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Advanced Distributed Learning Working Group Meeting in Georgia

St George's monument in Tbilisi, Georgia. Photo: Reto Schilliger

From 1-3 November 2011, the members of the Partnership for Peace Consortium’s ADL Working Group met for their annual conference, this time in Tbilisi, Georgia. The event, kindly hosted by the Georgian Ministry of Defense and organized in close cooperation with the ISN and the PfP Consortium, focused on the introduction of new and updated open-source tools, discussion of current members’ activities as well as the launch of new ADL projects.

November 1st: Workshops

The meeting started with a full day of workshops providing theoretical background as well as hands-on training on updated and new tools. The ISN Training and ADL Competence Center (TACC) prepared and delivered three workshops on the following topics:

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The Other Sides of Afghanistan: A Regional Perspective on Security Issues in Afghanistan

What's the way ahead for Afghanistan in light of the proposed troop withdrawal by 2014? Photo: US army/flickr

On 4 and 5 November, the Center for Security Studies (CSS) at ETH hosted an academic workshop entitled “The other sides of Afghanistan: A regional perspective on security issues in Afghanistan”. It was organized by Dr Stephen Aris and Dr Aglaya Snetkov (CSS) and supported by a grant from the Swiss National Science Foundation. The focus of the workshop was on the regional dimensions of the security situation in Afghanistan.

Ahead of the proposed US and NATO withdrawal from military operations in Afghanistan by 2014, many analysts are now arguing that the role and influence of regional powers and neighboring states in Afghanistan have become increasingly important and that an effective solution to the current instability in Afghanistan will require a coordinated regional approach. To evaluate the prospects for and likely nature of regional cooperation on Afghanistan, the goal of the workshop was to analyze the perceptions and responses of neighboring and regional states to the security situation in Afghanistan, as well as their views on the implications of the proposed Western withdrawal in 2014. To this end, area studies and country-experts on the states bordering Afghanistan (China, Iran, Pakistan, Tajikistan, Turkmenistan and Uzbekistan) and regional powers and states in close proximity (Russia, India, Kazakhstan and Kyrgyzstan) gave presentations about these countries’ perceptions, strategies and policies towards Afghanistan. In addition, experts examined the view and approach of NATO and Afghanistan itself to a regional solution, while regional analysts examined the transnational security and economic dynamics between the states of the wider Afghan neighborhood.

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A Quick Introduction to the Upcoming ISN Editorial Plan

The earth viewed from space. Photo: NASA Goddard/flickr

Dear valued members of the ISN community:

As of next Monday, 14 November, you are going to see something slightly different on the ISN webpage. Yes, you will continue to see many of the features we already provide. We are, however, going to embark on an experiment – a new Editorial Plan.

One of the temptations of being exclusively current events-oriented is that you can be “all over the map.” To try and avoid this problem, and to provide a service that few other websites of ISN’s type provide, we are going to implement an Editorial Plan. The title may infer something grand but all we actually want to do is tell a story. We want to walk through a three-part narrative that stops and thinks about some of the enduring issues that define international relations and security studies today.

The following slides depict what our story will focus on and how we will walk through it. Frankly, there is nothing complex about the three-part narrative of this tale, which is as follows.

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Pre-crime Identification – the FAST Program

Sweaty palms and an elevated heart rate: are you having bad thoughts? Photo: barrowboy/flickr

The Department of Homeland Security seems to be developing technologies reminiscent of the pre-crime unit depicted in Phillip K. Dick’s “Minority Report”.

The department’s so-called “FAST” project — which stands for Future Attribute Screening Technology — aims at nothing less than screening people for malign intent: for crimes they have not yet committed.

As the homepage for the FAST project describes, non-invasive sensors will be used to scan people for indications of bad thoughts. Currently, these indicators factor in posture, gait, thermal imaging of the face and changes in vocal tension while speaking, but might be extended to include other things, such as pheromones.

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Ethnic Minorities: Tipping the Scales in Syria?

Church next to a mosque in Hama, Syria. Photo: fchmksfkcb/flickr

Last month’s assassination of Kurdish activist Mashaal Tammo has put the spotlight on Syria’s almost forgotten Kurdish minority. Their involvement in the uprisings had been considerably low up to this point, propelled by fears that the regime of President Bashar al-Assad would ruthlessly put down Kurdish participation in the protests. But after the death of Tammo, a prominent opposition figure and founding member of the Syrian National Council, a wave of outrage has swept across the Kurdish population. This brought about the most intense protests and demonstrations of this ethnic minority since the beginning of the uprisings in March and might just mark a tipping point for the highly fragmented Syrian opposition.

While opposition movements of the Arab Spring have been characterized as heterogeneous and unstructured, Syria’s opposition seems particularly patchy. Approximately 40 percent of the population do not belong to the Sunni majority. Shia Muslims, Christians, Alawites, Druze, Jews and Ismaelites all have their own political agendas. One of the main reasons why Assad has managed to remain in power for so long is because he was backed by the country’s minorities. In exchange, he implemented laws and policies to secure the minorities from the Sunni majority.

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