( dentistry )

( phone arrgh )

( the other bit )

This made me laugh.

I've been in my current office since starting in my current job at the start of last year. We decided six months ago to move from serviced to unfurnished offices, and the decisive point has now been reached: I signed the new lease today for a new place in the International Press Centre on boulevard Charlemagne, behind the Berlaymont and just as conveniently located for most purposes.

Modern communication raised its head rather amusingly today, when a bloke who is thinking of renting my current office called me up by Skype, and I gave him a virtual tour of the place via webcam. (I should add that this was arranged via the agent, though it was my idea.) He seemed happy enough with it. It is rather extraordinary to sit in Belgium and have a conversation like that with someone who is in Brazil. But that is the 21st century, I guess.

First few minutes of this features my colleague in our Washington office (who used to run Kosovo).

( put behind cut tag as it appears to play automatically )

In the topsy-turvy world of international relations, one can still sometimes be surprised by the stupidity of the international system.

The UN yesterday approved foreign warships patrolling Somalia's waters in order to crack down on piracy, which is a very real problem. In general, of course, this is a Good Thing.

But it is irritating that the one area of the dysfunctional state which actually functions, Somaliland (the former British colony in the northwest) gets lumped in with the rest. As you can see from the UN's own maps, there have been precisely two incidents of piracy off Somaliland in the last few years, compared to scores off the coast of Puntland and the territory nominally controlled by the internationally recognised government.

( map )

On the ground, the international naval Combined Task Force 150 has among its duties the fight against piracy, in collaboration with local forces - ie the Somaliland coastguard. However its duties also include enforcing the international arms embargo on all parties in Somalia - also including the Somaliland coastguard!

International diplomacy has its own peculiar logic... (Declaration of interest: I advise Somaliland.)

37) Contested Lands: Israel-Palestine, Kashmir, Bosnia, Cyprus and Sri Lanka, by Sumantra Bose

Sumantra Bose first hit my radar screen when he wrote the best analysis I have read of post-war Bosnia. Here he combines that research with one other case that I know nearly as well - Cyprus - and three others about which I know much less - indeed I was astonished to realise just how little I knew about Kashmir. Also, although he doesn't give it separate treatment, Northern Ireland is a constant point of reference throughout the book.

I found this a very clear-headed analysis. These are all awful cases of human misery caused by other humans, and great powers meddling irresponsibly (one point he doesn't make, but which struck me, is that the Kashmir and Israel/Palestine situations share the experience of an indecently precipitate British withdrawal in 1947/1948). For all that, there has not been a lot of cross-referencing between them by scholars or practitioners.

The two cases I am more familiar with both essentially have their solutions mapped out - actively in the case of Dayton and Bosnia, potentially in the case of the Annan Plan and Cyprus. Bose does not hesitate to be prescriptive in the other three cases, where a settlement is not currently on the table - the Tamils will not get independence, but must get autonomy, with guarantees for the non-Tamil minorities; there will be no referendum in Kashmir, and the Line of Control will become the permanent boundary, but India has to deliver on autonomy for the area it controls and India and Pakistan must open up the LOC; there must be a Palestinian state, and Hamas must be brought into the political process. He makes the cases compellingly, though my libertarian heart regrets that the Kashmiris will clearly not get the independence that they apparently actually want.

Bose draws two lessons from the five cases. First, that constructive third-party engagement is essential to help move local actors away from zero-sum games. I couldn't agree more. The dog that doesn't bark here, in a way, is Northern Ireland: the 1998 settlement was essentially what was on the table in 1973 (as Seamus Mallon said, "Sunningdale for slow learners"). But it did require an externally appointed chairman of the calibre of George Mitchell to get everyone to agree to what in the end they knew they would have to agree to. Even then, of course, it took another nine years to nail down properly, but (whatever the DUP may say) 1998 is the moment of departure.

Bose's second point is that it is much better to start by aiming for the big picture rather than an incremental approach. This is slightly more controversial, but my instinct is again that he is basically right. The poster child of failure here is the Oslo process in the Middle East, but I've heard it said in the Cyprus context especially as well: in the absence of a big picture agreement (or even the framework of one) within which to operate, negotiating confidence-building measures can be a huge diversion of energy and can actually result in worse rather than better relations between the parties. (Supporters of incrementalism may complain that it was never seriously tried in Cyprus, and never seriously implemented in the Middle East, but perhaps those difficulties illustrate the basic problem.)

