Category: World order/governance

The face of the crisis – and some alternatives

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By Johan Galtung

From Madrid, Universidad Nacional de Educación a Distancia-UNED, Foro Los Nuevos Problemas Sociales, 24 Mar 2012

Here is one of the hidden faces of the economic crisis:

(¶C/¶t) + (¶C/¶S)rS + (1/2)(¶2C/¶S2)q2S2 = rC

The famous Black-Scholes equation to find the “correct price” for financial derivatives. Based on partial derivatives over time, this is classical calculus for continuous change; useful within a zone of stability, but not at the edge of that zone, the tipping points explored in René Thom’s catastrophe theory years earlier.

Black-Scholes is intellectually like calculating increasing speed of an accelerating car heading for a wall or an abyss. But, with warnings, no 1997 “Nobel Prize in Economics” (actually a Swedish State Bank’s prize honoring Alfred Nobel)? And one year later their company “Long Term Capital Management” had lost $100 billion and collapsed. The trade in derivatives is now at $1 quadrillion a year (15 zeros), ten times the industrial economy of the whole 20th century. Many got rich, but the system collapsed. Maybe prison would have been more adequate for intellectual sloppiness?Read More »

Reciprocity, lawfare and self-defence: Targeted killing

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By Richard Falk

This post is a modified and expanded text of a contribution to a Jadaliyya roundtable on targeted killing posted on March 5, 2012, and responding to the article by Lisa Hajjar referred to in the opening paragraph.

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There is an emergent Israeli/American controversy on the lawfulness of targeted killing. Although the policy has not yet attained the status of being a national debate, there are signs that it may be about to happen, especially in light of the Attorney General, Eric Holder’s Northwestern Law School speech on March 5, 2012 outlining the Obama’s administration’s controversial approach to targeted killing in some detail. Lisa Hajjar convincingly narrates how the “legalization” of targeted killing has evolved over the course of the last twenty years. [Hajjar, “Lawfare and Targeted Killing Developments in the Israeli and U.S. Contexts,” Jadaliyya, Jan. 15, 2012] She there calls attention to the analogy to the torture debate that, in many ways, defined the political and moral identity of the Bush presidency in the aftermath of the 9/11 attacks, and even caused moral and legal fissures to develop that divided the American people unto this day.

Hajjar shows that it was Israel that first crossed the threshold of legality in response to a wave of suicide bombings that traumatized Israeli society in the 1990s. In other words, targeted killing became a tactic of choice for both the Israel and the United States as part of the preventive logic of counter-terrorism, that is, placing a premium on eliminating threats before harm is inflicted rather than the reactive logic of striking back and retaliating. The upsurge in targeted killing seems responsive to the belief that neither defensive strategies nor deterrence, nor massive retaliation are appropriate or effective against a terrorist adversary, especially if the violence might accompanied by the readiness of a perpetrator to die while carrying out a mission.Read More »

The Menace of Present & Future Drone Warfare

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By Richard Falk

After the atomic bombs were dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki, and the colossal scale of devastation disclosed, there was a momentary embrace of sanity and rationality by world leaders and cultural commentators. There was a realization that living with such weaponry was at best a precarious journey into the future, and far more likely, an appointment with unprecedented human catastrophe if not apocalypse.

What to learn from the ongoing existence of nuclear weaponry

This dark mood of foreboding did produce some gestures toward nuclear disarmament tabled initially by the U.S. Government, but in a form that reasonably struck others at the time, especially the Soviet Union, as a bad bargain — the U.S. was proposing getting rid of the weapons for the present, but retaining the materials, the technology, and the experience needed to win handily any nuclear rearmament race. Read More »

Iran, the EU and what we should have learned by now*

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By Jan Oberg

On Monday the 23rd of January 2012, the EU’s 27 members unanimously decided to stop their oil import from Iran on July 1 this year. That sort of policy is considered benign in comparison with warfare. It won’t be when seen in the long run.

Sanctions usually have the opposite consequences of those “intended”. Secondly, as we know from the Iraq case, they are part and parcel of a build-up to war and will have, in the longer run, devastating, cruel consequences for innocent civilians whose lives are already hard.

How come EU leaders seem not to see the counterproductivity of their decisions? Do they not know that they contribute to a build up to a war that will be much more catastrophic than that on Iraq both for the region, for themselves and for the economy they otherwise try to keep from even deeper crisis?

Virtually everyone speaking on behalf of their country or the EU as a whole point out the risks of escalating the conflict; it may eventually lead to a spiral, one or more counter measures by Iran and a tit-for-tat dynamics that could – could – go out of hand. The next they therefore say, as if to soothe their own fears, is that war must be avoided and that, rather, sanctions and other types of pressures serve only one purpose: to get the Iranians to the negotiation table.

Don’t they know the basics of psychology?

This is pathetic and militates against everything one knows about psychology.Read More »

Three crises – Three ideas

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By Johan Galtung

Speech delivered at the United Nations in Geneva, Switzerland on 1 Dec  2011

Your Excellencies,

We are celebrating the 50th anniversary of NAM, the Nonaligned Movement; a great success.  They were not party to the madness of NATO-WTO (Warsaw Treaty Organization) confrontation and arms race, even nuclear. NAM was headed by two country triads, India-Indonesia-Yugoslavia and Finland-Sweden-Austria, and two high quality leader triads, Nehru-Soekarno-Tito and Kekkonen-Palme-Kreisky.  Their in-between roles gave the world some normalcy in the madness.  Much needed for West-Islam today; but that quality leadership is missing.Read More »