Skeptics immediately reply that women have not made war simply because they have rarely been in power. If they were empowered as leaders, the conditions of an anarchic world would force them to make the same bellicose decisions that men do. Margaret Thatcher, Golda Meir, and Indira Gandhi were powerful women; all of them led their countries to war.

But it is also true that these women rose to leadership by playing according to the political rules of “a man’s world.” It was their success in conforming to male values that enabled their rise to leadership in the first place. In a world in which women held a proportionate share (one-half) of leadership positions, they might behave differently in power.

So we are left with the broader question: does gender really matter in leadership? In terms of stereotypes, various psychological studies show that men gravitate to the hard power of command, while women are collaborative and intuitively understand the soft power of attraction and persuasion. Americans tend to describe leadership with tough male stereotypes, but recent leadership studies show increased success for what was once considered a “feminine style.”

In information-based societies, networks are replacing hierarchies, and knowledge workers are less deferential. Management in a wide range of organizations is changing in the direction of “shared leadership,” and “distributed leadership,” with leaders in the center of a circle rather than atop a pyramid. Former Google CEO Eric Schmidt said that he had to “coddle” his employees.

Even the military faces these changes. In the United States, the Pentagon says that Army drillmasters do “less shouting at everyone,” because today’s generation responds better to instructors who play “a more counseling-type role.” Military success against terrorists and counterinsurgents requires soldiers to win hearts and minds, not just break buildings and bodies.

Former US President George W. Bush once described his role as “the decider,” but there is much more to modern leadership than that. Modern leaders must be able to use networks, to collaborate, and to encourage participation. Women’s non-hierarchical style and relational skills fit a leadership need in the new world of knowledge-based organizations and groups that men, on average, are less well prepared to meet.

In the past, when women fought their way to the top of organizations, they often had to adopt a “masculine style,” violating the broader social norm of female “niceness.” Now, however, with the information revolution and democratization demanding more participatory leadership, the “feminine style” is becoming a path to more effective leadership. In order to lead successfully, men will not only have to value this style in their women colleagues, but will also have to master the same skills.

That is a trend, not (yet) a fact. Women still lag in leadership positions, holding only 5% of top corporate positions and a minority of positions in elected legislatures (just 16% in the US, for example, compared to 45% in Sweden). One study of the 1,941 rulers of independent countries during the twentieth century found only 27 women, roughly half of whom came to power as widows or daughters of a male ruler. Less than 1% of twentieth-century rulers were women who gained power on their own.

So, given the new conventional wisdom in leadership studies that entering the information age means entering a woman’s world, why are women not doing better?

Lack of experience, primary caregiver responsibilities, bargaining style, and plain old discrimination all help to explain the gender gap. Traditional career paths, and the cultural norms that constructed and reinforced them, simply have not enabled women to gain the skills required for top leadership positions in many organizational contexts.

Research shows that even in democratic societies, women face a higher social risk than men when attempting to negotiate for career-related resources such as compensation. Women are generally not well integrated into male networks that dominate organizations, and gender stereotypes still hamper women who try to overcome such barriers.

This bias is beginning to break down in information-based societies, but it is a mistake to identify the new type of leadership we need in an information age simply as “a woman’s world.” Even positive stereotypes are bad for women, men, and effective leadership.

Leaders should be viewed less in terms of heroic command than as encouraging participation throughout an organization, group, country, or network. Questions of appropriate style – when to use hard and soft skills – are equally relevant for men and women, and should not be clouded by traditional gender stereotypes. In some circumstances, men will need to act more “like women”; in others, women will need to be more “like men.”

The key choices about war and peace in our future will depend not on gender, but on how leaders combine hard- and soft-power skills to produce smart strategies. Both men and women will make those decisions. But Pinker is probably correct when he notes that the parts of the world that lag in the decline of violence are also the parts that lag in the empowerment of women.

Source: Project Syndicate

Author: Joseph S Nye

That’s why no one who has been inside a prison, if only for a day, can ever forget the feeling. Time stops. A note of attenuated panic, of watchful paranoia—anxiety and boredom and fear mixed into a kind of enveloping fog, covering the guards as much as the guarded. “Sometimes I think this whole world is one big prison yard, / Some of us are prisoners, some of us are guards,” Dylan sings, and while it isn’t strictly true—just ask the prisoners—it contains a truth: the guards are doing time, too. As a smart man once wrote after being locked up, the thing about jail is that there are bars on the windows and they won’t let you out. This simple truth governs all the others. What prisoners try to convey to the free is how the presence of time as something being done to you, instead of something you do things with, alters the mind at every moment. For American prisoners, huge numbers of whom are serving sentences much longer than those given for similar crimes anywhere else in the civilized world—Texas alone has sentenced more than four hundred teen-agers to life imprisonment—time becomes in every sense this thing you serve.

