In a recent Democracy Lab piece, editor Christian Caryl laments that genocide and mass atrocities continue to occur, and wonders why. After nodding to arguments that “we’ve made a lot of progress in preventing mass slaughter,” he turns pessimistic:
I have to confess that I don’t find the signs of progress he cites quite so encouraging. There are far too many places in the world where people are still being singled out for death on a grand scale simply because they belong to the wrong group.
In moral terms, it is impossible to disagree. Any situation “where people are still being singled out for death on a grand scale simply because they belong to the wrong group” is one situation too many.
Empirically, however, the historical trend is more encouraging than Caryl’s enumeration of recent examples and potential genocides implies. In The Better Angels of Our Nature, Steven Pinker aggregates data on genocides (loosely defined) over the course of the twentieth century from three public sources: research by R.J. Rummel, the Political Instability Task Force (PITF), and the Uppsala Conflict Data Program (UCDP). Each of these data sets is imperfect in its own way, and the quality of all estimates of the tolls of specific episodes of mass killing — in these sources or elsewhere — ranges from careful approximation to crude guessing. Still, the data they have produced collectively represent some of our best well-educated guesses about the frequency and severity of deliberate, lethal violence against noncombatant civilians by states and other armed groups over the past 100 years.
So what do those data show? Below, via Max Roser, is a reproduction of Figure 6-7 from Pinker’s book, showing annual death rates according Rummel and PITF data from 1900 to 2008. As Pinker wrote, “in the four decades that followed [the 1940s], the rate (and number) of deaths from democide went precipitously, if lurchingly, downward.” Contrary to popular belief, that long-term decline did not stop when the Cold War ended. Despite terrible genocides in Bosnia, Rwanda, and elsewhere, the global trend remained “unmistakably downward… The first decade of the new millennium [was] the most genocide-free of the past fifty years.”
Coincidentally, the statistics discussed in Pinker’s book stop just before the start of the global spell of economic malaise and political instability that began with the financial crisis of 2008 and includes the Arab Spring. That spell has produced new episodes of mass atrocities, including ongoing ones in Syria, Iraq, South Sudan, and the Central African Republic. To assess the trend since then, we can turn to the most recent data from UCDP, which now covers the period from 1989 through 2013. The chart below plots deaths per 100,000 people per year — the same statistic as in the previous chart, and shown on the same scale — for that 14-year period. UCDP’s data set includes low, best, and high estimates; to err on the side of overcounting, I used the high ones. The estimates of global population used to calculate the annual rates come from the World Bank’s World Development Indicators.
As the chart shows, the spell of global political instability that began in the late 2000s has not yet produced a significant increase in the severity of one-sided violence around the world, at least as of the end of 2013 and as far as UCDP can tell from its sources. This chart uses the same scale as the previous one to facilitate easy comparison. At this scale, the recent annual rates of less than 1 death per 100,000 people are hard to tell apart from zeros. The annual rate more than doubled from 2012 to 2013 — from 0.05 to 0.12 — but both of those figures remain radically smaller than the rates in the tens or hundreds the world saw just a few decades earlier. Even if UCDP’s best estimates are lower than the true counts — and, as UCDP acknowledges, they almost certainly are — the long-term decline has not been reversed. The latest data from PITF show essentially the same thing.
In short, humans certainly do continue to perpetrate mass killings, but the frequency and intensity of these terrible episodes has diminished significantly over the past half-century, and even the recent increase in violent instability has not reversed that longer-term decline. As horrible as the past few years may seem when reading the news, the intensity of deliberate, lethal violence against civilians remains an order of magnitude lower than what we typically saw just a few decades ago, which was itself an order of magnitude lower than the peak rates in the middle of the twentieth century.
Why? This, as Dartmouth professor and genocide scholar Ben Valentino wrote in a recent email, is the “million dollar question.” In his book, Pinker construes the decline in mass atrocities as part of a broader and longer decline in violence among humans, and attributes that trend to changes in cultural and material conditions that increasingly favor and reward our cooperative instincts over our more violent ones.
