Abstract

Artificial Intelligence (AI)-assisted hybrid warfare increasingly relies on information-influence engineered to appear legitimate. The objective is not mass persuasion through provocatively aggressive propaganda, but the slow erosion of trust in the systems that coordinate production, finance, logistics, standards, and alliances. This article frames how agentic and semi-autonomous AI can enable integrated campaigns that fracture confidence, disrupt institutional tempo, and steadily unplug the U.S. industrial complex from global networks of capital, supply, and cooperation. The central mechanism is the respectability engine, a method that launders destabilizing narratives through credible formats and voices, synchronizes them with operational friction, and converts institutional reaction into proof.

Introduction

Industrial security now includes protecting the credibility of industrial data and the interpretive environment that surrounds it. Adversaries exploit seams between cyber incidents, supply chain friction, and public narrative by converting ordinary disruption into strategic doubt. The next phase resembles recurring truth emergencies, where the cost is paid in slowed decisions, strained partnerships, and diminished confidence in reliability. Leaders are forced to operate in two areas at once: maintaining output while defending meaning. A coordinated coalition is therefore required.

Political leaders must enable rapid public-private action without turning each incident into theater. Industry leadership must treat integrity verification and narrative readiness as core functions that support the industrial complex’s core operating environment. Media production organizations must translate technical truth into credible public consumption before adversary framings harden it into a perceived common sense. The warning signs rarely arrive as dramatic outages. They appear as subtle shifts in data integrity, sudden narrative spikes aligned with routine friction, anonymous expert placements with thin provenance, and institutional overreactions that become proof for the adversary.

Modern industrial power depends on coordinating systems that facilitate complex production to scale across time, distance, and organizational boundaries. These systems include standards regimens, logistics platforms, financial and insurance mechanisms, cloud dependencies, supplier relationships, and allied interoperability agreements. In hybrid warfare, adversaries do not need to destroy this machinery to weaken it. They merely need to degrade trust so that coordination becomes cautious, verification becomes constant, and momentum becomes politically risky.

The respectability engine as a strategic method

The respectability engine is a pattern of influence operations that manufactures legitimacy for destabilizing claims. Its objective is credibility that survives long enough to shape institutional behavior. This is accomplished by embedding narratives inside professional wrappers, including policy language, risk reporting, investigative aesthetics, and analytic products that appear rigorous while concealing assumptions.

Respectability matters because institutions react to what looks serious. Claims presented with a measured tone and selective evidence are harder to dismiss without incurring reputational costs. Once leadership reacts, the narrative gains legitimacy because the reaction itself is treated as confirmation. This is why influence campaigns do not require universal belief. They require procedural conversion, where suspicion becomes an audit, a policy, or a pause.

A respectability engine fits industrial coercion because industrial systems generate ambiguity. Delays, quality escapes, price swings, and bottlenecks are normal. A respectability engine converts normal conditions into strategic messaging that frames routine friction as systemic failure. The industrial complex can remain productive while confidence in its output erodes, and that erosion can reshape markets, alliances, and oversight decisions in ways that persist after technical recovery.

AI as the scaling layer for influence operations

Artificial Intelligence (AI) changes the influence of information by altering scale, personalization, and iteration. Agentic tools can ingest trade reporting, procurement discourse, professional networks, and leaked data ecosystems, then map sensitivities and target audiences. They can generate tailored narrative variants for officials, investors, and industry leaders; seed them through distributed placements and persona networks; and synchronize messaging with disruptive events. Timing transforms coincidence into perceived confirmation, making minor delays or defects feel like proof.

These functions reduce the adversary’s cost of experimentation. Message variants can be tested, tuned, and redeployed faster than institutions can coordinate a unified response. This enables persistent pressure delivered at machine tempo, and it exploits the gap between automation and governance.

Campaign design to degrade, fracture, and unplug

An AI-assisted campaign aimed at unplugging the U.S. industrial complex is best understood as an accumulation of effects. The goal is degradation by gradual disconnection from global trust networks, not sudden collapse.

Degradation begins with perceived reliability. Isolated incidents are selectively amplified and framed as indicative of broader systemic weaknesses. Attention frequently centers on the integrity of data and coordination systems, as diminished confidence in information quality slows decision-making processes. Verification requirements increase, decision cycles lengthen, and operational tempo declines. As a result, responsiveness erodes even in the absence of physical disruption or damage.

Fractures follow. Partners question dependence. Firms diversify. Regulators tighten. The campaign does not need universal belief. It needs enough doubt that risk management shifts incrementally and persists, even after technical recovery occurs.

Unplugging happens when doubt turns into regulatory delay. Legal hesitancy increases. The burdens of insurance and compliance grow. Reputational risk discourages collaboration. The respectability engine depicts disconnection as prudent governance and responsible resilience, making strategic isolation seem self-selected.

Operational coupling: Influence that rides on disruption

Influence operations are most effective when coupled with operational events, whether induced or naturally occurring. A cyber incident that delays a supplier becomes a narrative trigger. A localized quality issue becomes evidence of systemic failure. A labor dispute becomes proof of industrial decay. The coupling is often correlational rather than causal. The campaign succeeds when the narrative becomes the default explanation, and behavior changes follow.

Mechanisms of quiet legitimacy

Quiet legitimacy is produced through repeatable tactics, ones where credential laundering places claims into the mouths of voices perceived as independent, creating the appearance of distributed confirmation. Analytics include charts and technical language to convey rigor while hiding assumptions. Selective transparency leverages leaks and partial documents stripped of context. Moralization frames disagreement as negligence, making restraint feel irresponsible. These tactics resemble normal professional discourse rather than propaganda, which is why they persist even when individual claims are challenged.

Institutional effects: Decision denial and self-reinforcement

The most damaging outcome is decision denial. Leaders hesitate, delay approvals, expand verification loops, and shift from action to internal adjudication. Institutions then reinforce adversary framing through audits, restrictions, and public messaging that signal seriousness. The institution becomes the amplifier.

A further enabling condition is strategic silence. Political and industrial leaders often treat AI-assisted influence as reputational risk rather than industrial security, narrowing attention to incidents and compliance outcomes. This reduces urgency to build rehearsed counter-influence operations, narrative baselines, provenance tracking, and rapid truth publication aligned with operational integrity checks. Incentives intensify the gap. Political leaders fear acknowledging systemic exposure. Industrial leaders prioritize near-term output and optics. Under pressure, organizations default to ad hoc messaging and policy drag, validating narratives and accelerating disconnection through doubt and fatigue.

Implications for defense

Effective defense requires campaign awareness over incident-focused thinking. It involves establishing a clear narrative baseline, maintaining discipline in provenance, and enforcing decision discipline that sustains tempo while verification continues. It requires integrity assurance for data systems so leaders can demonstrate reliability through verifiable controls and transparent recovery. It also requires rehearsed counter-influence operations integrated with cybersecurity, risk governance, and partner communication. The aim is to preserve trust while sustaining output.

Conclusion

Industrial competition is determined as much by trust as by throughput. AI-assisted hybrid warfare enables influence operations that degrade confidence, fracture alliances, and gradually unplug an industrial complex from global networks, thereby shaping what stakeholders consider reliable and what partners judge as safe. The respectability engine remains central because it converts destabilizing narratives into credible concerns and turns institutional reaction into proof. Its effects become decisive when machine-speed amplification makes those narratives unavoidable through repetition and timing aligned with routine industrial friction. The industrial complex remains globally connected only if it can sustain trust while operating at speed under pressure designed to look responsible, data-driven, and legitimate. When legitimacy is amplified by machine-speed, the contest becomes less about a single narrative and more about who controls the conditions under which common sense forms.

Mr. Greg Sharpe is a Fellow and the director of Communications and Marketing for the National Institute for Deterrence Studies and the Managing Design Editor for the Global Security Review. He has 25+ years in marketing and communications with a focus on digital communications, organizational and institutional change, and analysis. The views of the author are his own.

Information Influence in AI-Assisted Hybrid Warfare in the U.S. Industrial Complex was originally published on Global Security Review.

This was not an isolated incident. Civilian-grade drones and other dual-use technologies are increasingly being used to survey or target public infrastructure. From energy grids to airports, the connective tissue of modern life is exposed to risks once confined to traditional warzones. These developments are reshaping global security policies and blurring the boundary between civilian and military domains.

Civilian Tech, Strategic Impact

Cheap unmanned aircraft systems (UAS) are now accessible worldwide. While drones were initially developed for military use, the most commonly deployed platforms today, such as DJI’s Mavic series, were originally built for civilian applications like aerial photography and videography. Their affordability, portability, and high-spec cameras made them commercially popular, but those same features have made them easy to repurpose for military contexts.

In particular, first-person view (FPV) drones, designed for immersive recreational flying, were rapidly adapted for frontline use in conflict. These drones are now routinely deployed with improvised explosives or used for precision reconnaissance. In Ukraine, both sides repurposed off-the-shelf drones in vast numbers; nearly two million were produced in 2024 alone. Many of these are equipped with AI-enabled navigation and targeting, underscoring how quickly civilian tech can be weaponised.

Non-state actors are following suit. Armed groups are using FPV drones for low-cost, high impact strikes on infrastructure, blurring the lines between military and civilian threats. This second drone age shows that national security vulnerabilities now stem as much from consumer technology as from conventional arsenals.

The broader implication is clear: private-sector innovations, often created without any defense intent, are shaping the battlefield. These companies bring novel use cases, technical advantages, or agile design processes that legacy defense contractors may overlook. Civilian tech is not just a risk; it is a potential strategic asset. Tapping into this ecosystem, especially among start-ups and experts, could redefine how the country protects critical infrastructure in an era of hybrid conflict.

