy—especially in the form of the United States republic which attacked the notion of privilege by birth, for one. It also fails to give credit to those stubborn American tariffs which defied Britain’s free trade system yet helped strengthen the Union’s independence from British naval ‘protection’ and fostered self-reliance in a critical hour of need. American nationalism and its novel conception of freedom had more to do with universal ideals than universal profits. The United States rose to world power almost in spite of British naval supremacy, not because of it.
“Why, do you not know that we have a claim to the mouth of the Columbia River?” exclaimed Lord Stratford Canning[12] to John Quincy Adams in 1821. “I do not know,” replied Adams, “what you claim nor what you do not claim. You claim India; you claim Africa; you claim—.” “Perhaps,” cut the British ambassador sardonically, “a piece of the moon.” “No,” said Adams coolly, “I have not heard that you claim exclusively any part of the moon; but there is not a spot on this habitable globe that I could affirm you do not claim; and there is none which you may not claim with as much color of right as you can have to Columbia River or its mouth.”[13]
Only the rise of the Union Navy during the Civil War, not the good will of the Royal Navy, ensured that a new front in the conflict did not emerge in Mexico (against France), the Dominican Republic (against Spain), or Canada (against Britain). The European states could not successfully project their maritime power against a distant continental power to effect lasting changes on the map; coastal ironclads served American purposes well by threatening to cut-off the Gulf of Mexico and the St. Lawrence River from overseas reinforcements, for example. In addressing a British military commission’s report on the defense of Canada in the event of an Anglo-American war, Chancellor of the Exchequer and Liberal leader William Gladstone observed that the military factors favoring Britain during the Trent Affair of 1861-2 no longer prevailed by 1864: “before the Americans had shown what they could achieve in the way of rapid multiplication of iron-clad vessels, not of high sailing qualities, but such as, creeping along the coast into the St. Lawrence, might be found, when there, too numerous for us to deal with by the sea-going iron ships we should have to send across the Atlantic.”[14] Better that Canada be cut loose from imperial protection, rapidly evaporating in the face of the newly iron-clad Monroe Doctrine, and Britain allow such colonies “to ascend to the condition of free communities.” Thus the Canadian Confederation was born in 1867, and the Colonial Naval Defence Act, which effectively created the royal navies of both Canada and Australia, was passed in 1865.[15]
National Chauvinism, National Isolationism
‘Naval supremacy’ can be an exercise in chauvinism, nothing more: how big we are, how righteous, how unique we are in human history. This is evident in the British attitude toward naval power in the nineteenth century, and remains evident in the present construction of the Royal Navy’s largest-ever ships, the two Queen Elizabeth-class aircraft carriers. Prime Minister David Cameron justified them as “an investment in British security, British prosperity and our place in the world, transforming our ability to project power globally, whether independently or with our allies.”[16] Coincidentally, as HMS Queen Elizabeth was being assembled in Rosyth (Fife), the Scottish referendum on independence from the United Kingdom was gearing up, awkwardly stranding the Royal Navy’s 65,000-tonne flagship in the midst of stand-off between devolution and nationalism. The naming ceremony of the man-of-war was hyped by the media as a potent symbol of British national identity, part of the ‘Better Together’ campaign. The Royal Marine band, replete with white pith helmets, helped supply the patriotic fanfare along with the presence of the 88-year-old Queen.[17] The coincidence highlighted the true threat to modern Britain and the incidental value of material seapower in an age of fracturing identities.
