Recent technology advances have created smaller, faster, cheaper means to gather and transmit information and connect people within and across boundaries. As these means have become widely available, the monopoly enjoyed by nation-states over information and communication as an element of power has been rapidly lost. Constantly increasing speed and connectivity have empowered a broad range of individual and collective actors to create and disseminate near-real time or real time information with the ability to affect a broad audience. The unfolding Information and Media Revolution is having a profound, cascading impact on the social, political, strategic and structural networks of power spanning our world by simultaneously accelerating and magnifying both the centrifugal and the centripetal forces affecting the current Constitutional Structure of Global Order. This highly fluid and volatile transitional “conjoncture” points to the possibility of “Catagenesis” –that is, of both the breakdown of our global society due to the synchronic failure of its tightly interlinked economic, social, political and environmental foundations, and of the possible emergence of a more sustainable and resilient world order.
What impact is this Information and Media Revolution having on the legitimate use of force across international boundaries, as part of the international community’s emerging legal duty to protect individuals and groups confronting natural and man-made humanitarian disasters across the globe? Although various aspects of this “problématique” have been explored by political, legal, international relations, and strategic studies scholars, as well as by philosophers, historians and even network science specialists, no systematic and comprehensive inquiry has been undertaken connecting these disparate fields, seeking to offer a coherent analysis of their cumulative effect and possible consequences at the micro, mezzo and macro levels of social organization.
My working hypothesis draws upon a conception of legitimacy based on the Habermasian theory of communicative action and distinguishing between strategic and deliberative communication. It posits that the symbiotic relationship between the Information and Media Revolution and evolving notions of legitimacy reaching beyond the traditional institutions of our state-centric, Westphalian international system has triggered the emergence of a global civil society composed of individuals, groups and social networks increasingly capable of influencing political decision-making and implementation structures within and across national boundaries, thus affecting both the military effectiveness of the use of force and the degree of political support which condition their ultimate success.
In order to investigate the validity of the hypothesis claiming that only deliberative communication with citizens at both national and international levels will enable military operations to effectively attain their strategic objectives and maintain the necessary levels of popular support to accomplish their political objectives, I will focus on the most significant uses of force of various global and regional hegemonic, multilateral, non-state and post-Westphalian actors within one specific region –the Greater Middle East, since the end of the Cold War. I will attempt to evaluate the military effectiveness and political support achieved by these interventions as a function of both the internal legitimacy of the actors using such force and the external, global legitimacy of the intervention itself. I expect to find that only those actors possessing both internal and external legitimacy based on deliberative communication with citizens and collective stakeholders have ultimately achieved to a substantial degree their strategic objectives at both the military and political levels.
If validated, my hypothesis will constitute an important step in our quest to conceptualize the on-going metamorphosis of the Constitutional Structure of Global Order from a state-centric to an individual-based view of its basic unit of action. Such a configurative transformation would entail a paradigmatic shift in the organizing principle governing the distribution of authority between states from the liberal sovereignty of equal nation-states to the deliberative polycracy of non-hierarchical, functional, democratic levels of government constituting a highly adaptive, creative, efficient and legitimate global network of governance.
Today, we are oficially launching the NATO Challenge – a unique attempt to develop a grass-roots, global civil society solution to perhaps the most important problem we face in the Twenty-First Century: How can we help protect human beings across the globe whose rights and lives are arbitrarily threatened by humanitarian and environmental disasters?
The wider relationship between the use of force and the media and communications revolution, going beyond the examination and implications of 4th Generation Warfare, is beginning to get the attention it deserves in both military and civilian circles.
One of the most important developments arising therefrom during 2008 has been the emergence of a debate around the meaning, uses and effects of Strategic Communication. Cdr Steve Tatham, Director of Media & Communication Research at the UK Defence Academy’s Advanced Research & Assessment Group, has recently published a monograph entitled Strategic Communications – A Primer where he defines and discusses the critical importance of this concept in the success of on-going military operations.