Infrastructure in the Crosshairs

Modern infrastructure is a key target in modern conflicts or hybrid attacks, just like military bases traditionally were. In 2022, after the sabotage of the Nord Stream pipelines, over 70 drone sightings were reported near Norwegian offshore oil platforms. Oslo feared Russian-linked hybrid operations targeting Europe’s energy supply and deployed naval assets and invited NATO allies to assist in patrols.

Meanwhile, Ukraine’s energy grid suffered repeated drone and missile attacks, with waves of low-cost Shahed drones used to disable power plants. By spring 2024, roughly half of Ukraine’s electricity capacity was destroyed, forcing nationwide blackouts.

Outside conflict zones, attacks on infrastructure are also rising. In Sudan, a drone strike on a power station caused regional outages, and other drone attacks on water purification stations left the country on the brink of a significant Cholera outbreak. In the US, federal officials stopped an attack on a power grid by a man using an explosive-carrying drone.

Transportation hubs are vulnerable, too. In January 2025, drone activity shut down Riga Airport, disrupting dozens of flights.

 Gaps in Governance

 Despite growing risks, legal and operational frameworks remain fragmented. Drones and AI-driven surveillance systems often fall outside traditional arms control regimes. As a recent executive order put it, “Criminals, terrorists, and hostile foreign actors have intensified their weaponization of drone technologies, creating new and serious threats to our homeland.”

Jurisdictional confusion is common. In many countries, local authorities lack legal authority to respond to rogue drones above critical sites. Aviation safety rules and privacy laws create hesitation, giving bad actors a head start.

Even when threat awareness exists, coordination is inconsistent. The Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency warns that drones are used for surveillance and sabotage, yet they lack the comprehensive tools to oversee private-sector resilience or cross-border response.

 A Global Security Challenge

 Drone and AI threats are not confined by borders. In 2023, the European Commission launched a new counter-drone strategy, urging member states to harden infrastructure and coordinate airspace protections. NATO has added counter-UAS exercises to its joint drills, while AUKUS partners are beginning to share emerging drone and AI tactics.

But international law is lagging. There is still no global treaty governing the use of armed drones or autonomous surveillance. Export control regimes struggle to manage proliferation of AI-enabling components. At the UN, efforts to establish binding norms on autonomous weapons are stalled. Ad hoc coordination is, however, slowly improving.

When Norway’s oil platforms were threatened, NATO allies were called in within days. After drone sightings near Dutch and Belgian ports, neighboring governments exchanged countermeasure plans. These models suggest a path forward: rapid and collective responses based on shared tools, shared doctrine, and shared threat intelligence.

The future of civilian dual-use technologies will not be defined by innovators alone. Whether drones or AI software, these tools are already reshaping how adversaries threaten public safety and economic continuity. What is at stake is not just national security, but the resilience of infrastructure that supports daily life.

The Crucial Role of Start-ups in National Defense

 Civilian-origin technologies are now driving the next wave of defense capability. From FPV drones to AI surveillance tools, some of the most disruptive military applications today are emerging not from traditional defense primes but from commercial markets, often developed by start-ups with no military background.

A coordinated international framework is urgently needed, one that does not just support innovation and infrastructure protection but actively integrates civilian tech into defense planning. This means lowering the barriers for experts and start-ups to meaningfully contribute alongside legacy contractors. The United Kingdom’s recent Defence Review hinted at this shift, recognising that smaller firms are vital to national resilience, particularly when civilian infrastructure is under threat.

What is truly needed is a NATO-wide or broader allied framework that enables cross-border collaboration, streamlines regulation, and opens up procurement pathways.

Today, many start-ups working at the intersection of security and technology face steep hurdles: limited access to capital, opaque compliance regimes, and procurement processes designed around, and for, large incumbents. Yet by creating space for their innovation, we can modernize collective defense from the ground up, using the very same civilian tools that adversaries are already turning into weapons.

A coordinated international framework is urgently needed, one that not only supports innovation and infrastructure protection but also lowers barriers to experts and start-ups to contribute more meaningfully alongside traditional defense primes. The UK’s recent Defence Review hinted at this shift, recognizing the value smaller firms bring to national resilience. It is time to take similar action at home.

Harry Geisler is the CEO of YAVA.

How Civilian Dual-Use Technologies Are Reshaping Global Security Policies was originally published on Global Security Review.

Affected cities include Gaziantep, a historical city with a lineage spanning from the Roman Empire to the Ottomans, which has become a powerhouse for overseas exports in recent decades. Other devastated cities include Hatay, Kahramanmaras, and Adana, where the strategic Incirlik Air Base is located. Additionally,

Re-Building Paradise: A complete revitalization of the South-East of the Turkish Nation post the earthquakes of 2023

Osmaniye, Kilis, Malatya, Diyarbakir, Adiyaman, and Şanlıurfa have been impacted, bringing the total to ten affected provinces across the region.

Rather than adhering to existing city planning doctrines, a new approach must be implemented, incorporating both incentivization and distinct governance oversight. This will ensure the revitalization process is not hindered by other political developments, ranging from socio-political matters to day-to-day topics dominating the media cycle. Drawing inspiration from the London Docklands Development Corporation and the revitalization of East London in the 1980s, an emergency decree should grant tax breaks and relief to the southeast of Turkey.

An immediate Presidential Executive Order is necessary to designate all ten affected provinces as 25-year tax-free regions for domestic and international corporations. Individuals who move to the area or have existing registrations will also benefit from income tax exemptions for the same period. This policy promotes capital inflow and ensures existing residents are not priced out. Private investors must contribute a percentage of social housing, similar in quality to their own projects, to the local populace at cost. This approach is reminiscent of Singapore’s successful combination of foreign investment and social cohesion through high-quality social housing.

To curb unemployment, a 90% mandatory quota must be imposed for employing local Turkish workers, while incorporating similar quotas at the executive board level for Turkish entities. Those who relocate their businesses to the region will also benefit from the above-mentioned fiscal advantages. The ports of Iskenderun and Mersin will invigorate these developments by prioritizing sea routes and expanding the existing free trade zones.

Innovation must be reciprocated in governance by establishing a body directly accountable to the Presidency, superseding all Cabinet Ministers and Ministerial levels. This body will comprise Turkish Armed Forces officers and leading civilian administrators from various fields, forming a triumvirate to oversee region-specific redevelopment. This will ensure that the revitalization effort remains uninterrupted by internal or external politicization and election cycles.

The solution is clear as the Turkish nation looks toward a new dawn, with global support from allies like Israel and the United States and Turkey’s growing regional power in the Mediterranean and the Black Sea. The nation must move swiftly to not merely rebuild but to create a fundamentally new form of regional planning, administrative governance, security infrastructure, and economic policy. This innovative approach will serve as an example to other nations as they face the opportunities and challenges of the 2030s.

Revitalizing South-East Turkey After the 2023 Earthquakes was originally published on Global Security Review.

Although the Taliban’s spokesman in Qatar said that the Taliban now has “a policy of not having any kind of discrimination against the Shia people,” the Hazaras have been continually attacked at schools, weddings, and mosques for their support of the U.S. intervention in Afghanistan as well as their involvement with Iran to fight against Sunni Muslim forces in Iraq, Syria, and Afghanistan.  

The Iranian-backed Fatemiyoun Brigade recruits Hazara and Shia Afghan refugees, offering them payment, citizenship, and other legal protections in return for serving in the brigade. As persecution and targeting of the Hazaras continues, relations between Tehran and the Taliban regime will sour. In response, the brigade may look to recruit more Hazaras, who may be more willing to fight due to intense political and social isolation. 

Once the largest of Afghanistan’s ethnic groups, Hazaras now make up only 9 percent of Afghanistan’s population of 36 million, and Genocide Watch has declared this a “genocide emergency.” Offering protection for the Hazara people is more than an international security interest for the United States, but an urgent moral responsibility. Their support for the U.S. intervention in Afghanistan has deepened Taliban antipathy towards the Hazaras, and now that the United States has withdrawn troops, the Hazara community is more vulnerable than ever to Taliban violence. As a key stakeholder in Afghanistan that waged a war for two decades, the failure to protect the Hazaras is an acute human rights failure on part of the United States.   

While UN Donors, including the United States, pledged $1.2 billion in September to provide emergency assistance to Afghanistan in response to the economic and humanitarian crisis enveloping the country, the absence of significant international pressure on human rights issues leaves the Hazaras in a vulnerable position. To prevent a genocide of the Hazaras and further abuses against other minority groups, the United States needs to channel humanitarian assistance through independent organizations and condition longer-term development aid on respect for the human rights of the Afghan population.   

When the Taliban was last in power in the late 1990s, they were an international pariah due to their strict form of Islamic rule in which they forced women to stay home, banned girls from going to school, banned television and music, and held public executions. The Taliban’s initial public statements demonstrated willingness to moderate some of their past harsh policies; however, actions on the ground have not always matched their statements. There is the potential that coordinated pressure from the United States and other countries could encourage the Taliban leadership to follow through with their stated commitments on respecting human rights, especially those of women and minorities. 

Although President Joe Biden withdrew from Afghanistan to focus on foreign policy priorities in the Indo-Pacific, protecting minorities like the Hazaras is important for demonstrating global leadership on human rights issues, as well as preventing terrorism and deeper civil conflict in Afghanistan. This effort should be a shared responsibility. For the United States to effectively pressure the Taliban to protect the Afghan population it needs to have other international partners on board. 

