terrorism

4 December 2015

Posted on December 4, 2015 Leave a Comment

You can add Frances Jensen’s “The teenage brain” to your Christmas gifts list. It is a useful and accessible read for anybody working with adolescents, including at home. She digests the latest neuroscience findings on brain development to show that adolescence is a critical window of vulnerabilities and opportunities. As connectivity of the brain matures from back to front lobes through childhood, 20% remains unwired when kids enter their teens. She shows the effects of stress, substance abuse, and physical shocks on the adolescent brain development and discusses implications for education and justice systems inter alia. This is mind-blowing stuff that Jensen thinks should be made widely available to practioners, parents and adolescents themselves. So we invited her to our Conversation with Thought Leaders series, see here.

Some of you asked me what I read about ISIS. Like many of you, probably too much. But here are some of the (non-book) write-ups that helped me think and take a long view. On the origins of ISIS, I found Tim Urban’s “From Muhammad to ISIS: Iraq’s full story” clear and useful. On what ISIS is, I was interested in Graeme Wood’s “What ISIS really wants” because of the debate it triggered around the role of religion vs other pull factors attracting recruits. Lydia Wilson’s “What I discovered from interviewing imprisoned ISIS fighters”, for instance, points to “humiliated and enraged young men [seeking] a way out of their insecure and undignified lives; the promise of living in pride as Iraqi Sunni Arabs, which is not just a religious identity but cultural, tribal, and land-based, too.” For the Francophones, I would add Olivier Roy’s “Le djihadisme est une révolte générationnelle et nihiliste” because of his thought-provoking thesis, based on the study of recruits’ profiles, that we are witnessing the Islamization of (youth) radicalism rather than the radicalization of Islam [English speakers can read his Quartz interview here]. And Alain Bertho’s “Il faut être clair un monde a pris fin et il n’y aura pas de retour en arrière” which contrasts ISIS with the 1970ies political terrorism and post-communist social rebellions, and looks at the ideological vacuum they fill for destabilized young people. But I would like to hear which readings you found useful.

I found myself glued to the Bloomberg Carbon Clock, a real-time estimate of the global atmospheric CO2 level. Not very constructive. So my visual this week is from ITU’s “Measuring the information society report 2015”. The good news: 3.2 billion people are online, and 95% of the global population are covered by mobile-cellular networks. The interesting trend: Over the past year, mobile broadband subscriptions (47.2%) overtook households with internet access (46.4%). The bad news: multiple digital divides persist between and within countries; between rural and urban areas; between men and women; between rich and poor; between the more and less educated; and between social groups. The projections: by 2020 53% of people will be online globally; 45% in developing countries; but only 11% in LDCs.

My quote this week is from Nesta CEO Geoff Mulgan in “Meaningful meetings: How can meetings can be made better?”: “Some of the best meetings don’t happen.”

20 November 2015

Posted on November 20, 2015 Leave a Comment

Moorhead and Clarke’s “Big NGOs prepared to move South but will it make a difference?” brings exciting news. It shows the growing move of big INGOs’ headquarters and operations to the Southern hemisphere. Oxfam, Amnesty International, ActionAid are relocating their global HQs. This shift accompanies changes in function: from advocating with governments in the “North” to change things worldwide, to encouraging “governments across the world to be answerable to their own people”. And from delivering services to supporting local citizens to advocate for change. I got very interested in the HQ part of the story. Oxfam global HQ are moving from Oxford to Nairobi, getting thinner, and spreading across different hubs (Addis, Bangkok, Washington, and Geneva). Last year, I advocated for the relocation of our headquarters to Asia, with no traction. But looking at the transformation underway in INGO-land, one wonders: is the very concept of headquarters completely outmoded in today’s world? I found the Oxfam model consisting of a series of interconnected hubs with specific functions very appealing. Should the UN rethink its HQ design and location?

