For example, Baldaro (2020) explores security region-building in the Sahel from three different local perspectives – armed Islamist groups, political elites, and local populations – showing that the first views the West as the security threat, the second uses security-focused regional organization-building (G5 Sahel) to ensure regime security through extracting rents from international aid, while, for the third, regional circulation and mobility are crucial for securing livelihoods. Some of these agendas are aligned, while others conflict with Western interventions, and studies have shown that if Western interven- ers are not mindful of local contexts, ‘hybrid security governance’ and patronage politics may become entrenched, rather than ‘democratized’, through Western security assistance (Raineri and Strazzari, 2019).

Such in-depth and ethnographic studies are crucial for understanding various contexts, as well as for concept-building ‘from the periphery’ (Hönke and Müller, 2012). However, we also argue that this is not sufficient, as the local perspective gives too little attention to transnational entanglements other than with the West – and therefore misses crucial aspects of the making of (in)security in the Sahel. We therefore turn our attention to other actors than the usual Western suspects or their local beneficiaries. (my bold)

[By way of example,] scholars have focused mostly either on Western interveners of different kinds (e.g. the French military operations, security professionals from UN and EU missions, NGOs, development actors, researchers) or on a variety of local actors (e.g. state actors, security professionals, smugglers, armed groups, migrants) or security objects (mostly European border security technologies, boats, police vehicles, and so on). However, these are not the only actors or objects that are part of Sahelian (in)security assemblages: indeed, a range of transnational entanglements – which bring with them other actors, objects, practices, ideas, and rationalities from other parts of the world than Europe and Africa – are missing from this analysis.

[In particular], quotidian material infrastructures have crucial importance for the constitution of global politics, and the focus is then on the artifacts by which these actors become entangled (Salter, 2015, 2016). In our research, we focus on the materiality of transport infrastructures and logistics as sites where entanglements between geographically dispersed actors emerged. As our analysis will show, infrastructure serves multiple purposes that blur the distinction between trade, humanitarianism, and security – thereby nuancing the concept of security (Ziadah, 2019a).

[Again by way of example,] Turkish interviewees emphasize that Turkey is not engaging in the Sahel to counter France or the UAE, as is often purported in the press, but rather owing to its own interests (Libya, the Eastern Mediterranean) and the security interests of Sahelian countries (Interviews 5, 6 and 7). Turkish military relations with Sahelian countries are mainly bilateral, and Turkey has concluded military and security cooperation agree- ments with Niger (2020, 2013), Chad (2019), Burkina Faso (2019), Senegal (2022), and the other West African countries Togo (2021) and Nigeria (2021) (Biedermann, 2019; Gbadamosi, 2022; Özkan and Kanté, 2022). In the case of Niger, the security agreement from 2020 stipulates military training such as education and courses at military schools and centers; on-the-job training; mutual personnel exchange, including that of advisers and units; joint exercises as observer; operations other than war (i.e. peacekeeping and humanitarian aid operations); language courses; military history archives, publication, and museology; cooperation and training in logistical matters; and training/exchange in military intelligence, communications, electronics systems and warfare, cyber-defense matters, and defense against mines and explosives. According to several Turkish interviewees, this security agreement suggests that Turkey wishes to replicate its East Africa policy in the Sahel, which has included the training of Somalian security forces and police, and that it is also looking for the possibility of opening a military base in Niger in addition to the ones in Qatar, Libya, and Somalia (Interviews 5, 6 and 7).

SO WHAT?

[These developments] introduce new material artifacts, rationalities, resources, and connections independently of Western agendas. Taken together, these transnational entanglements that we have documented complement rather than radically challenge existing accounts of the production of (in)security in the Sahel: they point to the persistent need to embed analyses of Western interventions and their various local responses in larger, transnational frames that also account for South–South linkages and circulations in the making of contemporary (in)securities. (my bold)

That is, can we rethink pastoralist migrations across Sahelian borders as South-South linkages in just such ways?

Source.