As a condition of long-term development aid, the US and its partners should request the Taliban allow independent human-rights observers into the country to monitor and catalog abuses and make public the human rights violations of the Hazara people and other minorities. By conditioning development aid on respect for human rights, the Taliban will be less likely to commit serious abuses against these groups. This strategy allows the United States to continue to support the Afghan population without supporting the Taliban’s actions. 

 The UN Human Rights Commission must also begin to investigate the killing of Hazaras as genocide or as a crime against humanity. Publicizing the situation of the Hazara people would hopefully lead to international reckoning and urgency to help the situation before it becomes worse. The United States needs to take early preventative measures given these warning signs so the administration is not complacent in genocide as it has been in the past.

Protecting the Hazara People of Afghanistan is a Moral Obligation the World is Failing to Meet was originally published on Global Security Review.

Setup for Failure

The US-led invasion was intractable from the start. With the invasion occurring less than a month after the attacks on September 11^th, 2001, the US did not give itself or its coalition partners much time to devise a plan of action for the invasion and to create peace after the invasion. Though the legal basis was clear – al-Qaeda led by Osama bin Laden committed the most devastating terror attack on US soil to date, the Taliban harbored bin Laden and much of his al-Qaeda network within Afghan territory, therefore, the Taliban was complicit – the US failed to develop a comprehensive regime of goals and objectives outside of finding bin Laden and destroying the Taliban for harboring him. The Bush administration did try to ‘provide the security that is the foundation for peace,’ but failed to develop a functional strategy to achieve this because there was no real conceptualization of what that meant.

“It was an accidental war” following September 11, 2001. “It was initially to punish those who committed the crime with no plans or strategy for what needs to happen after that.” 

Ali Jalali, former Afghan Interior Minister

Ultimately, without significant conceptualization of what a post-Taliban Afghanistan could or should look like, NATO was never going to be able to do more than temporarily disrupt the Taliban which proved more resilient and willing to wait out the Coalition in the short and medium terms.

Development was Neither Afghan Centered nor Afghan Led

Part of what seems to sting the most for Americans critical of the withdrawal is the prospect of losing all of the progress that was made in Afghanistan towards building a democratic future for the country. But that was always impermanent. The development work in Afghanistan, from democratization initiatives, government capacity building, to infrastructure development, was always NATO-led, and therefore fragile when it came time for NATO to leave. Rather than empowering the Afghans to build organic political structures and institutions and security agreements and forces, NATO laid much of the groundwork itself. By imposing governmental structures and administrative procedures and making deals and agreements with local and regional leadership, NATO never allowed the new government to build a sense of legitimacy it would need to govern and keep Afghanistan secure by keeping those relationships and agreements intact after the occupation ended. This was probably done to prevent corruption and ensure capacities were built in ways that NATO could understand and quantify to continue justifying to publics back home. But this left the new Afghan government without its own roots and struggling with a perception of being a product of outside occupiers that would crumble once NATO left.

This is similar to what the US saw in Iraq. The US created partnerships between different regional and tribal groups to help bring security to the more turbulent regions of Iraq. But when US troops left the country, the bonds that held these regional coalitions together quickly snapped under the pressure of the inevitable power vacuum. Militias and warlords raced for arms and control of resources, ultimately devolving the country into civil war because the new Iraqi government was not yet stable enough to fill it. Because the new Afghan government hasn’t been at the helm creating its own security and stability, the same power vacuum is almost inevitable in Afghanistan as well. And the Taliban has been lying in wait for the day that NATO leaves and that vacuum opens up.

Is Afghanistan Better Off?

We must also question, like in Iraq, if Afghanistan is better off today than it was before NATO’s occupation. It is easy to look at democratization efforts and infrastructure projects like building schools and hospitals and say “yes, clearly.” But in reality, the NATO-backed government in Afghanistan only holds control of about 50% of Afghanistan’s total territory right now. The rest is controlled by the Taliban and aligned warlords. The reach of that development has not spread across the entire country. Further, what good has this development done if the people of Afghanistan are still captured in crossfire. Estimates from 2019 say that as many as 43,000 civilians, including women and children, have died as direct casualties of the occupation. As many as 100,000 more received injuries directly from occupation operations, not to mention mental trauma and indirect deaths and injuries. There are some positive outcomes from the occupation. But those outcomes aren’t widespread, sustainable post-occupation; and there’s a legitimate argument that these positive outcomes are offset or outsized by the brutal cost of the conflict in total.

Could the US & NATO Endure?

This article is not intended as a cynical endorsement of President Biden’s plan to withdraw US troops from Afghanistan. Rather, it is meant as a reckoning with the reality of the situation in Afghanistan over grandiose ideations of some undefined victory over the Taliban. The Taliban is dug in. It is fighting for what it sees as a righteous homeland. It knows how to extract resources from the environment in Afghanistan, including maintaining legitimacy with which foreign occupiers cannot compete. NATO can weaken it, but the Taliban can, has, and will endure in the shadows until the NATO tires. The US & NATO cannot endure, not the same way the Taliban can. The occupation is costly in lives and money and NATO partners must constantly justify these costs to publics at home that do not want to continue paying.

What is a Better, More Feasible Alternative?

Unfortunately, there are no good alternatives for NATO. The returns from the occupation continue to diminish as the Taliban gains more territory. And continuing the occupation will only prolong the inevitable. However, there may be some hope for a long-term shift in strategy that won’t dismantle the Taliban but may help build stability and give the chance for peace in the future. The Biden administration has begun the process – regional security cooperation between Afghanistan, the US, Pakistan, India, Russia, and China through the United Nations. It’s not clear exactly what roles each of these partners will have in promoting peace in post-occupation Afghanistan, but there is potential here. The security of the Central Asian region depends on the security of Afghanistan. Continued instability and insecurity in Afghanistan threaten the security of Pakistan and China directly, as they share land borders with Afghanistan and spillover effects could threaten regional dynamics destabilizing security dynamics for the others as well.

If this cooperation centers on the needs and capacities of Afghanistan and is led by Afghanistan, then there is hope that the democratic Afghan government can create crucial legitimacy-building and capacity-building initiatives. This would allow Afghan security forces to better counter Taliban operations and resource networks and disrupt the Taliban’s social, tribal, and cultural ties that help entrench its power. It would also show Afghans that they can have confidence that their government can provide good governance for them, not the foreign occupiers who are providing or dictating over them. But that would mean great care would need to be taken in this new security cooperation to ensure that Afghan forces lead and construct security operations and Afghan politicians and public servants need to develop, lead, and guide development initiatives following the needs and desires of the Afghan people. More specifically, that means Afghans need to be in charge of how development aid is distributed and used. This is a sharp change to how development aid is normally done – conventionally, how development aid is used and distributed is dictated by the aid giver- But this limits the aid recipient from being able to tailor that aid to the dynamic needs of the people it’s supposed to help, forcing them to either return of not use the aid or use it outside of its prescriptions and then face accusations of corruption. But if this new security cooperation can center the needs, interests, and leadership of Afghans first, then there is a that it will be able to push back against the Taliban over time. This won’t be overnight, or probably not even over the course of months or a year. But a long-term process of development, security cooperation, and resource investment into Afghan governance and economy may ultimately be the key to finally dismantling the Taliban rather than pushing them into the shadows.

The Inevitability of the Taliban’s Resurgence in Afghanistan was originally published on Global Security Review.

According to the 2018 Global Slavery Index, an estimated 40.3 million men, women, and children were victims of modern slavery. Women and girls made up 71 percent of victims. Modern slavery is most prevalent in Africa, where 9.2 million live in servitude, followed by Asia and the Pacific region.  State-imposed forced labor and forced marriages constitute the primary culprits of enslavement, which are compounded by recurrent or protracted bouts of armed conflict, especially in fragile and grossly underdeveloped states, such as Burundi, Eritrea, or Mauritania. Slavery or enslavement is a distinct legal concept. It is defined in Article 7(2)(c) of the Rome Statute  as “the exercise of any or all of the powers attaching to the right of ownership over a person and includes the exercise of such power in the course of trafficking in person, in particular women and children.” The 1956 Supplementary Convention on the Abolition of Slavery, the Slave Trade, and Institutions and Practices Similar to Slavery regards slavery as being constituted by four states of servitude, among them debt bondage, servile marriage, exploitation of children, and serfdom. Article 4 of the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights (ICCPR), on the other hand, in Article 8 prohibits the use of forced or compulsory labor and provides for the opportunity to freely choose the means of one’s gainful employment. Forced labor must not entail an element of ownership to constitute slavery but many forms of slavery often involve forced labor which can take many forms, including forced labor exploitation, forced sexual exploitation, and state-imposed slavery, which persists in contravention of Article 4 of the United Nations Declaration of Human Rights. In Mauritania, for instance, individuals become property of their masters, who exercise total ownership over their human ‘property’ and over their descendants. It is not uncommon for slaves, which account for an estimated 155,000 of population, to be inherited by family, to be bought, sold or rented out, and be given away as gifts.

Children are especially prone to various forms of enslavement and become particularly vulnerable to conditions involving forced labor. “Worldwide, 218 million children between ages 4 and 17 are in employment. Among them 152 million are victims of child labor; almost half of them, 73 million, work in hazardous child labor.” One in four victims of modern slavery is a child.