For most privileged, professional people, the experience of confinement is a mere brush, encountered after a kid’s arrest, say. For a great many poor people in America, particularly poor black men, prison is a destination that braids through an ordinary life, much as high school and college do for rich white ones. More than half of all black men without a high-school diploma go to prison at some time in their lives. Mass incarceration on a scale almost unexampled in human history is a fundamental fact of our country today—perhaps the fundamental fact, as slavery was the fundamental fact of 1850. In truth, there are more black men in the grip of the criminal-justice system—in prison, on probation, or on parole—than were in slavery then. Over all, there are now more people under “correctional supervision” in America—more than six million—than were in the Gulag Archipelago under Stalin at its height. That city of the confined and the controlled, Lockuptown, is now the second largest in the United States.

The accelerating rate of incarceration over the past few decades is just as startling as the number of people jailed: in 1980, there were about two hundred and twenty people incarcerated for every hundred thousand Americans; by 2010, the number had more than tripled, to seven hundred and thirty-one. No other country even approaches that. In the past two decades, the money that states spend on prisons has risen at six times the rate of spending on higher education. Ours is, bottom to top, a “carceral state,” in the flat verdict of Conrad Black, the former conservative press lord and newly minted reformer, who right now finds himself imprisoned in Florida, thereby adding a new twist to an old joke: A conservative is a liberal who’s been mugged; a liberal is a conservative who’s been indicted; and a passionate prison reformer is a conservative who’s in one.

The scale and the brutality of our prisons are the moral scandal of American life. Every day, at least fifty thousand men—a full house at Yankee Stadium—wake in solitary confinement, often in “supermax” prisons or prison wings, in which men are locked in small cells, where they see no one, cannot freely read and write, and are allowed out just once a day for an hour’s solo “exercise.” (Lock yourself in your bathroom and then imagine you have to stay there for the next ten years, and you will have some sense of the experience.) Prison rape is so endemic—more than seventy thousand prisoners are raped each year—that it is routinely held out as a threat, part of the punishment to be expected. The subject is standard fodder for comedy, and an uncoöperative suspect being threatened with rape in prison is now represented, every night on television, as an ordinary and rather lovable bit of policing. The normalization of prison rape—like eighteenth-century japery about watching men struggle as they die on the gallows—will surely strike our descendants as chillingly sadistic, incomprehensible on the part of people who thought themselves civilized. Though we avoid looking directly at prisons, they seep obliquely into our fashions and manners. Wealthy white teen-agers in baggy jeans and laceless shoes and multiple tattoos show, unconsciously, the reality of incarceration that acts as a hidden foundation for the country.

How did we get here? How is it that our civilization, which rejects hanging and flogging and disembowelling, came to believe that caging vast numbers of people for decades is an acceptably humane sanction? There’s a fairly large recent scholarly literature on the history and sociology of crime and punishment, and it tends to trace the American zeal for punishment back to the nineteenth century, apportioning blame in two directions. There’s an essentially Northern explanation, focussing on the inheritance of the notorious Eastern State Penitentiary, in Philadelphia, and its “reformist” tradition; and a Southern explanation, which sees the prison system as essentially a slave plantation continued by other means. Robert Perkinson, the author of the Southern revisionist tract “Texas Tough: The Rise of America’s Prison Empire,” traces two ancestral lines, “from the North, the birthplace of rehabilitative penology, to the South, the fountainhead of subjugationist discipline.” In other words, there’s the scientific taste for reducing men to numbers and the slave owners’ urge to reduce blacks to brutes.

William J. Stuntz, a professor at Harvard Law School who died shortly before his masterwork, “The Collapse of American Criminal Justice,” was published, last fall, is the most forceful advocate for the view that the scandal of our prisons derives from the Enlightenment-era, “procedural” nature of American justice. He runs through the immediate causes of the incarceration epidemic: the growth of post-Rockefeller drug laws, which punished minor drug offenses with major prison time; “zero tolerance” policing, which added to the group; mandatory-sentencing laws, which prevented judges from exercising judgment. But his search for the ultimate cause leads deeper, all the way to the Bill of Rights. In a society where Constitution worship is still a requisite on right and left alike, Stuntz startlingly suggests that the Bill of Rights is a terrible document with which to start a justice system—much inferior to the exactly contemporary French Declaration of the Rights of Man, which Jefferson, he points out, may have helped shape while his protégé Madison was writing ours.

