Читать книгу Protest on the Rise? - Adriaan Kühn - Страница 11

Mario Sznajder

It is difficult to measure the impact of war in any given society since it depends not only on the intensity of the fighting, use of different kinds of weapons, length of the fighting period and other empirical factors, but also on the stage of development of the country, the state and society resources employed in defending the population, and cultural traditions about war. War can be defined as an armed conflict between societies, within societies or a combination of both, which is the more common type of war in the last decades. Richard Smalley (Nobel Prize of Chemistry) has defined war as the sixth most important problem (together with terrorism) between the ten main issues that affect human life.

1. Energy2. Water3. Food4. Environment5. Poverty6. Terrorism & War7. Disease8. Education9. Democracy10. Population

Source: Smalley, (2003).

Looking at the list, it is clear that all the problems mentioned are interlinked in a cause-effect-cause relationship. The military-theoretical aspect of this assessment was developed in the 1930s by Erich Ludendorff when he enunciated his theory about Total War, which influenced perceptions and attitudes towards the 2nd World War and even more so, afterwards (Ludendorff, 1935). For the purposes of this work, the main significance of the total war theory is that the war-affected societies are entangled in a process from which there is no escape. This means looking for a place of refuge outside the area at war, generating waves of migration by refugees of war. In between actual war and migration we also find, in most of the cases, deep socio-economic crises related to infrastructural damages, economic paralysis, disinvestment, high rates of inflation, and lack of shelters, lack of food and medicine and disarticulation of any form of normal life. These economic critical situations articulate with the immediate danger of loss of life, personal and family physical damage and the psychosocial impact of total lack of security. These constitute strong incentives for migration and seeking a refugee status or asylum somewhere not affected by war. The research question of this paper is about the causes of massive migrations of refugees and what nation-states, regional organizations and the UN can do in order to alleviate the multiple problems that such waves of migration create in the “host” countries.

If we take the ten most important problems affecting humanity and link them to war-economic crises situations we can state that refugee-migrants will try to reach places where energy, water and food provision are safe and regular; they will try to settle in places that are safe from an environmental point of view and allow them economic opportunities to overcome poverty; they will try to get as far as possible away from war areas or those hard-hit by terror, to areas not affected by widespread disease; to democratic places where education is accessible and are not hostile and crowded.

This combination of “ideal” places for refugee-migrants leaves us with a relatively short list of Western European, North American and Australian democracies. If to this we add the problem of accessibility - and most of the refugee-migrants today come from Western and Central Asia and Africa – the list is further reduced to Western European democracies since Australia and North America are too far away and difficult to reach for poor migrants. Therefore, one of the main problems should be why and how do Western European democracies – a category extended to the members of the European Union and Great Britain – react to the problem of refugees-migrants trying to enter their territories.

Although moral considerations play a part in the political decision-making process, the issue of refugee-migration is so complex, from this point of view, that in this work it will not be addressed. In an ideal world, wherever people are in danger and suffer, they should be saved and helped by those that are in a better situation. Unfortunately, ours is far from being an ideal world, especially from the political and economic point of view. Moreover, modern public means of communication unintendedly play with human tragedy and generate shockwaves of public opinion brought about by sensationalist reporting of the most terrible tragedies - especially when they play to the emotions and fears of the general public. The case of the use of chemical weapons against the civil population of Idlib in Syria and its vicinity at the beginning of April 2017 serves as an example. In a country where in six years of civil and international war more than half a million people have been killed without generating the outcry that the use of chemical weapons did, one should ask whether the public opinion and political reaction that followed the chemical attacks are not a massive demonstration of cynicism.

For many decades, research has been carried out on the issues of migration and refugees and again, in an ideal world, the results of these researches should be used to generate the best possible policiess to deal with the complexity of these issues. Moreover, since the problems of migration-refugees are massive and are caused by well-known phenomena, the effort to alleviate and solve them should also be massive – regionally and internationally – and coordinated, in order to obtain the best possible results from the decisions taken, policies applied and resources invested.

