This post is a response to issues raised by Mr. Klein to my last post on equipping revolutionaries with satellite modems.
Mr. Klein's response:
Interesting idea, but there are a lot of problems with it:
1) Non-Interference/Reciprocity: A whack load of international law is based on the idea of non-interference, i.e. that countries don't mess with events inside other countries' borders. That would be a pretty clear violation of that principle (although under R2P, you could probably justify it if the UNSC approved the action and the leader of the target country were attacking his own people). If you did it anyway, what's to stop other countries from messing with your internal affairs? I mean, Congress even prevented DP World from buying Long Beach's port. How could you complain if Iran started handing out bomb-making manuals in Penn Station?
2) Recipients' risk: People who start/join a revolution are betting on its success to prevent reprisals. Even if you could hand them out secretly, and only to the right people, the recipients would be putting themselves at risk of treason *before* a revolution had even started, so they'd be holding evidence against them without even having a revolution to bet on. It's like depositing your life savings with a bookie before you even know when the race is gonna be or which horses are gonna be in it. You gonna take that bet?
3) Legitimacy: Although I get that it would just be facilitating what people would want to do anyway, that kind of support would make it very easy to portray a revolutionary movement as a foreign puppet show. That never goes down well.
4) Micro-Blowback: Let's drop the assumption that you hand them out only to the 'right' people and those people are able to keep them and stay on the 'right' side. Wouldn't the Taliban in Afghanistan just love to have a (bigger and cheaper) satellite comms network? Even if you hadn't given it to them directly, they could just go house by house and nab the devices from those who did have them, as they already do with cds.
5) International blowback: While distributing the devices would certainly sell better at home than arming them, it's not like the oil rich BFFs and panicky Israel would just stand there impotently cursing your resourcefulness a la Mentos commercial. They're gonna be effin pissed.
From the perspective of the powerful, it's pretty much never a good policy to arm the Helots. It's not always easy to identify what counts as a weapon and who counts as a helot. Discretion is the better part of valor.
Mr. Klein,
While your Mentos reference put a smile on my face (and made me go watch the foo fighters video again), I think I can (relatively easily) sidestep most of your concerns.
First of all, if undertaken by a government, such an operation would obviously have to be covert and risky by nature; points 1, 3 and 5 are totally valid if a government is stupid enough to get caught doing something like this. Perhaps it would be better (as I suggested) to let multinational media conglomerates try something like this. I think that would, at least to a certain extent, eliminate 1, 3, and 5 as issues: it’s not the British government, but rather a BBC reporter handing the things out to protest leaders. While this may influence point 3 the least, Israel and the Saudis would certainly understand they were dealing with a different beast.
This brings up a topic of particular interest to me: How does International Relations Theory deal with the "fourth estate" role of mass media? One thing that has been interesting for me to see is the zeal with which journalists have been charging into these places trying to get a story or an interview (often at great danger to themselves). While these people may just be acting out of careerist self interest (nothing like warzone reporting to boost your stature as a journalist), many seem to feel a responsibility to get images out and help people gain their right of expression. I could totally see a reporter doing something like I proposed spontaneously themselves...or an ambitious news editor coming up with the idea...
I have a few counterarguments for individual points of contention as well:
1) In addition to what I said above, I'm not sure I agree with the non-interference/reciprocity argument at all as it applies to what we might call rouge regimes (outlaw states?). Doing something like this in China would be dangerous for sure, but in almost any other country I can think that we could want to do this in, I don’t really care that they might get pissed off...in fact, those governments have already proven to oppress their people and have often shown official and direct contempt towards democratic values. If the US government gets caught handing out these kinds of devices in Iran, that’s bad, but they're developing nuclear weapons and funding our enemies anyway, so I don’t see how that changes things much. In an already deteriorating place like Libya I'm even less worried about territorial borders (apparently neither are the British or the Germans, as they landed a few warplanes in the desert a few days ago to airlift people out).