The trouble with the Bill of Rights, he argues, is that it emphasizes process and procedure rather than principles. The Declaration of the Rights of Man says, Be just! The Bill of Rights says, Be fair! Instead of announcing general principles—no one should be accused of something that wasn’t a crime when he did it; cruel punishments are always wrong; the goal of justice is, above all, that justice be done—it talks procedurally. You can’t search someone without a reason; you can’t accuse him without allowing him to see the evidence; and so on. This emphasis, Stuntz thinks, has led to the current mess, where accused criminals get laboriously articulated protection against procedural errors and no protection at all against outrageous and obvious violations of simple justice. You can get off if the cops looked in the wrong car with the wrong warrant when they found your joint, but you have no recourse if owning the joint gets you locked up for life. You may be spared the death penalty if you can show a problem with your appointed defender, but it is much harder if there is merely enormous accumulated evidence that you weren’t guilty in the first place and the jury got it wrong. Even clauses that Americans are taught to revere are, Stuntz maintains, unworthy of reverence: the ban on “cruel and unusual punishment” was designed to protect cruel punishments—flogging and branding—that were not at that time unusual.

The obsession with due process and the cult of brutal prisons, the argument goes, share an essential impersonality. The more professionalized and procedural a system is, the more insulated we become from its real effects on real people. That’s why America is famous both for its process-driven judicial system (“The bastard got off on a technicality,” the cop-show detective fumes) and for the harshness and inhumanity of its prisons. Though all industrialized societies started sending more people to prison and fewer to the gallows in the eighteenth century, it was in Enlightenment-inspired America that the taste for long-term, profoundly depersonalized punishment became most aggravated. The inhumanity of American prisons was as much a theme for Dickens, visiting America in 1842, as the cynicism of American lawyers. His shock when he saw the Eastern State Penitentiary, in Philadelphia—a “model” prison, at the time the most expensive public building ever constructed in the country, where every prisoner was kept in silent, separate confinement—still resonates:

I believe that very few men are capable of estimating the immense amount of torture and agony which this dreadful punishment, prolonged for years, inflicts upon the sufferers. . . . I hold this slow and daily tampering with the mysteries of the brain, to be immeasurably worse than any torture of the body: and because its ghastly signs and tokens are not so palpable to the eye and sense of touch as scars upon the flesh; because its wounds are not upon the surface, and it extorts few cries that human ears can hear; therefore I the more denounce it, as a secret punishment which slumbering humanity is not roused up to stay.

Not roused up to stay—that was the point. Once the procedure ends, the penalty begins, and, as long as the cruelty is routine, our civil responsibility toward the punished is over. We lock men up and forget about their existence. For Dickens, even the corrupt but communal debtors’ prisons of old London were better than this. “Don’t take it personally!”—that remains the slogan above the gate to the American prison Inferno. Nor is this merely a historian’s vision. Conrad Black, at the high end, has a scary and persuasive picture of how his counsel, the judge, and the prosecutors all merrily congratulated each other on their combined professional excellence just before sending him off to the hoosegow for several years. If a millionaire feels that way, imagine how the ordinary culprit must feel.

In place of abstraction, Stuntz argues for the saving grace of humane discretion. Basically, he thinks, we should go into court with an understanding of what a crime is and what justice is like, and then let common sense and compassion and specific circumstance take over. There’s a lovely scene in “The Castle,” the Australian movie about a family fighting eminent-domain eviction, where its hapless lawyer, asked in court to point to the specific part of the Australian constitution that the eviction violates, says desperately, “It’s . . . just the vibe of the thing.” For Stuntz, justice ought to be just the vibe of the thing—not one procedural error caught or one fact worked around. The criminal law should once again be more like the common law, with judges and juries not merely finding fact but making law on the basis of universal principles of fairness, circumstance, and seriousness, and crafting penalties to the exigencies of the crime.

The other argument—the Southern argument—is that this story puts too bright a face on the truth. The reality of American prisons, this argument runs, has nothing to do with the knots of procedural justice or the perversions of Enlightenment-era ideals. Prisons today operate less in the rehabilitative mode of the Northern reformers “than in a retributive mode that has long been practiced and promoted in the South,” Perkinson, an American-studies professor, writes. “American prisons trace their lineage not only back to Pennsylvania penitentiaries but to Texas slave plantations.” White supremacy is the real principle, this thesis holds, and racial domination the real end. In response to the apparent triumphs of the sixties, mass imprisonment became a way of reimposing Jim Crow. Blacks are now incarcerated seven times as often as whites. “The system of mass incarceration works to trap African Americans in a virtual (and literal) cage,” the legal scholar Michelle Alexander writes. Young black men pass quickly from a period of police harassment into a period of “formal control” (i.e., actual imprisonment) and then are doomed for life to a system of “invisible control.” Prevented from voting, legally discriminated against for the rest of their lives, most will cycle back through the prison system. The system, in this view, is not really broken; it is doing what it was designed to do. Alexander’s grim conclusion: “If mass incarceration is considered as a system of social control—specifically, racial control—then the system is a fantastic success.”

