Via MESH, two fascinating maps of geopolitical hot zones. The first is from Heartland: Eurasian Review of Geopolitics, and is a map of the troubled borederland between Afghanistan and Pakistan, which shows jihadist flows, sites of conflict and contested tribal areas.

The second is from Lebanon-Support, and indentifies vulnerable areas and “flash-points” within Lebanon. The map itself is a kind of palimsest, where a series of layers (political, confessional, security and economic) are drawn over the terrain of Lebanon.

Click on the thumbnails to view the images.

VoxEU launches a free book compiling all of its columns on the subprime crisis. Extensive in scope and filled with contributions from economists like Stephen G. Cecchetti, Willem Buiter, Charles Wyplosz and Marco Onado. A must read: The First Global Financial Crisis of the 21st Century.

Essential macro forecasting from Nouriel Roubini’s Global Economonitor. Referencing a recent paper, Roubini predicts, and lists ten reasons for, the downfall of the Bretton Woods 2 system. Will the Bretton Woods 2 (BW2) Regime Collapse Like the Original Bretton Woods Regime Did? The Coming End Game of BW2.

From The Guardian, news of a secret World Bank report, according to which biofuels have pushed up global food prices by some 75%. The WSJ Environmental Capital blog puts this hard to believe figure in some kind of context, then demolishes it. Turns out that the “secret report” was nothing more than an unpublished exploratory working paper, which, due to the interest generated from The Guardian “leak”, will be published by the World Bank at the end of the week with a much more reasonable figure for biofuel influence.

Doug Noland of Prudent Bear — after his invaluable weekly “credit bubble bulletin” round up — explains in Starbucks, the “Core,” and Conventional Mortgages why the closures of 600 Starbucks coffee shops in the US is emblematic of the troubles facing corporations after the credit boom has bust and the era of easy money has come to an end.

A couple of years ago, the PoMo-blogosphere was going a bit nuts to the tune of an article by Eyal Weizman, published in UK art magazine Frieze, called ‘Israeli Military Using Post-Structuralism as “Operational Theory”’. In it, Weisman charts the IDF’s growing engagement with post modernist architectural writers and — especially galling to the PoMo left — legendary French theorists Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari. According to Weizman,

The reading lists of contemporary military institutions include works from around 1968 (with a special emphasis on the writings of Gilles Deleuze, Félix Guattari and Guy Debord), as well as more contemporary writings on urbanism, psychology, cybernetics, post-colonial and post-Structuralist theory

Which in many ways sounds like the ideal reading list for any university programme, or just the tags of an average thread over at Hyperstition. One can understand the reaction of superstitious leftists, though. Reappropriation of the post-Structuralist, post-left cannon seems almost preordained. “Guy Debord is being read by the IDF to help them oppress Palestinians” — on some primal, conspiratorial level, that makes a kind of sense. And of course, this appropriation was also evidence of the essentially unradical nature of Deleuze and Guattari to both traditional leftists and newer strains of Zizeck and Badiou reading refuseniks. If Foucault had said that, “”someday this century will be known as Deleuzian,” here was the perverse proof.

They should all be pleased, then, to learn that the IDF’s obsession with hard to understand, wordy French philosophers was part of the reason for the strategic and operational blunders that led to its disasterous performance in the Second Lebanon War in summer, 2006. Avi Kober, in an excellent, prize winning, must-read paper in The Journal of Strategic Studies, pieces together causes of Israeli under-performance, and discovers that one significant problem was the fixation of the IDF officer corps with pretentious post-modern philosophy. Kober disdainfully notes that, under the influence of the colourful IDF Brigadier General (Ret.) Shimon Naveh, “IDF officers in military academies and colleges started learning the writings of great architects instead of the writings of the masters of war.” My favourite quote, however, regards the equally confusing language of EBO:

Yoram Yair, who investigated the 91st Division’s functioning during the Second Lebanon War, found out that using terms like ‘swarmed, multi-dimensional, simultaneous attack’ in orders issued by the division’s commander came at the expense of a simple and straightforward definition of objectives and missions.

Antoine Bousquet, a lecturer in international relations at Birkbeck with a germane set of research interests, recently wrote a paper that seems to be a preview of his forthcoming book, The Scientific Way of Warfare,: Order and Chaos on the Battlefields of Modernity. The paper — The Scientific Way of Warfare: Science and the Management of Techno-social Systems of Warfare — is at once a philosophical thesis on the role of technology in systems of social organisation (in the best sci-fi / theoretical traditions of CCRU), and a taxonomy of historical iterations of warfare and its understanding (in the best aeonic traditions of 4GW).