Valentino’s own answer resembles Pinker’s in general, if not in all the specifics. Valentino spotlighted two forces: a decline in the frequency and intensity of civil wars, and the collapse of communism. “Since most genocide and mass killing occur during civil war,” he wrote in an e-mail, “fewer civil wars means fewer mass killings.” As for why civil wars are rarer, “I’m inclined to believe that stronger central governments and the rise of full democracies are at least a big part of the story.” Meanwhile, the collapse of communism removed both the perpetrators and, to some extent, the motive behind many of the worst mass killings of modern history, and “nothing has really replaced communism as an ideology for mass killing on that scale.”
Valentino’s colleague and sometimes-coauthor Chad Hazlett, now a political scientist at UCLA, also sees the collapse of communism as an important part of the explanation, but more due to its effects on competition in the international system than the waning of the ideology. During the Cold War, the superpowers often prolonged and intensified armed conflicts within states by supporting rival sides, and many those conflicts involved mass killings of civilians. After the USSR collapsed and the Cold War ended, however, that external support evaporated, and with it went most mass killings. “Without superpower support to both sides,” Hazlett wrote in an email, “long-running conflicts and atrocities began to come to an end at unprecedented rates, producing a long decline in the number of atrocities.”
Scott Straus, a professor of political science at the University of Wisconsin-Madison who has written several books on the topic, sees the wider decline in armed conflict as a relevant factor, too. He also gives partial credit to changes in global norms and improvements in international and domestic policy options. He emailed:
Peacekeeping is better mandated, bigger, and more equipped for civilian protection than before. A range of non-military mechanisms is in place, from commissions of inquiry to “smart sanctions” to threats of international prosecution. I am as skeptical as the next scholar and practitioner on the specific effectiveness of each of these but the policy tools are at a minimum thicker and more applied than in the past. Whether these measures are causally related to the decline of mass atrocities is difficult to know at this stage, but there is a plausible connection between these developments and the decline in the mass atrocity events.
All of these scholars, including Pinker, acknowledge that this decline is not necessarily permanent, and none is certain of its causes. The trend itself is clear, however. While we recognize and grieve for those who suffer and die in the atrocities that persist, we might choose to take some encouragement from that fact.
This piece was written as part of the author’s work as a consultant to the Early Warning Project, a new effort to provide routine, public assessments of mass-atrocities risks for countries worldwide.
In the photo, Chorale Abagenzi singers take part in a genocide commemoration ceremony in Kigali, Rwanda.
Photo Credit: Chip Somodevilla/Getty Images
Jeb Bush has flip-flopped-flip-flopped.
On Monday, the Republican, who is running for president but hasn’t made it official, was for the Iraq war.
Under pressure, Bush said a day later he misunderstood the question.
Then he clarified his position.
One more time.
This type of waffling is impressive, even if the former Florida governor hasn’t officially launched a bid for the GOP nomination in next year’s presidential election. But it illustrates one of his biggest challenges to being an attractive candidate: the legacy of his big brother, former President George W. Bush, and his disastrous Iraq policy.
W. is still admired by many in the Republican Party, but keeping him at arm’s length may be something Jeb is forced to do to win over Democrats in a general election. His back-and-forth on the issue shows just how difficult it will be to completely sever family ties.
And just so you’re clear: Knowing what we know now — that the intel on WMDs was trumped up — Jeb Bush would not invade Iraq. Until he would.
Photo Credit: Justin Sullivan/Getty Images
When the European Council – the institution that sets the European Union’s agenda on broad, strategic issues[1] – published its Declaration on the Environment on December 3, 1988, climate change was mentioned briefly and in passing.[2] In 2009, the year of the United Nations climate summit in Copenhagen, the topic’s salience had risen dramatically. In that year, climate change made up more than 80% of the references to the environment in the European Council’s publicly-available Conclusions, and more than one-tenth of all references to policy issues.