One conceptual point which Bose hints at, and I wish he had explored more, is the issue of democracy. In polarised situations, it is almost natural for politicians to try and compete with each other in chauvinism rather than in their willingness to accommodate - Sri Lanka and Israel/Palestine are particularly obvious examples, as indeed is Northern Ireland. This creates difficulties for international peace-builders who (and this is my analysis, not Bose's) will instinctively try to construct "moderates" who are worth engaging with and "hardliners" who are not, essentially judging the standing of the local actors by the extent to which they are prepared to talk pretty for the internationals. Of course, the only criterion for credibility in the end is the level of your popular support; and while it is reasonable to set certain hurdles to participation in formal dialogue, it is stupid to set them in such a way that you prevent the critical mass necessary to consolidate the process from forming. Democracy is a hugely complicating factor in conflict resolution, but also a very necessary one.

TIME magazine has a short feature about us (mainly about the boss) this week.

(I was trying desperately to think of some appropriate play on words involving the phrase "in time", but, alas, inspiration failed.)

20) The Superpower Myth: The Use and Misuse of American Might, by Nancy Soderberg

Nancy Soderberg was a senior official in President Clinton's national security council (with a similar role to the fictional Kate Harper in the West Wing, but a political appointee rather than a representative of the military) and then deputy US ambassador to the United Nations. She was then a colleague of mine for several years; I looked over a couple of draft chapters in this book for her and she has been kind enough to thank me in the introduction.

It is a combination of autobiographical memoir and analytical reflection on the differences between the Clinton and Bush administration approaches to foreign policy. She is admirably frank about the early mistakes made by the Clinton White House, a combination of inexperience (after being out of government for twelve years) and a failure to grasp the ways in which the world had changed. She is rightly excoriating about the delusions of superpowerdom which have fuelled the Bush White House's bullying posture, and gives several case studies (most obviously Iraq, but also North Korea) detailing the mistakes made in both strategy and tactics. Although the book came out at the start of Bush's second term, very little in it would need to be changed in the light of events in the last three years.

For me the most interesting insights are into the dynamics of the Washington foreign policy establishment. That the Pentagon were in general opposed to actually deploying troops I already knew; the role of the State Department as a dead hand delaying policy innovation was new to me. Having said that, the role of key personalities with their own individual styles and agendas remains paramount.

Her chapters on terrorism are surprisingly good - surprisingly because a relatively large amount of the material is recycled from other sources (Dick Clarke and the 9/11 report), the key events having happened only after she had left government; but she manages the synthesis with her own earlier experience of institutional working habits very well.

It doesn't always work - for instance, the section on engaging the Arab world in the last chapter is rather weak, though probably right - but it's a fairly digestible and well-informed read of a pretty heavy topic.

A lot of my work involves steady slogging against the prevailing political winds. So when I get not one but two favourable gusts filling my sails on the same day, it is definitely worth noting.

Kosovo has declared independence, after years of restraint; and it seems likely that the international community by and large will recognise it - most of the EU member states will decide to do so at tomorrow's regular meeting of foreign ministers, and various other international actors have been lined up at least to facilitate the process. It's no big secret that I've been in favour of this for a long time; I'm glad that we appear to have a fairly soft landing for this process, though of course there are many pitfalls ahead. As one of my Kosovo friends said last year, this was one of the least unexpected developments in the Balkans in the last two decades: the ground had been well prepared, and the choreography is being duly executed.

The unexpected good news is that the Greek Cypriot president, Tassos Papadopoulos, has lost his bid for re-election, by quite a narrow margin but none the less he is out. There's still some way to go - in particular the two remaining more moderate candidates must now compete for Papadopoulos' hard-line votes - but the prospects for a Cyprus settlement suddenly look a bit better. As usual the Cyprus Mail has a trenchant commentary (written before the election took place) as part of its regular Tales from the Coffeeshop series; you may have to concentrate to interpret the columnist's nicknames for the personalities involved - eg: 'The ad contained the following statement by the five-star, luxury hotel suite freedom fighter: “My history does not allow me to be silent.” As if there is anyone in Cyprus who does not know his history as a windbag.'

There is a possible connection between the two events. The two situations are more closely linked than may be immediately apparent; certainly I have always been conscious of the similarities. Papadopoulos is practically the only Greek Cypriot president who could not even manage a modest lurch towards a settlement, and the voters have duly taken note. It may possibly be that a crucial bloc of Greek Cypriot voters realised that his policy towards the Turkish Cypriots was dangerously similar to the Serbian policy towards the Kosovars, which has so visibly and catastrophically failed today. Sometimes the 'domino effect' can be a positive one.

