Big Think Blog

For centuries, military theorists have drawn from texts such as Von Clausewitz’s On War (”War is politics by other means”) and Sun-Tzu’s The Art of Warfare (”Know thy enemy”) to explain and create strategies of warfare. But the failure of war theory to effectively address insurgency, guerrilla warfare, and terrorism cost the United States the war in Vietnam, and may do the same in Iraq and Afghanistan. This disconnect between the theory and practice of contemporary warfare led Assistant Professor Jason Lyall to teach a new seminar this semester at Princeton’s Woodrow Wilson School of International Affairs: The Dynamics of Violence in Civil War. Professor Lyall’s students will discuss other issues that Von Clausewitz neglected to mention: from child soldiers, to systematic rape, to satellite technology. (Sun Tzu could not use Google Earth to watch villages burn in Darfur.) The paradigm of theorized warfare will also have to accommodate the use of biological weapons, increased fighting for scarcer resources, and according to Mike Huckabee, “economic warfare” (see yesterday’s post from Jorge featuring Jim Hackett). In the meantime, we spoke with Lyall’s fellow Princetonian, professor and theorist Michael Walzer on Just War Theory, the question of when a country can justify war.

This year marks the sixtieth anniversary of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, originally drafted by Eleanor Roosevelt and signed in 1948 in a post-WWII international effort to express the rights to which all human beings are inherently entitled. An example of some of the basic rights it guarantees for the people of the world is in Article 1 of the Declaration, which reads, “All human beings are born free and equal in dignity and rights. They are endowed with reason and conscience and should act towards one another in a spirit of brotherhood.” Though according to the Guinness Book of Records, the Universal Declaration is the most translated document in the world, less than 5 percent of the world even knows that it exists. About a month ago, animation artist Seth Brau set out to capture the words of the document with motion graphics. Using simple text, a two-tone color palette, and linear visuals, Brau experimented with scale, typography and symbolism to bring the words of the Declaration’s thirty articles to life, and hopefully spread the word to new generations. Below, Gillian Caldwell, Executive Director of WITNESS, an international human rights organization, touches on the development of international human rights over the past sixty years and the role technology plays in globalizing these rights.

Serbia has won a nebulous bid to have Kosovo’s February secession reviewed by the International Criminal Court of Justice. Following Belgrade’s urging, the UN body has agreed to weigh in on the steps Kosovo took to sever its final ties to the former Yugoslavia. The decision to review is non-binding which is perhaps a good development since international law is a gray area when it comes to breakaway areas of Europe. The UN is loathe to set a precedent in officially assessing a secession case fearing that other restless regions like the Basque areas of France and Spain, Cyprus and/or Flemish Belgium could follow suit. Serbs have long cited the Kosovska Mitrovica district north of Pristina as their ancestral heartland. Lending a critical eye, journalist Kurt Pitzer reflected on his two experiences in the Balkans–during the Kosovar refugee crisis and its aftermath.

If last week’s news that light cigarettes have essentially the same effect on receptors in the brain as regular cigarettes wasn’t enough to make you go cold turkey, recent projections of smoking-related deaths in China may convince you to quit in solidarity. A study from the Harvard School of Public Health predicts that, if current levels of smoking and biomass and coal fuel use in Chinese homes persist, in the next twenty-five years there will be an estimated 65 million deaths due to chronic obstructive pulmonary disease. According to Harvard’s newswire, about half of Chinese men smoke and residents of more than 70 percent of homes in China are run on wood, coal and crop residues. And while China numbers may be the most staggering, the study also reports that more than 900 million of the world’s 1.1 billion smokers currently live in low-income and middle-income countries. It seems like Manhattan—where in the last 40 years cigarette prices have gone from $.35 to $9 per pack, in large part due to heavy taxes—may have the right idea. Here’s the World Bank’s David Dollar talking to Big Think about the Chinese government’s responsibility towards the environment.

On Saturday, Uganda’s Daily Monitor speculated on America’s impending fall from the throne of world power and the path we have followed to get there. Journalist Timothy Kalyegira wonders in a three-part series if the current financial crisis was precipitated by a myopic higher education system that has produced a generation of self-obsessed Wall Street i-bankers with little awareness that becoming a person, and one with a sense of values, is more important than becoming an executive. Taking shots at Harvard and Oxford, Kalyegira writes that the failure to instill values at the university level–not politicized family values but the more fundamental kind of putting the greater economic good before personal excess–has created fertile ground for systemic abuses of economic power. Quoting Solzhenitsyn, Kalyegira writes that America’s moral decay has led to a profligate abuses of wealth both in and outside her borders. The critique has been echoed across the journalistic world lately with high-profile outlets running unequivocal pieces on the passing of an age. Germany’s Der Spiegel and the Guardian both suggest that no matter who wins twenty-eight days from now will inherit a globe with a decidedly less centralized economic framework than existed before the crisis. At Big Think we often ask what is America’s proper role in the world–economically, politically, militarily and pretty much any other way. Jim Lehrer, host of PBS’s Newshour, was telling us back in November that we are an example to the world in many departments but that we also need far more opportunities for demonstrating our goodness.