E.M. Stambøl and T. Berger (2923). “Transnationally entangled (in)securities: The UAE, Turkey, and the Saharan political economy of danger.” Security Dialogue 54(5): 493–514 (accessed online at https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/pdf/10.1177/09670106231186942)

–For Gotthold Ephraim Lessing, 18^th century German Enlightener, the point is not for the sculptor or painter to portray a crisis at its climax, when visualizing a single moment. Better to choose a moment before or after the apex of destruction, so as to allow the viewers’ imaginations freer rein over what is to come. That way, Lessing argues, the narrative continues in an arc of reflection that is not cut short by any climax’s overpowering intensity:

[S]ince the works of both the painter and the sculptor are created not merely to be given a glance but to be contemplated. . .it is evident that the single moment and the point of view from which the whole scene is presented cannot be chosen with too great a regard for its effect. But only that which allows the imagination free play is effective. The more we see, the more we must be able to imagine. And the more we add in our imagination, the more must think we see. In the full trajectory of an effect, no point is less suitable for this than its climax. There is nothing beyond this, and to present to the eye what is most extreme is to bind the wings of fancy and constrain it, since it cannot. . .shun[ ] the visible fullness already presented as a limit beyond which it cannot go.

Instead of picturing Ajax at the height of his rage and slaughter, better he be depicted afterwards in the full realization of what he has done and in the despair leading him to what must come next.

–One problem with today’s crisis scenarios is the preoccupation with or fixation on a visualized climax. Obviously post-apocalypse can be pictured as even deadlier, but the point holds: In today’s catastrophe scenarios, the worst is imagined and imagination stalls there–like shining deer at night–in the glare of it all. Our unrelieved stream of crisis scenarios is itself proof of imaginations’ inability to let a prophesied climax do all the talking.

–What to do?

Any disappointment that one or more revolts–Occupy, Yellow Vests, Hong Kong protests, Arab Spring, the Extinction Rebellion–have not (yet) culminated into “far-reaching substantive change” is but one scenario only. More, the climax scenario may not be the most fruitful, suggestive moment to focus on anyway, let alone be overawed by.

The entire point of revolt may be revolts. As one European commentator put it when also writing about revolts,

In other words, protests have an autonomy — an autonomy that we risk losing when we necessarily think of dissident protest in terms of a continuum of existing (or absent) political organizations.

https://illwill.com/the-movement-of-refusal

Principal source

Gaiger, J. (2017). Transparency and imaginative engagement: Material as medium in Lessing’s Laocoon. In: A. Lifschitz and M. Squire (eds) (2017). Rethinking Lessing’s Laocoon: Antiquity, Enlightenment, and the ‘Limits’ of Painting and Poetry, Oxford University Press: Oxford, UK: 279 – 305.

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I

The opposite of peace is not-peace. War then is one type of not-peace, not all of it.

A better question, I think, is: What is neither peace nor not-peace? One answer: A state of being where nothing has been concluded about it either way. Nothing constitutes a binary to be experienced as peace and not-peace.

What terms do we give to conditions that aren’t concluded or concludable? Here, I also think, we confront the same problem associated with consciousness: As consciousness is very difficult to define and isolate, we instead give examples of what it is like to experience something.

And when you think about it, the examples are many, in fact so many that some have yet to be discussed.

II

This means in illustrating the multitude of what is neither peace nor not-peace, I can start almost anywhere. (That’s the great opportunity in complexity.)

For me, right now, what do the war dead say about wars? Well, to this atheist, the dead aren’t saying anything. Even when I memorialize the corpses as an argument against warfare, the dead still aren’t talking.

But, that’s too conclusive, right?

Any such determination is not part of the neither-nor inconclusiveness. The point of being neither peace nor not-peace is that the war dead are an entirely different matter, and that matter can’t be talked about in ways that we can talk about “peace” and “not-peace.”

So stated, this also opens the huge canvas of examples.