Just before the Global Forum took place, Clay Shirky -a well-known consultant, teacher, and writer on the social and economic effects of Internet technologies published a book entitled Here Comes Everybody: The Power of Organizing Without Organizations, where he examines how the wildfirelike spread of new forms of social interaction enabled by technology is changing the way humans form groups and exist within them, with profound long-term economic and social effects. As Mitch Joel noted in a Vancouver Sun article discussing the themes raised by Shirky in his book in the context of last November’s tragic Mumbai terrorist attack, where dozens of people began using Twitter to provide to the entire world with a stream of eye-witness accounts of the terrible events unfolding in front of their eyes long before the more traditional television and newsprint media arrived on the scene, “[a]ll of us are capable reporters, and when the tools are this cheap, it changes everything we know about communications, business and one another”.
Bringing together these most recent British, German, U.S. and Canadian military, media, social and academic perspectives on the concept of Strategic Communication and the larger social environment within which it currently operates will provide us with a better theoretical and practical understanding of the importance and relevance of this multi-faceted approach to the uses of information in current and future conflict situations.
Strategic Communication in a Complex Social Environment
Cdr. Tatham’s initial factual observation, on which he bases his investigation into the nature and uses of Strategic Communication, states that “[c]onveying information messages to specific audiences, in order to affect behavioural change for specific political objectives, may well prove more decisive in future battles than the placement of bullets and bombs upon a target”. If von Clauzewitz believed that war is politics by other means, then Tatham clearly is of the opinion that Strategic Communication is war by other means. Therefore, for him, “neither civilian nor military leaders can afford to take a passive view of public opinion… Information – its utility, effect and management – should be considered at the very core of future campaigns and operational planning, and done so not in isolation but as a coupled contribution to the whole plan.”.
Tatham envisions Strategic Communication as a key integral element of “mission success”: its declared goal is both to negate the effect of the enemy’s propaganda strategy, and to change the opinions, minds and behaviour of its target audience members to the extent required to facilitate the success of the ongoing military mission. He therefore proposes the following definition of the term:
“A systematic series of sustained and coherent activities, conducted across strategic, operational and tactical levels, that enables understanding of target audiences, identifies effective conduits, and develops and promotes ideas and opinions through those conduits to promote and sustain particular types of behaviour. This definition emphasises Strategic Communication as a means of changing behaviour and suggests a challenge in both devising means to accomplish it and measures of its success.”
Tatham’s sophisticated understanding of Strategic Communication is revealed above all in his use of the Pragmatic Complexity Model to explain exactly how such a process of communication and belief and behaviour modification actually occurs in a conflict situation.
Pragmatic Complexity Model
Rather than assuming a simple, linear relationship between Communicator A and Target Audience B, where B simply modifies its beliefs and behaviour based solely on the new information received from A, “[h]ere the success of A’s messages are dependent upon the wider external environment and, in particular, B’s perception of A’s role in that environment. It is against that role that A’s messages are processed; they may be dismissed out of hand or they may be accepted but in a contextualised manner. Rarely are they accepted tabula rasa. This model, which presents a much more realistic interpretation of society, suggests that there is no independent audience (B) waiting to be impacted by A, instead both parties are locked into a relationship of interdependence.”
The video report above provides a useful audio-visual illustration of an attempt by the British Army to affect the opinions and attitudes of its internal (British) and external (Afghani) target audiences by its careful use of narrative and visual techniques designed to highlight both the dedication and sacrifice of individual soldiers to bringing peace and security to Afghanistan, as well as the professionalism of the British Army and their total dedication to protecting and preserving the lives of the local population. By creating such a positive external environment and influencing its audiences’ opinions and beliefs about the nature of the British intervention in Afghanistan and the manner in which it is conducted on a daily baisis, the British Army hopes that its key message to its internal audience (“Support our troops! They are sacrificing their lives for a noble cause!”) and Afghani audience (“We are on your side! We value your lives and those of your children above everything else!”) will reshape their respective opinions to the extent that the UH Government will maintain its political ability to continue the mission to its conclusion, and that the local populations will accept British entreaties to cooperate with it in defeating the enemy on the ground.
