Tag: State Department

Does nonviolent resistance work? What Chenoweth and Stephan get right (Part 1a)

Posted on by kathiemm

By Ian Hansen

This is the first in a series of posts intended as reply to a comment by Dahlia Wasfi on a previous post of mine. Nonviolent uprisings are an area of interest rather than expertise for me. I welcome feedback on my thoughts and expect my own views to evolve as I learn more.Why Civil Resistance Works by Chenoweth & Stephan

  • Part 1: What Chenoweth and Stephan get right (also see Parts 1b, 1c, 2a, 2b and 2c)

Dr. Wasfi noted that nonviolent struggles cited as successful in Maria Stephan and Erica Chenoweth’s book Why civil resistance works: The strategic logic of nonviolent conflict (see a shorter article here) could also be read as failures and that successful nonviolent movements have rarely worked in isolation. Violent factions fought the same powers and arguably also contributed to successful changes of power attributed to nonviolent movements like Gandhi’s Satyagraha in India and the Civil Rights Movement in the U.S.  She also noted that Maria Stephan works for the U.S. State Department, which is true.

I believe that Why Civil Resistance Works provides valuable reading to anyone interested in changing the existing power relations in any society. Chenoweth and Stephan are very aware of potential counter-arguments to the nonviolent position and take detailed steps to address them. I particularly admire their pragmatic attempt to classify movements that are more violent than nonviolent and more nonviolent than violent, and to compare their relative success. This classification and judgment is a pretty fraught task, but it is possible to make a plausible comparison across movements when enough movements are included.

The implications of Maria Stephan’s work for the State Department are unclear—must we assume that nothing she says is credible? Is it not relevant that the State Department leans considerably more towards supporting the peaceful rule of law than does, say, the Pentagon or Langley/CIA, as argued by right wing critics of the State Department (assertion) on the assumption that supporting the peaceful rule of law is a bad thing?

The U.S. government may oversee an empire, but different elements of that government employ substantially different means and are guided by substantially different goals and even ideologies. The State Department appears at least somewhat amenable to a shift in policy towards creating and influencing nonviolent movements in order to pursue global interests, judging by its previous support for movements like Otpor in Serbia and the No! Campaign against Pinochet.

Ian Hansen, Ph.D., is an assistant professor in the Department of Behavioral Sciences at York College, City University of New York. His research focuses in part on how witness for human rights and peace can transcend explicit political ideology. He is also on the Steering Committee for Psychologists for Social Responsibility.

“Give the military whatever they need and more” (Cost of war, Part 2)

Posted on by kathiemm

[Note from Kathie Malley-Morrison:  Today we continue the series by guest author Neta Crawford. Part 2 picks up on the question of why it so difficult to accurately assess the true costs of war.]

First, there is a tendency to focus on what has been appropriated by Congress specifically for the war, with the consequence that the larger costs of war in Iraq are either missed or downplayed.

Dollars and dollars and dollars
"Artwork" with 20 Dollar Bills by selbstfotografiert, used under Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike Unported 3.0 license

Specifically, many tallies focus on Congressional appropriations to the Department of Defense for the Iraq war, most of which were authorized in special emergency or supplemental appropriation, not included in the regular Pentagon “base” budget appropriations.

Others rightly include war related appropriations to the Veterans Administration and the State Department and US Agency for International Development (AID).  One of the most sophisticated of these analyses, by Amy Belasco of the Congressional Research Service (CRS) totals appropriations to Pentagon, State/USAID and the VA at $806 billion from 2003-2011.

But overall Pentagon appropriations and spending increased over the war in large part due to the Congressional desire to give the military whatever they needed and more.

Winslow Wheeler, of the Center for Defense Information, estimates that the base budget increase attributable to both the Iraq and Afghanistan wars is more than $600 billion over the last 10 years (whether one counts in current or constant dollars, and that matters).

If Wheeler is right or even right by half, then the share of the increase in base appropriations to the Pentagon that can reasonably attributed to the Iraq war is between $190 billion and $380 billion.

The second reason the official estimates are low compared to what the war will actually cost is the tendency to forget how the Iraq war was financed — almost entirely by deficit spending.  If one calculates the interest on debt for just the Pentagon, State, and VA appropriations, using the amount appropriated according the CRS, for the Iraq war already paid, the total is about $117 billion.

Neta C. Crawford is a Professor of Political Science at Boston University and co-director of the Costs of War study www.costsofwar.org

The federal budget: Invasions, yes! Peace, no!

Posted on by kathiemm

At least that’s what the politicos are telling us.

By now, everyone must have heard something about the debates about the new U.S. budget. You may know that to address the deficits that have accrued since former President Bill Clinton created a budget surplus, powerful forces in Congress seek, among other things, to

  • Gut the Environmental Protection Agency
  • Block spending for health care
  • Cut food and other assistance programs for children, the elderly, and the disabled
U.S. Institute of Peace building
U.S. Institute of Peace, Washington, D.C.

But did you know that while declaring funding for the Pentagon off-limits for budget considerations, a majority in the House of Representatives also voted to eliminate funding for the United States Institute of Peace (USIP)?

The USIP, established by Congress in 1984, conducts research and training designed to prevent and end wars and to promote international peace, stability, and development. In recent years it has engaged in mediation and conflict resolution activities in Afghanistan, the Balkans, Colombia, Iraq, Kashmir, Liberia, the Korean Peninsula, Nepal, Pakistan, the Palestinian Territories, Nigeria, Sudan, and Uganda.

Despite the fact that the U.S. spends as much on what is euphemistically called “defense” as the rest of the world combined, Congress wants to end this independent nonpartisan organization with a budget that is only one tenth of one percent of the State Department budget.

The previous budget for USIP was minuscule compared to the spending in Iraq and Afghanistan (approximately $42.7 million every 142 minutes according to Congressman Dennis Kucinich).

What message is Congress sending to the American public?  To the rest of the world? Why is there so much more commitment to the arms industry than to peace?

Please send us your answers—and consider becoming an activist on behalf of peace and justice.

For inspiration, check out this BBC video and consider how we are all one people and if we want to survive in all our commonalities and all our uniqueness, we need to support efforts for peace.

Kathie Malley-Morrison, Professor of Psychology