III

For instance, I’m free to talk about the war dead in what has been called infrathin. Infrathin is a French coinage for any concept that is impossible to define and for which one can only give cases of. Repeatedly mentioned are the warmth of a seat just left, tobacco smoke that also smells of the mouth exhaling it; and the momentum in taking a minute of silence.

To my mind, the war dead are the infrathin of an indescribable ether around and in between us and not-us. Ether, you may know, has been proven to be an unscientific concept. Exactly my point.

This ether that is the war dead isn’t something we breath in and out, but rather it is “something” like our bodies being semi-permeable to the other bodies, consciously–just like consciousness.

IV

An example?

It is reported that Dante finished the Paradiso just before he died of malaria on September 14, 1321. That experience was of course before our experience with the war on malaria.

Novelist E.M. Forster’s exhortation: “Only connect!” Literary critic Frederic Jameson’s exhortation: “Always historicize!”

Well, yes and no. . .The ethnographer and writer, Michel Leiris, writes about the need “to merge the yes and the no.” “Between yes and no” is the title of an early essay by Camus. The work of Elizabeth Bishop was “perhaps more a quiet no than a great big yes,” according to another poet. More severe, “Herman Melville praised Nathaniel Hawthorne: ‘He says NO! in thunder; but the Devil himself cannot make him say yes. For all men who say yes, lie’”, records the critic, Christopher Ricks, who then asks: “But what about saying, ‘Yes, but…?’”

Ricks is spot-on. In the same way as dark energy and dark matter are said to make up the vast portion of the universe, politics, policy and management are grasped only because of–not in spite of–the not-knowing, difficulty and inexperience, all around and in between. I wonder if this might be how best to read the famous last sentence in James Joyce’s Ulysses: “yes I said yes I will Yes.”

So what?

To govern, they say, is to choose. But choose between an irresistible-Yes and an unmovable-No? Better to say: No one governs innocently, yes?

–I have a fantasy about supply and demand, provoked by all those graphs like the one below from Wikipedia:

That is: Imagine demand and supply curves shifting downwards, say, with equilibrium price P* and quantity Q* shifting down with them. At some point, say the two curves intersect the horizontal axis (as with the dotted Supply 1 curve in the figure), producing two quantities, Qs < Q*.

–But at that point, Qs must be the quantity supplied even when price is zero. To put it another way, a portion of the quantity demanded is actually provided at no price because of, say, intrinsic motivation, or suppliers are confused, or everyone got just lucky.

I’d like to think that is the good mess waiting in every partial (!) equilibrium analysis.

It’s easier to rationalize that humans invented logic in order that we can dispense with it at any time than it is to rationalize the sockets of power.

–Given the centerstage that improvisational behavior has in establishing and maintaining interconnectivity between infrastructures during shocks, it is unreasonable to assume that infrastructure operators and emergency managers can un-learn and un-experience cases where even the best plans did not mitigate the disaster as it unfolded.

–“I can’t say enough good things about planning and how important it is,” a state emergency manager in the Pacific Northwest told us.

“But you realize the gaps in plans when you’re dealing with such catastrophic events that we’ve dealt with in the past 18 months to two years…There’s a lot that needs to be decided on the fly because it hasn’t been planned for or it’s not going to work, the plan didn’t consider all the factors because every emergency is different”.

–The preceding seems obvious, but the implications aren’t as readily recognized. For one thing, it implies that there isn’t a “life cycle” of a critical infrastructure, if by that is meant one stage follows another until it, the single now-mature infrastructure, is superseded by something better. Infrastructures are like other complex organizations in that they shift in response to changes in their wider task environments, include sudden changes. That again implies the centrality of improvisation.

–“What does success look like?” a senior state emergency manager asked rhetorically, and answered: “Success in every disaster is that you didn’t have to get improvisational immediately. You can rely on prior relationships and set up a framework for improvisation and creativity.”

Success, in other words, is when pre-existing interconnectivity between critical infrastructures does not altogether disappear, however reconfigured. Otherwise, the interconnectivity would have to be improvised by micro-coordinating to match just-now demands with just-now capabilities. It is a shared error not to recognized the latter for emergency preparedness and management.