More of my job:

Saw this report during the week, and was amused to note that I have worked for two of the top ten (non-US) think tanks identified in the survey:

Centre for European Policy Studies (CEPS), Belgium
French Institute of International Relations (IFRI), France
German Institute for International Politics and Security (SWP), Germany
Institute of World Economy and International Relations (IMEMO), Russia
International Crisis Group (ICG), Belgium
International Institute for Strategic Studies (IISS), United Kingdom
Jaffee Center for Strategic Studies (now merged into the Institute for National Security Studies), Israel
Japan Institute of International Affairs (JIIA), Japan
Royal Institute of International Affairs (Chatham House), United Kingdom
Shanghai Institute for International Studies (SIIS), China

I've had dealings with all six of the western European ones but none of the other four, which I guess reflects the places that find my areas of expertise of interest.

If you're interested in the top thirty American think tanks, they are:


I think I've had dealings with about half of them.

A couple of people today (including swisstone) have linked to this article in the Independent about Facebook, academics and students.

The Independent should not be surprised that it is a popular phenomenon in universities - after all, that is what it was designed for. But I am struck that Facebook is becoming part of my own working environment too. Well over half of my Facebook friends list are professional contacts, mostly people of my age and below (including a group of my former interns). In the last few months, I have found myself arranging meetings with British parliamentarians, Scandinavian diplomats, and European Union officials via Facebook.

I suspect there is one particularly attractive feature that Facebook has for those of us working in international policy. It presents the illusion of a relatively secure communications environment. Emails can easily be forwarded, deliberately or accidentally, from one person to another, as we all know to our cost. Your Facebook correspondence is in its own secure space, and while one can always take screenshots or otherwise cut-n-paste, it takes much more determination to leak.

At a time when, we are told, more and more people are moving off email and onto the social networks for their basic leisure on-line communication, Facebook seems to be in the lead for professional networking as well.

Like a lot of people in my line of work, I don't use the media for news. I have my Google and other services set up to send me the latest stories on the parts of the world I am most interested in; I will often buy the Economist to find out what everyone else is reading; I buy the Guardian several times a week, but more for entertainment than information.

Since they got their RSS feed sorted out, I have found opendemocracy, the LJ feed for articles from the openDemocracy website, a really compelling read. Just today, for instance, there are three quite fascinating articles: my old friend Tom Gallagher on the SNP and Islam, the very respectable Paul Rogers assessing the vaunted US success in Iraq, and an article by a Belarusian journalist on the algebra of revolutions. Interesting reading, whether you agree with them or not.

My employers are advertising in this week’s Economist to recruit ( three senior positions )

While none of you (as far as I know) has actually applied for the internship in my office, a number of you expressed interest in this general line of work. You might like to know that there is a site called eurobrussels.com which is the key place for advertising jobs in European affairs generally. I've also advertised this particular position on w4mp.org which seems to be a similar clearing house for Westminster. I've also been contacted by a site called Electus Start which seems to be in the same game.

I do recommend that anyone who wants to dip their toe in this particular water consider signing up as an election observer, which basically requires proven interest in politics and international affairs and willingness to do it. (Just to review how you actually apply to be an election observer, US citizens go here, UK citizens here, Canadians here, Dutch citizens here, Belgians hier and ici. Irish opportunities are listed here.)

Job advert.

I attended a speech given by US Undersecretary of State Nick Burns on Monday. In the course of his remarks, he described the USA and Russia as having an "open relationship".

Isn't that the kind of relationship in which both partners agree that it's OK to shag other people?

Discuss.

1) Independent Diplomat: Dispatches from an Unaccountable Elite, by Carne Ross (.co.uk, .com)
2) Diplomacy Lessons: Realism for an Unloved Superpower, by John Brady Kiesling (.co.uk, .com)

These two books have a certain amount in common. Both authors resigned from their diplomatic careers (Ross from the British Foreign Office, Kiesling from the US State Department) in protest at the Iraq war. Both books offer a blow-by-blow account of how the respective writers came to their decisions. And both also offer some wider systemic thoughts about what went wrong, allowing grotesque and murderous blunders like Iraq to happen. Neither, interestingly, subscribes to any deeper conspiracy theory about why Iraq happened. Both are pretty scathing about the usefulness of intelligence agencies.