The resurgence of widespread and pervasive forms of modern slavery on the African continent coincides with the reinvigoration of the mining industry, which in turn, benefits from an amalgamation of human vulnerabilities. Poverty and civil conflict, fragile peace, debilitated post-conflict economy, low income, poor health and education of the general population increase opportunities for debt-bondage and resource depletion through unauthorized, poorly monitored and rudimentary illicit digging. Economies of fragile or underdeveloped states remain subservient to governmental fiat whose monopoly on the means of production open prospects for graft and political corruption. Military rule and state ownership of key resource extraction industries on the continent, on the other hand, contributes to the prolongation of civil wars and rebellions, growth of the black market and rise in organized criminal activity. Resource-rich African countries like Angola, the Democratic Republic of Congo, Eritrea, Liberia, and Sierra Leone, to name but a few, have long suffered from the consequences of internal skirmishes, conflicts and outbursts of unstable peace, while also being home to substantial mineral, gem and diamond deposits. This paradox of plenty combined with poor growth and anemic developmental outcomes has been dubbed by scholars as the resource curse, which does not go unnoticed by enterprising Western as well as also increasingly Chinese resource extraction entities.

Africa’s wealth…

Africa “hosts 30% of the earth’s mineral reserves, including 40% of gold, 60% of cobalt, and 70% of platinum deposits, and produces about 30% of the world’s gold, 70% of the world’s platinum, 28% of the world’s palladium, and 16% of the world’s bauxite … and 595,507 kg of gold-bearing ores.” The Democratic Republic of Congo, alone, according to Forbes, is endowed with over $24 trillion worth of untapped mineral deposits, including copper, diamonds, and coltan. The promise of high earnings potential combined with an unquenchable hunger for key mineral resources by China boosts foreign direct investment on the continent, stimulating an export economy, encouraging large-scale labor migration, and feeding irregular smuggling industries. Employment of child labor in mining is not uncommon and the involvement of political classes in resource extraction profiteering – by legal and illegal means – contributes to an exacerbation of already anomalous patterns in income and wealth distribution in fragile, poverty-stricken yet resource-rich African states. Even the established agrarian economies and subsistence farming become prone to major shifts in output as mining relocates workforce, supplants food production, and contributes to noticeable market declines in the agricultural sector of the economy. Poor man’s hopes of sharing in the wealth of gem, diamond and mineral deposits become dashed by revenue capture by large multinational corporations and political and organized criminal enterprises, polluting the local environment and depleting the land, while amplifying opportunities for civil unrest.

… and its inglorious colonial past

Today, the African continent faces its own peculiar set of especially difficult problems, split between a colonial past and a Chinese-dominated future. The cycles of boom and bust in the global supply chains of valuable minerals, coal, copper, uranium, gold, gems and diamonds have played an especially prominent role in Africa’s economic (under)development. Historical exploitation of the continent’s natural resources over the years put a cumulative stress on the traditional agricultural prowess of Central and Southern African states, straining familial and tribal relations and deeply affecting the moral and social fabric of its traditional orders. “Between 1867 and 1935, more than £1,200 million of public and private capital was invested in Africa.” Infusion of capital resulted in high demand for land and labor which caused “a massive decline in rural productivity” and “destroyed the economic, social, and political structures which had held African society together.” Colonial administration of African lands attracted French, German, Belgian, British, and German interests, which invested heavily in the mining industry, “whose dominant units [were] the major international corporations, that cause[d] and reproduce[d] the continent’s underdevelopment.”

The period of decolonization brought with it the globalization of the mining industry, which introduced American and Japanese stakeholders and developed new deposits in Australia and Canada, financed by the profits from Africa. Foreign interests brought capital resources, financial finesse, and technological innovation, yet profits have been one-sided and have disproportionately accrued to Western companies and their financial sponsors – large banking institutions such as Barclays, Deutsche Bank, or First National City Bank of New York – who upon entering into agreements with African governments were guaranteed unobstructed market access and little to none opposition to their projects, while Africa descended into  poverty, civil conflict, and war. Between 1868 and 1928, the South African diamond- and gold-mining industry alone generated “£340 million worth of diamonds, while the total amount of foreign capital invested in the diamond industry was probably no more than £20 million. The dividends of the diamond-producing companies, excluding the profits made by the individual diggers, exceeded £80 million.” Any foreign investments made around the African mineral resource economy were made to ensure the infrastructurally sound and reliable access and export of the mined goods. Investments in transportation links – railways and river barges – had been made to link Africa’s mineral wealth to the main trading routes that fed into the global economy; they had not been made to equip the continent with suitable standards of living and a sure path to development and independence.

The world’s ferocious demand for Africa’s resources, over decades of Western domination and exploitation, only exacerbated the continent’s underdevelopment and increased its dependence. The scramble for Africa’s wealth encompassed material and human goods leaving the continent’s men, women and children at the mercy of the supply and demand chains of the global economy. Mining in Zaire by near-monopolistic power of international capital, for example, “distorted the country’s social structure” through land expropriation leading to the pauperization of the peasantry and blocking the emergence of national bourgeoisie. The need for “cheap black labor” in Southern Rhodesia (present-day Zimbabwe) and the desire to stabilize the supply of labor force resulted in the colonial imposition of a land tax on the African population with an aim of preventing lucrative yields from land cultivation and forcing the local population into industrial mining. Despite Liberia’s position as “a country exceptionally well endowed with natural resources, of iron ore as well as diamonds and other minerals, with good soil, a huge potential in forestry and a booming export trade” the serious budgetary deficits which the country faced in 1968 were largely due to the generous concession agreements, relaxed government supervision of accounting and financial reports, and the inevitable “enormous outflow of resources to the mining companies.” Nearly a third of the country’s GNP of the monetary sector of the economy was consumed by the outflow of cash to foreign interests. Similarly, parasitic practices repeated many times over across the continent – from Zambian copper, South African gold, Namibian and Gabonese uranium, to Togolese phosphates – produced thriving Belgian, British, German, French, and American economies while sentencing Africa to the distressing Third World status. The seizure of land and deliberate suppression of indigenous industries and agricultural development is known to have been replicated by European colonial powers in French North Africa, Anglo-Dutch East and South Africa as well as India. As Shashi Tharoor has shown in Inglorious Empire: What the British Did in India (2017), when the East India Company was established in 1600, Britain accounted for a mere 1.8 percent of global GDP and India for the impressive 23 percent. In 1750, India and China together accounted for three-quarters of the global industrial output. However, by the time of India’s independence in 1947, after decades of systematic plunder and transformation by British imperial rule, India’s contribution to world GDP decreased to 3%, while Britain’s was three times as high, reversing the large imbalances of wealth and political leverage which have lasted well into the 21^st century.

History doesn’t repeat itself, but it rhymes

Today, Africa’s developmental path is heavily influenced by Chinese mining and resource extraction interests, substantial investments in agriculture, infrastructure, peacekeeping, and formal and informal security arrangements, which once again, set the continent firmly on the path of protracted material dependence. According to Brookings, between 2000 and 2017, China provided $143 billion in loans to African governments and their state-owned enterprises in the form of concession loans, credit lines, and development financing and pledged additional $60 billion at the 2018 Forum on China-Africa Cooperation (FOCAC).¹ The Export-Import Bank of China loan guarantees involve confiscation of resource-rich lands in the event of default. The world’s second largest economy imports $100 billion worth of base metals every year and its interests in Sub-Saharan Africa’s natural wealth in cobalt, chromium, iron ore, copper, gold, manganese, among others, will undoubtedly change the social-economic trajectory of Ghana, Democratic Republic of Congo, Cameroon, Kenya, Sudan, Tanzania, and Zambia. Mining alone, however, implicates cognate conflicts over land ownership, human rights abuses, and environmental degradation on the continent. The impact of mining on the environment has already caused much disaffection and concern. Harmful levels of radioactivity and poor corporate social responsibility paired with inadequate state oversight and corruption of state and local elites threaten to further exaggerate Africa’s vulnerabilities and accelerate social and economic inequalities of already disempowered local populations. In exchange for African countries’ symbolic political support in global institutions and multilateral fora, China – in substantially instrumental yet strategic ways – is gobbling up Africa’s vast natural resource wealth in order to ensure its own global dominance by 2049, the centennial of China’s Communist Revolution.

The many temptations of Chinese direct foreign investment in largely acquiescent Africa are bound to overlook the substantial human cost of forced or state-sanctioned labor, which all-too-frequently assist in the states’ rapid industrialization and upward economic growth.

Despite great legal strides being made in the form of the 1926 Slavery Convention, the 1956 United Nations’ Supplementary Convention on the Abolition of Slavery, Slave Trade, and Institutions and Practices Similar to Slavery, the 1976 International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights, and the 1957 Convention of the Abolition of Forced Labor, states and corporate entities are often complicit in the crime which maintains and perpetuates a system of political and economic domination and sustains structural inequalities inherent in the global economy. The illicit labor landscape is further complicated by mass population movements resulting from conflicts in North Africa and the Middle East. Vulnerable and at-risk populations turn to organized networks of smugglers and traffickers, who profit from human tragedy. Fresh supply of labor of forced and unforced nature creates opportunities for exploitation which often falls under the definitional category of ‘modern slavery’ or other forms of ‘consensual exploitation’ stemming from economic desperation offered in exchange for inhumane treatment and substandard working conditions. According to the 2005 A Global Alliance Against Forced Labour report “80 percent of forced labor is found in the private economy, mainly in the rural and informal sectors in developing countries, but also penetrating the supply chain of major companies in the developing and industrialized world alike.” Yet, the enforcement and criminalization of such practices remains elusive due in large measure to the architecture of modern demand and supply chains. Scholars even suggest that

“…the majority of victims of forced labour are not slaves of brutal war lords, dictatorial regimes or mafia-type criminal networks. They are subjected to coercion in the informal economy and in mainstream economic sectors, tied to their workplaces by subtle means of coercion and control… their exploitation is part and parcel of labour relations in certain parts of the economy.”²

Can international criminal law be an effective instrument against modern slavery?