Northern impersonality and Southern revenge converge on a common American theme: a growing number of American prisons are now contracted out as for-profit businesses to for-profit companies. The companies are paid by the state, and their profit depends on spending as little as possible on the prisoners and the prisons. It’s hard to imagine any greater disconnect between public good and private profit: the interest of private prisons lies not in the obvious social good of having the minimum necessary number of inmates but in having as many as possible, housed as cheaply as possible. No more chilling document exists in recent American life than the 2005 annual report of the biggest of these firms, the Corrections Corporation of America. Here the company (which spends millions lobbying legislators) is obliged to caution its investors about the risk that somehow, somewhere, someone might turn off the spigot of convicted men:

Our growth is generally dependent upon our ability to obtain new contracts to develop and manage new correctional and detention facilities. . . . The demand for our facilities and services could be adversely affected by the relaxation of enforcement efforts, leniency in conviction and sentencing practices or through the decriminalization of certain activities that are currently proscribed by our criminal laws. For instance, any changes with respect to drugs and controlled substances or illegal immigration could affect the number of persons arrested, convicted, and sentenced, thereby potentially reducing demand for correctional facilities to house them.

Brecht could hardly have imagined such a document: a capitalist enterprise that feeds on the misery of man trying as hard as it can to be sure that nothing is done to decrease that misery.

Yet a spectre haunts all these accounts, North and South, whether process gone mad or penal colony writ large. It is that the epidemic of imprisonment seems to track the dramatic decline in crime over the same period. The more bad guys there are in prison, it appears, the less crime there has been in the streets. The real background to the prison boom, which shows up only sporadically in the prison literature, is the crime wave that preceded and overlapped it.

For those too young to recall the big-city crime wave of the sixties and seventies, it may seem like mere bogeyman history. For those whose entire childhood and adolescence were set against it, it is the crucial trauma in recent American life and explains much else that happened in the same period. It was the condition of the Upper West Side of Manhattan under liberal rule, far more than what had happened to Eastern Europe under socialism, that made neo-con polemics look persuasive. There really was, as Stuntz himself says, a liberal consensus on crime (“Wherever the line is between a merciful justice system and one that abandons all serious effort at crime control, the nation had crossed it”), and it really did have bad effects.

Yet if, in 1980, someone had predicted that by 2012 New York City would have a crime rate so low that violent crime would have largely disappeared as a subject of conversation, he would have seemed not so much hopeful as crazy. Thirty years ago, crime was supposed to be a permanent feature of the city, produced by an alienated underclass of super-predators; now it isn’t. Something good happened to change it, and you might have supposed that the change would be an opportunity for celebration and optimism. Instead, we mostly content ourselves with grudging and sardonic references to the silly side of gentrification, along with a few all-purpose explanations, like broken-window policing. This is a general human truth: things that work interest us less than things that don’t.

So what is the relation between mass incarceration and the decrease in crime? Certainly, in the nineteen-seventies and eighties, many experts became persuaded that there was no way to make bad people better; all you could do was warehouse them, for longer or shorter periods. The best research seemed to show, depressingly, that nothing works—that rehabilitation was a ruse. Then, in 1983, inmates at the maximum-security federal prison in Marion, Illinois, murdered two guards. Inmates had been (very occasionally) killing guards for a long time, but the timing of the murders, and the fact that they took place in a climate already prepared to believe that even ordinary humanity was wasted on the criminal classes, meant that the entire prison was put on permanent lockdown. A century and a half after absolute solitary first appeared in American prisons, it was reintroduced. Those terrible numbers began to grow.

And then, a decade later, crime started falling: across the country by a standard measure of about forty per cent; in New York City by as much as eighty per cent. By 2010, the crime rate in New York had seen its greatest decline since the Second World War; in 2002, there were fewer murders in Manhattan than there had been in any year since 1900. In social science, a cause sought is usually a muddle found; in life as we experience it, a crisis resolved is causality established. If a pill cures a headache, we do not ask too often if the headache might have gone away by itself.

All this ought to make the publication of Franklin E. Zimring’s new book, “The City That Became Safe,” a very big event. Zimring, a criminologist at Berkeley Law, has spent years crunching the numbers of what happened in New York in the context of what happened in the rest of America. One thing he teaches us is how little we know. The forty per cent drop across the continent—indeed, there was a decline throughout the Western world— took place for reasons that are as mysterious in suburban Ottawa as they are in the South Bronx. Zimring shows that the usual explanations—including demographic shifts—simply can’t account for what must be accounted for. This makes the international decline look slightly eerie: blackbirds drop from the sky, plagues slacken and end, and there seems no absolute reason that societies leap from one state to another over time. Trends and fashions and fads and pure contingencies happen in other parts of our social existence; it may be that there are fashions and cycles in criminal behavior, too, for reasons that are just as arbitrary.

