Adding Nuance to the Peace vs. Justice Debate

The peace versus justice debate is unavoidable when it comes to the International Criminal Court (ICC).  The conversation goes something like: Team Peace argues that the immediate cessation of violent conflict has to take precedence over everything else, while Team Justice argues that ending impunity for human rights violations is crucial for deterrence against human rights violations in the future.  While this summary totally simplifies a complicated and multipolar conversation, these two camps shape the basic nature of the debate.  Though both have solid points, a messy, subjective truth lies somewhere in the middle and the effects of justice are heavily dependent on the specific situation.

While the division between peace and justice is not rock-solid, there are indeed real problems with pursuing justice over peace (a theme I’ve written about before).  A perfect example is Sudan.  The ICC’s arrest warrant against President Omar al-Bashir increases his need to stay in a position of power (though he says he will step down in 2015 this is probably more of a result of internal NCP politics and he certainly has no intention of handing himself over to the ICC), and has decreased his ability to participate in negotiations.  This fact decreases the possible avenues of engagement for the international community (to varying degrees depending on the actor) to bargain with Bashir, ultimately hampering the opportunities for an international tempering influence, which his is especially unfortunate given Bashir’s current position of weakness.

Another example of unintended ICC consequences is in Kenya, where ICC-charged duo Uhuru Kenyatta and William Ruto were essentially brought together as a political unit because of their respective warrants that date back to the election violence in 2007-2008.  Ruto and Kenyatta were able to use their confrontation with the ICC as a symbol of their resistance against foreign influence, consequently gaining them votes.  Their ticket eventually won the Kenyan elections (though there seems to also be evidence that the ICC helped convince Kenyatta and Ruto to call for calm before and after the election), and Kenyatta is now the second head of state to have been summoned by the ICC.  Unlike Bashir however, Kenyatta has cooperated with The Hague thus far.

So while there are real downsides to justice over peace, there are also plenty of benefits from a justice-centered approach.  As Erik Voeten points out in his Monkey Cage post, the ICC is very effective in deterring human rights abuses in countries where “mid-level” human rights abuses take place.  Also, the ICC is quite good at influencing mid-level individuals.  While Bashir, as Sudan’s leader, is out of the ICC’s reach, mid-level individuals in security forces and rebel groups worldwide are much more expendable, and they know that if a higher-up decides they’re a liability because of the atrocities they’ve committed, they’ll be on the next plane to The Hague.  The threat of ICC prosecution, for example, had a positive effect in Colombia, and the institution is quite effective at deterring torture.

Unfortunately though, the existence of the ICC does little to deter the most egregious human rights violations.  Individuals like Assad, Bashir, and Gaddafi have never been cowed by threats of eventual justice.  Keeping power outweighs any potential risks.  Conversely though, the existence of the ICC does not encourage human rights violations as James Fearson argued.  While it is supposed to, the ICC does not really close off all escape routes (they’ve never been in short supply anyway) for human rights violators, but these escape routes, in the end, have little effect on the level of human rights violations committed.  It is not as if Assad is being encouraged to kill as many people as possible before escaping to the ICC; leaders like Assad and Gaddafi never had any intention of pulling the escape cord when it looked like they have a credible chance of losing.  While the ICC can do little to prevent leaders bent on maintaining power through any means necessary from doing so, it can at least provide a just conclusion to some of these cases (Bosco Ntaganda is a good example), an outcome which shouldn’t be trivialized.

Justice and peace are not mutually exclusive phenomena, and while one can sometimes endanger the other, the specific context of each situation must always be taken into account before making a policy recommendation.  Ultimately, this is a debate that the ICC will have to enter to an increasing degree in coming years.  While it has made some progress, it must to do more to address the problems that come with an inflexible, justice-centered approach.  Luckily, it does have the tools to do that.  Article 53 of the Rome Statute, the founding document of the ICC, allows for the Chief Prosecutor to offer amnesty to a perpetrator in the interests of the victims.  This precedent should not be applied in every situation, but does potentially allow the ICC to take a more critical approach to its activities.  The ICC has certainly been a milestone achievement in the fight to end international impunity for large-scale human rights violations, but it is not without its problems.