Tatham finally develops the notion of “adaptive campaigning” by arguing that future armed conflicts of the 21st century will only be able to be won to the extent that friendly governments and their armies will master “the ability to effectively orchestrate, innovate and adapt effort across all arms of government to achieve effect at the right time. We might refer to this as adaptive campaigning. The essential characteristic of an adaptive campaign is that its structure and behaviour should be able to evolve over time and in a way that tends to increase the probability of ‘success’ through adaptation to the changes in the system, and to the environment in which it is embedded. An emerging tool in this adaptive campaign process – and one that is Increasingly being recognized across western governments – is Strategic Communication.”
War Journalism or Peace Journalism?
<strong>mArC von boemCken, senior researcher, bonn international Center for Conversion (biCC), germany</strong> <strong>Participants agreed that the impact of the media on peace and conflict dynamics should not be underestimated. Media messages do not simply ‘report facts’. They also have a direct bearing and influence on the way that people think and act… Journalists, in other words, may either promote peace and reconciliation or facilitate war and hatred.</strong> <strong>henriette von kAltenborn-stAChAu, world bank, Communication for governance and Accountability program (CommgAp), united states of America</strong> <strong>made it clear that anyone who understands peacebuilding must address the governance debate. The idea of the media debating amongst themselves is not sufficient… Lack of dialogue between a government and its people often causes new conflict. She illustrated these issues by showing several diagrams that contrasted societies which possess a “robust public sphere” and those that do not due to conflict. In a robust public sphere, communication between the state, the media and civil society is active and flowing in a circular direction. In a conflict situation, everything is fragmented and disjointed. The state is not willing to talk to the media. If the media does not understand why the state functions in a particular way, the reporting becomes shoddy. This leads to poor national dialogue, which can result in new conflict.</strong> <strong>the germAn ArmeD forCes AnD their engAgement in ConfliCt prevention: the meDiA in An ArmeD forCes mission?</strong> <strong>hosteD by ACADemy for informAtion AnD CommuniCAtion of the germAn ArmeD forCes</strong> <strong>The military has begun to think more systematically in terms of public information, while the media has started to take up a more active role in the field of civil-military relations and post-conflict reconstruction efforts. This new situation requires both actors to embark on a more open form of communication and cooperation. Here, the major challenge pertains to arriving at a clear identification of the roles, agendas and responsibilities of the armed forces and the media respectively.</strong> session 6 impact on peace and conflict: What journalists and peacebuilding practitioners need to know about it the role of media in peacebuilding: theory and practice <strong>The field of conflict prevention and peacebuilding is itself so new that few platforms exist to coordinate the various actors and approaches within specific regions. There have been few attempts to coordinate early warning and comprehensive response programs to foster the transformation of beliefs, attitudes and behaviors at all levels of a society such as among various civil society actors (such as business, academic or religious leaders), government and military.“Peace journalism” vs. “war journalism”
In his keynote address, the Secretary-General of the
Asia-Pacific Broadcasting Union in Kuala Lumpur,
David Astley, made the important distinction between
“war journalism” and “peace journalism”. The former
uses only few sources and confines itself to simply reporting
the facts on what is going on at a very particular
moment in time. By contrast, the latter would seek to
broaden its coverage so as to take the wider context of
a conflict into account. This would include not least a
detailed consideration of the root causes of violence.
“Peace journalism” thus attempts to encourage a deeper
understanding of the historical, socio-political and
economic background of certain events. As David Astley
explained, its function is, in this sense, not simply to
“inform” but also to “educate people”.
What struck me most two years ago, in the middle of the 2006 Israeli Lebanon Campaign, just as I was applying to the online MA – War in the Modern World Program of King’s College, London, was how much this war had become aboutpeople: not the members of the Israeli Defence Force or the Hezbollah actually engaged in the conflict, but about the average Lebanese and Israeli citizens, and beyond them the people in the Middle East, Europe, America and the world actively following this conflict.
Here indeed we were confronted with the paradigmatic asymetric conflict: while the IDF‘s strategic goal in this campaign was to neutralize Hezbollah‘s ability to mount military operations against Israel from its Southern Lebanon’s base – a classic strategic military objective, the Hezbollah‘s strategic aim was to remain standing at the end of the conflict and be seen as having survived the IDF‘s overwhelming military force. This, combined with daily images, video and blog reports pouring every day out of Lebanon documenting the civilian casualties, destruction of homes, cites, infrastructure and sheer human toll of this latest Israeli incursion in Lebanon would help the militarily inferior Hezbollah attain its ultimate strategic objective: win the war for the hearts and minds of the Lebanese people and, indeed, of the wider global public.
