Day: December 13, 2012

‘There Was a Country,’ by Chinua Achebe – NYTimes.com

What happened to Nigeria? The acclaimed writer Chinua Achebe, author of Things Fall Apart, a stable of pre-collegiate reading lists, explains:
“There was enough talent, enough education in Nigeria for us to have been able to arrange our affairs more efficiently, more meticulously, even if not completely independently, than we were doing. . . . Nigeria had people of great quality, and what befell us — the corruption, the political ineptitude, the war — was a great disappointment and truly devastating to those of us who witnessed it,” he says. Writers faced political repression and “found that the independence their country was supposed to have won was totally without content. . . . Like the head of John the Baptist, this gift to Nigeria proved most unlucky.”

Worse, after the end of civil war, “a new era of great decadence and decline was born. It continues to this day,” he laments. The country is a “laughingstock.” His disappointment fortifies his belief that “the British governed their colony of Nigeria with considerable care.” Achebe is careful to say that he is “not justifying colonialism.” But this partially rose-tinted view of the colonial past — a view one sometimes hears from other elderly Nigerians confronting the chaos of daily life — surely has much to do with the favored status enjoyed by Her Majesty’s onetime brilliant subject.

via ‘There Was a Country,’ by Chinua Achebe – NYTimes.com.

Hey, Foreign Policy, the World Really Is Getting Safer | Foreign Policy

Is the world a safer or more dangerous place? The battle rages on, with Stephen Pinker restating his case.

There is only one way to elevate a discussion of war trends above the level of a barroom argument, and that is to consult quantitative datasets assembled by disinterested scholars who define what they count as a “war,” stick to one criterion for which deaths to tally, and exhaustively list all wars known to have taken place during a set interval.

Several of these datasets are available, such as those of the Human Security Report Project (HSRP). Most of the scholars who have examined them agree that the decades since 1945 have seen a decline in wars among great powers and developed states (what I call the Long Peace), and the decades since the end of the Cold War have seen a decline in deaths from wars of all kinds (the New Peace). Disagreement persists, to be sure, about the causes of the declines and how long they will last.

via Hey, Foreign Policy, the World Really Is Getting Safer | Foreign Policy.

Some Thoughts on the United Nations | Power Games | Big Think

The UN needs updating as much as reform. An outstanding short blog, Power Games, offers this useful précis:

Much has been made of the UN being obsolete and increasingly irrelevant. Is this an assessment that you would agree with, or is it too simplistic and harsh?

There are many reasons why the UN’s credibility suffers: the corruption of high-profile efforts such as the Oil-for-Food Program, the dubious membership of the Human Rights Council, and the failure to do more to stop humanitarian crimes, for example. Given the sheer number of agencies and initiatives that fall under the UN’s auspices, however, it would be misguided to declare the entire organization obsolete. Consider the work of its peacekeeping forces, which, according to Stewart Patrick of the Council on Foreign Relations, “are deployed in roughly fifteen conflicts around the world to preserve regional security”; or that of the UN Children’s Fund, the UN Development Program, the World Health Organization, and the World Intellectual Property Organization.

The UN plays other important roles: the Millennium Development Goals that it articulated in 2000, for example, are widely embraced benchmarks for gauging the modernization of developing countries; documents such as the Convention on the Law of the Sea provide a basis for adjudicating disputes; and UN data and reports shape our understanding of numerous issues, ranging from refugee flows to nuclear safety to climate change. It is also revealing that while countries that seek to use force to achieve their objectives are unlikely to be dissuaded if the UN denies them “permission,” they nonetheless try to secure its imprimatur.

via Some Thoughts on the United Nations | Power Games | Big Think.

Confessions of a Strategic Communicator – By Rosa Brooks | Foreign Policy

Shop talk from an insider from the US Department of Defense–in case you wondered what goes on by those who do “strategic communications”:

But let’s look at that memo. It’s been agitating a corner of the blogosphere since Tuesday, mainly because its contents and import have been misrepresented (or just misunderstood) by the media. The memo is from Pentagon press spokesman and Acting Assistant Secretary of Defense for Public Affairs George Little to the commanding generals of the various combatant commands. It explains Little’s decision to stop using the term “strategic communication,” which he believes causes “confusion.” According to Little, “the more accurate terminology, which will be used in future Joint Publications, is communications synchronization.” The memo also complains that “over the last six years we learned that [strategic communication] actually added a layer of staffing and planning that blurred the roles and functions of traditional staff elements, and resulted in confusion and inefficiency. As a result, this year we stood down those staff elements.”

“So what?” you ask. Quite right. What we have here isn’t a DOD-wide policy change — it’s just a badly drafted memo explaining that OSD’s Public Affairs shop is changing its terminology and internal structure because it finds strategic communication confusing.

via Confessions of a Strategic Communicator – By Rosa Brooks | Foreign Policy.