The UNHCR is confronting the problem of refugees, together with many local organization but the scope of the issue, according to UNHRC sources, is far too great for any international institutional and financial to tackle with it. Dealing with more than 65 million displaced people all over the world (internally and internationally displaced) UNHCR addresses the predicament of more than 21 million refugees. Of these, 5.2 million Palestinian refugees have been cared for by UNRWA in refugee camps in the Middle East since 1948 and 16.1 million are under the mandate of UNHCR. 10 million are stateless people and more than 107,000 were resettled in 2015 (UNHCR, 2017a). UNHCR estimates its budget needs for 2015 were 7,232 million dollars but actually they only had 3,295 to spend, which is less than half of that sum. For 2017 the needs are for 7,451 million dollars, of which by now available funds are 1,958 million dollars (UNHCR 2017b). The meaning of this short summary is that if the main worldwide organization addressing the migrants-refugees problems is so underfinanced, then a heavier burden will fall on host governments and civil societies of the places that displaced people see as targets of migration. In political administrative terms this means that less institutional control by UNHCR and other international and regional organizations will produce more friction, illegal acts and violence.

The problem with humanitarian support for migrant-refugees is that the institutions that deal with them are tackling the consequences of a worldwide phenomenon without trying to address the causes of it. The causes are complex but well known. War and warlike situation endanger human lives by directing violence against civilians. In the last decades, 85% to 90% of the victims of wars are civilians (Wiist et al., 2013; Roberts 2010). If to this we add the economic disarticulation produced by war situation and all it involves, it is clear that masses of civilians will migrate from war zones looking for refuge in safer areas and will try to migrate towards places that offer an antinomy in life terms, as mentioned before.

Wars do not seem to be recessing. They have changed shape from what Mary Kaldor calls “new wars” that are different from old wars in the following ways (Kaldor, 2013):

• Actors: Old wars were fought by the regular armed forces of states. New wars are fought by varying combinations of networks of state and non-state actors – regular armed forces, private security contractors, mercenaries, jihadists, warlords, paramilitaries, and so forth. The larger the number of actors and the less institutionalized they are, the more difficult wars are to deal with.

• Goals: Old wars were fought for geo-political interests or for ideology (democracy or socialism). New wars are fought in the name of identity (ethnic, religious or tribal). Identity politics has a different logic from geo-politics or ideology. The aim is to gain access to the state for particular groups (that may be both local and transnational) rather than to carry out particular policies or programs in the broader public interest. The rise of identity politics is associated with new communication technologies, with migration both from country to town and across the world, and the erosion of more inclusive (often state-based) political ideologies such as socialism or post-colonial nationalism. Perhaps identity politics is constructed through war. Thus political mobilization around identity is the aim of war rather than an instrument of war, as was the case in ‘old wars’.

• Methods: In old wars, battle was the decisive encounter. The method of waging war consisted of capturing territory through military means. In new wars, battles are rare and territory is captured through political means, through control of the population. A typical technique is population displacement – the forcible removal of those with a different identity or different opinions (generating large migration of refugees). Violence is largely directed against civilians as a way of controlling territory rather than against enemy forces.

• Forms of Finance: Old wars were largely financed by states (taxation or by outside patrons). In weak states, tax revenue is falling and new forms of predatory private finance include looting, pillaging the ‘taxation’ of humanitarian aid, Diaspora support, kidnapping, smuggling oil, diamonds, drugs, people, and so forth. It is sometimes argued that new wars are motivated by economic gain, but it is difficult to distinguish between those who use the cover of political violence for economic reasons and those who engage in predatory economic activities to finance their political cause. Whereas old war economies were typically centralizing, autarchic and mobilized the population, new wars are part of an open, globalized and decentralized economy in which participation is low and revenue depends on continued violence.