The present-day landscape of corporate- and government- level initiatives attempting to address and redress the transnational nature of modern slavery has been gradually populated by a set of guidelines and good practices across industries and continents. Since the enactment of International Labour Organization’s 1977 Tripartite Declaration of Principles concerning Multinational Enterprises and Social Policy, the UN Global Compact, and the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD) Guidelines for Multinational Enterprises – which call for elimination of forced and child labor – governments and businesses alike have been forced to reckon with human rights abuses within their supply chains. Additionally, the Athens Ethical Principles adopted by business companies in 2006 to combat human trafficking worldwide, have espoused seven main values:

“(1)  Demonstrate the position of zero tolerance towards trafficking in human beings, especially women and children for sexual exploitation (Policy Setting); (2) Contribute to prevention of trafficking in human beings including awareness-raising campaigns and education (Public Awareness-Raising); (3) Develop a corporate strategy for an anti-trafficking policy which will permeate all our activities (Strategic Planning); (4) Ensure that our personnel fully comply with our anti-trafficking policy (Personnel Policy Enforcement); (5)  Encourage business partners, including suppliers, to apply ethical principles against human trafficking (Supply Chain Tracing); (6) In an effort to increase enforcement it is necessary to call on governments to initiate a process of revision of laws and regulations that are directly or indirectly related to enhancing anti-trafficking policies (Government Advocacy); (7) Report and share information on best practices (Transparency).”³

The identification, prevention, and mitigation of human trafficking, forced labor, and human rights abuses propelled by sporadic intensification of stakeholder pressures and generalized public boycotts, could benefit, however, from the assistance of regulators and law enforcement entities. By criminalizing behavior of companies and governments and holding them accountable for falling short on their commitments to the minimization of opportunities for human exploitation are severely overdue steps in the corporate responsibility and state liability discourse and practice. Domestic and international legal and criminal liability might be an effective last resort in incentivizing human rights compliance in both mainstream and informal sectors of the economy and broader state development schemes. The International Criminal Court (ICC) with its comprehensive transnational legal mandate can be a powerful institutional weapon in the fight against modern forms of slavery, which can ensure a modicum of accountability and just satisfaction as it prospectively endeavors to redress the all-too-prevalent abrogation of human, civil, and political rights. Strategic litigation that draws on international criminal law – be it through the ICC or other international judicial mechanisms – can provide a requisite roadmap to future prosecution of offenses of universally objectionable nature and issue an authoritative statement on crimes shocking to the human conscience.

¹ Y. Sun. 2020. “China and Africa’s debt: Yes to relief, no to blanket forgiveness” https://www.brookings.edu/blog/africa-in-focus/2020/04/20/china-and-africas-debt-yes-to-relief-no-to-blanket-forgiveness/

² B. Andrees, “Defending Rights, Security Justice: The International Labor Organization’s Work on Forced Labor” JICJ. 343-362.

³ Business and Human Rights Resource Centre. “The Athens Ethical Principles” https://www.business-humanrights.org/en/pdf-athens-ethical-principles

Africa’s (Modern) Slavery Problem was originally published on Global Security Review.

“Since the fall of the Berlin Wall, the number of border walls between nations has more than quadrupled” precisely at a time when cultural and economic globalization has both simultaneously and paradoxically promoted and invited greater human mobilization and internationalization of production, workforce, and education. The reappearance of the border-centered discourse has, in recent months, coincided with one of the most consequential mass population movements since World War II – The Syrian Refugee Crisis – displacing more than 12 million people in 2015 alone and quickly becoming the focal point of election slogans and innumerable public debates in some of the most traditionally open and astutely liberal polities. Legal and illegal, documented and undocumented border crossings by migrants, immigrants, and refugees prompted, in no small measure, reflections on national identity and social co-existence in a globalized, highly volatile, and increasingly mobile world. The pre-Brexit referendum debates evidenced dissatisfaction with pan-European arrangements of open borders, resulting demographic changes, and stringent economic austerity measures. A turn toward the “America First” approach was made out of perceivably lapse border controls between the United States and Mexico and a poorly administered U.S. immigration system. Alternative for Germany (AfD) party platform in the 2017 election cycle echoed political themes of “It’s about us, our culture, our home, our Germany” and “Get your country back!” that gave momentum to the nationalist movements in Merkel’s multicultural Germany and translated into seats in the Bundestag. The March 2018 Italian election campaign manifestos revolved around the country’s 600,000 migrants of mostly African descent, who were no longer welcome in the Mediterranean “La Patria” or fatherland. Anti-migrant sentiments and slogans are reinforced further by a tangible security apparatus, which manifests a determined proclivity toward the hardening of borders and increasing land and maritime border surveillance. It is no accident that since its creation in 2005, Frontex, the European agency tasked with the management of the continent’s external borders has enjoyed a generous budget and a steady increase in financial support (Agier, 2016) as migration is ever more tightly bound with security.

Given the above-cited precedents, what prompts the periodic resurfacing of nationalistic sentiments and isolationist tendencies? How should tensions between liberal proclivities to hospitality towards strangers be reconciled with communitarian values and patriotic fervor? Why do visions of exclusivity tend to prevail over cosmopolitan aspirations of undivided humanity? Do walls demarcating borders succeed and when do they matter most?

The developments of recent months give rise to a number of questions, which the subsequent pages mean to intimate at and explore but by no means definitively answer. The contemporary migratory landscape and political responses to the changing patterns of movement of people outlined in this article, however, offer a fertile ground for further reflection on the contours and character of our liberal polities and contents of our responsibility toward strangers or a distant ‘other’.

Migration and Its Consequences

 The question surrounding the status of minorities within the social and legal milieu is one of significant historical weight in Europe, a continent burdened by the legacy of the Austro-Hungarian, Ottoman, and Russian imperialism and subsequent travails of the World War II experience of mass genocide forced repatriations and ethnic expulsions. It is all the more pressing in view of ongoing conflicts in the Middle East and resulting in mass population migrations of refugees. In 2015, according to the International Organization for Migration (IOM) monitoring system, more than one million migrants and refugees crossed into Europe, resulting in a humanitarian crisis of considerable proportions and by 2017 the total number of asylum-seekers reached 3.5 million. Mass movements of refugees from Syria and Afghanistan into Austria, Germany, Greece, Hungary, Italy, Turkey, and Sweden to name a few, have posed significant social and security dilemmas not seen on the Continent since the wars in former Yugoslavia, Bosnia and Herzegovina of the 1990s. Population displacement of vulnerable at-risk populations due to war and protracted conflict, especially of women and children, carries with it existential risks and societal implications requiring long-term assistance and diligent care. The IOM found that close to seventy percent of migrants attempting to cross the Mediterranean have fallen victim to exploitation, abuse, human trafficking, imprisonment, and rape. Traumatized and exploited survivors, in turn, suffer debilitating long-term health consequences that require diligent medical help and legal assistance. Meanwhile, EU polities have struggled to come up with a concerted response to the refugee influx, spurring Parliamentary debates on the shape and character of EU’s refugee integration policy, financial support, and job creation, revamping of border security, reform of the asylum system and implementation of a humane return policy (EU Parliament News, 2017). Apart from a lack of pan-European consensus on a unified response to ongoing refugee flows, unilateral “open door” policies adopted by Sweden and Germany have proven politically controversial and socially and financially unsustainable. The integration of nearly 1.1 million refugees into German society has met with public disapproval. In a January 2016 Insa public opinion poll, forty percent of Germans wanted Merkel to quit over her “refugees are welcome” policy.  A number of EU member states declined to follow a similar path opting instead for refugee admission quotas resulting in a continent bitterly divided over integration, security, and financial sharing of burdens. All too often, however, the world’s response to mass atrocities is a compromise between a trial and error.

Mass population displacements due to protracted conflicts around the world have grown in scale and brutality. The United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees reported that some 65.3 million people were forcefully displaced by conflict and persecution in 2015 alone. The all too familiar shipwrecks carrying refugees across the Mediterranean, walls and barbed-wire fences, the camps in Calais, and the barrels of the gun have become the discomforting images that once again test our laws, our morality, and our humanity.

Walls and Borders in Historical Context

At the conclusion of World War II, there were fewer than five border walls in the world. By the end of the Cold War in 1989-90, the number steadily increased to fifteen. Despite the celebratory triumph of liberal values over Marxist-Leninist ideology that put an end to the symbolic ‘Iron Curtain’ represented by the Berlin Wall, more physical barriers have been erected than ever before with a singular purpose of keeping people in as well as out. According to researchers at the University of Quebec at Montreal, there are at present 65 walls standing or under construction. Old as well as new democracies guard themselves against, what Ai Weiwei’s recent documentary dubbed the ‘Human Flow’ (Amazon Studios, 2017). Despite its idealized pioneering project of visa-free entry, the Schengen Agreement, the EU is a leader in the construction of new border walls. Austria is erecting a physical border to deter migrants from traveling through Hungary and Norway and Slovenia are building walls to keep immigrants from Russia and Croatia. Spain’s 7-mile steel structure blocks immigration from Morocco and both Egypt and Israel erected massive steel barricades with Gaza. Bulgaria, Turkey, India, Myanmar, have all built walls on their borders and the United States is testing eight prototypes of barriers to be eventually erected on its nearly 2,000-mile-long Southwest border with Mexico. The EU, in the meantime, signed an agreement with Turkey to halt the flow of asylum-seekers and stop them from crossing the Aegean Sea. Containment of population flows by means of material barriers to entry conflicts with long-held liberal visions of undivided humanity and its accompanying humanitarian impulse and ethics of care proffered by the EU as an idea and an institution. Despite considerable elisions of ideological differences that separated people and fractured relations between the East and West at the height of the Cold War, the union of like-minded democratic states confoundingly gives rise to more physical walls that had historically estranged East and West Berliners.