But the additional forty per cent drop in crime that seems peculiar to New York finally succumbs to Zimring’s analysis. The change didn’t come from resolving the deep pathologies that the right fixated on—from jailing super predators, driving down the number of unwed mothers, altering welfare culture. Nor were there cures for the underlying causes pointed to by the left: injustice, discrimination, poverty. Nor were there any “Presto!” effects arising from secret patterns of increased abortions or the like. The city didn’t get much richer; it didn’t get much poorer. There was no significant change in the ethnic makeup or the average wealth or educational levels of New Yorkers as violent crime more or less vanished. “Broken windows” or “turnstile jumping” policing, that is, cracking down on small visible offenses in order to create an atmosphere that refused to license crime, seems to have had a negligible effect; there was, Zimring writes, a great difference between the slogans and the substance of the time. (Arrests for “visible” nonviolent crime—e.g., street prostitution and public gambling—mostly went down through the period.)

Instead, small acts of social engineering, designed simply to stop crimes from happening, helped stop crime. In the nineties, the N.Y.P.D. began to control crime not by fighting minor crimes in safe places but by putting lots of cops in places where lots of crimes happened—“hot-spot policing.” The cops also began an aggressive, controversial program of “stop and frisk”—“designed to catch the sharks, not the dolphins,” as Jack Maple, one of its originators, described it—that involved what’s called pejoratively “profiling.” This was not so much racial, since in any given neighborhood all the suspects were likely to be of the same race or color, as social, involving the thousand small clues that policemen recognized already. Minority communities, Zimring emphasizes, paid a disproportionate price in kids stopped and frisked, and detained, but they also earned a disproportionate gain in crime reduced. “The poor pay more and get more” is Zimring’s way of putting it. He believes that a “light” program of stop-and-frisk could be less alienating and just as effective, and that by bringing down urban crime stop-and-frisk had the net effect of greatly reducing the number of poor minority kids in prison for long stretches.

Zimring insists, plausibly, that he is offering a radical and optimistic rewriting of theories of what crime is and where criminals are, not least because it disconnects crime and minorities. “In 1961, twenty six percent of New York City’s population was minority African American or Hispanic. Now, half of New York’s population is—and what that does in an enormously hopeful way is to destroy the rude assumptions of supply side criminology,” he says. By “supply side criminology,” he means the conservative theory of crime that claimed that social circumstances produced a certain net amount of crime waiting to be expressed; if you stopped it here, it broke out there. The only way to stop crime was to lock up all the potential criminals. In truth, criminal activity seems like most other human choices—a question of contingent occasions and opportunity. Crime is not the consequence of a set number of criminals; criminals are the consequence of a set number of opportunities to commit crimes. Close down the open drug market in Washington Square, and it does not automatically migrate to Tompkins Square Park. It just stops, or the dealers go indoors, where dealing goes on but violent crime does not.

And, in a virtuous cycle, the decreased prevalence of crime fuels a decrease in the prevalence of crime. When your friends are no longer doing street robberies, you’re less likely to do them. Zimring said, in a recent interview, “Remember, nobody ever made a living mugging. There’s no minimum wage in violent crime.” In a sense, he argues, it’s recreational, part of a life style: “Crime is a routine behavior; it’s a thing people do when they get used to doing it.” And therein lies its essential fragility. Crime ends as a result of “cyclical forces operating on situational and contingent things rather than from finding deeply motivated essential linkages.” Conservatives don’t like this view because it shows that being tough doesn’t help; liberals don’t like it because apparently being nice doesn’t help, either. Curbing crime does not depend on reversing social pathologies or alleviating social grievances; it depends on erecting small, annoying barriers to entry.

One fact stands out. While the rest of the country, over the same twenty-year period, saw the growth in incarceration that led to our current astonishing numbers, New York, despite the Rockefeller drug laws, saw a marked decrease in its number of inmates. “New York City, in the midst of a dramatic reduction in crime, is locking up a much smaller number of people, and particularly of young people, than it was at the height of the crime wave,” Zimring observes. Whatever happened to make street crime fall, it had nothing to do with putting more men in prison. The logic is self-evident if we just transfer it to the realm of white-collar crime: we easily accept that there is no net sum of white-collar crime waiting to happen, no inscrutable generation of super-predators produced by Dewar’s-guzzling dads and scaly M.B.A. profs; if you stop an embezzlement scheme here on Third Avenue, another doesn’t naturally start in the next office building. White-collar crime happens through an intersection of pathology and opportunity; getting the S.E.C. busy ending the opportunity is a good way to limit the range of the pathology.