This estimate of climate change’s increasingly important role is possible because of data compiled by the EU Policy Agendas Project. The project’s researchers have analyzed the European Council’s Conclusions sentence-by-sentence from 1975 to 2012 to identify which policy issues are discussed and when.[3] This information is available in a public dataset[4], which gave me an exciting opportunity to explore how much attention the Council has given to climate change in the last three decades. This post retraces how I mobilized the EU Policy Agendas Project data – and added to it – to explore patterns in the Council’s attention to climate change since 1988.
First, some context: in the EU Policy Agendas dataset, climate change is considered a subtopic of the broader “Environment” policy topic. Between 1975 and 2012, the environment garnered an average of around 4% of the Council’s attention.[5] Overall, 32% of the references to the environment in the Council’s Conclusions are categorized as related to climate change. However, this average masks significant year-to-year changes. For example, in the six years from 1988 to 1993, climate change made up only 5% of the Council’s references to the environment. In contrast, from 2006 to 2011, climate change made up 74% of environmental references.
Climate change: international negotiations and EU climate policy
Although the EU Policy Agendas dataset distinguishes between climate change and other environmental issues, it does not include analysis of the specific climate-related topics that the European Council discusses. Therefore, as a next step, I analyzed all mentions of climate change in the dataset and organized them into three overall categories: general statements about climate change, statements about the international climate negotiations under the United Nations Framework on Climate Change (UNFCCC), and statements about European Union climate policy. Three examples of statements I placed in each category are given below in Figure 2.
So which of these three categories gained the most attention? Overall, the international negotiations under the UNFCC garner almost 60% of the Council’s climate-related attention. The EU’s climate policies attract a further 25%, with 15% related to generic climate statements. Figure 4 below gives a historical perspective on these estimates (from 1997 to 2011). The first mention of climate change was in 1988 (not shown), but it did not become prominent on the Council’s agenda until after the international agreement on the Kyoto Protocol in 1997. This same pattern was repeated in relation to the 2009 Copenhagen Conference, explaining the large increase in references to the international negotiations during that year.
Which EU climate policy?
Finally, I wanted to explore which specific climate policies the Council discusses. In its 132 references to internal EU policy over the period 1988-2011, the Council focused on general references to policy (39%), the EU’s targets for reducing greenhouse gas emissions (22%) and the EU Emissions Trading System (20%). Other policies received 5% or less of the Council’s attention.
Conclusion
As I mentioned in the introduction, the data exploration presented above has a few limitations. I have looked at the basic share of attention to climate change, and have not attempted to explain why we see the patterns that we do. Although I did not have the time to do so, more detailed analysis could examine the reasons why these patterns of attention exist. I also limited the analysis to only the references that were coded as climate change-related in the EU Policy Agendas dataset. Some climate topics were categorized differently (for example, ‘the global carbon market’ was placed in the energy policy category[6]). A broader analysis could attempt to track Council attention to those climate-related issues that were categorized as a different policy topic.
What I have found is, however, quite interesting. Taken together, this analysis suggests that in the mid-2000s, climate change became the dominant environmental issue on the European Council agenda. Much of the Council’s attention focused on the international climate negotiations, but with increasing space for EU climate policies like the EU Emissions Trading System. Although the EU Agendas dataset stops in early 2012, climate change is still clearly on the Council’s agenda (as evidenced by the 23-24 October, 2014 Council Conclusions, where the EU’s 2030 climate and energy framework occupied more than half of the document). It remains to be seen whether climate change will continue to play this important role on the EU’s environmental policy agenda in the years to come.
[1] Peterson, John and Michael Shackleton. 2012. The institutions of the European Union. Oxford: Oxford University Press. See pages 43-67.
[2] European Council Conclusions, 2-3 December 1988, Annex I
[3] Alexandrova, Petya, Marcello Carammia, & Arco Timmermans. 2012. Policy punctuations and issue diversity on the European Council agenda. Policy Studies Journal, 40(1), 69–88.
