January 2002 Insights Issue #39

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Networking for peace?

Traditionally, in times of peace at least, international politics was conducted by diplomats; the boundary between diplomacy and intelligence was, and still is, vague. With economic growth and democratisation in the west, the increasing importance of issues such as human rights and development have helped broaden the conduct of international relations by the professional diplomat to include a wider range of actors: non-diplomatic civil servants, non-state lobby groups, aid groups and so on.

This 'new diplomacy', supposedly based on values, rather than state sovereignty, works through coalitions - or networks - of state and non-state actors. Examples include the landmines campaigns and the International Criminal Court. Yet the new diplomacy has failed to deal with non-liberal and violent networks such as al Qaeda, - just as much a facet of globalisation as the networks that operate the ‘new diplomacy’. Are the events of September the 11^th just as much a diplomatic failure as a failure of intelligence?

Networks such as al Qaeda are often based in those parts of the world abandoned by diplomats to aid workers. The primary functions of diplomats are analysing political developments in foreign countries for their capitals, and promoting national interests. In what were previously seen as non-strategic conflicts, both these functions have, in part, shifted to aid workers. New thinking on conflict has arisen out of aid groups associated with research organisations; aid is increasingly blurred with international security.

Aid workers now routinely accept greater physical risk than do diplomatic or intelligence personnel. Ignorance of networks such as al Qaeda and their risk to international security is thus widespread amongst intelligence and diplomatic communities. Before September 11^th, for example, no one in the US Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) could speak Pashto, one of the main Afghan languages.

Delegating diplomacy to aid does not appear to work. It fails to deliver enhanced security and comprises the effectiveness of aid. The 'new' diplomacy needs to be a more radical conception of 'network diplomacy' than has hitherto been the case. Implications for policy include the following:

• Diplomats need to find new ways of engaging with networks as opposed to states- not only NGO and UN agency networks, through which aid is being securitised, but also the networks of which al Qaeda is an example.
• Elements of these networks are accessible and could be engaged. The 'jihadi groups' and religious parties that support such networks, for example, have operated openly in
• Pakistan for many years, as have the traders and businessmen from whom they get donations.
• Although portrayed as illogical and demoniacal, these networks have specific political and economic goals. Specialist diplomats could engage with them to improve understanding and the possibility of negotiation.
• The more moderate parts of these networks could be 'detached' from the more extreme elements through negotiation and discussion, a common objective in 'traditional' state-based diplomacy. This would require new orientation and training for diplomats and an acceptance of the type of physical risk aid workers are now accustomed to.

Source
'International Relations and the New Diplomacy', by R. McRae in 'Human Security and the New Diplomacy', Montreal: McGill-Queen’s University Press, edited by R. McRae and D. Hubert (2001) (www.mqup.mcgill.ca/);

'The Counterterrorist Myth' in 'Atlantic Monthly', by R. Gerecht (July/August 2001)
(www.theatlantic.com/issues/2001/07/index.htm)

'Shifting Sands: The search for coherence between political and humanitarian response to complex emergencies', HPG Report #8, London, Overseas Development Institute by J. Macrae and N. Leader (2000) (www.odi.org.uk/publications/humanitarian.html#hpgreports)

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