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Keyword in Focus: Western Sahara

Antonio Achille, working with the Military Liaison Office of the UN Mission for the Referendum in Western Sahara (MINURSO), looks through binoculars during a ceasefire monitoring patrol in Oum Dreyg, Western Sahara.
MINURSO monitors ceasefire in Western Sahara, courtesy of UN Photo/Martine Perret

Resource-rich Western Sahara is at the top of the news this week, and the “last colonial conflict” in Africa is definitely an issue to watch.

Al Jazeera’s bureau in Morocco was closed down two weeks ago by the authorities. The news network gave its coverage of the Western Sahara issue as one of the main reasons. So if the Moroccan government doesn’t want us to know about what’s going on there, chances are it must be something interesting and worth digging deeper into.

Representatives of Morocco, the Polisario Front, Algeria and Mauritania are currently gathered in New York for a round of UN-brokered informal talks in an effort to end a conflict that has its roots in the 1970s. Just before the talks started, a raid by Moroccan forces on a Western Saharan refugee camp left dozens injured and four dead.

Western Sahara is likely to gain strategic importance as world reserves in phosphate are depleted, because it is one of the few regions in the world to hold large quantities of this key fertilizer. Moreover, the region possesses significant fisheries and offshore oil reserves, raising the strategic stakes further.

Morocco doesn’t want to let go of such a treasure vault, but the Polisario front has been pressing for a referendum on the independence of the region for years. The UN, on the other hand, has been monitoring a ceasefire between the two parties since 1991, keeping a fragile and unsustainable ‘peace’ of sorts in place.

But what does the recent raid and the closing down of Al Jazeera’s Morocco bureau say about Moroccan tactics in Western Sahara and will negotiations this time lead anywhere?

To learn more about the background to this conflict, explore our Digital Library holdings on Western Sahara. Some resources worth highlighting include:

  • A policy brief by the United States Institute of Peace (USIP) outlining why the mediation process by the UN is not working
  • This situation report by the Institute for Security Studies (ISS)  presenting the perspectives of both Morocco and the Polisario Front on the conflict
  • This report by International Crisis Group describing the costs of this protracted frozen conflict
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ISN Insights: Look Back, Week Ahead

The ISN Insights week starts today, photo: Caro's Lines/flickr

Last week ISN Insights looked at:

  • The US mid-term elections in a preview piece by John M Donnelly and a post-election podcast with Bob Benenson of the Congressional Quarterly.

This week we’ll be examining: the US military’s COIN (counterinsurgency) strategy, the UK strategic defense review, Bahrain’s elections, tactical nuclear weapons in the New START treaty, and Tanzania’s elections.

Make sure to check back each day for the newest ISN Insights package. And if you’re an active Twitter or Facebook user, look us up and become a follower!

Europe’s Pariah People

One man in ten million, photo: Zsolt Bugarszki/flickr

With over 10 million members, the Roma (also called Romani) constitute today’s largest EU minority group. Scattered across a dozen countries, with their largest concentrated populations in Central and Eastern Europe, they have become Europe’s current pariah people.

In July of this year, French President Nicolas Sarkozy announced his government’s plans to deport thousands of Romanian and Bulgarian Roma migrants back to their home countries. Already in 2009, roughly 10,000 Roma were expelled from France, and around the same number has been driven out thus far this year. In Italy, where authorities already started to deal with the ‘Roma question’ back in 2008, large-scale evictions of Roma from settlements across the country are already taking place. In Milan alone, officials have expelled over 7,000 Roma over the past two years.

France and Italy are, however, not alone in evicting the Roma. Across Western Europe, politicians and public officials are tripping over themselves with declarations proclaiming that Roma as an ethnic group are dangerous and predisposed to crime and other antisocial behavior, and must therefore be removed from society as quickly as possible. In light of this, numerous Western European countries (namely Germany, Sweden, Norway, Denmark, Finland, and the UK) have either already moved to expel the Roma, or intend to do so in the nearby future.

In Eastern Europe, meanwhile, where most Roma live, the situation has never been anything but hideous. Across the region, Roma communities are denied equal access to adequate housing, education, health, water and sanitation, and thus remain deprived of all prospects. In addition, anti-Roma violence remains a serious and, in many places even an increasing problem, exacerbated by the fact that most perpetrators of violence against Roma continue to act with impunity.

However, discrimination against the Roma is not a new phenomenon.

Learning Intelligence

Chris Pallaris of i-intelligence explaining intelligence tools to ISN staff, image: Emilie Boillat/ISN

In order to be able to offer increasingly intelligent services, we are educating ourselves. This week, the ISN team is taking a workshop on “Skills in Intelligence Collection and Analysis.”

Let’s start with an intelligence problem. Thinking about the US mid-terms, we wondered about the future of the US during a coffee break. Our (bold) question: Might the US disintegrate over the course of the next decade?

Applying the methodology taught by Chris Pallaris of i-intelligence, we’d first analyze the problem by taking it apart. Intelligence analysis is problem-solving. As any good intelligence problem, our question asks for a predictive answer. Intelligence IS prediction.

The first step would be to make our assumptions concerning the US and its future explicit by writing them down. Assumptions are key to our thinking but need to be watched closely and examined critically because they may lead us to a  biased answer. Next, we would formulate hypotheses. As many as possible. We would develop indicators to monitor the stability and future prospects of the US. We would need to have a collection plan to guide the accumulation of information. In doing this, ‘source awareness’ helps us look for information in the right places.

Our problem may not demand an immediate answer. It may, as Chris put it, be a “wicked problem” that has no neat answer at all. We needn’t hurry. The tension between an accurate prediction crafted with care and time, and the limited amount of time available for decision-making and action, however, is always there. The longer we wait in answering the question at hand, the less time there is for our government to look for new allies and to do contingency planning.

Do you think our speculations are unrealistic? Well, intelligence is also about thinking the unthinkable.

We hope the ISN keeps inspiring you and catering to your intelligence needs with the resources we offer in the Digital Library and the analyses we provide with ISN Insights.

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When You Feed the Blog, It Grows

Nourish it and it will grow... photo: Brenda Anderson/flickr

To give our readers a sense of who reads the ISN blog, and exactly how many readers we have every month, I thought I’d take you on a quick tour of the ISN Blog readership. The impetus for this ‘tour’ came with the realization that our blog has been on a trajectory of healthy, even robust, growth in the past half a year, with October alone marking a 20 percent jump in our unique visitor numbers, now up to 7,000 unique visits each month. Page views, conversely, continue to hit the 30,000 mark every month.

This is great news and such rapid growth is particularly encouraging. What about the location of our readers then? As you read this, do you find yourself in a country where our reach is particularly wide or are you an ISN Blog pioneer? Most of our readers are based where we are based- Switzerland, but our US and UK readers are almost as numerous. We’re also increasingly popular in France, Germany, China and Israel, displaying the scope for growth in emerging and rapidly growing regions like the Middle East and Asia.

But is readership steady throughout the week? Interestingly enough, although it is quite steady, with many people checking out our blog even on Saturdays and Sundays, Thursdays are the most high-traffic days with the blog receiving an average of 1,900 page views on that day.

Thank you for your support and patronage thus far- keep visiting us, keep interacting and keep spreading the word!