New Sciences of Protection on The Terrors of Design:

In ‘Dissimulation and Terrorism’ Benjamin Bratton interrogated the interrelations between terrorism and the architectures of safe living. Today architects are literally being asked to ‘design out terrorism’. Yet the contemporary relationship between design, architecture and terrorism is a more intimate one. Terrorism makes use of existing architectures of safe living; it uses the concreteness of these architectures to inscribe itself on to the world. The act of terrorism also has a projective architecture of its own, whose conditions of existence of course include the removal of existing architecture. Terrorism is an exceptional violence wrought on an existing architecture and also, a posited counter-architecture itself. Bratton’s key manoeuvre was to demonstrate how the exceptional violence of terrorism solicits an exceptional response, with the consequence that responses to contemporary terrorism also adopt a terroristic form. Exceptional architectures of safe living are constructed in response to the threat of terrorism, constantly uprooting existing architectures of living in the process. Counter-terrorist design comes to validate and normalize the state of emergency brought about by terror and continually concretizes it in its (exceptional) designs for safe living. Terrorism has ceased to become simply a threat to the architecture of the social, but productive of the social architecture itself. In response to this Bratton urges that it must be ensured that this war on terror is only fought, if it must be fought at all, as a provisional moment. It is imperative that the normalization of terror through the architectures of counter-terror design be resisted. Without this resistance there is no telling that this terror will pass and a very real danger that we will dress our cities in its hysterical fashion.

This is a very important thesis. Sociologist Frank Furedi has consistently warned that contemporary political discourse risks normalising fear/terrorism as a default state. Are we to let urban planners and designers normalise our kinetic experiences and design interactions as responses to the perception of terrorism as a an ever-present and existential threat? This is a point Bryan Finoki has written on brilliantly in his comments on the fossilization of the GWOT.

The primary reference for TTOD’s post seems to be a session from a conference at Lancaster University last week on New Sciences of Protection: Designing Safe Living. I notice that one of the speakers was Dan Lockton, whose Architectures of Control blog - subtitled, Design with Intent - has been grappling with these problems for years.

[cross-posted to Complex Terrain Lab]

Public diplomacy blog Intermap has officially been relaunched after a four-month absence. Here’s the blurb from Craig Hayden and Shawn Powers:

The Intermap website and blog presents news, opinions, and research on issues related to communication-centric foreign policy, public diplomacy, global media and news flows. More broadly, this site aims to investigate the intersections between communication, media studies and international relations scholarship that deal directly with how global controversies and politics are carried and sustained through media. We call this media argument: where media outlets, technologies, and tactics represent the symbolic and visual space for the contest of ideas between nations, citizens, non-state actors.

Our focus here on media argument presents a number of avenues for critical inquiry and discussion - from institutional and political constraints shaping international broadcasting policies, to the analysis of news media framing, to investigating ecological transformations introduced by networking technologies. Analysis is warranted, because our understanding of persuasion, identification, and information diffusion is changed in the increasingly crowded global media environment. Therefore, we aim to inform, synthesize, and add to contemporary debates on the use of global media to cultivate attitudes and to be the proxy space of international conflict.

The website joins the growing community of weblogs that already deal with public diplomacy, international broadcasting, and the broader conceptual issues of strategic communication and new media proliferation. This website hopes to add to the conversation, with an emphasis on the contributions of related (but often disconnected) strands of research in mass communication, rhetoric & argument studies, international politics, and media studies. These contributions can ideally provide a research-oriented context for the rapid pace of news and information pertinent to the study of international communication and public diplomacy. Much like the excellent COMOPS Journal, critical attention to these topics is not redundant, but valuable contributions to public discussion.

The previous incarnation of Intermap was a product of a research program looking at Arab media as a space for controversy about the United States. While that project has concluded, Intermap will continue to be a venue for posting information about related research projects, events, and proposals by the authors and the broader community of readers.

Good stuff. Slots right in next to Abu Aardvark, COMOPS Journal and MountainRunner on my reading list.

[Cross-posted to Complex Terrain Lab Review]

I’ve got a new post up at Complex Terrain Lab Review, Replacement Geography - Get Off Yer Fat One:

Spotted at the Jewish Exponent, Andre Oboler, 3 July 2008, Google Earth’s New Platform for Anti-Israel Propaganda.

The influence of the Internet on our lives is increasing. The online world allows the creation of a virtual reality that at times bears only passing resemblance to facts on the ground.

The gap between reality and virtual reality is further exploited by political activists promoting what we term “replacement geography,” a means of controlling the virtual representation of land in place of controlling the land itself. In an information age, control on the common map may be worth more in negotiations than control on the ground.