How Do We Do Advocacy?

Fellow STAND members like myself  perform advocacy almost every day.  We write blog posts, prepare one-pagers, discuss foreign policy issues, analyze news, and hold events to amplify our voices.  We do this to contribute to the reduction of violence against civilians and in that hope that, maybe one day, we will end mass atrocities.  But how do we execute this advocacy?  What factors influence the development of policy or the discourse we use?  To borrow a Marxist analogy, ideology forms the base of advocacy.  When we enter advocacy, ideology (or moral beliefs) is what initially drives us.  However our advocacy, unless we wish to be totally marginalized, cannot be entirely ideological.  Therefore, we allow our advocacy to be shaped by strategic, environmental, and institutional pressures that form the superstructure.  Ultimately, the base and superstructure interact with each other to form the manner in which we carry out advocacy.

While our a priori beliefs are essential for motivation to pursue advocacy, advocates quickly encounter a constraint.  In order to perform advocacy, advocates must present their ideas to an audience, and also quickly learn that to most effectively do so, they must shape their ideas, channeled through discourse, in a way that is accepted by the audience.  This however, immediately presents a dilemma.  What if the audience is full of libertarian isolationists?   Saying that the United States should withdraw as much as possible from the United Nations and foreign affairs would compromise our ideology as STAND advocates, but saying the opposite would not be well received by the audience.  Therefore, when advocates must engage with an audience, they weigh the pros and the cons to come to the most desirable outcome.  However, strategy is not simply limited to picking a position that will cause the audience to react in the desired way.  In fact, it is more about presenting the underlying ideology via well-planned discourse in a way  that conforms to the audiences expectations and inclinations.  (While advocates generally attempt to please their target audience because it correlates with getting what they want, pushing individuals into performing specific actions is almost always the final goal.)  Advocates must also be careful to present our ideology in a discourse that will not come back to bite them later.  Therefore, as individual advocates interact with multiple audiences over time,  ideology and the way they present it in discourse become hardened.  As advocates’ positions become more accepted, they have less need to win over every audience.  Conversely, as advocacy reaches more people, audiences’ a priori beliefs about advocates and their ideas become more positive.

Though ideology forms the base of advocates’ actions, it by no means exists in a vacuum or a freezer.  The development of ideology, and advocates’ reasons for becoming advocates, is strongly (if not totally) influenced by their environment, and once people become advocates, their ideology is shaped by their social, familial, and intellectual contexts.  Again, advocates encounter the audience/strategy dilemma, and while they may not intend to present their ideas in the same way they would in a formal capacity, engaging in conversations in informal contexts still requires strategic thinking and intellectual reconsideration of ideas.  This informal discourse also ultimately influences ideological development.  However, as with ideology and audience, the interaction between ideology and environment goes both ways.   Ideology, manifested in discourse and actions, changes the ways those around advocates think and speak about the issues that important to them.  Advocacy, therefore, produces an interplay between advocates in society, in which both, consciously or unconsciously, struggle with ideas.