It is always good to have a look of the G-20 Leaders Communiqué. Given the timing, terrorism-related issues took over a big part of the agenda. Some highlights include a strong call to fight inequalities that bring “risks to social cohesion and the wellbeing of citizens, [have] negative economic impact and hinder our objective to lift growth”; an agreement to reduce youth unemployment by 15% by 2025 in G20 countries; and the endorsement of a package of measures to reduce tax evasion (blessed by finance ministers last month). It is also important to note the recognition by the G20 of the refugee crisis as a “global concern” with a call to “all states to contribute to responding to this crisis, and share in the burdens associated with it”: a big win for the Turkish host and the EU, most directly affected by the crisis. While terrorism and refugee matters brought members of the group together, climate change was more divisive. A weak reference to the 2°C target was the hard won gain of a late night debate where India and Saudi Arabia strongly opposed referring to any review mechanism: a signal that the upcoming Paris negotiations may be tough. The next G20 Leaders Summit will be held in Hangzhou in September 2016. As China takes over the G20 Presidency, we may want to consider possible entry points in the preparatory process, not least because G20 Leaders agreed to “develop an action plan in 2016 to further align [their] work with the 2030 Agenda”.

My interactive map of the week is from the Global Terrorism Index 2015 just released by the Institute of Economics and Peace. The main facts from the report: 32,658 people were killed by terrorist attacks in 2014, this is 80% more than in 2013. Only 0.6% of terrorist attacks occurred in countries without ongoing conflicts. 78% of attacks happened in just five countries: Afghanistan, Iraq, Nigeria, Pakistan, and Syria. And half of the 2014 attacks were perpetrated by Boko Haram and ISIS, with the former being the deadliest.

My quote this week is from Marshall McLuhan’s “The medium is the message” [1967]: “Our “Age of Anxiety” is, in great part, the result of trying to do today’s job with yesterday’s tools – with yesterday’s concepts”.

9 October 2015

Posted on October 9, 2015 Leave a Comment

Patrick Cockburn, the author of “The rise of Islamic State: ISIS and the new Sunni revolution”, is said to be the first expert who predicted the rise of ISIS. The seasoned reporter argues that “the birth of the new state was the most radical change to the political geography of the Middle East since the Sykes-Picot Agreement was implemented in the aftermath of the First World War”. And he offers a blunt and bleak account of how that happened: the marginalization of Sunnis in Shia-led Iraq, the breeding of violent activists through decades of war, the failures of the US-led “war on terror”, the influence of the Wahhabi ideology, the Saudi (financial) support, the Iraqi army dysfunctions, the denial and misreading of Western governments…His analysis zooms in on ISIS’ capture of Mosul in June 2014 and its expansion throughout Iraq and Syria in the following 100 days. He describes the functioning of a sophisticated organization: military strategies, tax collection system, detailed operations reporting, and social media mastering. And he shows the complexity of the Iraq and Syria situations with multiple internal conflicts, many players fighting for different reasons, and an ethnic disintegration possibly gone too far to re-create unitary states. To my frustration, the author is silent about what could be done and ends his book with this line: “ISIS has many enemies, so numerous indeed that they should be able to overwhelm it in the long term, but their disunity and differing agendas mean that the Islamic State is fast becoming an established geographic and political fact on the map”.

Vivek Wadhwa tells us that “These technologies will shift the global balance of power in the next 20 years”: clean energy, fracking, robotic manufacturing, and digital manufacturing. Interesting list. Plausible scenarii. Less convincing are the geopolitical implications drawn by the author (America reinvents itself, Russia and China stir up regional unrest, oil producers go bankrupt and the Middle East breeds instability), because they are not substantiated enough in the article.

My graph this week is from the Global Monitoring Report 2015/16 “Development goals in an era of demographic change”. The IMF/World Bank flagship report looks at future development challenges and opportunities through a demographic lens and offers a typology of countries based on their ability to capture demographic dividends. There is a clear link between this typology and the income-based one. “Pre-dividend” countries are mostly low income countries; “early-dividend” countries are lower MICs; “late-dividend” countries are upper MICs; and “post-dividend” countries are HICs. For each group, the report identifies national policy priorities as well as opportunities to leverage international trade, migration, and international finance to make the most of demographic dividends. This analysis is useful to think and articulate the foundational nature of our work in different demographic contexts. I would recommend reading the 20-page executive summary.

My quote this week is from Charlie Munger in his 2003 Herb Kay Memorial Lecture [H/T Shane Parrish] “Academic Economics: Strengths and Weaknesses, after Considering Interdisciplinary Needs”: “If you don’t get elementary probability into your repertoire you go through a long life a one-legged man in an ass-kicking contest”.