The constant stream of texts, commentaries, sound and images coming out of Lebanon also accomplished an important tactical goal: it hampered the IDF in its attempts to fully deploy and bring to bear its ground and air power against its enemy because of the Israeli political leaders’ fundamental concern over being portrayed, in Israel, Lebanon and across the globe as insensitive to the needless civilian damage and casualties the IDF was portrayed as inflicting. Such negative portrayal would inevitably intensify the already powerful popular reaction not only in the Middle East, but even among Israel’s allies in Europe and North America against its military actions – already labeled as “war crimes” by Amnesty International and even by the UN High Commissioner for Human Rights, Louise Arbour, who stated that “those in positions of command and control” could be subject to “personal criminal responsibility” for their actions in the conflict.
The aftermath of this conflict, where the IDF‘s failure to accomplish its strategic goals was considered by Israeli politicians and citizens alike to constitute the first ever, major Israeli defeat at the hands of an Arab foe, the severe cleavages it exacherbated within Israeli society, and the ensuing distabilization of the Israeli government, coupled with Hezbollah‘s increased popularity among the residents of Southern Lebanon and its reinforced position within the Lebanese government, clearly showed that the public perception of Israel having lost the conflict both militarily and morally was translated into political reality In Israel, Lebanon and around the world. This was particularly true in the United Kingdom, where Prime Minister Tony Blair’s failure to call for an early ceasefire in the conflict and his continuing support of Israel was seen as having played a key role in his resignation as Labour Party leader and replacement by Gordon Brown, less than one year later.
Hezbollah‘s deft use of the new media, communications and information channels and its ability to project an image of itself as the sole protector of this war’s true victims – the people of Lebanon, appealed strongly to an inchoate, but nevertheless powerful sense of justice and support for the underdog among the local and global publics. It pointed to the underlying reality of an emergent, active global civil society, connected by a complex web of wireless cam phones, blogs, on-line information sources and discussion forums, where the ability of one single individual to film a few minutes of video footage with a hand-held device at the very epicenter of a conflict, upload it on YouTube, embed it on her blog, instantly comment on military events still taking place, and publish it for a world-wide audience long before the traditional media could ever hope to do so, can truly influence the subsequent conduct of military operations on both sides of the conflict.
This critical relationship between the use of force, the media and information revolution, and an emergent global civil society has received little attention in military, strategic and academic circles. Yet it has become central to our understanding of the shifting parameters of the legitimacy of war in the 21st Century, and consequently on the ability of any state or alliance system to intervene militarily either to defend itself or its members, or to protect, across international borders, human beings at risk due to a variety of humanitarian and environmental disasters.
Understanding the relationship between the power of legitimacy and the legitimacy of power in the use of force in the New Millennium has become a fundamental and urgent need for academics, lawyers, strategists and politicians alike, in a world where Connectivity and the Power of One has begun to actively rival the more established concepts of sovereignty and massive application of military power. Upon this depends, to a large extent, our continued ability to exercise our moral and legal Duty to Protect -both our own citizens, and our fellow human beings around the world whose human rights are being violated in the most flagrant manner and whose futures and very lives are at risk.
The emergence of a proactive, world-wide civil society connected by modern media of information and communication is in the process of fundamentally shifting the legitimacy of use of force from its traditional, state-centric understanding as enshrined in the UN Charter, towads an unprecedented, little-understood, yet all-too-real new paradigm of global consent of individuals connected across borders and continents -and fully capable of influencing both the course of events and the perception of the outcome of all future conflicts. Just as warfare in 16th and 17th Century Europe exercised a decisive role in the rise of the territorially defined, centralised, modern nation-state, so the use of force in the 21st Century is playing a critical part in the emergence of a global public sphere and of a cosmopolitan citizenship which, in turn, will dramatically affect when, how, by whom and with what results military force will be deployed in the future. The Warrant for WarResearch Project aims to make a modest contribution towards better understanding these complex, interactive forces and drawing therefrom appropriate lessons for the way we structure, organize and manage our military, political, and international institutions.
