Category Archives: Why wars happen

Scarcity of food, overpopulation and CO₂ production

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The artificial fertiliser market is worth about $400 billion dollars. Those involved do not want to see that reduced!

Over 50% of that market is production of 200 million tonnes of nitrogenous fertiliser each year.  That fertilizer is required to feed our over-populated planet. Half the world’s population relies on artificial fertiliser.

8 billion people on the planet, half needing that fertiliser. That is about 50 kilos each or 1 kilogramme of fertiliser per person per week.

Each additional person increases the demand. When we have gone from 8 billion to 12 billion people, the fertiliser need will have doubled. The market will have doubled too. Ker-ching!

(Oh, heck. We’re at 8.1 billion people already. I thought we only just heard it was 8.0 billion.)

Production of nitrogenous fertiliser is energy intensive. It is responsible for 2.1% of greenhouse gas emissions. A 50% increase in the population will double those emissions.

To feed our over-sized population, we are using artificial nitrogenous fertiliser, which is a carbon-industry product.

For our population to keep growing we must increase our CO₂ production.

This is why some people keep saying “WE NEED MORE PEOPLE TO, umm, thinks, there must be something, oh yeah, LOOK AFTER YOU WHEN YOU ARE OLD!!!!”

The carbon industry would love there to be more people on the planet, because without the carbon-based fuels, they would starve to death. Ker-ching!

Eat up your petroleum (and coal and gas) products people! Om, nom, nom!

This is going to get very ugly within a couple of decades.  Seriously, we are so doomed unless we do something about climate change and our increasing overpopulation.

This Land is Mine

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This simple 3½ minute video This Land is Mine is a superb explanation and demonstration of who started the fighting in Israel, who is right and who is wrong.

This video should be put out instead of the news one day.

If I was working with children, I’d use it as the key part of a discussion.

 

Russian disinformation about Ukrainian Nazism

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Someone was alluding to Russia’s claim that the invasion of Ukraine was to tackle Ukrainian Nazism.

If we had called out Zelensky, American support for Ukraine would not have been there and America would be involved in one less “New War[s]”.

In direct reaction to that comment, I spent three hours reading up on Zelensky, accusations of Nazism in Ukraine, accusations against military units and political parties in Ukraine and comparing what has been said from different sources. I read up on the American position, the Israeli view, the view of Ukrainian Jewish groups and the Jewish international media.

I have no axe to grind here, it was genuine impartial curiosity.

Apart from Russian disinformation, there is nothing of any significance in what this person was alluding to. Various media, government, NGO and social groups have looked at what had been going on in Ukraine regarding Nazism, far right politics, treatment of Jews,involvement of Jews in Ukrainian government and military and the like and concluded there was nothing going on that is unusual for 21st century Europe.

The American government did indeed discuss and analyse the accusations about Zelensky and Ukraine and concluded the accusations did not stand up and decided continued support was the right thing to do. This decision was later supported by Jewish academics, media and Ukrainian Jewish groups.

So, what this person was wishing for, did indeed happen, and it concluded continued American support for Ukraine was appropriate.

In short, the reason for the Russian invasion of Ukraine was false.

The reflective part of this is that I am so pleased I did my undergrad and Master’s degrees.  Between the lecturers, librarians and other support and training I had, my already-existing research skills were strengthened by the ability to find counterarguments, be open-minded, evaluate sources, understand political and media biases and find an answer for myself in which I can be confident.  Although my conclusion above is lightweight and unreferenced, in three hours I covered a heck of a lot of different sources very efficiently.  I’m please I can do that.

 

Why are bullies attractive?

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“Tough guys have always had their hangers on. And no, they don’t have to be physically tough. They just have throw their weight around and generally act like a bully. That’s what Trump does so well. The real question for me is … WHY is that attractive to so many people?”

I think it is three-fold, based on evolutionary psychology, ignorant fear and social psychology.

Firstly, evolutionary psychology: the herd mentality. Go where the majority goes, or seems to be heading. Some head off for a different corner of the field, follow them because they must have seen something worth having. And if you really want to benefit from what is there, run and get there first, go further than the others, become an extremist.

Second, superstition and religion. If we try harder than anyone else to follow the will of the god(s) or not upset the demons / volcano / weather then we will have better harvests and more good luck and less disease. So we look to the priests and wise men for ideas. And we sacrifice our children, flagellate ourselves or hand over our possessions to appease the gods through the priests. So when a leader implies they have divine wisdom, we so want that to come true, we will do anything.