Do not confuse ends and means—as naval historians often do. Nations tend to keep their mouths shut when truly great, rather than spout off about how great they are, or used to be, or ought to be. This process of self-delusion is how figures such as Alfred Thayer Mahan and, particularly, Sir John Knox Laughton made their mark on the ‘historical profession.’ As Roger Knight observed in his review of The Foundations of Naval History: John Knox Laughton, the Royal Navy and the Historical Tradition (2000), Laughton deeply ‘influenced’ Mahan.[18] In 1874, six months before Parker bemoaned the lack of American strength ‘upon the deep’ before the U.S. Naval Institute, Laughton addressed the Royal United Service Institute on “The Scientific Study of Naval History,” objecting to the “idea that the history of the past contains no practical lessons for the future, and is therefore merely a useless branch of scholarship, [which] daily gathers strength.” British maritime nostalgia and the romance of the sea could not be allowed to challenge the proper goal of naval history: to magnify the necessity of seapower. In this way the navy becomes ever more central to national growth and greatness, not less. “Laughton’s main purpose,” Donald Schurman perceived in 1965, “was to maintain and improve the Royal Navy as an efficient instrument of war.”[19]
Conclusion
The U.S. navy must also learn from its history—the true history of littoral dominance that sustained its independence. That history is consistent with a historically grounded strategy of leading by example, rather than through aggrandizement upon the high seas. The United States is poised to radically redefine what seapower means in relation to its own history, rejecting the tired ‘naval history’ cadences of status quo or decline. Decline is a red herring. America’s fortunes are now so thoroughly intertwined with the global maritime economy—the global community—that nothing short of World War III, of mutual annihilation, could arrest this process of all-or-nothing interdependence. Because of this new interdependence, it rests not upon the shoulders of the U.S. navy alone to preserve the maritime commons, despite the exhortations of naval romanticists and wayward historians.
[1] February 5, 1860, Palmerston to Russell, Russell Papers, British National Archives (Kew), PRO 30-22: 21.
[2] Act 1, Scene 1.
[3] First printed by Routledge in 2004 and now in its third edition (2013).
[4] Admiral David Dixon Porter was the Institute’s first president, in 1873, succeeded by Worden the following year.
[5] Foxhall A. Parker, “Our Fleet Maneuvers in the Bay of Florida, and the Navy of the Future,” Proceedings 1, no. 8 (Dec. 1874): 163-178. Rear-Admiral C. R. P. Rodgers was “loath to believe that maximum speed of any fleet of the United States navy is only four and a half knots,” having commanded several of the vessels himself before the exercise. Chief-Engineer Charles Baker noted the poor performance was due to worn-out boilers on many of the vessels at the time.
[6] Parker, “Our Fleet Maneuvers.” According to Adrian Cook, during the Civil War “750 ships, representing a total burthen of 481,332 tons” were transferred to foreign flags, namely Britain’s, because of the roving threat posed by British-built commerce raiders such as the C.S.S. Alabama. “In 1860 two-thirds of the commerce of New York was carried in American bottoms, but by 1863 three-quarters of it came in foreign ships”; see Cook, The Alabama Claims: American Politics and Anglo-American Relations, 1865-1872 (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1975), 15. That Americans were willing to settle for $15.5 million in gold from Britain in 1872 ‘for damages’ had more to do with the fact that “America needed more foreign investment. The shortage of risk capital at home guaranteed good relations with Europe, especially England,” see page 241.
[7] Craig L. Symonds, “The Yankee Mariner, Seventeenth to Twentieth Centuries,” in The Yankee Mariner & Seapower: America’s Challenge of Ocean Space, ed. Joyce J. Bartell (Los Angeles: University of Southern California Press, 1982), 29-46.
[8] From his December 1, 1862, Annual Message to Congress.
[9] See for example, Winston S. Churchill, A History of the English-Speaking Peoples, 4 vols., The Great Democracies (New York: Dodd, Mead & Company, 1958) 4: 29-30. Churchill was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1953 just as he was completing his final volumes. He was 79. Churchill had already asserted the notion in the House of Commons on 8 March, 1948: “From Trafalgar onwards, for more than 100 years Britannia ruled the waves. There was a great measure of peace, the freedom of the seas was maintained, the slave trade was extirpated, the Monroe Doctrine of the United States found its sanction in British naval power—and that has been pretty well recognised on the other side of the Atlantic—and in those happy days the cost was about £10 million a year,” Hansard, Vol. 448, cc803-981. Ten years later M.P. Sir Joseph Percival William Mallalieu echoed, “It is absolute folly for us to have it [the hydrogen bomb] and I am not impressed with the argument that by giving it up we should increase our dependence on the United States. The United States has been dependent on us for the best part of a century—dependent on the Royal Navy. It was an American President who propounded the Monroe Doctrine, but it was the Royal Navy which maintained it and the fact that America was dependent upon us did not notably stunt her growth in the 19th century,” March 4, 1958, Hansard, Vol. 583, cc978-1127. If any agent established the theory in the historical literature (which Churchill would have drawn upon) it was likely British historian Harold Temperley, in his reverential biography of George Canning; see Foreign Policy of George Canning 1822-1827 (London: G. Bell & Sons, Ltd., 1925), 124.