The words “still on the table” have become a mantra for manliness, (and that includes you, Hillary), as the presidential candidates try to prove their toughness over the course of the campaign. While Senators Clinton, Obama and McCain refer to the possibility of a nuclear strike against Iran, “still on the table” also apparently applies to nuclear energy, a subject once considered closed by many anti-nuclear activists. For example, the pro-nuclear overtures initiated by Italian Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi have led to the abandonment of Italy’s 1987 referendum banning nuclear power: the country’s first nuclear power plant will open in 2017. Now that flowers push through the concrete at Chernobyl, the fear of nuclear power seems to have waned; Big Think recently interviewed Christine Todd Whitman, the former governor of New Jersey and director of the EPA under George W. Bush. Since leaving that less-than-desirable position, she has co-founded CASE (Clean and Safe Energy) an organization “dedicated to giving citizens the facts about nuclear energy.”

Weirdly, campaigns once dedicated to citizen vigilance against Nuclear have faded from consciousness. Films such as Groundspark’s “Deadly Deception,” the Academy Award-winning film that fueled a boycott against energy giant General Electric are now eighteen years old. (Watch a Quicktime clip, or go to their site.) The morose resignation of the farmer pointing out the homes of his cancerous neighbors seems to belie Whitman’s statement that “the closer you live to a nuclear reactor the more support you have for it.” Moral of the story: Keep your fingers crossed that the nuclear option really has become safer in the past twenty years, because it is definitely staying on the table.

Former president of Ireland Mary Robinson moderated a panel today at the Clinton Global Initiative on meeting the demands of population growth and urbanization. The panel included Paul Hawken, entrepreneur environmentalist; Louis Alberto Moreno, director of Inter-American Bank and former ambassador to Columbia; Former ambassador from Saudi Arabia to the U.S., Prince Turki Al Faisal Al Saud; and New York Mayor Michael Bloomberg. Robinson opened the panel by noting its lack of gender balance, but mused, “I can handle that.” Robinson keeps a home in Ireland but has lived in New York since 2002. The idea of the panel was to discuss the challenges associated with an urban population explosion: 50 percent of people in the world live in urban areas. As Ambassador Al Saud noted, “we have realized that oil is depletable but people are not.” Here are a few interesting nuggets from the panel:

New York City’s life expectancy is higher than the U.S. as a whole. “If you want to live longer move to New York City,” said Bloomberg. But urbanization driven by the uneducated with big families will pose major new challenges including ethnic and religious battles and a competition for resources.

According to Former Ambassador Moreno, Columbia has an urban population of 75 percent, meaning major challenges in transportation, but also concerns over how to plant viable and safe social networks. Crime has doubled in Latin America since the debt crisis of the eighties.

According to Hawken, cities aren’t cause of population growth, they are the expression of it. Population growth is connected primarily to: education for women, better health care for women, economic opportunities for women, and fourth, cities. When people move to cities, birthrates drop. But since nobody moves to cities to become poor, the entrepreneurial qualities are extraordinary.

Bloomberg reminds the audience that in Japan and Western Europe, populations are actually shrinking. He sees as the problems in the U.S. that there’s a transfer of wealth from the young to the old. “Eventually, we’re going to run out of money,” Bloomberg says.

Here’s more from Mary Robinson, who spoke to Big Think about a topic not discussed today at the panel, the future of Africa.

It looks like Barack Obama may not need to apologize for his position on the troop surge after all. According to Science Daily, a recent paper by UCLA geographers is questioning the conclusion that the surge has been an all but triumphant success. By tracking the night light signatures of Baghdad neighborhoods, the geographers are finding that security in post-surge Iraq may not have been improving as much as was previously thought. Using available night imagery captured by a Department of Defense satellite, researchers found that until just before the surge, the night-light signature of Baghdad had been steadily increasing overall. If the surge had been effective, geographers would have expected to observe “a steady increase in night-light output over time, as electrical infrastructure continued to be repaired and restored.” Instead, they found that just at the start of the surge, night-light signature began to decrease, particularly in areas associated with ethno-sectarian violence and neighborhood ethnic cleansing. The assumption, according to lead author John Agnew, UCLA professor of geography, is that “by the launch of the surge, many of the targets of conflict had either been killed or fled the country.” In other words, “the surge really seems to have been a case of closing the stable door after the horse has bolted.”

Russia’s Federal Mass Media Inspection Service wants to give the axe to South Park and 117 other cartoons broadcast on St. Petersburg’s 2×2 Television. Transitions Online reported that officials cited “a search for questionable pleasures and extreme sensations” in many story lines, and they further warned that young viewers could suffer from “a state of panic and develop neurotic conditions.” Though few could excuse a show featuring a character called “the Christmas Poo” from being irreverent, the Kremlin’s move is the first ban to threaten the series. And though Russian fans can always go online for dubbed selections of the show, as they do for the majority of their unexpurgated media, the snarl with 2×2 only highlights Moscow’s grip on freedom of expression. A June report from the International Press Institute hit Russia hard saying independent journalists risked “threats and physical harrassment.” They decried state media as little more than mouthpiece for pro-Putin-Medvedev flattery. Michael Idov editor of Russia! magazine told us Russians are so used to repression that censorship is just a fact of everyday life. Still, Idov blames Russian journalists themselves for much of the current press climate.

The Chronicle of Higher Education news blog published a Gulf Times story on the planned Social and Economic Survey Research Institute (SESRI), the expected child of Qatar University and the University of Michigan at Ann Arbor’s Institute for Social Research, thus adding another bi-cultural university baby to the booming generation of international universities. You can already spend four years in Doha and receive a degree from Carnegie Mellon or attend Duke University Medical School in Singapore. SESRI demonstrates the evolution of the international university trend, once devoted almost exclusively to technical and science-related courses of study. When John Sexton came to talk to Big Think, he described what will be the next step in the evolutionary process: NYU is building a self-sufficient campus in Abu Dhabi, set to open in 2010.