Also, I don't much care about an Iranian passing out bomb making material in New York...that kind of information is available online and in thousands of other places, even if it might be harder to get at since 2001 (glad I printed out my copy of the Jolly Roger Cookbook). And its not like the guys in militias are going to have a problem getting guns or explosives in the US. This might be made part of a larger point of democracies that have freedom of expression need to worry less about fringe views than those that heavily restrict access to information.
2) I guess I was more envisioning this as a tool to be given to revolutionaries in actio. The risk in trying to establish sleeper cells of these things is high. In fact, I think the most difficult logistical issue here is to identify who to give the things to: if you give it to an established protester (who might be able to use it most effectively) he's also the one that's going to get arrested first. If you give it to just any old guy, you might not get any quality images.
Mr. Klein's response:
Interesting idea, but there are a lot of problems with it:
1) Non-Interference/Reciprocity: A whack load of international law is based on the idea of non-interference, i.e. that countries don't mess with events inside other countries' borders. That would be a pretty clear violation of that principle (although under R2P, you could probably justify it if the UNSC approved the action and the leader of the target country were attacking his own people). If you did it anyway, what's to stop other countries from messing with your internal affairs? I mean, Congress even prevented DP World from buying Long Beach's port. How could you complain if Iran started handing out bomb-making manuals in Penn Station?
2) Recipients' risk: People who start/join a revolution are betting on its success to prevent reprisals. Even if you could hand them out secretly, and only to the right people, the recipients would be putting themselves at risk of treason *before* a revolution had even started, so they'd be holding evidence against them without even having a revolution to bet on. It's like depositing your life savings with a bookie before you even know when the race is gonna be or which horses are gonna be in it. You gonna take that bet?
3) Legitimacy: Although I get that it would just be facilitating what people would want to do anyway, that kind of support would make it very easy to portray a revolutionary movement as a foreign puppet show. That never goes down well.
4) Micro-Blowback: Let's drop the assumption that you hand them out only to the 'right' people and those people are able to keep them and stay on the 'right' side. Wouldn't the Taliban in Afghanistan just love to have a (bigger and cheaper) satellite comms network? Even if you hadn't given it to them directly, they could just go house by house and nab the devices from those who did have them, as they already do with cds.
5) International blowback: While distributing the devices would certainly sell better at home than arming them, it's not like the oil rich BFFs and panicky Israel would just stand there impotently cursing your resourcefulness a la Mentos commercial. They're gonna be effin pissed.
From the perspective of the powerful, it's pretty much never a good policy to arm the Helots. It's not always easy to identify what counts as a weapon and who counts as a helot. Discretion is the better part of valor.
Mr. Klein,
While your Mentos reference put a smile on my face (and made me go watch the foo fighters video again), I think I can (relatively easily) sidestep most of your concerns.
First of all, if undertaken by a government, such an operation would obviously have to be covert and risky by nature; points 1, 3 and 5 are totally valid if a government is stupid enough to get caught doing something like this. Perhaps it would be better (as I suggested) to let multinational media conglomerates try something like this. I think that would, at least to a certain extent, eliminate 1, 3, and 5 as issues: it’s not the British government, but rather a BBC reporter handing the things out to protest leaders. While this may influence point 3 the least, Israel and the Saudis would certainly understand they were dealing with a different beast.
This brings up a topic of particular interest to me: How does International Relations Theory deal with the "fourth estate" role of mass media? One thing that has been interesting for me to see is the zeal with which journalists have been charging into these places trying to get a story or an interview (often at great danger to themselves). While these people may just be acting out of careerist self interest (nothing like warzone reporting to boost your stature as a journalist), many seem to feel a responsibility to get images out and help people gain their right of expression. I could totally see a reporter doing something like I proposed spontaneously themselves...or an ambitious news editor coming up with the idea...