Kiesling was not intimately involved with the Iraq issue. He writes instead of years of getting to know Greece and trying to interpret it to Washington (and vice versa) with excursions also into Armenia, Romania, Morocco and India. His chapter on terrorism - specifically the Greek 17 November group, and how the US security agencies hindered Greek law enforcement from catching them - is a classic, and I'm glad to hear from the author that he's expanding that topic into another book. Most readers, however, will concentrate on his vivd descriptions of senior colleagues, and will boggle slightly at the occasional blocks of blacked out text, most of which appears to have been about the CIA.

Ross was much closer to the Iraq issue, having been posted to the British mission to the UN where he handled negotiations on sanctions against Baghdad in the years leading up to the war. He writes now of his shame in colluding with the misery of the Iraqi people, but also of much else about diplomacy: the mind-set, the procedural rituals, the peculiar training process, and the systematic failure of international negotiators to listen to the people whose fate is settled around the conference table. He has now founded a new organisation whose goal is precisely to help the marginalised actors in international politics to be heard in the diplomatic world, and in the interests of full disclosure I should state that I work for it, and him.

Kiesling is deeply committed to the idea that US diplomacy still can be a force for good in the world, and his resignation was a protest at the squandering of America's moral capital, in which he felt he could no longer collude. Ross takes the view that the system itself is broken: traditional diplomacy is caught up with procedure and bureaucracy, and the real stuff is increasingly happening elsewhere. I find myself closer to Ross's views (which is just as well since I work for him, not Kiesling); in particular, it ties in well with the concept of epistemic communities which I find fascinating.

But I think anyone wanting to understand better what features of the international system made the Iraq war possible will find much of interest in both of these books.
------------------

My new intern started today. She spotted my Valentine's day present, and informed me that her brother was a friend of Terry Nation's son, and she had spent many happy childhood hours trundling along inside the original daleks.

If she'd put that on her CV, I'd have hired her immediately without going through all this interviewing nonsense!

...time for a brief moment of nostalgia: the soon-to-be-ex-employers' promotional video is now on YouTube. I have about ten seconds on it, starting at 02:02.

Well, the London office went through the 345 applicants for the internship in my new job, and weeded them down to 15, as far as I can tell by throwing out anyone who didn't speak at least four languages and have a Masters degree. (One did slip through who doesn't yet have his M.A., but he has written two books so I suppose that's all right.)

Making the final selection is not going to be easy.

Mysteriously didn't show on my f-list first time I posted this, so here goes again: This is the second of two sets of interview questions. I know I owe questions to a number of you; if you wish me to owe interview questions to you as well, say so in the comments.

From grahamsleight:

1. Which would you most like back in the BBC archives in its entirety - Evil of the Daleks or The Daleks' Masterplan? ( answer )
2. What's your preferred electoral system for the UK - STV or AV? (Or, indeed, other?) ( answer )
3. How easy do you think it is for the person-at-home-with-a-TV-and-internet to grasp the complexity of (eg) the Bosnian conflict? ( answer )
4. Do you have any personal preference between sf and fantasy as genres in general (as it were)? ( answer )
5. Is it worth visiting Brussels if you can't stand moules? ( answer )

From bugshaw:

1. Crosswords or Sudoku? ( answer )
2. Three countries you've never visited but would like to? ( answer )
3. Tell me an anecdote from your schooldays. ( answer )
4. Where did you find fandom? ( answer )
5. Assume the Daleks have been purged from this space-time continuum. Who would you like to be your new overlord(s)? ( answer )

From secritcrush:

1. I've only watched the Baker and Davison years of the old Dr Who - what would you recommend as the essential episode to watch that I've never seen? ( answer )
2. What is the most frustrating aspect of your job? ( answer )
3. What is the first book you remember reading? ( answer )
4. Do you play any musical instruments? ( answer )
5. Pirate or robot? Defend your choice! (and none of that robot pirate nonsense.) ( answer )

From despotliz:

1. How do you manage to juggle things and find time for a family life, a demanding job, reading hundreds of books, and posting to LJ? ( answer )
2. Which of the regular cons you've been to is your favourite? ( answer )
3. Best book you've read this year? ( answer )
4. Do you find learning languages easy, or is it something you have to work at? ( answer )
5. Where would you like to live if you weren't in Belgium? ( answer )

Below the cut is a map of the EU district in Brussels, showing (in pencil scrawl) the main EU institution buildings and (in red biro) the member states' diplomatic representations (not all of these in precisely the right place - some are a block or two out, and the Greeks have just moved to be beside the Germans).