Third we see the person is a competent leader because they have followers. People like following winners because it makes them feel safe, that will be on the winning side at the end. It is easier than making decisions for themselves. So we form gangs and tribes and armies and political parties. Hence people switch their political allegiance to best suit themselves. Even politicians who swear they are totally aligned to one set of values, will change sides if it suits their career. Alliances change between nations: so leaders will send their people to fight and die to support X against Y, then later send them to die for Y against X. So who was right, X or Y, or is it down to the leader’s whims and because they have power? So we will go and kill and die just because someone says so, and without really knowing why.

We think we’re clever. We’re just stupid sheep who think we’re smart.

Understanding International Relations Theory

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I’ve just completed and passed a 12 week course “Understanding International Relations Theory” on Coursera run by the HSE University, Moscow.  It was written four years ago, so well before the invasion of Ukraine. It has been on my To Do list since I completed my Masters in Conflict Resolution and Peace Studies, essentially an international relations course, but I wanted the perspective of a Russian university on the subject.  I got round to doing it when I did because a small number of people were saying the invasion of Ukraine was inevitable and were predicting the nation of its escalation of not addressed.   I also felt it was predictable and based on Russia feeling unheard in its objections to Eastward NATO expansion, not being heard on the world stage beyond its power of veto at the UN and its objections to how regime change was being conducted by the West.

Anyway, the theory is just the same: Realist, Liberalist and Marxist paradigms of interpreting international relations, with their modern neo- versions to accommodate their failings, and the special theories like Democratic Peace Theory, Regime Theory and the delightfully named Liberal Transnationalism or Complex Interdependence Theory.  Also, the critical theories of Constructivism, Postmodernism and Feminism. As expected, it starts with the Peloponnesian Wars, goes through the philosophers like Hobbes and Locke and the Westphalian view of state sovereignty, the League of Nations, the Great War, WW2, the United Nations, the Cold War, the collapse of the Soviet Union and almost up to the present day.  All as expected.

But the interesting bit was toward the end: the analysis of Russian foreign policy.  It is entirely a Realist policy, so very different from how the West operates.  And using the Realist paradigm of a desire to balance power, of great powers operating in a ‘concert of nations’ and Russia expecting to be the most influential state in its region, the behaviour of Russia was indeed entirely predictable.

While many were saying Putin is mad, that he intends to invade and conquer Europe, that it is all to do with internal Russian politics, had got it wrong.  The invasion of Ukraine is – like most violence at any scale – all about humiliation.  Russia resents being treated as insignificant on the world stage, resents the encroachment by NATO and the EU into its sphere of influence, resents not being involved in decision-making about world issues such as the Arab Spring (hence its involvement in propping up the Syrian regime to show that it can) and that it was not defeated and eliminated when the Soviet Union collapsed.  Russia wants to be seen as what it sees itself as and has been for centuries: one of the great powers in the Eurasian zone.

All conflicts end with communication.  And communication starts with listening.  We need to stop treating Russia as a defeated opponent or an enemy to be crushed by an ongoing unofficial Cold War and try listening.

Why is conflict resolution not as recognised as it should be?

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Why do we expect politicians to be all-knowing multidisciplinary people?

This was asked on LinkedIn by one of my fellow students at Lancaster University, someone I was very impressed with, Pilar Perez Brown.  The context was President Macron attempting mediation talks with Putin, despite not having the necessary academic background or training to do so.

Mediators that comprehend the full political and strategic reality of the war are needed, people that know the best ways to guide this conflict and the relations in it. We need economists and strategists that can explain the depth of both sides’ demands, as well as many other specialists who are equally necessary despite not being politicians.

A discussion began.

Conflict analysis and responses have changed enormously this past few decades.  There are far more options and interventions available to prevent conflict, transform conflict and resolve conflict than most people are aware of.  Somehow, we need to get conflict resolution recognised and given a much higher profile in diplomacy and international relations incident management.

Exactly! Thank you for your insight. Indeed the nature of conflict has changed, and so the analysis of it has enhanced, therefore presenting more opportunities to transform and resolve conflicts, as you mention.
Why do you think these processes are not as recognised as they should be?