I have a few counterarguments for individual points of contention as well:
1) In addition to what I said above, I'm not sure I agree with the non-interference/reciprocity argument at all as it applies to what we might call rouge regimes (outlaw states?). Doing something like this in China would be dangerous for sure, but in almost any other country I can think that we could want to do this in, I don’t really care that they might get pissed off...in fact, those governments have already proven to oppress their people and have often shown official and direct contempt towards democratic values. If the US government gets caught handing out these kinds of devices in Iran, that’s bad, but they're developing nuclear weapons and funding our enemies anyway, so I don’t see how that changes things much. In an already deteriorating place like Libya I'm even less worried about territorial borders (apparently neither are the British or the Germans, as they landed a few warplanes in the desert a few days ago to airlift people out).
Also, I don't much care about an Iranian passing out bomb making material in New York...that kind of information is available online and in thousands of other places, even if it might be harder to get at since 2001 (glad I printed out my copy of the Jolly Roger Cookbook). And its not like the guys in militias are going to have a problem getting guns or explosives in the US. This might be made part of a larger point of democracies that have freedom of expression need to worry less about fringe views than those that heavily restrict access to information.
2) I guess I was more envisioning this as a tool to be given to revolutionaries in actio. The risk in trying to establish sleeper cells of these things is high. In fact, I think the most difficult logistical issue here is to identify who to give the things to: if you give it to an established protester (who might be able to use it most effectively) he's also the one that's going to get arrested first. If you give it to just any old guy, you might not get any quality images.
In cases like Libya or Bahrain(and Iran as well), however, people have already shown that they are willing to risk their lives even without these things; you have an already established revolutionary movement who is going to be hanged anyway. This strategyis designed to make it easier for the condemned to get their message out, not be the reason they get hanged.
3) I'm not sure how powerful arguments from leaders who have already been de-legitimized by their people claiming outside influence have on popular opinion within the country. While I grant you the point, I don’t think I can give it much weight, especially if we modify my proposal as in point 2 above. And again, while the argument of outside influence can still be made if a media organization is handing these things out, such a situation gives western governments at least a sheen of plausible deniability and complicates the sales job of an embattled regime significantly.
4) Two points here. One, I don’t think there is an application for this in places like Afghanistan in the sense that I'm saying. I'm not trying to get poor people internet to help them build a new life, I'm trying to get the pictures of revolution out. And though the Taliban is leading a revolution, it’s not a democratic one: the images or video they would be posting to the net would appeal to a much smaller audience and not affect international public opinion in their direction. Video of decapitating prisoners and cutting off women’s noses isn't exactly going to win them any friends in the world community.
More specifically, I would be surprised if Taliban and Al Qaida leaders (in particular) don’t already have satellite phones, if not versions of exactly these devices.
5) I think I covered this point mostly at the beginning of this post. Again, if a government got caught doing this it would certainly be bad for them...the idea is to not get caught...
3) I'm not sure how powerful arguments from leaders who have already been de-legitimized by their people claiming outside influence have on popular opinion within the country. While I grant you the point, I don’t think I can give it much weight, especially if we modify my proposal as in point 2 above. And again, while the argument of outside influence can still be made if a media organization is handing these things out, such a situation gives western governments at least a sheen of plausible deniability and complicates the sales job of an embattled regime significantly.
4) Two points here. One, I don’t think there is an application for this in places like Afghanistan in the sense that I'm saying. I'm not trying to get poor people internet to help them build a new life, I'm trying to get the pictures of revolution out. And though the Taliban is leading a revolution, it’s not a democratic one: the images or video they would be posting to the net would appeal to a much smaller audience and not affect international public opinion in their direction. Video of decapitating prisoners and cutting off women’s noses isn't exactly going to win them any friends in the world community.
More specifically, I would be surprised if Taliban and Al Qaida leaders (in particular) don’t already have satellite phones, if not versions of exactly these devices.
5) I think I covered this point mostly at the beginning of this post. Again, if a government got caught doing this it would certainly be bad for them...the idea is to not get caught...