Finally, there are institutional influences on the way advocacy is performed.  When advocates form organizations to amplify their effectiveness, they must find a way to work together a present a clear message.  Therefore, organizations tend to temper extreme views.  In this process, official organization discourse will reflect the beliefs of those somewhere near the middle, while individuals with extreme views will likely be pulled closer to the middle.  This happens through the strategic/audience dilemma posed above.  Members with extreme views will feel the need to present their ideas in a discourse that other members will respond to, and over time, this compromise in discourse will also cause an ideological shift.  (I do not mean to suggest that institutions will always simply moderate any radical views.  Contexts change, and new individuals with different beliefs enter organizations over time, meaning institutional moderation alone is insufficient to explain ideological trajectories.)  Within institutions, the same audience effect exists, but another layer is added.  Individuals must present ideas through discourse that will appeal to other members, who then can transmit that idea to a target audience.  Therefore, existing with an organizational space inherently alters discourse, and by extension, ideology.   However, because decision-making power in organizations is diffuse, strategy becomes more muddled.  Individuals within organizations with perceive strategic decisions differently, and then as multiple people interpret inter-organization ideas and transform them into official policy, concepts will inevitably be altered from their original form.  While this process can confuse strategy, multiple minds can also collaborate to create more factual, more compelling, and better-worded discourse.

The way we do advocacy is a complex process of interaction between multiple influences in which each one affects the development of the others.  For the sake of conceptual clarity, I separated ideology, discourse, strategy, environment, and organizational influences, but none of them exist without the others.  Ideology, for example, can only be conveyed through discourse, but the way we talk about our ideas inherently shapes what those ideas are.  This performance of advocacy then, is a fluid and interactive process, in which we must navigate a large and sophisticated array of problems and considerations .  Understanding these influences, and why they make us act the way we do, will surely help improve the quality of our advocacy.

When a Government Falls in the CAR, Do Analysts Hear a Sound?: A Narrative of Current Events

Of the 565 ppl I'm following, 4 r tweeting about the impending collapse of Bozize. Someone should probs call it part of the Arab Spring #CAR—
Danny Hirschel-Burns (@DHirschelBurns) March 23, 2013

As I sarcastically noted in the above tweet yesterday, the reaction from the foreign policy community to the news of rebels entering Bangui last night was quite underwhelming.  Though I’m about the furthest thing from a CAR expert, I’d like to do my part to fill the information gap about the collapse of Bozize’s regime by aggregating various news reports and producing a more coherent narrative.

Bozize’s (whose ascendancy to power seems to have started when he beat up a French officer) downfall began back in December, when a coalition of four rebel groups, Seleka (meaning “Alliance” in Sango) took up arms against CAR’s government.  The two most powerful groups that form Seleka, the Union of Democratic Forces for Unity (UFDR) and the Convention of Patriots for Justice and Peace (CPJP) , both started as loosely-organized self-defense militias in northeastern CAR (and of the two, the UFDR is the most powerful).   While Bozize’s neglect of rural areas is surely a cause of the rebellion, in the New York Times, Louisa Lombard argues that a United Nations D.D.R. program that failed to understand how the CAR actually works (and seems to have even encouraged some rebels to take up arms) also shares some of the blame.

As Seleka advanced and looked as if they might well overthrow Bozize, the government took to the negotiating table.  Though the “talks”, held in the Gabonese capital of Libreville, were conducted with plenty of pomp by the four regional leaders present, they did not produce any strong comprises.  The hastily signed peace document simply rehashed previous talks from 2007 and 2008 which Bozize had failed to uphold.  Seleka itself, though present at the negotiations, was internally divided on whether or not to engage with the government, considering its then position of strength.

By mid-March, Bozize had still failed to uphold the peace agreement.  Seleka accused Bozize of not fulfilling the four main demands by the rebels that had appeared in the January talks: the release of political prisoners, an end to the curfew and road blocks, the withdrawal of foreign (primarily South African) troops from the country, and finally the integration of at least 2,000 rebel soldiers into the country’s security forces.  The accusation caused Bozize to appear on radio on March 15th and decree that his government respect the first and second demands.  However, his actions only partially placated dissenting voices.  Though Prime Minister  Nicolas Tiangaye (a Seleka representative who had been inducted in the newly formed unity government) had repeatedly encouraged Seleka to lay down its weapons and engage in dialogue with the government, on March 18th, Minister of Defense Michel Djotodia (also a newly inducted government member from Seleka) threatened to overthrow Bozize if the rebels demands were not met within 72 hours and fled Bangui to join with Seleka armed forces.  Bozize failed to meet the demands, Seleka advanced, taking Bangui and causing Bozize to flee across the river to the DRC on the 23rd.