( map )

So my choice is: Rondpoint Schumann (where "Sch" is written in red over "Tunnel Belliard") or further west (more or less under the "y" in "Rue Montoyer"). Tricky. Having slept on it, though, I'm closer to a decision.

Am off to the Ardennes for a staff meeting for the next few days, so those of you who have requested interview questions may have to wait.

I decided when I started blogging that, since I am a public figure (at least in some countries), there was no point in embracing anonymity at the risk of being exposed; so my real name has been clear here from the start. But I also decided that I would only rarely write unlocked (or even locked) entries here about my job, or work-related stuff.

As a nod to transparency, I am now making it public that I am leaving my current job at the end of this year, and joining a new organisation as head of their Brussels office. I have been in my current position for four and a half years, in the course of which I have expanded my area of operations from the Western Balkans to include also Moldova, Cyprus and the three South Caucasus states.

But I have been on the lookout for a role which would involve more of the advocacy activities which I most enjoy about my present job, and less of the grind of production of research reports, which I don't enjoy doing so much. It also occurs to me more and more that those of us who are working in international politics, and not doing anything about Africa, have to ask ourselves why. I myself became a Balkanist largely by accident.

Thus the move. My new geographical focus will be simultanously more global, but also more concentrated in the countries where I am working; the new organisation currently has a client in Europe and two in Africa, so I am getting up to speed with the literature relating to my new responsibilities. Also on the lookout for office space in Brussels, preferably a bit closer to the European quarter than my current Avenue Louise location.

Come the new year, the number of work-related posts here will certainly decrease still further from the current low level - but that doesn't mean that there will be none at all!

powered by performancing firefox

I told F yesterday that I am going to Moldova for a couple of days.

He asked, "Are they going to split up?"

(We had had a number of conversations earlier in the year about my visits to Montenegro and Kosovo.)

He already knew that Moldova had split up from Russia, and so did Ukraine and "Blerrus" and "Lativia".

I explained that indeed there are people in Moldova who want to split it up and join their bit onto Russia, but the problem is that Russia is now quite a long way away from Moldova, and anyway I don't think the people who want to split up Moldova are very nice people.

He's only seven. I suspect we will have more conversations like this, at least as long as I stay in this line of work...

Foreign Policy has just published its annual Failed States Index, ranking 146 countries from Sudan to Norway in order of vulnerability to state failure.

( map )

As with all of these things, it's good to have a basis for argument. I do take issue with some of the rankings. While I don't think many people would dispute that the top eight countries on the list probably are in pretty bad shape (Sudan, DR Congo, Cote d'Ivoire, Iraq, Zimbabwe, Chad, Somalia and Haiti) I'm a bit surprised to see Pakistan listed next, as being in a worse situation than Afghanistan, Guinea or Liberia. Serbia and Montenegro is very likely to split apart later this month, but is only 55th on the table. (OK, so it's not exactly "state failure", in that there will be little disruption to existing structures.)

Anyhow, food for thought.

10) You, The People: The United Nations, Transitional Administration and State-Building, by Simon Chesterman
11) International Governance of War-Torn Territories: Rule and Reconstruction, by Richard Caplan

Two books on very similar topics. Don't really have the energy to review either right now. Chesterman's slightly the better read, though also less accurately titled in that he deals with post-1995 Bosnia and post-2003 Iraq, neither of which is really UN per se. Both very good and detailed.

The three real killers for international interventions post-conflict are, according to both writers:

i) wishful thinking about conditions on the ground, rather than proper planning for the circumstances of the mission, often driven by domestic political pressures on key players
ii) failure to establish purpose of the mission (and thus conditions for eventually terminating it) right at the very start
iii) failure to establish rule of law very early on in the process, ie police, courts, enforcement mechanisms.

Very useful food for thought, anyway.

While on the plane I also read Spyridon Kotsovilis' paper on Greece's policy towards Macedonia, picked up on a Google trawl since he references me briefly in a footnote. An attractive argument about international relations in general, and how the Realists and Constructivists are Both Wrong; unfortunately his English lets him down in one or two key places, but I think I basically agree with what he's saying and must read more of the writers he references positively (other than myself).

I was supposed to have lunch with a Swedish MEP today, but she's just emailed to say that her little twins have a tummy bug so she is staying in Stockholm. Quite right too.

And it gives me a better chance of catching some of the eclipse (from 1145 to 1330 here).

Even though it's over ten years since I submitted my Ph D thesis, deadlines still loom large in my life, and I found much to recognise in this article. If you are procrastinating on a postgraduate project, read it. And also if you are procrastinating on any piece of writing at all.