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	10 years after September 11 by Saskia Sassen Social Science Research Council USA   Writing about 9/11 in 2001, right after it had happened, what I saw as an activating field, though not the origin, was the rapacious global political economy Western governments and firms have produced over decades and centuries. By “activating field,” I do not mean a cause, but a type of agency that enables, which might be one of several.   This activating field has been one factor in many and diverse historic events—some emancipatory, such as the independence movements of the 1960s in Africa, and some brutal and murderous, such as the 9/11 attacks.   Being asked to write about what I see today, ten years later, I am struck by the emergence of yet another activating field—the urbanizing of wars and the associated global projection of even minor attacks. Declaring a “War on Terror” and invading Iraq were critical factors in this process. The alternative, criminalizing 9/11 and using sleuthing rather than bombs as the main tool against terrorism, would have produced a very different outcome.   Making a New Activating Field for Violence   The last ten years have brought two transformations to the fore. First, asymmetric war has become the dominant form of interstate war, a sharp departure from the pattern of World War II and earlier wars in the West. Today, when a conventional army goes to war, it is likely that the enemy is an irregular combatant for whom dense city space is a weapon, one that replaces powerful aircraft and tanks.   Secondly, a network effect imbues every minor local act of terrorism with global meaning—each feeds a sort of universalizing of terrorist sites, from the local subway to the international hotel. Neither of these is a good outcome of the vast expense, loss of lives, and destroyed livelihoods the United States and its allies have suffered in the name of fighting terrorism.   The first transformation has meant that the pursuit of national security has become the making of urban insecurity. Asymmetric war—war between a conventional army and armed insurgents—has put the city on the war map as one site for battle. Cities worldwide are a potential theater for asymmetric war, regardless of what side of the divide they are on, allies or enemies, and regardless of whether they are or are not part of the narrow theater of war, be it Iraq, Afghanistan, or Yemen.   The new urban war map is expansive: it goes far beyond the actual nations involved. The bombings in Madrid, London, Casablanca, Bali, Mumbai, Lahore, Jakarta, and on are all part of this all-encompassing map, even as each bombing has specific features and can be explained in terms of particular grievances and aims.   With the second transformation, even the most elementary and bungled of these attempts at terrorism can have impact. As material practices, these are localized actions by local armed groups acting independently of each other and often quite rudimentary in their capabilities. Yet they are also clearly part of a new kind of multi-sited war—a distributed and variable set of actions that gain larger meaning with the global projection of a particular conflict.   The invasion of Iraq was a conflict with global projection that made it possible for even a minor and otherwise invisible event to become globally meaningful. This combination is dangerous—it is an incentive to execute a terrorist act.   What would have been the trajectory of terrorism if the United States had not invaded Iraq with guns blazing and the full attention of the global news media? Pursuing terrorism as a criminal act rather than an act of war would have entailed sleuthing rather than shooting. It would have minimized the global projection of dispersed terrorism acts because there would have been little, if any, incentive, given merely local visibility.   No global meme would have been produced. The invasion and ensuing sharpened violence and sectarianism became an incitement to do something violent because it can garner global media attention.   Caught in a Sticky Web: The Endless War   Many of the elements that came together to produce the disastrous history of killing, ethnic cleansing, and destruction of the basics of daily life that followed the Iraq invasion were not new. It is well known that religious-ethnic divisions are ancient and that they become bloody only under certain combinations of conditions.   Perhaps less known is the fact that urban terrorism began in the 1990s, long before the 9/11 attacks. The US Department of State’s annual report on global terrorism allows us to establish that since 1998 most asymmetrical attacks, defined by the report as attacks by non-conventional combatants, have been in cities.   From 1993 to 2000, cities accounted for 94 percent of injuries resulting from all terrorist attacks and 61 percent of the deaths. In contrast, in the 1980s, hijacked airplanes accounted for a larger share of terrorist deaths and destruction. Urban targets are far more accessible than planes or military installations and now far more likely to be hit.   Responding to the 9/11 attacks by invading Iraq altered the meaning of such urban attacks. A whole new “project” was enabled and promoted. What might have been a somewhat obscure and restricted set of destructions went global. This brings to mind what John Mearsheimer has called the tragedy of great powers—what happens when great powers fail in necessary self-restraint.   The rise of asymmetric war as the main kind of war for conventional powers has its own specific consequences. Although these wars can be very diverse, they share a few features: Asymmetric wars are partial, intermittent, and open-ended. There is no armistice to mark their conclusion, disabling the old practice of superior military powers bringing warfare to an end when the destruction becomes too vast and no longer makes sense. The fact that wars can be endless is one indication of how the center no longer holds, whatever the center’s format—the imperial power of a previous period or the nation-state of our modernity.   Here I want to distinguish four types of asymmetric war, though they are not necessarily mutually exclusive. One of these is the actual encounter between conventional and unconventional forces on urban terrain, with post-2003 Iraqi cities prominent instances. Under these conditions, the city becomes both a technology for containing superior conventional military powers and a technology of resistance for armed insurgencies.   