I think these are some factors:

  1. The nature of the media.  “If it bleeds, it leads“.  War is exciting and attracts readers / viewers so it is the lead story (to help sell advertising and raise revenue for the media).  Peace is not exciting: there is no blood, no blown up cars, no crying children or other images to bring in the readers.  So the media do not cover peace.  Hence people do not know peace-making is happening all the time.  This makes people assume war is the natural outcome of conflict.
  2. The warring leaders do not want to look weak.  All conflict ends by talking.  When powerful people who publicly say they hate each other come to meet and compromise, they do not want their supporters to know they are doing so.  They think it makes them look like they are backing down and are weak.  So negotiation talks are kept secret.  Hence people do not get to hear about them.  When the outcome is a peaceful solution, even then the conflict resolution talks are not mentioned.  So people do not get to hear about how conflict resolution was involved and worked.
  3. Sometimes powerful third parties are involved in the conflict who want their involvement kept secret.  When it becomes politically or economically expedient to have this conflict resolved, it is not necessarily desirable to have the rest of the world see into the detail of the conflict.  Revealing their involvement in the peace process could reveal their role in causing or feeding the conflict, or appear hypocritical because of what they are doing somewhere else.  So they do not want any media coverage of the process of resolving the conflict.  It just quietly fizzles out, without the rest of the world noticing a process was followed.
  4. Revealing the presence of peace-making mediators makes them a target and can cause more conflict.  Some people will not want the conflict resolved and may attack the mediators.  Once mediation has been successful, knowing they were involved could make them vulnerable when they get involved in a later conflict.  So their involvement is never revealed.  This can be high profile individuals or specialist mediation agencies.  Again, the conflict resolution process does not get talked about, this time for reasons of mediator personal security.
  5. Historical precedent.  One view of Neville Chamberlain’s appeasement of Hitler was that it bought the rest of us a year to re-arm and prepare for the inevitable war.  But he has gone down in history as a weak man and a failure.  I suspect politicians are frightened of ending up in the history books for the same reason.  However, if you fight a war and lose, you can still be recorded as the brave hero who refused to give in.  It may seem better politically to go into a war and risk losing, then go into mediation talks that might fail and result in war anyway.  So a guaranteed war is actually more attractive than the risk of one.  Hence getting involved in peace talks risks losing one’s political credibility, so there is no interest, and no desire to have anyone know if they do so.
  6. President Eisenhower warned of the military-industrial complex and how they have a vested financial interest to influence public policy toward fear of conflict.  Governments and academia get added to this mix, depending on the theory.  I cannot imagine NATO or Lockheed Martin lobbying to have their funds are reduced and diverted to investment into conflict resolution research and promotion.  Mediation specialists have small budgets for advertising and little need to do so to the general public.  The arms industry and the military and their activities get plenty of coverage for free.  That normalises conflict for the public.
  7. The immaturity of International Relations Theory.  It is still based around the Realist / Liberalist / Marxist tripartite.  The Realist theory is simplest, oldest and most embedded in our culture as “might is right” and international relations being anarchic, amoral and all about survival.  Liberal theory has had to be modified many times to try to match current affairs, making it look weak and reactive and so of little use as a theory.  Marxist theory is a political non-starter.  When people have studied international relations theory, it has typically been this academic view, one which is not about conflict resolution.  Instead, it is about studying how war is just and inevitable, based on past experience.  However, that does not cover what actual practitioners have been doing in reality, nor count the times a war was avoided.  Huge progress has been made in understanding how people are motivated and how to achieve change painlessly and so that it sticks.  These practitioner fields and their modern techniques are not taught so much as IR Theory in generalist politics degrees.
  8. But I blame the media foremost.
    Create a cease-fire in a war: it’s an editorial on page 7.
    Slap someone on TV for mocking your partner’s medical complaint: it’s front-page news and it fills social media (about 4,810,000,000 results on a Google search!)
    Violence increases sales and increases advertising revenue, conflict resolution does not.

Nuclear weapons threat, end of German pacifism, NATO expansion and the arms race and censorship

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I went to bed reminded of living as a child of the bomb, not expecting to reach adulthood because of the permanent threat of nuclear war and obliteration.  No point working for the school exams or planning a future, because there would not be one.  And now there are news stories looking breathlessly at nuclear escalation as an exciting prospect.