4GW is now seemingly somewhat passé, but Bousquet’s model is both pleasingly abstract and playfully eclectic (and perhaps more importantly, rather useless). In short, he describes four regimes of warfare based around four techno-scientific discourses. These discourses are embodied in the metaphors used to describe them and which, in some sense, the whole techno-scientific social apparatus is organised around. What Bousquet means is that techno-scientific advancements are to be understood primarily as social phenomena before they are to be understood as technological or scientific artefacts. To use Deleuze and Guattari’s famous example, the spur enabled or brought into play a whole social order (feudalism) that would have been unimaginable without the technology that allowed the charges of mounted knights.

There is some overlap with the four modes of war in the Generational Theory of War, but it does not map completely. Like the Generations of War, the four techno-scientific regimes develop chronologically, but previous regimes are often present; for instance, the clock-like discipline of marching is still practised to this day.

The first way of warfare is mechanistic, and the technological machine ascribed to mechanistic warfare is the clock. The clock is a metaphor for the Newtonian vision of the universe as inherently rational and deterministic, with God, the “divine watch maker”, regulating and ordering all things. The chaos of war is exorcised by the invocation of the clock in the form of drills and rehearsed, synchronised movements. Battle is fought by generals affecting centralised control through predetermined routine. Mechanistic warfare is embodied in the army of Frederick the Great.

The second scientific way of warfare is thermodynamic, and is embodied in the metaphor of the nineteenth century engine. Thermodynamics charts “the convertibility of all forms of energy and its inevitable dissipation into randomness through entropy.” After the optimism of the Enlightenment, time’s arrow suddenly pointed straight to heat death and the stability and rationality of Newton’s clock-work universe was superseded by a revolutionary fervour and mass upheaval. Ideologies of various hues proclaimed that “from the chaos of the age, a final and immutable order would emerge”. Thermodynamic warfare focused the power and drive of industrialisation into ever more destructive forms of violence, bringing the total mobilisation of populations and industry into the domain of war. Even as political systems and regimes were achieving unprecedented levels of control over their subjects, the battle field was collapsing into chaos, as embodied in the German army’s Auftragstaktik and the writings of the legendary strategist Carl von Clausewitz.

The third techno-scientific way of warfare is cybernetic warfare its machinic metaphor is the computer. Bousquet describes how the complexity of war increased in the thermodynamic age, the need for efficient logistical systems and communication technologies grew. In response, telegraphs and telephones were frequently deployed in wars and “stimulated growing scientific interest in the concept of information.” From this milieu emerged cybernetics, the study of complex systems, focusing on the study of information as a form of negative entropy, or “negentropy“. Thus cybernetics held aloft the promise of controlling chaos through information, specifically, through the operations of computers, a machine which also emerged from the painful heat death of war. Cybernetic warfare returned man to the dream of the mechanised and centralised ordering of warfare, as demonstrated by the Cold War’s use of system’s analysis and one-button-till-Armageddon hierarchical decision makers.

The fourth way of warfare is chaoplexic warfare and it’s dominant machinc artefact is the network. Chaoplexity is shorthand for the twinned (or at least, related) disciplines of chaos theory and complexity. Bousquet notes how under this new scientific regime,

Information remains the central concept, and in this sense chaoplexity is an outgrowth of cybernetics and information theory, but the focus on change, evolution, and positive feedback breaks with the concern for stability of the cybernetic pioneers. While some of the certainties and predictability of the existing scientific theories and methodology are terminally undermined, a hidden order is discovered behind chaos which itself becomes no longer an evil to avert but the very condition of possibility of order.

Cybernetic warfare failed in the messy jungles of Vietnam, and the simple dualism of the Cold War has been replaced with a confusing and granular-ised mass of conflicting forces. Chaoplexic warfare is described as being embodied in the doctrine of network-centric warfare, with its sci-fi imaginings of wired techno-soldiers and swarming, self-organised drones.

But as we know, chaoplexic NCW has not been without problems. We await the next phase.

Perspectives on Politics roundtable review on “The New U.S. Army/Marine Corps Counterinsurgency Field Manual as Political Science and Political Praxis“, featuring Stephen Biddle, LTC Doug Ollivant, Professor Stathis Kalyvas, and Professor Wendy Brown.