Before I move into the nitty-gritty of what’s happened in the last three days, I’d like to ruminate on two reasons why Seleka was able to overthrow Bozize.  First, there seems to have been a strategic miscalculation on Bozize’s part.  While he had been able to maintain control after sham peace process in ’07 and ’08, it clearly didn’t work this time.  Surely, it should have been pretty clear that the rebels were both militarily strong enough to take Bangui (perhaps he was counting on international support that never materialized?) and that individuals like Djotodia could not be co-opted, even as members of the government.  One possibility is that Bozize himself was not the final power broker here.  Perhaps decision making power in his government was diffuse, meaning hardliners ultimately overruled and paralyzed Bozize, but considering the perfunctory nature of January’s peace talks, the first explanation, a pure political miscalculation, seems more likely.  Second, Bozize fell into a classic trap for dictators in weak states, “Observers say Mr Bozize kept the army weak because he was afraid of a military coup” (via BBC).  James Fearson wrote about this dilemma in the Monkey Cage, and indeed, it seems that dictators (ok, so Bozize won elections, but still had dictatorial tendencies) in weak states, even with ample resources, are unable to build strong security forces to safeguard their rule because of the threat of mutiny.

So what’s happening right now?  It sounds as if, at the time of writing, the skirmishes between Seleka and government forces have ended.  Despite the end of formal fighting, there seems to be widespread looting in Bangui, which may be being directed or prevented by Seleka, depending on the article you read.  Reports indicate that nine South African soldiers died defending Bozize’s governments.  Though it’s still unclear exactly why there were there in the first, the theories I’ve seen have postulated it was an attempt to extend SA’s continental influence and curry good favor with Bozize in order to access CAR’s mineral wealth.  France, which already has 250 soldiers stationed around Bangui’s airport, has deployed another 300 ostensibly to protect French citizens, and Francois Hollande has stated that he does not intend to interfere in internal CAR affairs.   This surge in fighting seems to have involved many child soldiers, and there are also unconfirmed reports of rape and torture perpetrated by the rebels.  While Djotodia has declared himself interim President (he surely has the shortest Wikipedia page of any world leader), Tiangaye was named Prime Minister, and elections are to be held in three year’s time.

The situation on the ground will inevitably change rapidly within the next few days, and in all likelihood, the full picture will become more clear with time.  Finally, I hope that this conflict will start to receive the attention it deserves.

Update 1 (12:15 am EST, 3/26/13)

News is still slow to make it’s way out of CAR.  Ban Ki-Moon has condemned Seleka’s seizure of power and expressed concern regarding reports of atrocities and the deteriorating humanitarian situation (especially in areas of the CAR where the LRA has had a presence).  Looting continues, but several regional armed forces are working with Seleka to restore order.  Seleka has pledged to name a power-sharing government, and has also suspended the constitution and dissolved parliament.  Finally, the death toll for South African soldiers has been raised to 13.

Update 2 (12:30 pm EST, 3/26/13)

Djotodia issued the following statement, “I consider it necessary to suspend the November 27, 2004 constitution, to dissolve parliament as well as the government.  During this transition period which will lead us to free, credible and transparent elections, I will legislate by decree.  We will lead the people of Central African Republic during a three-year transition period, in accordance with the Libreville Accord.”  This statement cites a recognition of the Libreville Accord, despite the fact that Seleka’s rejection of the legitimacy of this process was the main cause for taking up arms.  In light of the rebellion, The African Union has suspended the CAR and placed personal sanctions on Seleka leaders.  Water is in short supply throughout the CAR, and large parts of the country, including Bangui, are without electricity.  Ex-President Bozize, after a few days of unknown whereabouts, has popped up in Cameroon.  The US has weighed in on the issue, condemning Bozize’s ouster, but also failed to call for his re-instatement.  Finally, the BBC (surely responding to my statement on the short length of Michel Djotodia’s Wikipedia page) has published a profile of the world’s newest leader.