This is why we should have got rid of nuclear weapons by now.  We are still living in fear of total destruction which is supposedly there to protect us.

So the post WW2 constitutional attitude of Germany being a peaceful nation in Europe is over.  It feels like we’ve gone back 90 or more years in European peaceful negotiation and concepts.  Once again a militarised Germany in the centre of Europe, throwing its weight about.  And providing the arms for a war in another country: great way to get back into the game, Germany, by supporting a proxy war.  Start out at a low level, why don’t you?

And Germany has committed to providing 2% to NATO, so NATO’s budget goes up as a result of Russia’s actions.  Well done NATO for coming out the winner in this.  The most powerful state in the world with a national flag, national anthem, guaranteed budget paid by taxpayers elsewhere and with no democratically elected leaders.  Amazing.

Lots of countries are promising to send weapons of various sorts.  Russia is on the outskirts of Kiev.   By the time they have been found, ready to be boxed up, it will all be over.  But the contracts and orders with the arms manufacturers will still go ahead.  It is just throwing money at the arms industry that will have no effect.  What are they going to do with them when they are ready for shipment in a couple of months – send them to the Russians occupying Ukraine?  “Oh, these are items in the stores!”.  They have to be gathered up, boxed up, transport arranged, receipt arranged, training booked, maintenance arranged, documentation provided … it won’t happen.

And the censorship has begun.  During the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan I found it very interesting watching the mainstream news and listening to the BBC World Service, Voice of America and Radio Moscow and comparing the different versions of events.  By tracking what each was saying about the front moving back and forth in my school atlas, and keeping track of the losses and gains reported on each side, I was able to work out which was utter bobbins and which seemed reasonably accurate, albeit with some spin.  The Voice of America was utter bonkers fiction; the others were generally aligned.  Fake news and lies in the media are not a new thing.  Censorship in the West is.

What an unpleasant weekend.  How quickly politicians will re-instate a Cold War and military escalation when given the opportunity, rather than trying to sort their problems out.

Welcome to living with fear.

Ukraine – prevention

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I feel that if there were more money and effort spent on building international relations and conflict prevention, this (the invasion not just of disputed territories but the whole of the Ukraine by Russia) need not have happened.

The criticism of NATO’s continued existence as an offensive military organisation (as opposed to a mutual defence treaty) once the Warsaw Pact had collapsed is not a new one. I can understand Russia’s concern about it. And I have seen many suggestions being made for diplomatic solutions which could have addressed or at least challenged Russia’s demands for not having NATO on their borders. For example, a buffer alliance of East European states not in NATO or Ukraine joining an alliance of neutral states.

Our own national posturing and feeble threats did nothing to prevent what has happened. Nor have our sanctions spread to a whole list of things that any geezer down the boozer could come up with: impounding their ships and aircraft; expelling the 900 Russians who bought an express UK citizenship; banning all trade with Russia; confiscating any containers or goods bound for Russia; instructing every investment house to freeze the assets of every Russian investor or risk being struck off. I’m sure there are many more people with more knowledge can think of, especially for dealing with the Russian supply chain.

Photos of UK politicians wandering around Kiev wearing a furry hat (on a day when it was warmer than Manchester) might get votes but has absolutely zero impact on reality.

It’s another case of a country with some demands (going back 30 years) being ignored and challenged as if to say “We dare you”. But Russia has a cultural tradition of strong and brave leadership: they would respond with a strong and brave response. Which they have. Big surprise. Not.

There’s also the cultural issues in the region which go back a thousand years. The history is really complex and we learned during the Paris Peace Conference a century ago that self determination is really important. If people in a region feel they do not want to be governed by a different peoples, then that needs to be listened to or it will eventually escalate. Since then, and especially in the past 30 or so years, we have learned an awful lot about conflict de-escalation and how to create societies with imbalanced powers that actually work. Instead of waiting for this to go horribly pear-shaped, like we did when Yugoslavia fell to bits, we (European states, mostly, but also the UN) could have done more to help resolve the Ukraine / Crimea / Russia situation by thinking of the people, power structures, how to reorganise society and the history instead of nation state politics.

I don’t think international politics or relations is easy. Well, it is if you ignore it and wait for it to go belly up and wait for it to be a military problem, I suppose, rather than dealing with it. I don’t suppose it is any easier for a national politician in the UK to go and say “Can we help?” than it is to get involved when the neighbours are shouting at one another in the street. It’s easier to draw the curtains and hope it goes away.