From The Christian Science Monitor:

Uncle Sam is adding 60,000 barrels of oil a day to giant underground caverns in Texas and Louisiana to be used for the proverbial ‘rainy day. Is it raining yet? … Proponents of the government taking action to ease the crunch say that storing oil at a time of soaring prices, in what is called the Strategic Petroleum Reserve (SPR), does not makes sense. Some want some oil released in the hope that it will drive down prices. Opponents counter that using the SPR would probably have little impact. In fact, they maintain, as does President Bush, that there is no emergency.

I have just read a (very good) paper by Macartan Humphreys of Harvard University, Economics and Violent Conflict, which is basically a literature review of econometric research into the impact of violent conflict on economic functionality. In it he explicitly rules out an idea I explored in an earlier blog post, namely, that “war makes the state”, and that in preventing developing nations from making war, the international community prevents strong state formation. Humphreys notes that,

In some instances, conflict has helped to strengthen taxation systems as a result of the state’s increased need for revenues, its inability to access revenues from external sources and its enlarged mandate to intervene in the economy. Canada for example introduced income taxes in 1917 to help pay for its war efforts and succeeded in maintaining this revenue source after the end of the war. Similarly, wars fought by Britain in the 18th century and by the United States in the 19th and 20th centuries are often held to explain the development of institutions of domestic taxation. Conversely, some scholars argue that the lack of a military threat to contemporary developing nations helps to explain the weakness of those states. One implication is that the present rise in civil wars may be what is needed to strengthen states, and in Edward Luttwak’s phrase we should give war a chance. This conclusion, however, is problematic. While there is considerable evidence for relations between international war and state formation, particularly in Europe, there is little evidence that the logic holds for contemporary civil wars. Possible reasons for the differences are suggested by sociologist Miguel Angel Centeno’s study of war and taxation. Drawing on the Latin American experience, Centeno suggests that conflict does not lead to developments in institutions of taxation when state administrative capacity is low, when state control over its own territory is weak and when states have access to “external” sources of revenue. All three conditions are likely to hold for poor, natural resource-dependent states undergoing civil war. It is inappropriate then to expect that states presently undergoing civil war will repeat the European experience and become stronger as a result of their conflicts.

Ever get the feeling that you’ve been here before?

I’ve been thinking about Castro and Cuba over the last few days, and have come to the reluctant conclusion that my usual anti-Castro rants are less than constructive. With that in mind, and trying to look at Cuba and the achievements of Castro with some degree of objectivity and non-partisan alignment, I agree that he has provided good public policy, i.e. public goods, in some important, if very limited, areas. Health and education are prerequisites for civilised society, and by all accounts, Cuban health and literacy levels are high for the region and high given Cuba’s poverty. However, it is also the case that Castro runs a communist dictatorship. He has jailed and killed dissidents. He has presided over the economic ruin of Cuba. There are no free elections and there is no free press.

The health indicators, according to the Wikipedia article Healthcare in Cuba, are impressive and compare favourably to the first world.

According to the World Health Organization (WHO), the chance of a Cuban child dying at five years of age or younger is 7 per 1000 live births in Cuba, while it’s 8 per 1000 in the US. WHO reports that Cuban males have a life expectancy at birth of 75 years and females 79 years. In comparison, the US life expectancy at birth is 75 and 80 years for males and females, respectively. Cuba’s infant mortality rate is better than the US with 5 deaths per thousand in Cuba versus 7 per thousand in the US. Cuba has nearly twice as many physicians as the U.S. — 5.91 doctors per thousand people compared to 2.56 doctors per thousand.

Cuba has been able to reach such high standards despite its lack of wealth by using a preventative model of healthcare – in fact by seemingly not distinguishing between proactive and reactive healthcare – and by placing a lot of emphasis on community care, as described in a UK Select Committee report. All this has been accomplished despite annual per capita health spending being a meagre $260. America spends 25 times that amount.

Castro’s education system has also had some positive outcomes. Literacy levels are around 100%. Education is free, and compulsory.

As I see it, the influence of a variety of different factors determines these results. They do not simply represent Castro’s benevolence, the efficiency of his pet projects or the ignored triumphs of Marxism-Leninism. (Permit me as well some cynicism regarding figures provided by official Cuban bodies). Unfortunately, the press has generally stuck to its romantic view of Cuba and the revolution and uncritically accepted the Castro regime’s claims. Michael Moynihan at reason.com has an invaluable round up of pro-Castro pieces in recent mainstream publications. The conventional wisdom is that the Communists are “not so good on free speech, but oh-so-enviable on health care and education.”

