Tag: Conflict

Africa Needs More than Just the Silencing of Guns

Africa Out of Bullets, courtesy of Control Arms /flickr

This article was originally published June 17 2014 by the Institute for Security Studies (ISS).

Over the past five decades, Africa has experienced significant change and positive transition. However, violent conflict continues to compromise prospects for sustained human development and economic progress. As part of its 50th Anniversary Declaration in May 2013, the African Union (AU) set itself the goal of ending all wars in Africa by 2020 and is now working on a roadmap towards a conflict-free continent (‘silencing guns in Africa’, as the slogan goes).

Is this goal in fact attainable? Ending wars is imperative, as violent conflict is the biggest impediment to a more prosperous Africa. But what would the concrete benefits look like over time; and would the absence of war by 2020 really boost Africa’s economic and human development and yield immediate dividends? By generating momentum for this kind of discussion in the context of the post-2015 development agenda, the AU’s aggressive target is noteworthy.

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1914 and 2014: Is Asia on the Verge of Repeating Europe’s Slide towards War?

Illustration of The Siberian War, courtesy of The Library of Congress /Wikimedia Commons

Martin Zapfe, what themes and subjects will be covered in this ‘series’ of publications and events?

We will cover a variety of issues on security in Asia – some that are at the center of public attention – like the re-militarization of Japan under Prime Minister Shinzo Abe – and some that often evade public scrutiny, like China’s maritime strategy in the Indian Ocean. Michael Haas and Prem Mahadevan will look at those two themes in-depth in two “CSS Analyses”. In addition, the Center for Security Studies’ (CSS) “Global Security Team” will look at war risks in Asia and determine whether often-applied analogies to “1914”are applicable to present-day Asia. If that really is the case, what does it tell us about possible policy responses? An additional CSS Policy Perspectives to be published later this month will explore this question in greater depth. Finally, we will host a CSS Evening Talk in early July, when the International Institute for Strategic Studies’ (IISS) Christian LeMière will discuss how Switzerland could be affected from security risks emanating from Asia.

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The Central African Republic – Politics or Religion?

Photo: flickr/mwfearnley

The ongoing conflict in the Central African Republic (CAR) is not a ‘religious’ war. As in other cases, it is a politically-motivated conflict between people that happen to be members of different religions. And behind this all-too-familiar, opportunistic and now uncontrolled misuse of religion stands Michel Djotoda, a key leader of the Seleca rebellion, which lasted from December 2012 through March 2013, and the CAR’s beleaguered president from 24 March 2013 until 10 January 2014.

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Aircraft Stories: The F-35 Joint Strike Fighter (Part I)

Joint strike fighter of the US Navy, courtesy of Mark Schierbecker/wikimedia

This article was originally published May 16 2014 by The Disorder of Things.

How big is the F-35 Joint Strike Fighter? By one set of measures, it is three times bigger than the Eisenhower Interstate Highway System, ten times bigger than either the Apollo Project or the International Space Station or Hurricane Katrina, or one hundred times bigger than the Panama Canal. These comparisons are only moderately outlandish. US$1.45 trillion is the Pentagon’s own December 2010 estimate of lifetime operating and supporting costs for the 2,443 copies of the F-35 currently on order by the United States government, which we can then compare to the known price tags, in 2007 dollars, of these five projects.[1] Costs—also variously prefaced as procurement, actual, sunk, fly-away, upgrade, true and so on—and their contestations are central to a discourse of accountancy that surrounds all projects that require large-scale mobilization of public power. But enormous as they are, these numbers still cannot capture the size of this particular weapons program. To understand just how big the F-35 is, I wish to suggest in this two-part post, we ought to conceive it as a proper assemblage—a heterogeneous association of human and nonhuman elements that is at once split, processual, emergent, and, most importantly, constitutive of the modern international.

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The Great Green Sea Control Fleet

US Navy ships in the Pacific Ocean, courtesy of U.S. Navy/fotopedia

This article was originally published May 12 2014 by War on the Rocks.

The recent announcement that the Navy Research Lab (NRL) had successfullyconverted seawater into fuel was greeted by hyperbolic claims that this “game changer” was going to allow the Navy to “say goodbye to oil.”As impressive a scientific feat as this was, the Navy has a very long way to go from flying a model plane powered by molecularly restructured seawater around a field to powering a sizeable portion of the non-nuclear fleet. This research was the latest in a series of milestones achieved in pursuance of what the Navy calls the “Great Green Fleet.” The objective is to reduce oil consumption by 50% and utilize alternative energy for 50% of the Navy’s energy requirements by 2020, a goal that even many supporters find aggressive. The aims of the seawater-to-fuel program are to make it possible for the fleet to remain 100% operational by eliminating the need for ships to come into port to fuel, and to avoid logistical nightmares resulting from the fact that a large portion of petroleum comes from unstable areas and must flow through some of the world’s major chokepoints, such as the Strait of Hormuz.

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