[10] November 7, 1823, in Charles Francis Adams, ed., Memoirs of John Quincy Adams: Comprising Portions of His Diary from 1795 to 1848, 12 vols. (Philadelphia: J. B. Lippincott & Co., 1875), 6: 179. Monroe’s subsequent address to Congress (December 2) announcing the new America foreign policy doctrine was likewise drafted by Adams, who had already noted two years earlier Britain’s standing policy of “willing to wound, and yet afraid to strike” the United States, (entry dated January 31, 1821, Memoirs, 5: 261).
[11] See for example, Peter Padfield, Maritime Dominion and the Triumph of the Free World: Naval Campaigns that Shaped the Modern World 1852-2001 (London: John Murray, 2009), an expansion of his more modestly titled but no less deterministic Maritime Power and the Struggle for Freedom: Naval Campaigns that Shaped the Modern World 1788-1857 (London: John Murray, 2003) and Maritime Supremacy and the Opening of the Western Mind: Naval Campaigns that Shaped the Modern World, 1588-1782 (London: John Murray, 1999). Padfield attempts to square the circle of the rise of America as a continental power during the Civil War era by calling the Northern States “maritime” and the South “territorial” or continentally militaristic; Padfield, Maritime Dominion, 33.
[12] George Canning’s cousin.
[13] Adams, Memoirs, 5: 251-252. See also Harlow Giles Unger, John Quincy Adams (Boston: De Capo Press, 2012), 202-203.
[14] On July 12, 1864; see William Gladstone, Defence of Canada, “Confidential,” in MS 62, Palmerston Papers, University of Southampton, “Broadlands Papers, 1862-1865,” CAB/183-193.
[15] See for example the work by R.U.S.I. analyst Damian P. O’Connor, in Imperial Defence and the Commitment to Empire 1860-1886 (CreateSpace Independent Publishing: 2014).
[16] Emphasis added.
[17] See for example Severin Carrell, ‘Supercarrier made in Britain hailed as flagship for Better Together campaign’, The Guardian (online), July 4, 2014, available from http://www.theguardian.com/uk-news/2014/jul/04/hms-elizabeth-naming-ceremony-hailed-pro-union-occasion. HMS Queen Elizabeth was launched in July 2014; the Scottish Independence vote took place two months later with only 55.3% voting to remain part of the U.K.
[18] Roger Knight, Reviews in History, no. 94 (Feb. 2000); Andrew D. Lambert, The Foundations of Naval History: John Knox Laughton, the Royal Navy and the Historical Tradition (London: Chatham Publishing, 1998); see http://www.history.ac.uk/reviews/.
[19] John K. Laughton, ‘The Scientific Study of Naval History,’ Journal of the Royal United Service Institution 18, no. 79, (1875): 508-527; D. M. Schurman, The Education of a Navy: The Development of British Naval Strategic Thought, 1867-1914 (London: Cassell, 1965), 98.