Read the rest here. Also, check out Mike Innes’ piss-take of the recent Seven Meme business. Yours truly gets a public whipping. I’ll have my revenge, Mike.

I have two new posts up at CTLab Review:

Mahmoud al-Massad at the Frontline Club - a review of al-Massad’s acclaimed documentary Recycle, in which he returns to Zarqa in Jordan, birthplace of Abu Musab al-Zarqawi and attempts to find out what makes a terrorist.

Monumentalising Defeat - a brief look at Christophe Abrassart’s photographic essay on the WWII Atlantik Wall.

Mike Innes has also been busy, and has has his legal hat on this weekend:

Khadr v. U.S. (D.C. Cir. June 20, 2008) - The D.C. Circuit, in an opinion by Chief Judge Sentelle, has dismissed a petition by Omar Khadr asking the Court to address certain procedural issues relating to Khadr’s war crime trial before a military commission at GTMO. The opinion relies on language in the Military Commissions Act providing that the D.C. Circuit’s jurisdiction in this context comes into play only after a final judgment by the commission that has been approved by the Convening Authority and after all aother MCA appeal options are complete.

Constitutional Cartography & the Parsing of Terrorist Space - I’ve been reporting on the Opinio Juris Insta-Symposium (OPJIS) on the Boumediene Case in dribs and drabs as I stumble through the wealth of offerings from various contributors [Mike's piece is also cross-posted at Small Wars Journal, where it sits nicely next to a companion article by Robert Lamb on Ungoverned Areas and Safe Havens]

Benjamin Wittes on Law and the Long War - The smash book of the season… reviews and commentary on Benjamin Wittes’ new book Law and the Long War: The Future of Justice in the Age of Terror (Penguin Press, 2008) have been popping up all over. Mike takes a look at them.

Mark Safranski, aka Zenpundit, addresses Visualcy and the Human Terrain in his first post at the growing community blog that is Complex Terrain Lab Review. Congratulations Mark, and welcome to the crew.

Here’s the intro to the piece:

COIN and public diplomacy alike tend to encounter significant barriers to effective communication between the state actor and the intended audience. In part, this is due to gaps in cultural intelligence that will only be remediated by degrees with the careful advice of Subject Matter Experts (SMEs) and the experience derived from an extended immersion in another society. The other aspect of the problem is that the target audience often has greater complexity and cognitive heterogeneity than the Western society from which the warrior or diplomat hails.

As a result of public education, the rise of mass-media and commercial advertising, Western nations and Japan, some earlier but all by mid-20th century, became relatively homogenized in the processing of information as well as having a dominant vital “consensus” on cultural and political values with postwar Japan probably being the most extreme example. The range between elite and mass opinion naturally narrowed as more citizens shared similar outlooks and the same sources of information, as did the avenues for acceptable dissent. A characteristic of modern society examined at length by thinkers as diverse as Ortega y Gasset, Edward Bernays, Marshall McLuhan and Alvin Toffler.

Read the rest of this great article here.

I wish I had more time to respond adequately to a great discussion over at Savage Minds, so this is as much a reminder to self as anything else. Kerim Friedman posted his critique of Tom Boellstorf’s Coming of Age in Second Life: An Anthropologist Explores the Virtually Human, a recently published ethnography of the virtual world I’ve been meaning to have a look at for a while. Kerim doesn’t try to hide his personal dislike of Second Life as a platform but does raise a series of excellent points to which Dusan Writer and Tom Boellstorf amongst others respond. Virtuality, subjectivity, anthropology, post mortem avatars and a lonely cat - all the fun of the fair.

[Cross-posted to CTLab]

I’ve got a new post up at Complex Terrain Lab:

On Wednesday 11 June 2008 the Frontline Club in London hosted a discussion evening, Media Talk: Assassination and Insurgency - Are the Taliban Winning? Moderated by Nazanine Moshiri of Al Jazeera, the panel brought together Alastair Leithead (BBC), James Fergusson (journalist and author), James Appathurai (NATO spokesman), John D. McHugh (photojournalist) and, via Skype from Kandahar, Mawlavi Abdulsalam Zaeef (ex-Taliban ambassador to Pakistan).

Read the full article here.

Joseph Stiglitz has recently been much in the news, with the February 2008 publication of The Three Trillion Dollar War: The True Cost of the Iraq Conflict (with Linda Bilmes). On Friday 13 June, Stiglitz was in London at the Frontline Club, in conversation with Stephanie Flanders, Economics Editor of the BBC.

Read the rest of my article at Complex Terrain Lab.

Update: Some feeds may have a broken link - use this one if that’s the case.

I’ve just posted a short review at Complex Terrain Lab, Cut Nose, Spite Face: more on Human Terrain.