Top 10 Pieces Since I Started Blogging

Because I’m currently nearly bedridden and off to La Paz tomorrow, in lieu of a real analytic post, I thought I’d pay homage to Nick Hornby and make a top 10 list of the best articles I’ve read since I’ve started blogging.  In no particular order…

1. The Unbelievable Lightness of Some African States - James Fearson, writing for the Monkey Cage, gets a crucial question in state stability.  Why are wealthy dictators unable to secure their rule through legions of loyal personal guards?

2. The Curse of Stability in Central Asia – This next piece, written by Sarah Kendizor over at Foreign Policy, also challenges common wisdom on state stability.  How is that many states in Central Asia seem constantly of the verge of failing, yet never quite do?

3. A Fresh Look at ‘the Mainstream’ – Swarthmore professor and lifelong activist George Lakey looks at how activists define themselves in Waging Nonviolence, and wonders if self-marginalization in the pursuit of integrity is worth it, or if that is a false choice.

4. Guns as Witchcraft – Another post by another Swarthmore professor.  In the wake on the Newton shootings, Africanist Tim Burke writes a deeply personal reflection on guns and witchcraft, as he tries to untangle Orientalist attitudes toward witchcraft by framing beliefs in gun ownership in that very framework.

5. Why Rebels (Sometimes) Commit Atrocities – Alex Bellamy, writing in the Global Observatory, looks at why some rebel group commit atrocities and other don’t, arguing that context and ideology matter.

6. Africa’s Image and Reality: Wealth and Poverty Sit Side-by-Side – In African Arguments, Richard Dowden takes on both the Africa Rising motif and images of Africa as being filled with starving children, concluding, that well, both are true, and it’s more complicated.

7. Racism Obstructs Extremism in Mali - Too many analyses of Mali put the country at the heart of a global Islamist conspiracy, and John Campbell, in Africa in Transition, argues that local tensions are not only a cause of the conflict, but caused significant friction within the rebel movement.

8. Who Will Write About R2P’s African Origins? – R2P has received plenty of heat from mostly leftist commentators for being neo-colonial and a Western tool to invade smaller nations.  Oliver Stuenkel fights back, demonstrating that R2P is more than just a Western concept.

9. The Cat’s Cradle of Congolese Politics – In Reinventing Peace, Jason Stearns intricately sketches out the causes of conflict in Eastern Congo in the last ten years.

10. States Are Like the Millennium Falcon – Jay Ulfelder gets his nerd on while making some solid points on the nature of states.

One Year Later, Analyzing Kony 2012′s Fatal Flaws

Since the original Kony 2012 video came out on March 5th, it became the most viral video of all time, received tremendous amounts of criticism, and then as quickly as it appeared, the movement faded into relative obscurity.  While the concrete effects of Invisible Children’s campaign on the LRA’s insurgency are fleeting, the video prompted both a public interest in central African conflict and a critical discussion on foreigners’ role in conflict prevention, the LRA’s place in a broader African context, and a history of human rights abuses by the Ugandan army.  While Kony 2012, at the very least, was terribly problematic, it did accomplish a very limited number of its goals.  However, considering the massive following it was able to initially achieve, the campaign was certainly a failure.  Joesph Kony continues to elude pursuing armies, and policy-wise, little has changed in the past year.