Dr. Howard J. Fuller
Dr. Howard J. Fuller is a Senior Lecturer in War Studies at the University of Wolverhampton. He specialises in Anglo-American 19th-century history, particularly American Civil War and the British Empire. This includes maritime developments, naval technology, strategy and warfare, and modern international relations and diplomacy. The 2002-3 Fellow in U.S. Naval History through the U.S. Naval Historical Center in Washington, D.C. and a West Point Fellow in Military History, Dr. Fuller has lectured in America, Britain and Europe on naval power in the mid-Victorian era and teaches additional history courses online for University of Maryland University College. He is a frequent contributor to conferences and journals on both sides of the Atlantic, and is the author of the critically-acclaimed Clad in Iron: The American Civil War and the Challenge of British Naval Power (2007) and recently, Empire, Technology and Seapower: Royal Navy Crisis in the Age of Palmerston (Routledge, 2013), with an edited collection of critical essays due in 2015: The Real Pax Britannica: The Royal Navy Deterred and the Decline of Gunboat Diplomacy.
Interviews
Mónica Serrano is Professor of International Relations at El Colegio de México, Senior Research Associate at the Centre for International Studies, Oxford University and a Senior Fellow at the Ralph Bunche Institute for International Studies, CUNY. Between 2008 and 2011, as Executive Director of the Global Centre for the Responsibility to Protect, she worked closely with the UN and other human rights organizations to build momentum behind an emerging international norm to prevent mass atrocities. Dr. Serrano has written extensively on international security, and on the international relations of Latin America, with particular reference to international institutions, security, human rights, transnational crime and civil-military relations.
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Joshua Stanton, an attorney in Washington, D.C., has advised the House Foreign Affairs Committee on North Korea-related legislation, including the North Korea Sanctions Enforcement Act, and blogs at OneFreeKorea. His article, "North Korea: The Myth of Maxed-Out Sanctions", a legal analysis of North Korean sanctions, refuted the idea that there is nothing left that the world community can do to bring them to the negotiating table. In this interview, he expands further on this idea addressing why people think that nothing more can be done and how the Iranian nuclear deal will affect relation with North Korea. The views expressed are solely his own.
FSR: Why is it that there is popular perception in the United States that the sanctions regime against North Korea is comprehensive, while in your opinion it is one of the weaker sanctions regimes?
Stanton: I think that perceptions have a way of being perpetuated and entering the perceived wisdom until people stop questioning them. It may be that some of that opinion is a leftover from 2008, when sanctions were certainly more comprehensive than they are now. The sanctions were dramatically weakened in 2008 by President [George W.] Bush. But also, to challenge an assumption that commonly requires you to go into a lot of statutory and regulatory reforms and executive orders. Not only do you have to synthesize all of that law, but you also have to be able to compare it to other legal authorities that apply to Sudan, Burma, Belarus, Zimbabwe, Iran, and many other countries. So that takes a lot of work, and if you are a reporter on deadline you don’t have time to do all that. I want to encourage people to read more closely and to think differently.
FSR: Do you think that the sanctions regime against Iran and Iran’s subsequent willingness to engage in negotiations over its nuclear program could signal to U.S. policymakers that a more comprehensive sanctions regime against North Korea could be beneficial?
Stanton: Certainly. And I think it has. I will tell you that I was surprised by how effective the Iranian sanctions were. Iran turned out to be a softer target than I had thought, because of some of the structural inefficiencies in the Iranian economy. But I really thought that an economy as large and as diverse as Iran’s with as many trading partners in Europe as Iran has would not be knocked down really to the brink of collapse within the space of a couple of years. That, in fact, happened, and I think it is a testament to the competence of the Treasury Department and the Office of Foreign Assets Control that it did happen that way.
FSR: Since the mid-2000s when the U.S. did have a pretty comprehensive sanctions regime, do you the North Korean government has adapted its economy in ways that would make sanctions less effective today than they were then?
Stanton: Sure. . . there is no Banco Delta Asia solution in North Korea today, because North Korea used to have a lot of roads that led to one bank. They converged a lot of their funding flows in one bank, and they have learned a lesson from that and have diversified. But the same can be said about Al-Qaeda, ISIS or any number of drug trafficking organizations. They diversify their financial flows too, and we have had great success — certainly in the case of Al-Qaeda — in drying up a lot of their funding. I don’t think that a country of 23 million people can ever have an invisible footprint in the financial ecosystem. With diligence and with enough resources, we will be able to track those funds down and sanctions enforcement can be effective. But the concern that I have is that the administration is either over-taxed from enforcing sanctions against Iran, Venezuela and other countries, or that, quite simply, the political will is not there.