These are the features of the new type of wars:

• The virtual disappearance of wars between states;

• The decline of all high intensity wars, involving more than a thousand battle deaths;

• The decline in the deadliness of war measured in terms of battle deaths;

• The increase in the duration and/or recurrence of wars; and

• The risk factor of proximity to other wars.

Chaotic ground war, or more technically, ‘militarized occupation’, continues to prevail in Syria, Iraq and Afghanistan, and are globally-impacting. In Bosnia and Kosovo they are still rebuilding their devastated social infrastructure with limited support. In North Korea and the Taiwan Strait new tensions are developing. In sub-Saharan Africa conflict is endemic. In short, the application of massive intervention forces has not brought about a positive peace anywhere, and long-simmering conflicts are intensifying, such as that in the Kashmir region, wheretwo states have now developed weapons of mass destruction. Unfortunately, it also seems likely that new zones of military engagement will continue to emerge in the coming years. In the meantime, the world faces a global war called the War on Terror that has come to frame most existing conflicts whether they are local, regional or global. In Simon Cooper’s words, ‘a combination of political, economic and technological factors are leading towards a state where civilian populations are permanently militarized, where the gap between war and peace collapses, and where peace as a mode of being distinct in its own right seems impossible to constitute’ (James & Friedman, 2009, p. 31).

From out of the discussion, we can garner some simple conclusions: firstly, not all wars are globalizing, but modern wars tend to do so. Secondly, the new transnational wars of the contemporary period tend to occur in zones where there was previously a colonial order of authority as part of an earlier period of imperial globalization. Thirdly, while regional and localized wars in the past usually had limited impact beyond their immediate region – that is, except when great powers became involved – now they have increasingly come to have profound globalizing consequences. Fourthly, the process of globalization in relation to war is contradictory – one of a relative balance of forces, between centralizing and fragmenting tendencies caught in a web of global relations. And finally, with the War on Terror we face a new kind of global war based on globalized networked relations and a new kind of engagement that, at one level, transcends territorial and temporal containment (Modelski & Morgan, 2006).

To all the above we must add the intractability of religious-ethnic conflicts that mix with political and economic interests – as are the cases of the Kurd minority in Turkey, Iraq and Syria, Alawi minority in Syria and Christian Minorities in Middle East –that make the attempt to resolve the “roots” of the conflictual situations into an almost impossible task.

Therefore we should seek for possible solutions in the political, economic and military aspects that lie behind the ongoing conflicts. As a general observation, we could claim that higher levels of institutionalization may help to prevent conflicts and refugee migration. This means better functioning states, as well as regional and international organizations in the conflictive areas. One of the phenomena that is obvious to the observer of the last decades’ conflicts is that lower levels of governability or higher levels of state de-structuration or the disappearance of states - as has been the case in Libya, Somalia, Afghanistan and certain African countries – produce political chaos, high levels of violence, economic impoverishment and massive waves of migrant-refugees. The reaction of all the interested parties – by this I mean the internal actors in each conflict and the regional and international communities - should be to strengthen existing states and to closely assist transitions from authoritarian rule to more democratic situations, taking special care of fostering viable models of national economies in countries affected by these kind of processes.

The other side to address according to the above models is what makes possible modern massive violence, globalized wars and terrorism, or what the means to be controlled are. Illegal capital movements that can finance wars are a classic case of lack of control. Drug production has financed internal violence and wars - and probably still do – in Lebanon, Colombia, Afghanistan, Myanmar and other places. Weapons trade - legal and illegal – feed violence and wars everywhere. All these suggest that in order to have less military clashes in the periphery, there is a serious need to strengthen intelligence and police work on the behalf of the central and richer countries in order to thereby avoid the phenomena that make war in the periphery possible.