[4] Alexandrova, Petya, Marcello Carammia, Sebastiaan Princen, and Arco Timmermans. 2014. Measuring the European Council agenda: Introducing a new approach and dataset. European Union Politics, 15(1): 152-167.
[5] Alexandrova, Carammia, & Timmermans, 2012, pg. 75.
[6] “The strengthening and extension of global carbon markets” (March 9, 2007) was categorized under energy policy.
The post The rise of climate change on the European Union agenda: 1988-2011 appeared first on Ideas on Europe.
The summit between President Barack Obama and representatives from the Persian Gulf countries that kicked off today at Camp David is meant to reassure Washington’s Arab allies. “Don’t worry about the nuclear deal with Iran,” Obama will say. “We’ve got your back.”
And what’s the best way to show your friends that you’ve got their back? Sell them billions of dollars worth of advanced weapons. In fact, it seems like arms sales are the Obama administration’s tool of choice these days for dealing with everything from counterterrorism to a lagging economy. And the consequences, unsurprisingly, are bloody.
In its first five years in office, the Obama administration entered into formal agreements to transfer over $64 billion in arms and defense services to Gulf Cooperation Council (GCC) member states, with about three-quarters of that total going to Saudi Arabia. And new offers worth nearly $15 billion have been made to Riyadh in 2014 and 2015. Items on offer to GCC states have included fighter aircraft, attack helicopters, radar planes, refueling aircraft, air-to-air missiles, armored vehicles, artillery, small arms and ammunition, cluster bombs, and missile defense systems.
Sales to GCC members have been the most important component of the record-level U.S. arms deals concluded during Obama’s term. The Obama figures for sales worldwide even edge out levels reached during the Nixon administration, when the end of the Vietnam War and the rising purchasing power of members of the OPEC oil cartel spurred the United States’ first major arms export boom.
The surge in arms sales under Obama is rooted in two factors, one political and one economic. The political aspect of the Obama approach mirrors the path pursued by President Richard Nixon in response to the unpopularity of the Vietnam War. In 1969, Nixon announced that henceforth the United States would supply generous quantities of military assistance to allied regimes, in an effort to “avoid another war like Vietnam anywhere in the world.” And in a 1967 article in Foreign Affairs, Nixon referenced the political roots of his emerging policy, noting that Vietnam had sown “bitter dissension” domestically, producing a “deep reluctance to become involved once again in a similar intervention on a similar basis.”
Substitute Obama for Nixon and Iraq for Vietnam, and you have a latter-day version of the Nixon Doctrine of arms sales promotion. Obama wants to be seen as a president who ended large-scale wars, not a president who started new ones. And, as he has made clear time and again, he is particularly reluctant to put large numbers of U.S. “boots on the ground,” as the Bush administration did in both Iraq and Afghanistan. Given these restrictions, the Obama administration has developed an approach to warfare designed to limit U.S. casualties. This has relied largely on drone strikes and the extensive use of Special Forces; but boosting arms sales advances is also a part of this hands-off approach, giving allies the equipment and training to fight terrorism on their own. (Let’s forget for the moment the fact that Obama’s approach may spawn more terrorists than it kills by generating anti-U.S. sentiment.)
But it might be the legacy of the 2008 economic crisis, as much as the 2003 Iraq disaster that drives this White House’s arms sales. The Obama administration clearly wants to create jobs in the defense industry and boost the bottom lines of major defense contractors. The Pentagon’s 2010 announcements of offers involving tens of billions of dollars’ worth of F-15 fighter planes, Apache attack helicopters, armored vehicles, and other equipment to Saudi Arabia listed the prime beneficiaries as Boeing, Lockheed Martin, Raytheon, General Electric, the Sikorsky Helicopter unit of United Technologies, and ITT Aerospace. But these are just the major contractors; thousands of subcontractors across the United States will get a piece of the action as well. For example, in announcing the deal for selling 84 Boeing F-15s to the Saudis, Assistant Secretary of State for Political-Military Affairs Andrew Shapiro proudly asserted that the deal would create 50,000 jobs in 44 states, most notably in St. Louis, the site of the main assembly plant for the plane.