FSR: After the attack on U.S. Ambassador Mark Lippert (which, after the fact, North Korea seems to have supported on their official news channel) and the cyber attack on Sony, how do you think the appetite for sanctions against North Korea has changed in Washington?
Stanton: I think that Congress already was a coiled spring on this issue, before [the Sony cyber attack]. I was invited to come up to Congress and write a very strong sanctions bill in 2013 after North Korea’s third nuclear test. I think that Sony added a great deal of impetus to that. You have seen how quickly H.R. 757 [the North Korean Sanctions Enforcement Act of 2015] moved from introduction through committee mark-up as a result of that. I think it has changed the way that the Senate sees North Korea sanctions legislation. So I am optimistic that the Senate will move a bill as strong or stronger than H.R. 757. The attack on Ambassador Lippert and North Korea’s reaction to it will certainly increase Congress’s frustration that the administration does not appear to have enforced sanctions against North Korea seriously.
FSR: The Office of the U.N. Commissioner for Human Rights has been reporting widespread human rights violations in the DPRK since 2003, but it took them until 2013 to file an official commission of inquiry into human rights in North Korea. What do you think explains this long delay in creating a commission of inquiry?
Stanton: Well, I think it is shameful that we have gotten this far and that crimes as serious as this have not been addressed by the United Nations in any meaningful way. [The UN] has redeemed itself to some degree by the quality of the report that [commission of inquiry leader] Justice [Michael] Kirby,and [commission of inquiry members Sonja] Biserko and [Marzuki] Darusman have written. But the fact that the United Nations was established at the very end of the Holocaust and that it took 10 years or more for it to take the grave crimes against humanity in North Korea seriously just speaks so badly of the institution. I have to suggest that it was most likely China that was responsible for delaying it.
FSR: In an early piece for the Fletcher Security Review, you mention that many North Koreans rely on the gray market for their survival. Does the rise of the gray market in North Korea have implications for the future of the North Korean state?
Stanton: Absolutely. I think that this gray market, or jangmadang as the North Koreans call it, is now the only institution in North Korea that the government does not control and that the government cannot stamp out. They have stamped out religion, they have stamped out independent thought, and they have stamped out any alternative journalism or communication. . . But here is this market that sprung up from the ashes of the [North Korean famine] and the North Korean government is not capable of stamping these markets out without the housewives coming out to protest against them, without there being civil unrest in the market towns. That is only going to grow with time as the regime fails to provide the things that their people want.
*Interview has been lightly edited for clarity. Brackets indicate editorial additions.
Book Reviews
Over the last 14 years of war, our military developed incredible relationships both within and outside the Department of Defense. The concept of the Joint Force reached its full potential as we relied on one another in places such as Iraq and Afghanistan. We learned how to effectively integrate the talents of our Special Operations Forces and conventional forces on the battlefield. We integrated with other government agencies on the battlefield, ranging from the CIA to USAID, moving the concept of “one team, one fight” forward. We even worked closely with non-governmental organizations (NGOs) and humanitarian organizations, often finding ourselves in similar areas with similar goals. As we continue to downsize in Afghanistan and our efforts in Iraq remain at the advisory level, my biggest fear is that we forget the lessons we have paid for with the blood and sweat of our brothers and sisters. It is absolutely critical that the military retain the myriad lessons learned from these 14 years for future conflicts.
Toward the goal of capturing important lessons learned, Transparency International UK’s Defence and Security Programme has published the valuable handbook, “Corruption Threats and International Missions: Practical Guidance for Leaders.” This well-written and easy-to-use document will be invaluable to leaders of any organization conducting operations in areas where corruption exists, but especially for our military leaders of today and tomorrow.