The other feature about migration-refugee problems is that most of the people that flee a combination of war, violence and economic crisis, for a variety of reasons migrate to neighboring countries. Linguistic and cultural similarities, short distances from abandoned homes and easier communications and transport with the home countries, families and friends and fear of distance and long term migration are among the main causes of this kind of migration. In the Middle East, Central Asia, Africa and Latin America, the target countries of this kind of refugees migration waves are not particularly different in terms of their level of development and available financial resources, than the countries of origin. Therefore, today we find a large majority of refugees from the countries in conflict (Syria, Iraq, Afghanistan, Yemen, various African countries and Guatemala, El Salvador and Honduras) in their neighboring countries: Turkey, Jordan, Lebanon, Pakistan, Iran, other African countries, Mexico and Costa Rica). The most developed Western Countries (USA, Canada, Germany, Britain, France, Italy, Spain, Sweden and others) have received a large number of refugees, but proportionally to their resources and population, much fewer than poor neighboring countries in the vicinity of the areas of acute conflict. Leaving moral considerations aside and looking at raw political, economic and social capacities, the impact of these processes is one of starting a chain process of destabilization of the poorer and conflictive areas that, in the case of non-containment of the conflicts in Syria, Iraq, Yemen, Afghanistan, Central Africa and Central America, could expand the waves of migration of refugees and destabilize developed Western countries.

Taking into consideration that the economic crisis beginning in 2009 has had a limiting impact in budgetary policies, the main practical question is where to find the resources to cope with the migration of refugees – be it nationally, regionally or internationally. The second set of questions concerns what to do about the conflicts themselves.

The first logical answer is to divert financial resources away from military spending, especially by reducing the acquisition of expensive conventional weaponry. The logic of this step is that they will not be of much use in future conflicts due to the changing nature of political and military relations into the 21st century. From another angle, the non-treatment of migration-refugee crises can generate a new type of conflict that will deeply affect the big spenders on military hardware. This kind of change implies profound reforms in military structures from the point of view of personnel, training and organization. We should remember that planning the wars of the future on the basis of experiences of the past may be a great mistake, especially in an era where the acceleration of changes is what marks the future.

The other military point is politically-agreed upon military intervention in order to placate violence and structuring political compromises. I am well aware that this sounds “imperialistic” – developed powers intervening in the less developed world – but since the financial and weapons sources that feed conflicts are tied to these powers, there seems to be no alternatives to the negotiation between them in order not to allow the continuation of conflicts. A political agreement between the relevant powers about Syria (Russia, USA, Iran Turkey, Saudi Arabia, the EU and others) could undoubtedly lower the level of violence, destruction, economic damage and, as a consequence, the number of migrant-refugees. It is very difficult to achieve, but not impossible, especially if we take into consideration the - at least declared – common denominator of the war “against terror.” It is true that long-term solutions have to do with the imperial divisions of the periphery areas that created modern nation-states highly heterogeneous from a religious, ethnic, tribal, and even racial point of view with consequent national, political, demographic, cultural and socio-economic differences in Asia, Africa and Latin America. Resetting these processes is a long and complex task, but meanwhile, reigning violence, restoring political order and economic viability in “failing states” is an urgent objective. Peace-keeping multinational forces may play positive roles but only if they work in coordination with comprehensive plans of socio-economic and political-administrative reconstruction.

Even if all the above is carried out, we will still be left with a huge problem of migrant-refugees populations in need of support. Supporting financially the states that have absorbed the largest amount of migrant-refugees is a first logical step and it has been already done in many cases, in order to avoid chain processes of failing states. However, the UNWRA example with the Palestinian population of refugees in the Middle East, and the counter-example of Jordan that integrated a large number of these refugees prove that policies have to be formulated both in the sense of local integration as well as a return to places of origin. Perpetuating refugee problems and maintaining large refugee camps seems to be a recipe for the perpetration and strengthening of conflicts and violence.

Studies of migration also show that those that migrate beyond the neighboring state to their home countries are in many cases people with initiative and personal resources that may be transformed into positive migrants who contribute to the societies that are willing to receive them. Examples of positive integration of migrants-refugees abound in Post-War World II in Europe and elsewhere. Migrants escaping conflicts have, in many cases, proved to be very valuable contributors to the societies willing to host them. There exist many examples in the USA, Canada and all over Latin America, as well as in other parts of the world.