Social trends deeper and less visible to us may appear as future historians analyze what went on. Something other than policing may explain things—just as the coming of cheap credit cards and state lotteries probably did as much to weaken the Mafia’s Five Families in New York, who had depended on loan sharking and numbers running, as the F.B.I. could. It is at least possible, for instance, that the coming of the mobile phone helped drive drug dealing indoors, in ways that helped drive down crime. It may be that the real value of hot spot and stop-and-frisk was that it provided a single game plan that the police believed in; as military history reveals, a bad plan is often better than no plan, especially if the people on the other side think it’s a good plan. But one thing is sure: social epidemics, of crime or of punishment, can be cured more quickly than we might hope with simpler and more superficial mechanisms than we imagine. Throwing a Band-Aid over a bad wound is actually a decent strategy, if the Band-Aid helps the wound to heal itself.

Which leads, further, to one piece of radical common sense: since prison plays at best a small role in stopping even violent crime, very few people, rich or poor, should be in prison for a nonviolent crime. Neither the streets nor the society is made safer by having marijuana users or peddlers locked up, let alone with the horrific sentences now dispensed so easily. For that matter, no social good is served by having the embezzler or the Ponzi schemer locked in a cage for the rest of his life, rather than having him bankrupt and doing community service in the South Bronx for the next decade or two. Would we actually have more fraud and looting of shareholder value if the perpetrators knew that they would lose their bank accounts and their reputation, and have to do community service seven days a week for five years? It seems likely that anyone for whom those sanctions aren’t sufficient is someone for whom no sanctions are ever going to be sufficient. Zimring’s research shows clearly that, if crime drops on the street, criminals coming out of prison stop committing crimes. What matters is the incidence of crime in the world, and the continuity of a culture of crime, not some “lesson learned” in prison.

At the same time, the ugly side of stop-and-frisk can be alleviated. To catch sharks and not dolphins, Zimring’s work suggests, we need to adjust the size of the holes in the nets—to make crimes that are the occasion for stop-and-frisks real crimes, not crimes like marijuana possession. When the New York City police stopped and frisked kids, the main goal was not to jail them for having pot but to get their fingerprints, so that they could be identified if they committed a more serious crime. But all over America the opposite happens: marijuana possession becomes the serious crime. The cost is so enormous, though, in lives ruined and money spent, that the obvious thing to do is not to enforce the law less but to change it now. Dr. Johnson said once that manners make law, and that when manners alter, the law must, too. It’s obvious that marijuana is now an almost universally accepted drug in America: it is not only used casually (which has been true for decades) but also talked about casually on television and in the movies (which has not). One need only watch any stoner movie to see that the perceived risks of smoking dope are not that you’ll get arrested but that you’ll get in trouble with a rival frat or look like an idiot to women. The decriminalization of marijuana would help end the epidemic of imprisonment.

The rate of incarceration in most other rich, free countries, whatever the differences in their histories, is remarkably steady. In countries with Napoleonic justice or common law or some mixture of the two, in countries with adversarial systems and in those with magisterial ones, whether the country once had brutal plantation-style penal colonies, as France did, or was once itself a brutal plantation-style penal colony, like Australia, the natural rate of incarceration seems to hover right around a hundred men per hundred thousand people. (That doesn’t mean it doesn’t get lower in rich, homogeneous countries—just that it never gets much higher in countries otherwise like our own.) It seems that one man in every thousand once in a while does a truly bad thing. All other things being equal, the point of a justice system should be to identify that thousandth guy, find a way to keep him from harming other people, and give everyone else a break.

Epidemics seldom end with miracle cures. Most of the time in the history of medicine, the best way to end disease was to build a better sewer and get people to wash their hands. “Merely chipping away at the problem around the edges” is usually the very best thing to do with a problem; keep chipping away patiently and, eventually, you get to its heart. To read the literature on crime before it dropped is to see the same kind of dystopian despair we find in the new literature of punishment: we’d have to end poverty, or eradicate the ghettos, or declare war on the broken family, or the like, in order to end the crime wave. The truth is, a series of small actions and events ended up eliminating a problem that seemed to hang over everything. There was no miracle cure, just the intercession of a thousand smaller sanities. Ending sentencing for drug misdemeanors, decriminalizing marijuana, leaving judges free to use common sense (and, where possible, getting judges who are judges rather than politicians)—many small acts are possible that will help end the epidemic of imprisonment as they helped end the plague of crime.

“Oh, I have taken too little care of this!” King Lear cries out on the heath in his moment of vision. “Take physic, pomp; expose thyself to feel what wretches feel.” “This” changes; in Shakespeare’s time, it was flat-out peasant poverty that starved some and drove others as mad as poor Tom. In Dickens’s and Hugo’s time, it was the industrial revolution that drove kids to mines. But every society has a poor storm that wretches suffer in, and the attitude is always the same: either that the wretches, already dehumanized by their suffering, deserve no pity or that the oppressed, overwhelmed by injustice, will have to wait for a better world. At every moment, the injustice seems inseparable from the community’s life, and in every case the arguments for keeping the system in place were that you would have to revolutionize the entire social order to change it—which then became the argument for revolutionizing the entire social order. In every case, humanity and common sense made the insoluble problem just get up and go away. Prisons are our this. We need take more care.