A second is the extension of the space for war beyond the actual “theater of war,” as might be the case with the bombings in London, Madrid, Bali, and elsewhere after the war on Iraq was launched.   A third is the embedding of conventional state conflicts in an act of asymmetric war, as might be the case for the Mumbai attacks. And the fourth is the activating by asymmetric war of older conflicts that evolve into armed conflict between two unconventional armed forces, as is the case with the Shiite-Sunni conflicts in Iraq.   There is a broader, often older history that also has escalated sharply over the last decade—human displacement. This is both one source and one component of that large activating field that emerged in the early 2000s.   A feature of contemporary wars, especially evident in less-developed areas, is that they often involve forced urbanization or de-urbanization. Contemporary conflicts produce significant population displacement both into and out of cities. In many cases, as in African conflicts or in Kosovo, displaced people swell urban populations. In other cases, ethnic cleansing, in its diverse variants, expels people, as has been the case in Baghdad with the departures of Sunnis, Christians, and others.   Finally, in many diverse contemporary armed conflicts, the warring forces avoid battle or direct military confrontation, a feature described by Mary Kaldor in her work on the new wars.   Their main strategy is to control territory through the expulsion of “the others,” as defined in terms of ethnicity, religion, tribal membership, and political affiliation. The main tactic is terror—conspicuous massacres and atrocities pushing people to flee.   These types of displacements—with ethnic/religious “cleansing” the most virulent form—are now a growing part of today’s global landscape. Our militarizing of the response to 9/11 was not the cause, but it was a stimulus for, or an authorizing of, expanded armed conflict in already fragile areas.   Finally, this militarizing of conflict, with its attendant security regimes, can have a profound impact on the cosmopolitan character of cities, generating what Richard Sennett calls “the brittle city.” Cities have long had the capacity to bring together people of different classes, ethnicities, and religions through commerce, politics, and civic practices.   Contemporary conflicts unsettle and weaken this cultural diversity when they lead to forced urbanization or internal displacement. Cities as diverse as Belfast, Baghdad, and Mosul continue to be at risk of becoming an assemblage of separate urban ghettoes as a result of ethnic cleansing, which is destroying their civic character and also thereby one key source of resistance to urban armed conflict.   Baghdad has undergone a deep process of such “cleansing,” a major reason for the (relative) “peace” of the last two years—which cannot be a lasting peace.   Could it be that the systemic equivalent of these types of “cleansings” in our cities is the growing ghettoization of the poor and the rich—albeit in very different types of ghettoes? This leaves it to the middle classes, not always the most diverse group in cities, to bring them urbanity; the risk is that they will supplant traditional urban cosmopolitanisms with narrow defensive attitudes in a world of growing economic insecurity and political powerlessness. Also, under these conditions, displacement from countryside to town or within cities becomes a source of insecurity rather than a source of rich diversity.   A Poor Algorithm for Our and the World’s Safety   Ten years after 9/11, we are less secure in the world, less significant for the world, and we are poorer. The War on Terror consumed vast amounts of our government’s resources, impoverished our government, rewarded many soldiers with unemployment and mental illness, and destroyed the small family enterprises of many of the men and women who served in the military, even as it gave vast riches to arms dealers and the Haliburtons of this world. The evidence suggests that opting for militarizing our response to the horror of 9/11 was a fatally flawed choice.   In short, with all our advanced technology, vast investments in armaments, and will to invade foreign countries, we have produced a poor-quality algorithm to make the world a safer place. The algorithm leaks. And the harder we use it, the more it leaks . . . blood and fanaticism.   * Saskia Sassen is Robert S. Lynd Professor of Sociology and co-chair of the Committee on Global Thought at Columbia University (www.saskiasassen.com). Below is a link to a series of essays on Sep 11 from the Social Science Research Council. Visit the related web page
	African crisis exposes failed logic of humanitarian system by Suzanne Dvorak, Lena Aahlby Save the Children / ActionAid   July 2011   African crisis exposes failed logic of humanitarian system, writes Suzanne Dvorak from Save the Children.   Two tragedies are unfolding in the Horn of Africa. The first is the very visible tragedy of families who have walked for weeks, their children growing weak with hunger, desperate for our help.   Then there is the larger tragedy of a failing humanitarian system built around responding to emergencies, not preventing them.   Over the years of Somalia"s long implosion, aid workers have come to expect a steady trickle of desperate people fleeing their former lives as herders and pastoralists. But now the trickle has become a flood.   More than 2300 people are leaving Somalia each day, and that number is increasing. It is the worst crisis in two decades. The families there are incredibly tough, but they have been hit by a triple whammy. The rains have failed this year in Kenya and Ethiopia, and for the past two years in Somalia. Food prices have shot up across the region, with staples rising by up to 240 per cent, and the ongoing conflict in Somalia has severely weakened people"s resilience and ability to absorb shocks.   Families are struggling to get even one meal a day as livestock die and crops wilt. Small children are especially vulnerable to malnutrition, which leaves them stunted for life, physically and mentally.   We saw this disaster coming. There"s a warning system in place, fed by satellite imagery, rainfall measurements and crop growth figures. Food prices have been rising for years. My organisation was already trucking in emergency water supplies in February. But the fate of many of the children now malnourished was already sealed. We have a broken humanitarian system based on responding, not preventing.   