CONCLUSIONS

As with any other human problem migration, of refugees can be addressed in different ways. Its scale in the 21st century is such that it requires the attention of civil societies, governments and regional and international institutions. Moreover, coordination between all the levels of intervention is essential when the problem of scarcity of resources as well as the need to generate positive public opinion and empathy are taken into consideration, in order to create the political will to act.

It is clear that the causes of migration-refugee crises are the direct result of armed conflicts – wars, in the most modern sense of the word – that make life impossible where they take place - not only because of the high levels of personal danger but also because they destroy any future positive perspective. This is done not only through the installation of sectorial hatreds but also by the destruction of the economic and social fabric of life. People will prefer to flee a war zone than to die as a result of violence, lack of medicine or hunger. Once peace is achieved, high levels of destruction and economic and social non-viability prevent return. One of the main factors that may make return possible is not only “normalization” but the creation of a positive perspective of the future, through both expectations and mainly, the execution of rehabilitation plans.

Research carried out in the area of contemporary return from exile and expatriation shows that the longer the period of absence from the home country, of the less likely are the chances of returning, especially from places where the migrants-refugees have in some way been integrated. Return to home countries is important from the point of view of recovering human capital lost through forced migration. Moreover, human capital may be enriched by those who have managed to integrate in host societies and are willing to return or to rebuild active links with their home countries. However, even after long periods, some of them will return if the circumstances – pacification, economic prosperity, ruling of law, democratization - will make returning home possible, and more so if plans of support for the returnees are implemented by host and home countries. We have to take into consideration that globalization has made possible levels of communications, transport and translocation that allow for transnational phenomena such as sojourning, double or triple residency, the creation of international networks and communities that may become part of future solutions. Post-migratory transformations take place in a context of dispersion and globalization, which have created new forms of residence, work and retirement - many of them bearing a transnational character. The countries that generated massive exile in the last phases of the Cold War suffered the loss of large numbers of politically mobilized and culturally-active citizens. Once abroad, many of these individuals professed to return once conditions allowed it, while undergoing multiple personal transformations in the host environments. Diaspora and return are indeed inscribed in the experience of thousands of displaced citizens whose scientific, educational, cultural and political development weighed heavily on each of their fields of knowledge, as well as in the political landscape.

Nevertheless, the main way of solving these problems is by avoiding them. This means not allowing violent conflicts to evolve, supporting weak states in order to avoid their becoming failing states, supporting those that support and those that host refugee-migrants and expanding economic development in the periphery of the more developed world. All these require social constructs that do not generate immediate economic profits or benefits at the individual level in the developed countries, but bearing in mind that the alternatives may inflict such a high level of damage that makes not trying hard to avoid them not only inhuman but also illogical even from the point of view of extreme individualism and economic rational choice.

REFERENCES

Kaldor, M. (2013). In Defence of New Wars. Stability: International Journal of Security and Development, 2, p. Art.

Ludendorff, E. (1935). Der totale Krieg. Munich: Ludendorffs Verlag

Modelski G. & Morgan, P. M. Understanding Global War. In D. Grenfell & P. James (Eds.), Rethinking Insecurity War and Violence (pp. 5-28). London, New York: Routledge.

Roberts, A. (2010). Lives and Statistics: Are 90% of War victims Civilians? Survival, 52, 115-136.

Smalley, R. E. (2003). Top Ten Problems of Humanity for Next 50 Years, Communication held at the Energy & Nanotechnology Conference, Rice University, May 3.

UNHCR (2017a). “Figures at a Glance”. Retrieved from http://www.unhcr.org/figures-at-a-glance.html.

UNHCR (2017b). “Global Focus”. Retrieved from http://reporting.unhcr.org/financial#_ga=1.147870463.935073933.1492161776.

Wiist, W. H. et al. (2014). The Role of Public Health in the Prevention of War: Rationale and Competencies. American Journal of Public Health, 104, e34-e47.