Contemporary Patterns of Migration

Between 2005 and 2014, some 40,000 people died trying to cross borders across the world (Jones 2016, 4). According to the International Organization for Migration, 10,000 of them died since 2014. In 2016 alone, more than 4,000 people have died trying to cross the Mediterranean. No monument has been raised to commemorate the victims. No special mention or a minute of silence has been dedicated to this modern-day atrocity. To borrow Judith Butler’s words, those ‘precarious’ lives lost in war or in transit may simply not be ‘grievable’ enough (2009). After all, from the comforts of ones’ home or office, one cannot imaginatively enter into a condition of conflict displacement, making the perilous journey of a refugee or an asylum-seeker not sufficiently ‘intelligible’ to the Western mind to ‘matter’ on a social scale (Butler, 2009). On the contrary, the sheer depersonalized statistical certainty of people perishing as a result of a hazardous border crossing is met with distracted indifference and reinforces the perception of modern-day migration as an underground enterprise rife with deception and danger that make death if not inevitable, certainly highly possible. The undocumented, the paperless, the undesired, and the uninvited – left in despair or helplessness that only war can bring – have increasingly turned to networks of smugglers who in their attempt to breach the ‘walls’ of the security state apparatus expose the victims of their own unlucky stars to the arsenal of civil and criminal state responses. The 2011 Human Rights Watch Report recorded instances of arrests and detentions of migrants held in overcrowded detention centers that did not meet minimum human rights standards. Failure to separate men from women on religious grounds, the internment of unaccompanied children in unsanitary and poorly ventilated cells, and use of physical violence by guards prompted the European Court of Human Rights in M.S.S. v. Belgium and Greece to hold Belgium and Greece liable for violations of Article 3 of the European Convention on Human Rights by exposing migrants to ‘inhuman and degrading treatment’. On the U.S.-Mexican border, border patrols use live ammunition to deter crossings (Agier, 2016). Non-response to migrant crossings is also a response. In 2011, the ‘left-to-die’ migrant boat off the coast of Lampedusa failed to meet with a concerted rescue effort from commercial and NATO ships in the area and Spanish and Italian Coast Guard vessels resulting in the death of sixty-three people (including two babies) and launching the European Council investigation that exposed a “double standard in valuing human life.”

It would be too facile, however, to confine the phenomenon of the proliferation of border walls to the limitations of our imagination or a symptom of a decline or failure of liberal values. Globalization, warfare, threats of terrorism elucidate tensions between democratic ideals and realpolitik propped up by a muscular security apparatus of state power retrofitted for operations in the theatre of a perpetual state of modern-day displacement. Neither pinning our hopes on the human rights conception of free movement of peoples and the subsequent desire of states to thwart such lofty aspirations seems especially helpful in elucidating the return of the wall as a psychological, legal, political, and physical barrier, which amplifies socio-economic divisions and reinforces hierarchies of power. Nor will the desire for security and preservation of identity – hijacked by political elites – offer sufficient explanatory justifications for the dramatically high numbers of barriers separating states and peoples in the 21st century. It is not any of those taken separately that captures the lived reality on the ground. Taken together, however, they present an ignoble image of the world undone by specular failures of institutional and ideological regimes of global governance currently in place.

Precedents to the Refugee Crisis and a Path Forward

 The less emphasized story in the debate on walls and borders is one of the wide-ranging failures of the Western liberal regimes that now opt to wall themselves off against the existential threats from abroad; threats, which the West bears significant responsibility for creating. There are, at minimum, six consequential events of the last two decades that directly contribute to the refugee crisis of today. The ongoing population displacement, which gives rise to disenchanted Western publics’ search for populist solutions to elite entanglements, can be said to have germinated with:

1. George W. Bush’s misconceived Afghanistan and Iraq Wars resulting in sectarian divisions, instability, and conflict in the Middle East.
2. Failure of multiculturalism in Europe (recall Angela Merkel’s or David Cameron’s statements to this effect) resulting from an inadequate level of cooperation across multilateral institutional domains on migrant integration and assimilation.
3. Military incursions of Western powers into the Middle East (Libya, Yemen, Syria), which undermined existing institutional capacities and crippled the region with a lack of strategic purpose and defined military objectives.
4. Moral, legal, and political paralysis of the UN System as global humanitarian crises ensue.
5. E.U.’s ill-conceived and unevenly implemented refugee policy post-2015
6. Uneven patterns of globalization resulting in wide inter-regional developmental divergences and economic disparities driving mass migration.

Until the West rectifies the past wrongs brought about by foreign policy misadventures; men, women, and children will continue to wash up on Europe’s inhospitable shores stoking anti-migrant sentiments, criminalization of movement, nationalism, and isolationism. This entails ensuring that needlessly protracted conflicts are settled – even if and when politically inconvenient for one of the parties involved – and that the very places of origin of displacement are again made safe for the purpose of rebuilding and resettlement. Institutional mechanisms that respond to the movement of people must also put an end to routine humiliations of migrants, immigrants, and refugees on account of their dispossession, religious denomination, place of origin, or race in the form of regional quotas or particularly pernicious public pronouncements made by candidates or parties at election time. Western powers should be wary of displacing the battlefield in the ‘global war on terror’ and needlessly projecting it onto the civilian sphere protected by a plethora of civil, political, and human rights, which become regularly abrogated. International law should be an active, rather than a passive, and a proactive, rather than merely reactive, mechanism of protection and intervention. As a framework for global law, it should complement state and regional laws rather than serve as a back-up instrument activated and used in cases of state failure to abide by the law’s original doctrines and precepts.

Humanity, inevitably, is on the move, it is high time the laws that regulate borders moved with it eliminating thus the condition of exclusion and social irrelevance on account of ones’ foreignness and uncertain legal status. This means that inherent features of the globalizing world – migration – are no longer treated as an aberration but a norm in need of protection and safe passage.

References

Agier, Michel. 2016. Borderlands. Cambridge: Polity.

Butler, Judith. 2009. Frames of War: When is Life Grievable? New York: Verso.

Jones, Reece. 2016. Violent Borders: Refugees and the Right to Move. New York: Verso.

Humanity on the Move: Migration in the Age of Walls and Borders was originally published on Global Security Review.

These young men, who live in severe poverty and are without much in terms of economic prospects, are at the forefront of the fight between various ideologies and regional proxy powers. Afghanistan’s urban elites, however, reside comfortably in barricaded homes in city centers, often forgetting there is a broader Afghanistan.

This fact highlights one of the underlying causes of successive regime changes in Afghanistan; inequality and a dangerous rural-urban divide come with a heavy price for any political authority in Afghanistan. The staggering (and growing) levels of inequality in Afghanistan—in terms of wealth, income, political status, and socio-economic conditions—increases the likelihood of regime change.

It was this exploitation of inequality—under the banner of social equality—by the Afghan communist movement that led to the overthrow of King Zahir Shah in 1973 and, subsequently, his cousin the first President of Afghanistan Sardar Mohammad Daud Khan in 1978. This was followed by the rise of the Afghan Mujahideen, which fought against the communist regime from 1979 to 1989. The Mujahideen stayed in power from 1992 to 1996, when it was overthrown by the Taliban—a group of rural young men who were tired of the prevailing warlordism and insecurity in the country. These examples of the dangers of rural-urban divide and its consequences for stability in the country.

Unfortunately, this phenomenon remains more accurate today than ever due to the easy flow of foreign aid money and military contracts over the past decade, and a half has created a wealthy urban elite often oblivious of the rural Afghanistan, which in turn has widened the inequality gap in the country.

Today, Afghanistan exists as two countries: the Afghanistan of the haves and the Afghanistan of the have-nots; one of the urban elites and one of the rural tribal chiefs; of conservative rural values and liberal, urban values.

According to the recent National Risk and Vulnerability Assessment (NRVA) survey, more than 70% of the Afghan population lives in rural areas, the country’s Gini coefficient is 38.5%, and almost 40% of the population live in poverty—a majority of whom live in rural areas. Only 23.4% of Afghans inhabit urban areas, with the rate of urbanization standing at 5.4%, with income inequality between rural and urban Afghans only increasing.

If history is a lesson to Afghan political leaders and politicians, it is that a succession of Afghan regimes has been toppled by a rebellion that originated in rural Afghanistan as a result of neglect or rapidly-imposed reforms. Furthermore, Afghan politicians, policymakers, and public officials—along with their international allies and partners—forget this divide and mistakenly think of Afghanistan in the narrow sense of its the six major cities.

The real Afghanistan is the remaining 28 out of 34 provinces—which have, over the years, been consistently neglected by successive Afghan regimes. In fact, in multiple instances when a particular administration has come to power with the help of disaffected, rural young men, those in power forget the roots of their plight and end up living relatively comfortable lives in urban Afghanistan. At times, the Afghan urban elite is so oblivious to the conditions of rural Afghanistan that they forget the broader Afghan polity consists of not only the country’s six major cities of Kabul, Mazar, Jalalabad, Herat, and Kandahar, but the remaining 28 provinces, as well.