In the military, we have observed and dealt with corruption everywhere. Whether in the Kosovo Protection Corps, the Afghan local police or the Iraqi Army, each of us who have deployed to one of these areas has experience dealing with corruption. Current operations, whether in Central America, Africa or once again in Iraq, are in areas where corruption is not only rampant – it is often a culturally acceptable way of conducting business. But what should a leader, whether in a military unit or humanitarian organization do, when faced with this type of endemic corruption? This field guide provides meaningful advice and examples on how to deal with corruption.
As an Army Officer, I like the format of this field guide. Its format consists of a mix of checklists, examples, and various corruption scenarios a leader may encounter. In my opinion, this publication is perfect for any leader of an organization who is working in an area where there is the potential for corruption. Realistically, that is almost anywhere in the world where we find ourselves today.
The guide starts out with a basic, but incredibly relevant explanation as to why corruption is such an issue where we operate. The title of the first chapter, “Why is corruption a threat to mission success?” can easily be applied to any organization operating around the globe. While too often we turn a blind eye to corruption, this manual hammers home why corruption is so devastating to any mission, whether military or humanitarian.
Chapter two looks at the 10 main corruption pathways, the varying ways you can look at corrupt networks and the risks within forces caused by corruption. You get a more in-depth analysis at each of these pathways in chapter six as well. Chapter three will be invaluable to those preparing to go to a region where we know corruption exists. The “Specific Preparatory Actions” section provides a checklist of considerations and potential solutions/options as you plan for your eventual entrance into an area rife with corruption.
For me personally, chapter four was the most valuable, having spent a good deal of my time deployed working with host nation security forces. Using a similar format of chapter three, I read this chapter and wished aloud that I had this knowledge before my first rotation to Iraq in 2004. I worked at a member of an Advisory Support Team training one of the first Regular Iraqi Army Battalions and made nearly every mistake possible. Clearly the authors have previous experience building partner capacity. As I read each item to consider regarding host nation security forces and corruption, I literally shouted aloud, “Yes!” as I saw in print a list of all the things I failed to consider back in 2004. This chapter alone will be of extreme value to junior leaders preparing to work with host nation forces, a continuing mission of extreme value to our national security.
Chapter five gets into existing guidance on anti-corruption. It includes sources ranging from NATO to the Danish Ministry of Foreign Affairs on how different organizations attempt to deal with corruption. Additionally, the chapter points out how the current guidelines apply in Afghanistan for the international forces operating there. This chapter serves as a literature review of the existing doctrine and practices in use for dealing with corruption and is an important point as a “one stop shop” for anyone researching existing anti-corruption policies.
Finally, the last chapter outlines in greater depth the “ten main corruption pathways” which I found extremely interesting and useful. While you may find a different corruption pathway in your operational area, these ten capture what you are most likely going to encounter and provides you with the time to think about them. Most importantly, it provides recommendations on how to plan on dealing with corruption before you ever set foot on the ground. These ten pathways may serve as your planning considerations as an organization models the potential challenges they may face regarding corruption.
Overall, this is an extremely user-friendly handbook for any military organization that operates or trains to operate in an environment where corruption is prevalent—in other words, every military organization! Available for free on Transparency International’s website, I cannot praise this work enough and have shared it with my colleagues who continue to operate around the globe. It is worth a look.
To read Transparency International's UK Defence and Security Programme handbook: Corruption Threats and International Missions: Practical Guidance for Leaders, click here.
A Book Review by Dr. Thomas Matyók | 26 August 2015
Though the USIP’s Guiding Principles for Stabilization and Reconstruction have served as an adequate guide to post-conflict peace operations, it is time for a re-write.