In some ways, Cuban healthcare is a function of its economic weakness. As The Guardian notes, “millions of Cubans are forced to exercise because cars and public transport are so scarce”. In addition to the involuntary effects of weak transport capability, the scarcity and lack of resources forced the Cuban government to innovate and develop its preventative system. The Guardian states that, “Cuba is admired by public health experts in Britain and around the world for putting the horse before the cart. Unable to afford too many hi-tech operating theatres, it focuses its efforts on keeping its people well and picking up illness early - when it’s easier and cheaper to treat.”

The ideological concerns of the original revolutionary movement drive healthcare and education policies, and the regime uses them to legitimise its rule. An even less laudable cause of Cuba’s impressive policies is the other half of their revolutionary origin: the political institutions and culture that the revolution created. Cuban healthcare and education are universal. They are also coercive. A BBC article states that, “According to the doctor we met, there is also one particularly important thing: your annual house-call will probably take you by surprise.” The Guardian reports that, “Everyone is supposed to be visited at home at least once a year, often without warning, so the GP can scrutinise a patient’s lifestyle.” The UK Select Committee had “concern regarding freedom of choice both for patient and doctor.” School is a vehicle for indoctrination. The state uses the so-called “Cumulative School File” to measure the ideological integration of students. Literacy levels may be high, but there are heavy restrictions on what Cubans can read. A tightly controlled surveillance society like Castro’s Cuba is well suited to the enforcement of good social policies, as long as those good social policies represent the best interests of the holders of political power.

Finally, present day healthcare outcomes also reflect a long history of Western medical practice, dating back to the 19th century. Cuba led first world states on many health indicators before Castro took power. In the 1950s, Cuba had more doctors per head than Britain, France and Holland. Cuba had the lowest infant mortality rates in the region, and was ranked 13th lowest in the world, ahead of a various first world states who would nevertheless come to outrank Cuba during the current regime’s existence. Similarly high levels of literacy were also present before Castro took power.

In fact, Cuba in the 1960s was, in terms of development, comparable to southern European states like Italy or Portugal, or Latin American states like Northern Mexico, Puerto Rico, or Costa Rica. Measured by this indicator, Castro’s regime has been an abject failure. He turned one of the most prosperous countries in the region into one of the poorest, and he did this himself, without the say-so of the Cuban people, for the glory of the Communist revolution. Havana was once a prosperous modern city, as its ruins now attest. Castro murdered thousands – he brought poverty and decay. According to Kirby Smith and Hugo Llorens, in their paper “Renaissance and Decay: A Comparison Of Socioeconomic Indicators in Pre-Castro And Current-Day Cuba”,

An enduring myth is that Cuba in the 1950s was a socially and economically backward country whose development, especially in the areas of health and education, was made possible by the socialist nature of the Castro government. Despite the widespread acceptance of this view, readily available data show that Cuba was already a relatively well-advanced country in 1958, certainly by Latin American standards, and in some cases by world standards. The data show that Cuba has at best maintained what were already high levels of development in health and education, but that in other areas, Cubans have borne extraordinary costs as a result of Castro-style totalitarianism and misguided economic policies. Indeed, with the possible exception of health and education, Cuba’s relative position among Latin American countries is lower today than in it was in 1958 for virtually every socioeconomic measure for which reliable data are available.

The effects of the trade embargo are less obvious. It is true that the trade embargo will inevitably have had some impact on the quality of life in Cuba. Trade matters. The unintended irony of the “Stop the Blockade” campaign is that the anti-capitalists argue that the trade barriers should come down in one of the few instances where they are in power. “Stop the blockade” indeed. Stop all the blockades. It is also true that the blockade will not improve the amount or quality of medical capital available to the government for purchase. But the effects are often overstated. In the BBC article linked to already in this post, the embargo looms large as the prime cause of Cuba’s ruin. It states that, “Thanks chiefly to the American economic blockade, but partly also to the web of strange rules and regulations that constrict Cuban life, the economy is in a terrible mess.” According to the BBC, then, Cuba’s highly regulated economic life is clearly not as important a factor in determining its poverty as the American trade embargo. We know differently: Castro’s disastrous economic policies keep Cuba poor, not the embargo, and the “Stop the Blockade” campaign is a tacit acknowledgement of that fact. Castro’s government wants to trade goods for its own personal profit and be given lines of credit and do all the things that it forbids its own subjects from doing. Prof Brad DeLong sums it up perfectly,

You know, there is something very wrong with an argument that goes (a) Leninist centrally-planned communism is necessary because market exchange is inherently exploitative an destructive, and (b) it’s not Castro’s fault Cuba’s economy is in the toilet–America won’t trade with it. That simply does not compute.