Source: The New Yorker
Author: Adam Gopnik

Measuring Peace in the Media covers over 160,000 news items from 31 news and current affairs programs that air on four continents. Each of the news networks covered on average 70 countries. The TV program with the broadest coverage was the BBC World Service which covered 119 countries.

The report explores the media coverage, or lack of coverage, of peace and conflict with a special emphasis on news themes that may help to create stable, peaceful societies. It is evident from the research that the structures that create peace are not well covered in the least peaceful countries.

Download the report: Measuring Peace in the Media 2011 Report

Key findings:

• The only two networks which were either 50% accurate or more were SABC News @ One and ABC World News with 56% and 50% accuracy, respectively.

• War, conflict and violence are the most widely covered events.

• The number violence reports aligned in direct proportion to the actual level of violence on the country being reported.

• The Arab Spring countries saw a rise in the number of reports, especially on topics such as ‘the functioning of government’ as well as war and violence.

• Based on the Structures of Peace taxonomy, critical topics such as the ‘Distribution of Resources’ received almost no coverage.

• On average, the number of negative reports far exceeds news reports which are positive in tone.

• Countries which have most declined in peacefulness received approximately thirteen times the level of coverage than countries which have most improved in peacefulness.

• Consistent with the data and observations, relatively peaceful countries tend to receive the majority of their international coverage due to exceptional violence or disaster related news stories.

Launch of Measuring Peace in the Media at Davos
Measuring Peace in the Media 2011 was launched a Davos 2012. Speakers at the event included: Ibrahim Negm, senior advisor to the Grand Mufti, Salil Shetty, Secretary-General of Amnesty International, the CEO of Media Tenor Roland Schatz and Steve Killelea, founder of the Institute for Economics and Peace.

The approach was adopted in a very different world when Europe was full of expansive and optimistic vision. The Euro and the big enlargement had been decided on. Economies were growing. It was less than three months before 9/11, nearly two years before the invasion of Iraq, just over seven years before Lehman Brothers collapsed, triggering chaos in the financial markets and the biggest financial crisis and global recession ever.

In 2001 the EU girded itself to build peace far beyond its borders. In 2011 it couldn’t even manage to complete a ten-year review of what it has done, though an effort to do so was initiated by the Hungarian EU Presidency at the start of the year.

There has been an evaluation by an independent consortium commissioned by the EC, focusing on activities supported by EC money. It finds that the money has been well spent overall with some good impact and nevertheless some things that could be done better, the sort of balanced conclusion one expects from a review like this.

But perhaps, given the situation Europe is in, it is the right time to go a little further, taking a fresh look rather than just evaluating. And that means looking not just at peacebuilding and conflict prevention but a little deeper.

Policies are often founded on assumptions that are not just unquestioned but apparently unquestionable. They express a worldview. When policies run into the sand, unless the worldview changes, those responsible for implementation are told to refuel, rev up and drive harder. Such founding assumptions are part of the anthropology of policy and politics and they need to be brought out into the light by looking at unstated beliefs, unwritten rules, silent norms, the way things are done – rather than just by looking at policy positions, statements, decisions and actions.

Three founding assumptions of peacebuilding – and, indeed, of international development assistance – recommend themselves for a fresh look in these times:

• It’s for others;
• It comes from benevolent power;
• It brings its beneficiaries into a development trajectory that, roughly speaking, is the same as ours.

Taking a look at these underpinnings of peacebuilding does not mean that one is setting out to reject the whole edifice. Far from it in the case of this article. But it does entail an acknowledgement that some self-reflection could be most valuable.

It’s for others

The EU has always thought of peacebuilding as something for ‘out there.’ The grand enterprise of European unity was itself from the outset a project of building peace and it has successfully created and spread a zone of peace and stability. But this was an inherent attribute of the EU, a spillover effect from its core functions. In Europe, it hasn’t needed to do much that is particularly focused on building peace; it just had to go on trading and regulating, steadily breaking down the barriers, and peacefulness resulted.

Conflict prevention and peacebuilding were conceived as an extension of the EU enterprise to other regions that would only slowly (like the western Balkans) join the EU and others that never would. This was about a wealthy, stable and growing region offering others the benefits of its own success and simultaneously acting self-interestedly to protect that success from insecurity and instability in the wider global arena.

I don’t question that underlying motive. But I look around Europe and I ask myself if peacebuilding is really only relevant for ‘out there.’