The rural population of Afghanistan makes up the majority (over 70%) of the population and is more conservative, traditional, and mainly lives in absolute or near-absolute poverty. Afghan urbanites, in contrast, are more liberal, are connected to the internet, and enjoy high levels of disposable income thanks to an aid-dependent bubble economy which has provided cash and other unaccounted wealth.
Early on, the Afghan government understood this issue and tried to address it with a rigorous rural development agenda, but lost focus along the way.

Afghanistan’s interim-presidential administration led by Hamid Karzai recognized this threat and designed several comprehensive national rural development programs under the initiative of the then-Finance Minister and current President of Afghanistan, Dr. Ashraf Ghani. These initiatives, such as the National Solidarity Program (NSP), National Rural Access Program (NRAP), National Area Based Development Program (NABDP), Microfinance Investment Facility for Afghanistan (MISFA) amongst others, were intended to provide block grants to self-organized, democratic and self-governed community councils around the country.

These grants would be used to fund the priorities identified by the local councils to improve their communities and improve accessibility to urban centers by building rural roads and providing micro-loans for their household and business needs. However, after almost a decade, none of these programs are sustainable and are heavily dependent on foreign aid and management.

Additionally, these programs were community development projects rather than projects designed to drive nationwide productivity and growth to provide mass employment and serve as important drivers of the rural Afghan economy. More often than not, they have been essential elements of an unsustainable subsistence economy in the rural parts of the country.

The Politics of Inequality: Access to Public Office, Rampant Poverty, Collateral Damage, Discrimination, and Ethnic Politics

Family politics is returning to Afghanistan. Once-thriving under the former King Zahir Shah, years of communist rule and war weakened this institution. One of the main reasons why people sympathized with the two communist factions of Khalq (The People) and Parcham (The Flag) was due to growing frustrations over the increasing monopoly on power and resources by many of the families close to the then-king and his court. Today—by several estimates—the politics, economics, and finances of Afghanistan are in the hands of a few families which enriched themselves through holding high public office, receiving millions of dollars of foreign military contracts, and through exercising a tight grip over the Afghan private sector.

The vast majority of Afghanistan’s wealth is in the hands of a few hundred individuals with strong political ties to the Afghan government. Today, 10% of the wealthiest Afghans control the economy and politics of a country where the majority of the population cannot meet their daily basic needs. Additionally, the social and economic upward and sideways mobility—which is expected in a dynamic economy—is absent in the Afghan context. The Afghan economic and political landscape is increasingly monopolized by a few families, individuals, and political parties with whom one must have a relationship with to enter into public office.

The Economics of Inequality: Foreign Aid and the Dilemma of Balanced Development versus Unbalanced Development

The flow of foreign aid and easy money through foreign military contracts have created a new economic and business elite in Afghanistan. Thus, political and economic power has been concentrated in the hands of the few powerful individuals who maintain links to the Afghan government with substantial control over the Afghan private sector. Meanwhile, the fixed geography of the war in the southern and eastern regions of the country has created huge income, wealth, and economic disparities between the south and north of Afghanistan.

According to the World Bank’s provincial briefs of Afghanistan, the poverty and inequality indicators (poverty rate, depth of poverty, the average consumption of the poor, per capita monthly total consumption and the Gini coefficient) of southern Afghanistan are almost several times higher than those in the northern sectors of the country. In addition, due to persistent insecurity in the southern and eastern regions of Afghanistan, the National Risk and Vulnerability Assessment report (2012-3013) shows that the percentage of vulnerable population groups at high risk of poverty, malnutrition, and disease (female-headed households, children, women, addicts, and the elderly) are almost double those in northern and western Afghanistan. This intra-regional and provincial inequality, coupled with a lack of access to essential services and economic opportunities, is cause for serious alarm.

Afghanistan’s economy is increasingly moving towards a narco-mafia model where a few families throughout the country control the private sector and public offices both at the national and subnational level. According to a recent report by Integrity Watch Afghanistan (IWA), nearly all major contracts are won by a few wealthy and well-connected business with ties to senior government officials (ministers, governors, deputy ministers, amongst others). When a senior official then enters a line of business, small businesses tend to voluntarily opt out of the market, be intimidated, or are otherwise forced to quit.

The perception that competing against a political “strongman” is a futile effort is quite common among those who run smaller and medium‐sized businesses. Monopolization also indicates the exclusivity of markets. The market in Afghanistan is run by a limited number of actors, making the Afghan market an oligopoly wherein a few sellers or providers of services dominate the entire market, evidencing the extent of market failure and capture by criminal, mafia, and other corrupt networks.

This evidence points to shrinking business opportunities for both medium and small enterprises in the Afghan economy and the growing monopoly of a few dominant business players over the Afghan private sector.

The Military Consequences of Inequality: The Geography of War and the Mafia Economy

The monopoly on political power, financial resources, and economic opportunities—combined with the developmental imbalances of the country provides an optimal recruitment environment from which insurgents can draw. Insurgents can attract many unemployed and disgruntled youth who believe a few corrupt officials monopolize the country in the top echelons of the country’s political and economic establishments.

Today, the majority of the Taliban’s foot soldiers are unemployed youth from the most impoverished and underdeveloped areas of Afghanistan. Many of these youth are seasonal fighters who work in the fields during harvest season and fight for the rest of the year precisely due to lack of descent employment opportunities and a grudge against the country’s so-called “overnight millionaires” who are seen as American collaborators and incredibly corrupt.

Further marginalizing and encouraging people to distance themselves from the current government is the concentration of power at the subnational level in the hands of rural elites and tribal chiefs with connections to the presidential administration.

Inclusive Institutions, Politics, and Balanced Development: The Difficult Road Ahead

Afghanistan is rapidly moving towards being an oligopoly, with extractive political and economic institutions. The increasing amount of wealth and political power under the control of a small minority of Afghans is increasingly marginalizing the vast majority of the country’s population—largely in rural Afghanistan. Particularly within the country’s historical context, this is cause for alarm. Rural Afghans have often initiated regimes changes due to the negligence of political leaders, policymakers, and politicians in Kabul and other cities who often lose touch with the realities of rural life.

The new Afghan president should make Small and Medium Enterprises (SMEs) the driver of the Afghan economy and break the tight grip of the few families and individuals have over the country’s economy and the private sector. Balanced development of the country and equitable allocation of financial resources and business opportunities is essential for an inclusive and secure Afghanistan.

The Price of Inequality: The Dangerous Rural-Urban Divide in Afghanistan was originally published on Global Security Review.

The CAR’s population is primarily split between into two regions: most of the country’s minority Muslim population inhabits the Sahel, while the majority Christian community is located mainly in the savanna. The present conflict between both groups erupted in 2012 and continues today. The conflict was ignited when Muslim rebels of the Seleka group seized power from the Christians. In response, Christians formed the anti-Balaka faction. Since 2012, government forces have become involved, leading to a number of severe humanitarian crises that threaten to destabilize the country further.

Nearing the Tipping Point

In 2013, then-Secretary-General of the United Nations Ban Ki-Moon stated that the Central African Republic had experienced a “total breakdown of law and order” that threatened both its security and stability and that of its neighbors. While government forces remain in control of the capital of Bangui, armed groups have taken over 70 percent of the country, subjecting civilians to regular attacks. The nature of the conflict has heightened ethnic tensions, as hundreds of localized groups beyond the Seleka and anti-Balaka factions taking control of territory throughout the CAR.

Fighting between the two rival groups and government forces has made life difficult for civilians, who are increasingly fearful of leaving their homes or allowing their children to attend school. The conflict in the CAR is at a tipping point and threatens to push the country into a state of famine. Peacekeeping and mediation efforts have stagnated, making it essential to promote an alternative approach to providing conflict resolution and humanitarian assistance in the CAR. Intervening organizations must engage at the community level to stem the flow of fighters entering the conflict.

Conflict at the Community Level

The violence in the Central African Republic has affected communities large and small. Towns and villages have been destroyed as young men are increasingly attracted by the possibility of income from joining a militia. Political disruption, violence, and a weak economy have perpetuated a lack of adequate medical services, hindered internal migration, and prevented communities from modernizing necessary infrastructure. Disease is nothing new to the CAR, but the conflict has exacerbated the inaccessibility of healthcare leading to increased mortality rates.

As violence spreads, higher numbers of CAR citizens have been forced to flee to refugee camps. As of 2018, the U.S. Central Intelligence Agency estimated that almost 550,000 individuals had been internally displaced. The conditions in these refugee camps are less than adequate. In regular communities, access to medical facilities is limited, and transit to and from first aid areas is minimal. However, individuals in refugee camps are faced with “little or no humanitarian assistance,” and are often left to fend for themselves.

The Evolution of Humanitarian Issues in CAR

As of 2018, half of the CAR’s population requires humanitarian aid, more than two million people. The CAR is mostly comprised of rural communities that lack access to medical facilities or basic first aid, the capital of Bangui, for example, has just one major hospital. According to the CIA, many suffer from treatable diseases, such as malaria or malnutrition, due to a weak healthcare system exacerbated by violent conflict. With a poor transit system destroyed by a conflict that makes it difficult for rural residents to travel for medical care, mortality rates remain high. Even if they can make it to a medical facility, those who suffer life-altering injuries resulting from the conflict are often unable to afford medical services and pharmaceuticals.

The ongoing conflict has weakened the country’s economy, leaving 75 percent of the population impoverished. Attacks at a local level have increased, which have primarily come in the form of violent attacks on refugee sites and on educational and healthcare facilities. Growing numbers of internally displaced peoples has made it challenging to provide clean water at refugee camps, and obstacles to trade and farming have inflated the prices of food and other essentials.

Humanitarian aid groups face difficulties in their attempts to assist the affected population. Threatened with violence and robberies, the movement of humanitarian groups within the CAR has been limited. As of September 2018, seven of these groups have withdrawn their services from the nation.