Foreign sales are particularly critical for keeping alive weapons production lines that are about to be closed down as the Pentagon moves towards buying next-generation systems. Absent new domestic orders, Boeing’s F-18 production line will have to close in early 2017. But last week’s report that Kuwait intends to buy 40 F-18s for $3 billion holds out hope that the line will stay open for another year or more, during which time the company can seek more foreign sales to prolong the life of the program even further. Similarly, the General Dynamics M-1 tank, a program which the Army started winding down in 2012, has been surviving based on yearly add-ons to Pentagon budget requests spearheaded by the Ohio and Michigan delegations, whose states host the main production sites for the vehicles. These efforts have been supplemented by a deal to upgrade 84 M-1s for Saudi Arabia.
The Obama arms sales boom has bolstered the bottom lines of companies like Boeing, Lockheed Martin, and Raytheon. Each firm has been the lead contractor one or more mega-deals like the $29 billion offer of 84 Boeing F-15 fighter jets and related equipment to Saudi Arabia, a $6.5 billion sale of Lockheed Martin’s THAAD missile defense system to Qatar, and the proposed transfer of the Lockheed Martin/Raytheon produced Patriot Air and Missile Defense System to Saudi Arabia for $1.8 billion. The payoff won’t come all at once, but as these deals work their way through the pipeline, they will generate substantial profits for each of these firms for years to come.
As Pentagon procurement spending has dipped slightly due to the caps on the agency’s budget established in the Budget Control Act of 2011, arms industry executives are looking to promote overseas sales even more aggressively — and the Middle East market will be central to these efforts. Lockheed Martin has set a goal of increasing exports to 25 percent of total sales over the next few years. In a conference call with investors in late January, Lockheed Martin CEO Marillyn Hewson suggested that continued “volatility” in the Middle East and Asia make them “growth areas” for the firm. And a few years ago, Boeing launched an effort to get export sales in its defense division up to 25 to 30 percent, from just 7 percent in 2005. Dennis Muilenburg, a company vice president who formerly ran Boeing’s defense segment, has suggested that if the F-15 deal with Saudi Arabia stays on track, the company will be “well on our way” to its goal.
The Obama administration is clearly on board with the industry’s agenda. The lengths to which U.S. officials will go to help secure an arms sale for a U.S. company were revealed at a House Foreign Affairs Committee in April 2013. Asked whether the administration was doing enough to advocate for U.S. arms exports, Tom Kelly, principal deputy assistant secretary of the State Department’s bureau of political-military affairs, said that, “it is an issue that has the attention of every top-level official who’s working on foreign policy throughout the government, including the top officials at the State Department … in advocating on behalf of our companies and doing everything we can to make sure that these sales go through.” Just to make himself perfectly clear, Kelly went on to say that [arms sales promotion] “is something that we’re doing every day, basically [on] every continent in the world, and we take it very, very seriously and we’re constantly thinking of how we can do better.”
The Obama administration can definitely do better — but not by hawking top-of-the-line weaponry to Middle Eastern regimes. That approach has already proved disastrous.
In 2011, the U.S-backed security forces of Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates intervened to help put down the pro-democracy movement in Bahrain. Last summer, the United Arab Emirates conducted bombing raids against Islamist forces in Libya, further inflaming the situation in that country. Most recently, Saudi Arabia, armed with U.S. planes and bombs, has launched a devastating assault on Yemen that has killed at least 700 civilians, displaced hundreds of thousands, and sparked a humanitarian emergency by blocking access to food and medicine.
One shudders trying to imagine what comes next after the president inks billions more dollars worth of arms sales at Camp David this week.
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