Beyond the campaign’s basic inability to successfully prompt the arrest or death of Joseph Kony, Invisible Children ultimately made little headway in producing an approach that was likely to achieve one of those two goals.  In a panel discussion I helped organized last semester, Swarthmore history professor Tim Burke argued that the United States’ past attempts to work with African strongmen had always failed, and would continue to do so.  IC’s campaign could not be a more perfect example.  Kony 2012 threw all of its eggs into the Ugandan military‘s basket, simply ignoring its long history of human rights violations and Musevini’s use of the LRA to justify a large military budget (which is then used to fund meddling in the DRC).  IC also failed to take into account Museveni’s propensity to use hunting the LRA as a bargaining chip with Western donors.  Ultimately, using a military force with foreign advisers to hunt down and eliminate the LRA is a tactic that has been tried over and over, and failed every time.

Invisible Children’s approach to ending the LRA conflict in the Kony 2012 video was essentially based in a flawed, simplistic understanding of the conflict.  Though, to its credit, IC does some really good work on the ground in Northern Uganda, its policy proposals, consisting of more American military advisers, were always destined to fall flat.  The LRA is a symptom, and not a cause, of poor governance, violence, and civilian suffering in the areas in which it exists.  Killing Joesph Kony is highly unlikely to seriously change regional dynamics in DRC, South Sudan, or the Central African Republic.  This analysis seems pretty basic, and so it’s hard to understand why Invisible Children chose to promote such nonsensical policy.

Though Kony 2012 did succeed in taking Invisible Children, and even human rights advocacy, to new heights, it seems that there were small changes IC could have made to promote better policy without damaging the video’s popularity.  In the end, the problem with Kony 2012 was not so much the template they used to draw viewers in, but rather with the solutions the campaign espoused.  Instead of a campaign focused on killing Kony, IC could have produced a similarly sappy video that focused on efforts to coax poor African children who have suffered at the hands of the monster Kony out of the LRA and back into their communities.  It could have even convinced viewers to direct some of their ire toward regional governments who have done little to help the plight of LRA victims.  This alternative video would still have catered to those with a white savior complex and totally simplified the conflict.  It could have portrayed the LRA’s child soldiers as poor souls trapped in between the spiritual delusion of Kony and the neglect of greedy and incompetent regional governments.  A stronger focus on LRA child soldiers as victims would have helped sort out the bizarre moral universe created by IC in the original Kony 2012 video in which child soldiers are victims, but also legitimate targets for a military mission aimed at killing Kony.  This alternative video would still have had many problems, and would have still been rightly subject to mounds of criticism, but at least it could have done some good.  

* For a more in-depth reflection on Kony 2012, check out Daniel Solomon’s in-progress five part series on the campaign. 

A Comparitive Analysis of Citizen Security: Bolivia and the United States

*As I did in my previous two posts about my experiences this summer, I will continue to use the pseudonym Joplin to describe the city in order to protect the identity of the people I mention.

I arrived in Cochabamba, Bolivia just over two weeks ago, and am enjoying getting myself acquainted with Bolivia.  Before departing, I read Rutgers anthropologist Daniel Goldstein’s book Outlawed, which looks at citizen security in Cochabamba southern neighborhoods.  These areas are made up of recent indigenous internal migrants.  This constant struggle to protect one’s family and possessions reminded me of my experiences working in Joplin last summer, a place where residents constantly fear for their safety because of gang violence.  Both Cochabamba and Joplin are places where race and class differences are strikingly obvious: Joplin has a murder rate almost twice Detroit’s, but is just two miles away from rich, white, leafy suburbs.  Cochabamba, and Bolivia as a whole, is incredibly unequal.  Recent indigenous migrants exist side-by-side with the city’s elite.  In both cities, citizens are forced to attempt to protect themselves without the prospect of significant state assistance, but continue to look toward the state for security.

The most striking similarity between Joplin and Cochabamba’s southern sections is the state’s inability or unwillingness to hold a monopoly on force.  While this is true on the surface, the state is not entirely absent in either case.  Instead, Goldstein uses the term “the phantom state” to describe that while the state doesn’t intervene directly, its laws and hypothetical presence shape the actions and expectations of residents.  If the state actually didn’t exist (as perhaps one could say about Mogadishu two years ago), residents would not have to think as hard about whether or not to take security into their own hands.  In Joplin at least, the state exists to a minimal degree, but residents still distrust the police to actually carry out their duties (for a city of between thirty and forty thousand, Joplin has only six officers on duty at a time).