A Solution Starts at the Local Level

To decrease the attractiveness of joining armed groups, there is a need for solutions at the community level to improve economic and living conditions. As shown by the largely ineffective peacekeeping missions in the region, external mediation with the government and militias has been difficult.

A focused and localized approach within the CAR’s communities could have a more lasting effect, providing other outlets for civilians while stemming the flow of new militia recruits. As such, there are five recommendations to engender an improved situation in the country:

1. Expand local peace agreements and non-aggression pacts

Recently, a number of peace agreements and non-aggression pacts at a local level have had a stronger effect on reducing violent conflict within rural communities. These peace deals bring prominent community actors and organizations together, including women’s organizations, religious leaders, and local government authorities, to mediate peace offers between rival groups.

2. Address the conflict’s religious and ethnic characteristics at the source

To prevent the conflict from strengthening at the national level, it is critical to address the issues at the core of the conflict at the local level. That means promoting tolerance in communities and helping local religious leaders and other respected leaders to influence their communities to pursue reconciliation. Since the conflict in CAR is of a religious nature, it is imperative to intervene with education for youth so as not to perpetuate divisions between ethnic and religious groups.

3. Provide alternative employment to young men

Young men in the CAR are the most likely to impede future peace agreements between rival groups. Thus, it necessary to provide alternative outlets for these individuals to prevent them from perpetuating the conflict at the national level. To keep them from joining armed groups, local groups and international mediators will need to create and provide new forms of employment in numerous communities. This is already happening in a number of CAR’s communities, but it is essential to expand these practices across the nation.

Currently, many work projects “involve restoring public goods, including schools, clinics, bridges, roads, as well as churches as mosques,” according to a piece published by Foreign Policy. The benefit of this is not only to make potential militia fighters unavailable while rebuilding the country’s infrastructure but to provide tangible skills and training in community roles that can develop into careers and boost both local and national economies. With the potential for a job, young men are provided with other income options that make joining militias less attractive.

4. Invest in technology and medical facilities in rural areas

Technology will bridge the equality gap between the people of cities and rural communities and will distribute vital information to rural dwellers who have little access to resources on politics and economics.

Rural communities desperately need access to medical facilities, especially with the spread of disease in areas hospitable to insects like tsetse flies and mosquitoes. This requires the creation of new medical facilities and improved transportation and communications infrastructure.

5. Crackdown on the sale of weapons

National and local governments must impose stricter regulations on the transfer of military-grade weaponry throughout the CAR. These weapons often end up in the hands of local rebels, who incite violence in communities, further exacerbating the conflict. To limit these sales, it is essential to shut down the black markets that distribute weapons to rebels.

Looking to the Future

The situation in CAR will take time to resolve. Promoting tolerance at the local level while helping respected leaders to arrange reconciliation, promoting understanding, and helping respected leaders facilitate dialogue between rival groups. While international assistance is necessary, successful mediation will require a broader effort from community actors and CAR citizens to resolve this conflict at the grassroots level.

Local Approach Needed in Central African Republic as Humanitarian Crisis Looms was originally published on Global Security Review.

It is worth considering Britain’s wider role in Africa as Theresa May visits this critical part of the world on a trade and investment tour. This latest diplomatic endeavor provides an opportunity to evolve UK’s Africa strategy in the context of forging a new path for a global Britain that seeks to maximize the opportunities of leaving the European Union. This is a crucial area of a global Britain approach, ensuring that the UK remains competitive in an ever-increasingly competitive global market.

In Cape Town, the prime minister announced an ambitious new approach to Britain’s spending on the continent, wishing to overtake the US by 2022 as the largest foreign investor in Africa, which would see Britain becoming Africa’s largest trading partner in the G7. This would seek to build upon the already high levels of existing British investment in Africa; with bilateral trade between the UK and Africa totaling $37 billion in 2016 and set to increase further post-Brexit.

With 29 business executives accompanying the prime minister and other officials on this trip, the overriding purpose of the mission is clear: to drum up business with some of the world’s fastest growing economies. The key stops on the Prime Minister’s tour include South Africa, Nigeria and Kenya. These three countries, traditionally strong British allies, are widely regarded as the core engine of future African growth.

By 2030, household consumption across the continent is expected to reach $2.5 trillion, up from $1.1 trillion in 2015. A third of that will come from these three states alone. Other countries with high growth rate forecasts over the next decade include Egypt, Tunisia, Sudan, Ethiopia and Ghana. They all maintain strong relations with Britain, leaving considerable scope for developing these ties further.

Britain’s combined imports and exports with African countries more than doubled between 2005 and 2014, however exports to Africa still only represents 2.5% of total British exports. Considering Africa is a continent whose the population is set to increase by half a billion people by 2030–43% of whom will acquire middle and upper class status–it is remarkable that Britain has not sent such a top trade delegation to Africa sooner.

In that sense, Britain is somewhat late to the party. The U.S., despite seeing exports to Africa halve from 2014 – 2016, still has a bilateral trading relationship with the continent worth $53 billion. However. even this is dwarfed by both China and the E.U.-27’s trade numbers with Africa: in 2015 worth $188 billion, and $269 billion respectively.

In particular Beijing’s role in Africa has solidified in recent years. This trend goes well beyond the seven fold increase in trade with the continent since 2005. China is also seemingly aiming to become the preeminent security actor across Africa in an attempt to displace the legacy role still played by the former European colonial powers. In addition to establishing its first overseas base in Djibouti in 2017, Beijing also has 2,466 troops currently on active duty across Africa.

In recent years, Chinese military personnel have taken part in United Nations peacekeeping missions in the Democratic Republic of the Congo, Liberia and Sudan, with an 800-strong combat deployment sent to South Sudan in 2015, a country with significant Chinese oil investments. The security relationship between China and the UN contrasts sharply with the majority of western states, often more militarily risk-adverse regarding African deployments.

However, after meeting with Nigerian President Muhammadu Buhari, Mrs. May announced the two countries had signed a defense and security partnership which would see the British forces train full Nigerian army units to combat insurgents in the north-east of Nigeria. Furthermore, the UK will assist Nigeria in countering the use of improvised explosive devices used by Boko Haram, and in strengthening Nigeria’s lawless northern borders.

In order for the UK Government’s post-Brexit Africa strategy to really pay off, especially in the face of increasingly stiff international competition from the Chinese, Britain’s strengths as a security partner must be firmly emphasized as a reminder of why we should remain the firmest African ally. By leveraging Britain’s increasing role as a security actor in Africa, it should seek to press this advantage regarding trade deals post-Brexit.

Theresa May met members of the British military contingent based in Kenya, east Africa’s economic power and the focus of Britain’s greatest African security commitment. Kenya is utilized as a training area for British troops going on high readiness operations in other theaters, in addition to providing training and support for regional states engaged in the fight against al-Shabaab across east Africa. Ranging from Mali to Djibouti, Kenya to Gabon, the British military maintains a significant involvement across sub-Saharan Africa.

Currently providing training and support to no less than nine African states, small teams of specialized British personnel conduct a range of missions, from counter-terrorism to anti-piracy and anti-poaching. These missions are designed to build up the capability of host nations, by training their leaders and instructors in military skills often hard-learnt over recent British campaigns, now passed on to other states to assist in their own security development.

These training missions have tangible impact and results. For example, over 22 separate training missions by British forces in Uganda since 2011 have developed the Ugandan People’s Defense Forces, who undertake the majority of the heavy fighting in Somalia under the African Union mission. The success witnessed by the African Union Mission to Somalia (AMISOM) has led to increased international confidence in the security situation in Somalia, resulting in a gradual reduction in African Union personnel from the Horn of Africa.

Mrs May will seek to highlight the threats posed to both European and international stability through letting the security challenges occurring across Africa go unaddressed. These challenges include the current situation in the DRC; ongoing Ebola outbreaks across the country, coupled with increasing civic strife has led to over four million internally displaced people throughout the DRC.

Considering the rising numbers of individuals wishing to flee internal conflicts, ethnic tensions, human trafficking and large scale poverty and corruption, Europe faces potentially a second wave of millions of migrants from the African continent escaping war and famine and seeking new opportunities. The case has already been made that Britain, in ensuring a strategic partnership with Africa, can do more to help mitigate these developments by training security personnel in the DRC to better cope with the country’s many crises.

Additionally, al-Shabaab poses a lethal security threat in the east of the continent, while Boko Haram and al-Qaeda affiliates threaten its western areas. UK military assistance is a key part of the multi-national efforts to contain and ultimately defeat these terrorist organisations. Concurrently with training Kenyans, Ugandans and Somalis in the fight against al-Shabaab, Britain has also trained over 30,000 Nigerian soldiers since 2015 in counter-insurgency operations to help the fight against Islamic militancy in Nigeria.

By highlighting the threats facing African security, combined with the pragmatic methods with which Britain utilizes its armed forces in developing local-level state actor security, a Global Britain approach to a new Africa strategy should therefore seek to combine increased trade and investment into African economies, with a renewed focus on strengthening existing bilateral military relationships.

This twin-tracked approach based around trade and security will seek to achieve the government’s target to be the G7’s largest African trading partner post-Brexit; filling a geostrategic void left in the wake of a withdrawing US. If Britain is to assert itself as Africa’s most valuable G7 trading partner, then Britain must seek to fulfill African desires for investment whilst simultaneously offering the continent a type of security assistance that is beyond China’s military skills and capabilities.

Security and Trade: The Need for a Global Britain Approach in Africa was originally published on Global Security Review.