Could-isms

Our expert-interview exercise with leading thinkers on the topic revealed how climate technologies can potentially propagate very different types of conflict at different scales and among diverse political actors. Conflict and war could be pursued intentionally (direct targeted deployment, especially weather-modification efforts targeting key resources such as fishing, agriculture, or forests) or result accidently (unintended collateral damage during existing conflicts or even owing to miscalculation). Conflict could be over material resources (mines or technology supply chains) or even immaterial resources (patents, soft- ware, control systems prone to hacking). The protagonists of conflict could be unilateral (a state, a populist leader, a billionaire) or multi- lateral in nature (via cartels and clubs, a new “Green OPEC”). Research and deployment could exacerbate ongoing instability and conflict, or cause and contribute to entirely new conflicts. Militarization could be over perceptions of unauthorized or destabilizing deployment (India worrying that China has utilized it to affect the monsoon cycle), or to enforce deployment or deter noncompliance (militaries sent in to protect carbon reservoirs or large-scale afforestation or ecosystem projects). Conflict potential could involve a catastrophic, one-off event such as a great power war or nuclear war, or instead a more chronic and recurring series of events, such as heightening tensions in the global political system to the point of miscalculation, counter-geoengineering, permissive tolerance and brinksmanship. . . .

States and actors will need to proceed even more cautiously in the future if they are to avoid making these predictions into reality, and more effective governance architectures may be warranted to constrain rather than enable deployment, particularly in cases that might lead to spiralling, retaliatory developments toward greater conflict. After all, to address the wicked problem of climate change while creating more pernicious political problems that damage our collective security is a future we must avoid.

https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S2211467X22002255 (my bolds)

Let’s be clear: All such “could’s-as-possibilities” do not add up to one single “must-as-necessity.”

May-isms

Intuitively, stronger interactions between systems may be expected to increase the numbers of drivers of any one system, change driver behaviour and generate more system noise. As a result, we would anticipate that higher levels of stress, more drivers and noise may bring forward threshold-dependent changes more quickly. For any particular system (for example, the Amazon forest) it is possible to envisage a time sequence that starts with one main driver (for example, deforestation), then multiple drivers (for example, deforestation plus global warming), more noise through extreme events (for example, more droughts and wildfires), with additional feedback mechanisms that enhance the drivers (for example, diminished internal water cycle and more severe droughts). A vortex could therefore emerge, with drivers generating noisier systems as climate variability and the incidence of extreme events increases.

https://www.nature.com/articles/s41893-023-01157-x (my bolds)

Yes, that may, might, could happen. Or not.

Upshot

The only way “could or may” leads to “must” would mean that each article and like ones began with “must avoid this or that” and then proceeded to demonstrate how to undertake really-existing error avoidance with respect to the could-events and might-be’s.

Regulators should also ensure that AI products and services compete on a level playing field with non-AI products and services, including human-provided services. Sectoral regulations on liability, professional licensing, and professional ethics should apply equally as is appropriate to both AI and non-AI solutions. For instance, hiring decisions and credit decisions must be subject to the same rules against discrimination and bias, no matter whether they are made by humans or AI. Likewise, financial advice should be subject to similar kinds of regulation regardless of whether it is provided by humans or AI. This may reduce AI use in some sectors, and simultaneously avoid the degradation of service standards through the use of AI. . . .

There are cases where human workers are penalized for discounting the analysis of an AI solution in their workplace, creating a lopsided liability burden. For instance, nurses in some US hospitals can disregard algorithmic assessment of a patient’s diagnosis with doctor approval but face high risks for such disregard as they are penalized for overriding algorithms that turn out to be right. This may lead nurses to err on the side of caution and follow AI solutions even when they know they are wrong in a given instance. . .While these are private penalties upheld by hospital administrations, there has been at least one case where a nurse was held responsible by an arbitrator for a patient’s death because she did not override an algorithm. The arbitrator held that she was pressured by hospital policy to follow the algorithm, and thus her employer was directed to pay damages to the patient’s family.