But I thought the point of the United Nations was to stop this sort of thing, to create a safe environment to settle issues. Maybe that is where to look for the failure here. In what way does the UN need to change?

And where the heck were the UN peacekeepers? Instead of NATO posturing and behaving like a belligerent nation itself with its leader making threats and demands on the world stage (did you vote for him? I didn’t.), NATO could have offered to provide the peacekeeping force to the UN. To protect the border, from invasion, not as a NATO attack force but a UN peacekeeping force. They have the resources and money for a war, surely they have the resources and money for not a war?

Yes, it’s sad. Unimaginative and weak leadership, more concerned in posturing and local votes than making the world a better place. But then, isn’t that politicians the world over? Me, me, me, me, me.

It does not take a strong person to start a fight. It takes a strong one to stop one. And that strength could come from investment into further research into conflict management, raising awareness of the methods, publicising success when it works and promoting its application when the neighbours are having a falling out. Hmm. I wonder where the money could come from to pay for that?

How about starting with the management of NATO. Scrap NATO as an organisation – but leave the sensible mutual defence pact Treaty in place – and use the money saved for managing international relations in a peaceful way?

Posts I never made

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There is a useful function called ‘Google Alerts’ whereby Google will email you any new results for a given search.

I used this to set up a number of searches relating to ‘no new wars’ and the centenary of the Great War.

  • 21/12/2014 to 17/06/2021, “11-11-2018”, 1,117 results.  Returned anything that looked like a date of 11th November and 2018.
  • 21/12/2014 to 17/06/2021, “11/11/2018”, 1,113 results.  Returned anything that looked like a date of 11th November and 2018.
  • 09/06/2013 to 20/06/2021, “”Great War” 100 years”, 1,890 results.  Was just about memorials being done up.
  • 31/05/2013 to 20/06/2021, “”Great War” centenary”, 1,371 results.  All sorts of results, very few potentially interesting.
  • 17/06/2013 to 17/06/2021 (just by chance), “”war to end all wars” 100 years”, 1,042 results.  All sorts of results, very few potentially interesting.  Mostly about memorials.
  • 09/06/2013 to 29/05/2021, “”war to end all wars” centenary”, 348 results.  Some of these are very interesting, discussing the rights and wrongs and truths of war.  For about half of those, the article is no longer online.
  • 17/06/2013 to 13/06/2021, “”No New Wars””, 186 results.
  • 17/06/2013 to 21/01/2021, “NoNewWars”, 18 results.
  • “”NoNewWars””, 0 results.

I had been full of good intentions to read and consider each of those results.  Many of them contain multiple results themselves, up to about 6.  So there’s about 10,000 to 15,000 actual links there.  I was being waaaaay too optimistic.

I did glance at those messages, frequently.  Almost all were about heroes, celebrating sacrifice, celebrating the start of the war, how we need to remember what a great thing it was.  So much pro-war, pro-death, pro-suffering in the media.  It is very depressing.

As a consequence, no posts resulted.

But an awful lot of people saw pro-war messages.

 

 

Four combined pressures for militarisation

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Within our society there are four powerful bodies with an interest in increased militarisation:

  • the bureaucracy always seeks greater power for itself, as any bureaucracy always does;
  • the military seeks new tactical weapons and greater destructive power from those it has;
  • academia wants sources of funding and bids for money from government and the arms industry in exchange for more developing more powerful and new types of weaponry;
  • arms industry corporations want to increase profits and look for more powerful and novel destructive weapons to sell and new markets to sell them to.

The bureaucracy supports the military’s expansion, funds academic military research and provides trade to the arms industry.

The military funds academic military research and encourages the arms industry to develop more powerful weapons and new types of weapon and pressures the bureaucracy to allow greater novelty in weaponry.  It campaigns for greater acceptance of militarisation within society, especially children.

Academia develops more destructive weapons, greater killing efficiency from weapons and devises new ways to be destructive benefiting the military’s aims for faster and greater destruction and opportunities for the arms industry to make profits.

The arms industry campaigns for less controls on weapon use, funds research into novel types of weaponry, promotes the threat and use of violent conflict as a diplomatic approach by the bureaucracy.

Between them they have the power, desire, intellect and money to promote war-making.

It’s amazing the peace sector makes any progress against them at all.