Mapping the Gap Part III by Chirol

Like Mark, my reading list is long and never ending as is my list of audio interviews, speeches and presentations. After listening to the audio version of Theresa Whelan’s presentation at John’s Hopkins on Africa and the security threats arising from the huge swathes of ungoverned area on that continent. It similarity and complimentary nature to PNM theory immediately struck me. Let’s look at what DoD calls ungoverned areas and compare it to PNM theory and compare their evaluation of the nature of future security threats and suggested solutions.

Ungoverned Areas:

Ungoverned Area is defined by DoD as “a physical or non-physical area where there is an absence of state capacity or political will to exercise control.”

Keep in mind this area an be physical such as land, water or air or nonphysical such as cyberspace, financial transactions, and even an individuals mind. There are several subcategories of ungoverned area:

Ungoverned Territory – rugged remote, maritime or litorral areas not effectively governed by a sovereign state.

Competing Governance: a sovereign state’s inability or unwillingness to exercise authority over part or whole of a country, eg: Somalia (warlords, breakaway regions etc) or Nigeria (its delta region).

Exploitation of Legal Principles: Areas in which legal norms and processes can be exploited by actors who threaten domestic or int. order (eg: speech and assembly rights

Opaque Areas of Activity: areas created by the inability of a government to monitor or control certain illicit or facilitating transaction when they are conducted in a certain way (e.g. within cyber or financial systems)

As many others have mentioned, in the post 9/11 theat environment, states are no longer the most important actors nor the primary threats to the US. Non-state actors, such as terrorists, which thrive in failed states represent growing security threats and a major part of the battle will be denying them their home territory, i.e. ungoverned areas. Her presentation went into more specifics about the civilian and military means of achieving that through developing better capacities to control within these states.

Thomas Barnett sees a similar picture when he looks at the wall, but he sees a Core and Gap. I won’t rehash PNM theory here, but Barnett claims that disconnectedness defines danger and that the disconnected areas of the world, that is those least connected to the global economy, represent a non-functioning Gap in which terrorists, among others, thrive and from which our current and future threats will come. He proposes a grand plan to connect the disconnected areas of the globe through both civilian and military means relying heavily on the private sector.

So how does Whelan and the DoD’s map line up with “The Gap”

Unsurprisingly, they bear quite a resemblance to each other.