It"s a collective failure. Aid agencies go to huge lengths to prepare the communities they work with to adapt to droughts and other shocks, but there is a limit to what they can do to raise money from governments and the UN in the early stages of a crisis. It is very hard to talk up a situation before it becomes a full-blown emergency.   If aid agencies successfully stop a problem developing into something worse then we are open to criticism of crying wolf. It is easier for an organisation to prove it has dealt with an emergency rather than averted one.   Politicians and policymakers in rich countries are often sceptical about taking preventative action because they think aid agencies are inflating the problem. Developing country governments are embarrassed about being seen as unable to feed their people. This leads to huge pressures on aid agencies to keep the problem under wraps and exacerbates their concerns over data, always difficult to collect in unstable countries.   The crisis gets worse, until it becomes so serious journalists can"t ignore it. But by the time it makes the evening news, it"s too late. What is doubly frustrating is that by acting earlier we could have had far more effect for much less money. The UN estimates that every $1 spent in prevention saves $7 in emergency spending.   While critical to do, taking early action is a big, difficult choice for cash-strapped African governments. Do they use their limited hard currency to buy grain reserves, or do they spend it on something else and hope for the best?   Aid agencies go to great lengths to run programs that help people adapt to drought conditions in the long term. By planting drought-resistant trees, storing rain when it does fall, and helping local economies by handing out cash grants and food vouchers, we can build the resilience of people who have been brought low by conflict and a historically unprecedented series of droughts.   We work on a large scale but can"t operate on a national scale. For that, we need proper support from donor countries, and for national governments to plan and pay for disaster prevention schemes.   The Horn of Africa is among regions that will be first affected by climate change. In particular, droughts will become more common. We already have the techniques that will make this a viable place to live. Now early warning must become early action.   We need to provide help now. But we cannot forget that these children are wasting away in a disaster that we could - and should - have prevented.   July 2011   East African drought a sign of things to come, writes Lena Aahlby from ActionAid.   Millions of people in East Africa are suffering the impact of climate change. In the Horn of Africa, the countries of Kenya, Uganda, Somalia, Ethiopia and Dijbouti are facing a devastating drought with little but food and water distribution programs standing in the way of starvation. Most people in the region are already poor and living directly off the land. They cannot expect to grow their own food again until, at the earliest, 2012 when the rains may return. Until then, they are completely dependent on aid provisions.   Climate scientists have warned us again and again that more extreme weather patterns are to be expected in a world of accelerating climate change. To manage this we need to do two things: drastically reduce our carbon emissions and prepare ourselves for dealing with the climate change that is now unavoidable as a result of past carbon emissions.   It is a cruel reality that those who have contributed the least to the problem of climate change will suffer the most. Already close to 1 billion people go to bed hungry every night, and this number is set to increase as food supply is further affected by climate change. What we are seeing in East Africa is only the beginning.   The effects of climate related disasters such as the one unfolding in the Horn of Africa, can be reduced by building resilience in communities. Small scale farmers produce 90 per cent of food in Africa and about half of all food worldwide. Women account for up to 80 per cent of these farmers. Perversely the majority of people going hungry worldwide are women and girls.   Experts agree that supporting women farmers in the developing world is a proven way to end hunger. According to the United Nations Food and Agriculture Organisation, supporting women farmers to the same level as their male counterparts would reduce the number of hungry in the world by between 100-150 million people.   By investing in smallholder woman-led sustainable agriculture over industrial export-focused agriculture, world leaders would not only reduce the number of hungry people today, but would also strengthen communities resilience into the future.. What"s more, small-scale farming is better for the environment than industrial agriculture, so it"s a solution to hunger that is also contributing to the global efforts to combat the worst impacts of climate change.   July 2011   Climate change threatens world security says UN chief.   Climate change is generating an "unholy brew" of extreme weather events that threaten global security, the UN chief has told the UN Security Council.   Secretary general Ban Ki-moon urged concerted action and called on developed countries to lead the charge in mitigating the effects of climate change, he also encouraged the developing world to do its fair share.   "Extreme weather events continue to grow more frequent and intense in rich and poor countries alike, not only devastating lives, but also infrastructure, institutions, and budgets - an unholy brew which can create dangerous security vacuums," Mr Ban said. Climate change, "not only exacerbates threats to international peace and security; it is a threat to international peace and security.”   Achim Steiner, director of the UN Environment Program, says there are myriad threats already and their numbers will rise, noting droughts like the one currently afflicting Somalia, floods such as the ones that hit Pakistan, and their implications on the food markets.   "The scale of the natural disasters will increase exponentially," he added. Two regions of Southern Somalia, hit by a devastating drought, were declared in a state of famine on by the United Nations, which called it the worst food crisis in Africa in 20 years. Visit the related web page
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