Despite its constant negligence, it is still the state that residents appeal to for security.  In Cochabamba southern regions, residents are frustrated by laws that prevent police from holding criminals without sufficient evidence.  Many believe in a pact between the police and criminals where criminals, when caught, allow themselves to be taken in by the police, but are then released when they arrive at the station.  By the residents’ reckoning, it gives police officers something to do, it provides a steady stream of revenue to underpaid police officers, and it keeps criminals’ businesses alive.  In community meeting after community meeting in Joplin, I heard a desire for more police on the streets, more raids on suspected drug dens, and more powers to arrest suspected criminals.

The lack of a state to provide security for its citizens challenges our notion of what states are, and similarly, it problematizes human rights discourse.  For many residents of Cochabamba’s southern self-constructed neighborhoods, HR is a language spoken by foreigners that protects criminals rather than normal citizens.  While I never heard HR discourse directly challenged in Joplin, a disdain for suspects’ rights was commonplace.  In mainstream human rights discourse, there is a victim and a perpetrator, but when those lines are not clear cut, applying basic HR concepts becomes much more difficult.  In both Joplin and Bolivia, threats come from a mass of unorganized, faceless, and nameless young men.  Human rights discourse is supposed to protect such masses, but when they themselves are seen as the threat by a terrified populace, residents don’t want to listen to lectures on due process.  If human rights discourse is to succeed in places the like Joplin and Cochabamba, it needs to reinforce the right to receive security services from the state.

Lacking a state to protect them, how can citizens living in marginal spaces improve their communal security?  Organization, on three fronts, is crucial.  Firstly, residents must organize to press the state for the expansion of security services, and use their political power to punish officials that do not make the necessary changes.  Secondly, residents can establish neighborhood security organizations that promote greater cooperation and understanding among residents on efforts to improve citizen security.  Finally, neighborhoods must work across gender and age gaps to promote understanding.  Though in Joplin I repeatedly heard calls for expansive police powers, these statements were all coming from middle aged women.  Young men, for whatever reasons, were absent from the meetings, and had they been present, their demonization would have not provided a welcoming environment.  To tackle this problem, a series of workshops have been organized in Joplin that first talk about violence with separate groups of teenagers/twenty-somethings and middle aged residents, then bring them to together to continue the conversation.  Without a state to provide security, communities that are able to reach across internal divisions to promote a collective security effort will likely be safer.

A Bolivia: A Change of Pace and A Project for the Future

Tomorrow morning, I begin my journey to Cochabamba, Bolivia, where I’ll be studying Globalization, Multiculturalism and Social Change through the School for International Training until mid-May.  My workload, the details of my living situation and my ability to connect to the internet are all still up in the air, so the frequency of my blogging may be affected.  Hopefully my experiences in Bolivia will give me good fodder for future posts.

With all of that said, I do want to sketch out a project that I’ve been thinking about for awhile.  For my senior thesis, for which I will start research this summer, I plan to write on nonviolent responses to mass atrocities.  I’ve written before on civilian peacekeepers, and how they could one day be one way to respond to mass atrocities.  In my thesis, I’m hoping to expand beyond just civilian peacekeepers, and create a more comprehensive study that looks at how international diplomacy, local power dynamics, and early warning systems could be used to prevent and respond to mass atrocities without the use of violence.  I plan to build on some of the theories presented by Maria Stephan and Erica Chenoweth in Why Civil Resistance on how non-state actors can nonviolently leverage power, even when faced with significant state violence.  In my research so far, however, I’ve found written material on this topic really light, and have used texts only tangentially related.  Therefore, if any readers of TWL have book recommendations, they would be greatly appreciated.

With that said, I’m off to finish packing.