Developed as a joint project of the United States Institute of Peace (USIP) and the U.S. Army Peacekeeping and Stability Operations Institute (PKSOI) in 2009, the Guiding Principles for Stabilization and Reconstruction serve as a good initial response in addressing the need for a document that contributes to the enhancement of interagency coordination. Lacking the glue of doctrine that binds military forces together in peacebuilding operations, civilian agencies are often left with only cooperation and good will as guiding principles. As a first generation reply to the lack of comprehensive strategic guidance for civilian agencies of the U.S. government working in conflict-affected areas,[1] the Guiding Principles have served well. However, now it is time to rethink if the Guiding Principles are adequate for the peacebuilding challenges we now face and can expect to confront in the future.
A major challenge when designing principles of any type is that they must be broad enough to apply across a broad range of events that have not yet occurred, while simultaneously being specific enough to be useful. The authors of the Guiding Principles navigated that challenge well. Nonetheless, the Guiding Principles fall short of their potential. They assume a fixed and controllable post-conflict context, with little recognition of complexity. The complexity of modern conflict and peacebuilding is bound up in the recognition that activities occur in the physical, social, and spiritual domains, simultaneously, and at the interpersonal, community, national, and regional levels of analysis.[2]
Peacebuilding is a growth industry, and the spaces in which peace and stability operations are conducted is becoming crowded with Whole-of-Society actors. Coordination between these actors and the agencies they represent is an ongoing challenge. As a living document, it is important to critically review the Guiding Principles and determine if they are having a positive impact in contributing to interagency coordination in complex peacebuilding operations.
Possibly the major strength of the Guiding Principles is that they offer the interagency system with a shared lexicon. Currently missing from the interagency and military peacebuilding literature is an accepted structure and language that can be used by the multiple actors in a conflict area. The Guiding Principles make a tentative step in that direction. However, they should not be viewed as the answer. The Guiding Principles seem best applicable in stable conditions where control is possible and complexity is absent—something rarely possible. It is absolutely necessary to recognize that the conflict context should drive any intervention. Policymakers must focus on a bottom-up approach rather than a top-down one where we expect stability to cascade through society. The Guiding Principles engender an almost myopic focus on elites. Anchored to a neo-liberal approach to peacebuilding and conflict resolution, the Guiding Principles appear to ignore the importance of non-Western, indigenous peace processes. This leads to a work that is highly prescriptive in nature following an expert model of intervention in contrast to a more elective, ally-centered approach. Local actors are treated as bit-players in someone else’s show.
Missing is a discussion on non-state actors and the multiple roles they can play in the peacebuilding process. Non-state actors and groups cannot be wished away. Connected here is the text’s recognition that political agreements are necessary in moving forward with stabilization and reconstruction activities; however, there is no meaningful discussion of how political agreements are determined. For so important an activity, this is a glaring deficiency in the Guiding Principles.
Beginning with existing circumstances, the Guiding Principles address only tangentially the potential need for designing peace infrastructures. Peacebuilders should remain attuned to the possibility that the structures themselves are the problem, and that working within them can lead to a loss of credibility with the host population. Working within an inadequate system can inadvertently lead to a band-aid approach to peacebuilding where the damaged social body is patched back together with little regard for whether it is worth repairing.
A multi-track approach to peacebuilding that integrates formal state, non-governmental, and grassroots peacebuilding approaches into a broad range of actions will contribute much to enhancing the utility of the Guiding Principles. This holistic approach is needed if we are to better coordinate the multiple actors present in modern conflict-affected areas where chaos, contradiction, and ambiguity are the norm. We must embrace the complexity of these contexts, not avoid it. In order to build complexity into the interagency approach, recognizing the need to operate simultaneously at the interpersonal, community, national, and regional levels will prove useful.
Peacebuilders should rapidly move away from purpose-based end-states that suggest static and controlled environments. A broader discussion of next-states is desirable. End-state thinking contributes to a linear approach to peacebuilding that restricts the utility of the Guiding Principles. History never ends. There can be no end-state, only an altered context. Ideally, we will achieve a better conflict. As peacebuilding professionals, we delude ourselves when we think we can act upon a complex conflict environment and move it to a static end.
