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.
And if you shaded in the countries that have the opposite problem of too much government (e.g. NoKo, Zimbabwe, Venezuela, Egypt), you’d get an even more complete overlap with the GapMap.
“In the post 9/11 theat environment, states are no longer the most important actors nor the primary threats to the US.”
Surely you mean, “no longer considered the most important actors…” or at least, “In the post-cold-war environment…”
The supposed uniformity of threats for which the US was preparing was alway, in my opinion, a bit of a red herring. After all, the USSR seized on states which were in the same zone you’ve highlighted, indicating that if they hadn’t been there, things would have fallen apart anyway. I’m not saying they did anybody any favors- far from it- but the point is, we just didn’t realize that perhaps they were there for a reason. The Soviets absorbed a lot of hatred and losses in these anarchic states. “The enemy of my enemy” ceases to be my friend when my enemy becomes my friend.
“disconnectedness defines danger”
And yet once more, people mistake correlation and effect with cause. Danger is not disconnectedness. Danger comes from anger and the means to avenge it. Interestingly, there is much more danger in large cities of those countries (where people are ostensibly more connected) than in the rural areas. Disconnectedness exacerbates the situation that ferments danger, and connectedness can help. But not always.
Note the cartoons of Mohammed: this was a case of over-connectedness exposing huge numbers of angry Muslims to something that they had previously failed to know exists (namely, blasphemy against prophets and God). Further talks on international news stations and in forums have not eased the situation. It’s a fundamental disagreement between two sides that were already offended. Connectedness is not helping.
Excellent post. The global rule-set for intervention has yet to be written. The fact that the US administration had sent only six troops on UN peacekeeping missions, when the rest of the world had sent over 60,000, suggests there are huge differences within the global community yet to be resolved.
This ties in well with my recent assessment of the Westphalian system. Why are we treating non-states as though they were states?
Very nice post. Catholicgauze has been looking at similar issues, too.
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How does the map of Muslim migration and dispora pan out against these maps? If you look, they’re somewhat similar, but also follow historic trade routes set up centuries before. They seem to naturally follow these paths through the gaps.
Some more info that may be useful to gap analysis – Aon Insurance’s Political and Economic Risk map can be found here: http://www.aon.com/about/publications/pdf/issues/2006_P&E_Region_Snapshots.pdf
The map also has an interesting table on page 2 of events, their impact and the likelihood of them occurring.
Writing a global rule-set for intervention won’t be easy. The insurance risks map suggests that a militarised insurance company and the United Nations would intervene in regions for different reasons. For example the insurance company would not intervene to stop a humanitarian disaster.
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