A reply to your reply (the debate is on!):
ReplyDelete1. You might not care who favours distributing them, and it might even be a good thing much of the time, but there is a value to having effective rules independent of their specific content. If we chuck out the rule book in favour of expedience in cases that favour our causes, there is nothing to stop those who favour other causes from doing the same thing when it suits them. Mr. Shackleford could probably back me up with some Kantian arguments, but I'll leave that to his expertise.
2. You kind of summed up the big argument against handing them out in actio. Who should get them? How do you find the right recipients? Is that the best use of scarce resources? A picture might be worth a thousand words, but clubs are trumps. Qadaffi doesn't really give a rat's tuckus what the world or his people think of him. If the boogeyman-leader's motto is, as Abu Zuhair Yahya said, "I came in a tank, and only a tank will evict me." your money and the recipients' risk might be better invested in anti-tank RPGs.
3. If the popular narrative is that the US is run by a Jewish cabal, and Israel is the source of all evil, as is pretty much the case in Syria, Iran, Sudan, etc., then how can you say it won't compromise the movement's legitimacy? This perception also applies to big chunks of the media (more on the media below). And plausible deniability always sounds like a get out of jail free card, but actions planned on that basis are rarely deniable, and the denials are rarely plausible. Remember the Bay of Pigs, Ollie North, the Allende coup, the Arbenz coup, the Mossadegh coup, the Suez crisis, etc? Okay, now rerun all of those events with Twitter and Wikileaks, and tell me how it goes. But my prognosis is that garden variety sh!tstorms will become catastrophic crap tsunamis.
4. I'm not talking about development-via-internet either. I'm talking about giving schmucks like the Taliban an instant satellite comms network ripe for the harvest. Yes, they already use stuff like sat phones, but you're proposing the communications equivalent of hanging bandoliers of 7.62 mm shells from lampposts (if they had lampposts).
As to the place of media in IR theory and the idea of using the media as an authorized distributor of pro-revolutionary contraband: oy vey.
ReplyDeleteThe media has been generally ignored in IR until relatively recently. The practice of embedding reporters in military units got some attention post-Iraq II, and the consensus seems to be that it plays an ambivalent role: yes, it provides information, but it does so practically as a propaganda subcontractor for whatever government is embedding. Some posties (post-modernists/structuralists) have also looked at the media's uses of metaphors, analogies (e.g. familial metaphors in reference to NATO or biological metaphors in relation to nuclear proliferation) as instances of language games. The quality of this stuff is really mixed, and, typically for postie work in general, it's hard to summarize a consensus view. Critical development studies folks have also done some solid critiques of the media's disaster/poverty porn.
Personally, I'd say it's never a good idea to be uncritical about the media's role and function in society. Their business isn't promulgating The Truth; the business of the media is business. The truth is whatever they're selling and we're buying, regardless of whether it's 'true' or not. My cynical view of the media has been heavily influenced by one of the best blogs on this great web of ours, The Last Psychiatrist. Here's a sample of posts that, once read, ought to make you sceptical about subcontracting political agency to the media (NB: the first is a 'cover' of Howard Beale's rant in Network, another great portrayal of news media, but it's still worthwhile):
http://thelastpsychiatrist.com/2010/04/china_needs_more_tvs.html
http://thelastpsychiatrist.com/2010/08/if_ive_won_cronkite_ive_won_am.html
http://thelastpsychiatrist.com/2009/10/wolf_blitzer_is_not_an_idiot.html
http://thelastpsychiatrist.com/2010/09/hot_sports_reporter_ines_sainz.html
http://thelastpsychiatrist.com/2010/08/real_or_fake.html
Sociologist General's Warning: reading these posts may lead to crotchety hermithood.
Love The Last Psychiatrist..
ReplyDeletei wrote a whole long response here about the role of the media in disseminating freedom of speech ideas and the wacky effects that might have on IR and political theory but then Blogger ate it and didnt publish it. So just imagine the arguments I would have made and my general mischeviousness in regards to thinking about new ways that media can influence things and counter-argue from there if you see fit :-)