Roberto J. González is perhaps best known for his continued opposition to the involvement of anthropologists in the U.S. military’s Human Terrain System. The title of his 2007 article, ‘We Must Resist the Militarization of Anthropology’ sums up his concerns with the delicate relationship between social science and the military. Who shapes the agenda? Is it ethical to ‘enable the kill chain’? Should social science be subordinated to the aims of the Department of Defense and the Central Intelligence Agency? These are all valid issues, of course, but González’s work often seems tinged with a reactionary attitude as uncritical as those he claims to be challenging.

Read the rest here.

[Cross-posted from Complex Terrain Lab]

On 21 May, Daniel Kimmage, Regional Analyst for Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty, spoke to the International Centre for the Study of Radicalisation and Political Violence at King’s College London. The basis for the talk was his recently published study The Al-Qaeda Media Nexus: The Virtual Network Behind the Global Message [.pdf] which received a fair amount of attention in the blogosphere and beyond. He is also author, with Kathleen Ridolfo, of The War of Images and Ideas: How Sunni Insurgents in Iraq and Their Supporters Worldwide are Using The Media [.pdf].

Kimmage is worth listening to and reading for many reasons, but the principal advantage Kimmage has over most commentators and analysts on the subject is that he is fluent in Arabic. This provides him with real insight into the practical workings of jihadist media, whilst most of us observe from at least one linguistic remove. His sample in this case was 446 outlets identified in July 2007, of which 78% concentrated on Iraq, in particular the Islamic State of Iraq and Ansar al-Sunnah.

In Kimmage’s analysis, jihadist media have developed media products with consistent and systematic branding, using virtual media production and distribution entities (MPDEs) to link a plethora of groups under the global jihadist umbrella. This strategy, mirroring conventional media structures, imparts a degree of legitimacy and credibility to jihadist narratives, as well as facilitating control over the ideological content of the ‘message’.

It is this desire to control media output that Kimmage identifies as the principal reason why jihadist groups are not at the cutting-edge of technology use, in contrast to much of the reporting and analysis to the contrary. The use of ‘web 2.0′ technologies, such as social networks and video sharing sites, threatens message control and is therefore actively discouraged by jihadist groups. As previously noted, this is a fairly traditional approach to media, one that eschews the reflexivity and interactivity of available technology in favour of one-way message propagation. Essentially, it is a propaganda machine.

Kimmage concluded by examining the origin of foreign fighters in Iraq, the majority of which come from media-repressive regimes such as Saudi Arabia, Egypt and Libya. He posed this speculative question as a result: could a freer, more interactive internet be the secret weapon against al-Qaeda’s ideology? We are reaching a point where virtual claims and kinetic actions are increasingly divergent - advertisement of this trend could reduce internet radicalisation and help stem the flow of online jihadist rhetoric.

My gut feeling is that this would be a sensible move. The challenge of convincing repressive regimes to open up the virtual media space is a difficult one, and there is also no guarantee that a bottom-up, ‘liberalising’ debate would emerge in those societies in which jihadist media flourishes. Jihadist forums are not exactly welcoming of ideological challenges to their chosen stances, and increased access to the internet and the lifting of censorship is unlikely to be met with analagous social reform either. I am reminded of a notice pinned to the wall of a downtown Cairo internet cafe I occasionally visited: “Our patrons are kindly asked not to mention any of these subjects whilst using the internet: sex, religion, politics.”

Kimmage’s study is an interesting one, with undoubted value but, and he freely admits this, is of limited scope. Jihadist internet use is by no means restricted to the Arabic language, and his sample was kept deliberately manageable in size and time. His assertion that the sophistication of jihadists’ use of internet technology is often overstated has some traction, but equally ignores the fact that those wishing to employ counterstrategies have barely even got to grips with the internet as a contestable space. This is changing, particularly in the U.S. military, but there is a long way to go, conceptually and operationally.

I also find myself thinking that there is an opposite underestimation at work here. The nature of the internet is such that - and I believe a lot of insurgents and terrorists know this - once material is on the internet, it tends to take unpredictable paths. This in itself constitutes the exercise of a strategic choice that this study and others miss: a lot of material is deliberately and wilfully produced just so it can be remixed and reworked by whoever chooses to - this is categorically not an attempt to straitjacket the ‘message’ within a normative media framework. The propaganda of the deed thrives in this viral, memetic environment, which might even be a force-multiplier in the global insurgency.

I wish Daniel luck in finding new employment after the recent restructuring of RFE/RL, and look forward to further work in this field. I suspect a new study might back up many of his findings but also, in the ever-changing and dynamic global information ecology, open up unexpected avenues of research into insurgent media.