Expanding the peacebuilding narrative to incorporate a discussion of the drivers of peace will be useful. Drivers of conflict, and those activities within society that can mitigate the negative effects of context, can unwittingly move the conflict to the least destructive condition. This is a negative approach to conflict management. As the drivers of conflict are reduced, a space for peace is opened, and there needs to be a peace structure that is capable of occupying that newly opened place. Simply mitigating the negative effects of conflict is not enough. Designed peace structures are required.
As mentioned earlier, peacebuilding strategies today require a cultural sensitivity that incorporates indigenous peace processes from the start. Also needed is a cultural awareness that attends to differences within the interagency system. The old saying applies: “if we want people with us on the landing, they need to be with us on the takeoff.” The thinking that informs ideas of transition from U.S. peacebuilding practitioners to the post-conflict nation contributes to a linear strategy. Needed is more horizontal and less vertical thinking.
Greed and grievance thinking heavily influences the Guiding Principles.[3] This is an outcome of its highly Western approach to peacebuilding and conflict management/resolution. A reliance on the Rational Actor Model of conflict resolution, where individuals follow their interests in an almost game-like process, is shortsighted. Lacking is recognition of the increasing identity-based and religious dimensions of conflict. Religious conflict is at a six-year high,[4] and every indication is that we can expect religion and religious actors to play an increasing role in future conflicts. This is possibly the biggest gap in the Guiding Principles approach to stabilization and reconstruction. Where is the discussion of religion? Religion is wholly missing from the Guiding Principles. Ignoring religion as an element of analysis is difficult to understand, especially given religion’s global resurgence,[5] and its significance in post-conflict environments.[6] Certainly, not all conflicts are religious in nature; however many—if not most—have a religious dimension. Failing to discuss the potential of religion and religious actors to contribute to peacebuilding leaves a significant intellectual space unfilled.
So, it is past time to re-look the Guiding Principles with an eye toward moving them away from a Rational Actor Model of peacebuilding that ignores the complexity and multidimensional nature of conflicts. The next edition of the Guiding Principles should include a discussion of how peacebuilding needs to occur at the interpersonal, community, national, and regional levels of analysis and in an environment characterized by the physical, social, and spiritual needs of host nation actors.
[1] United States Institute of Peace, “Guiding Principles for Stabilization and Reconstruction” 2009,
http://www.usip.org/sites/default/files/guiding_principles_full.pdf
[2] Thomas Matyok, Cathryne Schmitz, and Hannah Rose Mendoza, “Deep Analysis: Designing Complexity Into Our Understanding of Conflict” InterAgency Journal (Summer 2014), 14-24.
[3] “Greed and grievance” are two common Western conceptions of civil war drivers.
[4] Pew Research Center, January, 2014, http://www.pewforum.org/2014/01/14/religious-hostilities-reach-six-year-high/
[5] Peter L. Berger, “The Desecularization of the World: The Global Overview,” The Desecularization of the World: Resurgent Religion and World Politics ed. Peter L. Berger (Washington, D.C.: Ethics and Public Policy Center, 1999), 1-18.
[6] Robert Cunningham, “Religion in Peacemaking and Statecraft: Whither Faith-Based Diplomacy?” in Seaford House Papers, 2004 ed. J.E. Spence (UK: Royal College of Defence Studies, 2004), 142.
Dr. Thomas Matyók
Dr. Thomas Matyók is an assistant professor in the Conflict and Peace Studies program at The University of North Carolina - Greensboro. He has been professionally involved in conflict resolution for over 35 years as a mediator, negotiator, facilitator, trainer, executive and conflict coach, dispute systems designer, researcher, and professor. He has consulted for private, civic, religious, and community organizations. Dr. Matyók has been interviewed for radio and television regarding international conflicts and national security issues. He has negotiated significant international agreements and has been recognized for his abilities by the United States Coast Guard and United States Army as well as national and international human rights organizations. He has presented and testified to industry and government officials regarding cross-cultural conflict and slavery in the transnational merchant marine. His current research interests are violence, global citizenship, missing war narratives, institutions of peace, and the academic preparation of international conflict workers.