To avoid situations where humans defer to AI against their better judgment, liability frameworks should be neutral to ensure that technology follows sectoral regulation and not the other way round. AI technology should not be applied in circumstances in which it does not meet regulatory standards.

Vipra, J. and A. Korinek (2023). Market Concentration Implications of Foundation models: The invisible hand of ChatGPT. Center on Regulation and Markets Working Paper #9, Center on Regulation and Markets at Brookings, Brookings Institution, Washington DC. (Accessed online at https://www.brookings.edu/tags/center-on-regulation-and-markets-working-papers/)

I agree with the above passage, at least as far as the authors go. The problem is they do not go far enough. Namely, the regulation of AI foundation models must also go beyond the regulator standards of the regulator of record. This most certainly holds when the AI models are integrated into the sectors and infrastructures focused on by the authors.

The key to understanding how the authors stop short of going far enough is their own example of the nurse. The nurse is actually a reliability professional, one of whose functions is to correct for regulatory error or lapses in standards. Irrespective of problems with any specific AI algorithm, no one can or should expect regulatory standards to be all-covering or comprehensive at any point of time in such dynamic fields as healthcare.

In practical terms, this means there is not just the risk of regulatory non-compliance by real-time professionals, like nurses; there is also the risk of compliance with defective regulations. Either way, the importance of time from discovery to correction of error reinforces the nature of dispersed regulatory functions beyond that of the regulator of record.

Below is the full abstract from an excellent review of case material on river restoration in Newfoundland and Labrado, Canada:

Despite millions of dollars being spent annually to restore degraded river ecosystems, there exist relatively few assessments of the ecological effectiveness of projects. An evidence-based synthesis was conducted to describe river restoration activities in Newfoundland and Labrador. The synthesis identified 170 river restoration projects between 1949 and 2020. A practitioner’s survey was conducted on a subset of 91 projects to evaluate ecological success. When the perceived success of managers was compared to an independent assessment of ecological success, 82% of respondents believe the projects to be completely or somewhat successful whereas only 41% of projects were evaluated as ecologically successful through an independent assessment. Only 11% of practitioners’ evaluations used ecological indicators, yet managers of 66% of projects reported improvements in river ecosystems. This contradiction reveals a lack of the application of evidence to support value-based judgments by practitioners. Despite reporting that monitoring data were used in the assessment it is doubtful that any meaningful ecological assessment was conducted. If we are to improve the science of river restoration, projects must demonstrate evidence of ecological success to qualify as sound restoration. River restoration is a necessary tool to ensure the sustainability of river ecosystems. The assessment conducted in this study suggests that our approach to planning, designing, implementing, monitoring, and evaluating projects needs to improve. An integrated-systems view that gives attention to stakeholders’ values and scientific information concerning the potential consequences of alternative restoration actions on key ecosystem indicators is required.

Skinner, S. W., A. Addai, S. E. Decker, and M. van Zyll de Jong. 2023. The ecological success of river restoration in Newfoundland and Labrador, Canada: lessons learned. Ecology and Society 28(3):20. https://doi.org/10.5751/ES-14379-280320

My problem is not their main finding: “Despite reporting that monitoring data were used in the assessment it is doubtful that any meaningful ecological assessment was conducted.”

I can well believe it. What troubles me is that phrase, “only 41% of projects were evaluated as ecologically successful through an independent assessment.”

I don’t know what world the authors or you, the reader, live in. But in my world, a 40% success rate in river restoration projects is huge! I mean, really significant. Indeed, I come from a project implementation background where conjoining, “success” and “ecosystem restoration,” is like waving a red flag in front of a phalanx of critics at the ready to disagree.

This project victory (if indeed confirmed) is in no way to be characterized, I feel, as “only 41%”–a phrase repeated later in the body of the article.