To understand the real effects of the trade embargo, consider the effects of removing it. Not being Cuba isn’t everywhere helping other developing nations climb out of poverty. There is a lot of disagreement about what causes growth, but it’s surely more complicated than merely not being the subject of a US trade embargo. To capture the real benefits of trade and to disperse those benefits throughout the population, the regime would have to open Cuba to the global economy. As it stands, the limits on which Cubans can trade and what those Cubans have to offer in trade would massively lesson the positive effects of trade. Obviously at present Cuban industry is limited and Cuban spending is undertaken mostly by the government. The person with the dollars in Cuba trying to buy medical equipment would be the government, and the person who sold the goods to acquire the dollars would be the government. This means that the government would be capturing the chief benefits of trade, because the government is the only Cuban entity involved in the exchange. This fact dictates US policy. I personally think that the embargo aids the Castro regime by helping to keep Cuba a closed society, but I can admit that the principal benefactor of increased international trade will be the group that controls it and decides how to divide the profits.

To conclude, and trying still to extend every courtesy to Castro’s 46-year reign, yes, he has achieved some limited success with healthcare and education policies. However, Cuba already had high levels of health and literacy before Castro took power. The Communist Party’s ability to enforce its social policies represents the extent of its control over the population: In a totalitarian state, the government does what it likes, and the people have to like what it does. More damningly, Castro has wrecked Cuba’s development. He did this (with Soviet subsidies, it must be added) through his terrible economic policies. The opportunity cost of the revolution has been to exchange the potential of a Latin American Spain or Portugal for a country on a similar level of development to Bolivia or the Dominican Republic. Cuba’s poverty is not a function of the US trade embargo, because the US trade embargo stops trade with the regime. No trade with Cubans is possible. Castro, then, has murdered thousands, wrecked Cuba’s economy, destroyed its cities, brainwashed and oppressed its people, and completely derailed its development. Crow all you want about his incremental improvements to Cuba’s health and literacy levels, but I think that this is his real legacy.

Hasta la victoria siempre!

The Westphalian state represents a relatively new equilibrium of state formation: the nation-state. According to the insight of Ronald Coase, via Douglass North, states exist and are required where transaction costs are greater than zero, and according to the insight of Charles Tilly, “war makes the state and the state makes war”. Vigorous internal and external competition amongst European states drove the evolution of the Westphalian nation-state. As a generic type, this category of state became very powerful and was able to partake of what we might describe as economies of scale of power projection. The existence of this new equilibrium raised transaction costs for other actors (for example, protecting one’s subjects from invasion became more expensive).

Therefore, non-Westphalian states have become clients of Westphalian states. Client status has affected a kind of price fixing in the international arena. The large operating costs, which the existence of the Westphalian nation-state creates, set a high barrier to entry into this market. In response, Westphalian states effectively chose to subsidise their favourite companies, reducing the influence of Schumpeterian pressure and preventing market-style competition from honing the efficiency and composition of their clients. The same hyper-competitive regional “market-mechanism” that brought forth the nation-state is unable to function.

I’m currently thinking of these newer, post-Westphalia “market barriers” as a variety of binding and non-binding price floors, in that the binding price-floors determine the market outcome, and the non-binding do not. Where a state is unable to produce (war) at the level of the price floor, it is prevented from entering the market. In the Middle East, this means that, because of Western state interventions pursuing Western state interests at the expense of Arab nationalists, regional violence is very expensive. For example, the high cost of acting against the interests of the Great Powers defeated Ali Muhammad of Egypt in the 19^th Century. Where those price floors are close to the market price, they are irrelevant. In terms of being able to administer internal violence at the discretion of the leader, Middle Eastern states have, even today, a large degree of freedom. For example, the ease with which Assad put down the Muslim Brotherhood rebellion in Hama reflects a general lack of interest and of constraint from the international order. In addition, the price floors still operate at a national level, and therefore are binding for some insurgent forces within the state. Internal rebellion is consequently more expensive and difficult to undertake. For example, the failure of the Egyptian Islamists to overthrow Nasser and Sadat was, at least in part, thanks to the patronage of the Powers, who provided the regimes with aid, weapons and other assistance.

All of this is an unfair advantage from the perspective of a “free market” where the regime and challenger compete for power and legitimacy. We have effectively institutionalised a system whereby we guarantee the state against internal overthrow but prevent the state from engaging in cross-border wars of conquest. Violence can flow downwards but not across.