No – us too

Everywhere we see signs of disaffection and a leaning to violence. From last summer’s riots in England to anti-austerity riots in Greece and the thin patina that many people tell me stands between order and a similarly angry chaos in Ireland; from the youth movements in Spain to the simmering anger in Italy; to the country proclaimed by opinion surveys to be happiest in the world – Denmark, whose capital has been scarred by school-burning and gang warfare in the last couple of years; and from Breivik’s monstrous massacre on the island of Utoya,to immigrants murdered by right-wing extremists in Germany, to the surging anger the far right is feeding on.

These are different in form, in politics, in their social basis. Listing a few in the same paragraph does not imply they can be equated. But consider the state of the continent that they reflect.

Of course, not all are mass actions and one was the action of a seemingly psychotic loner. But none of these actions, regardless of the number involved – none is entirely divorced from a social and political background of disaffection, a sense of betrayal and exclusion, and an anger that is not far from violence. They occur in a political and social landscape where people’s sense of social belonging and engagement in the common good is challenged as never before. Job opportunities and the belief in a better future diminish before our eyes. Politics is professionalized and in most countries is ever more distant from growing segments of the population, especially among the poor and among the young.

So – no, peacebuilding is not just for others. It can be brought home. The kind of approaches that offer some degree of hope of stability and forward movement out of repetitive cycles of violent conflict in other countries are worth looking at here as well.

The benevolence of power

Closely related to the ‘out there’ assumption, the world the EU saw a decade ago was one in which the OECD countries – developed capitalist economies and democratic polities – had the wealth and power and the rest of the world did not. It’s the world of Francis Fukuyama’s ‘end of history’ in which the rich North will henceforth have no grounds for internal conflict but outside of that zone is a world of turmoil where, from time to time, the rich North may need to intervene.

The EU version of this was considerably more subtle and far-sighted because the intervention would be long-term, multi-faceted, and involving as little force as possible. But the starting points were the same, albeit largely implicit.

Thus it went without saying that what was willed would be done and what was done would be effective. It might take time to get it right, there could be errors along the way, it would be necessary to be self-critical, but when power went to work on weakness – well, the power would work.

Er, what happened to the power?

Except, of course, it’s not like that. That vision of the world doesn’t coincide with reality at ground level and in fact it didn’t ten years ago either. There have long been plenty of actors around, powerful in their arenas, whom neither the EU nor the US could bend to their will, whether with aid, bribery or force. And some of those actors are powerful in very large arenas.

About five or six years ago, in a discussion of the longer range and broader questions of peacebuilding and development with, for example, officials at the EC, DFID or SIDA, it would often be remarked late on in the meeting that there was a topic we hadn’t quite discussed, an elephant in the room. Today, China is not ignored. During the world recession it has continued to grow. Its clout as fastest growing major economy and the holder of massive amounts of American debt is undoubted. The December 2011 grand strategy for the Eurozone bail-out included asking China to stump up some funds. The markets stabilised at this, then China raised a quizzical eyebrow and the markets resumed their normal haywire ways.

So, no, peacebuilding and development can no longer be thought of in terms of what was always an over-simplified polarisation between the powerful stability of the giver and the weak turbulence of the beneficiary. It was always wrong to see the world that way; now it’s impossible.

The development pathway

With our economies stagnant, joblessness rising, growth next to invisible, politicians impotent and politics alienating, plenty of people are asking what’s so attractive about a development trajectory that leads to where we are. And that’s before we even begin to think about environmental sustainability, climate change and the pressures of demography.

There is a well-established literature criticising development aid and, more recently, peacebuilding as an export drive for a normative model of economics or politics or both. The arguments are a bit shop worn these days because they tend to overdo the role of development aid in exporting norms and over-simplify the uniformity of social and political models among OECD countries. But there are worthwhile insights there still and a very large part of the policy discussion among European politicians and development NGOs unfolds without much reference to them. Instead, that discourse has got itself tied up in predominantly two things – money and measurable targets.

The thing about money and targets is that they guide you towards working out how to do more of the same only better. The next big issue for international development discourse is the new set of targets to replace the Millennium Development Goals when their target date comes round in 2015. Current projections indicate that by 2015 not a single MDG will be met in any conflict-affected and unstable country. That is not something that better targets and more money will fix. It is something that should precipitate a rethink. And part of that rethink ought to be about the trajectory.

To which destination

In this respect, peacebuilding is quite different, perhaps because it is newer. It is worth spending time with the questions, what kinds of countries are stable and why? Both the World Bank’s World Development Report 2011 and the independent Global Peace Index reflect this process of inquiry and analysis.

The more the development discussion keeps narrowly to targets and money, the more trouble it has with the issue of destination. With no destination, there is no direction for development assistance, there is only good works – a humanitarianism chronologically extended beyond the humanitarian emergency, doing good but not necessarily adding up to development.

That is the challenge that the peacebuilding discussion is taking on by attempting to identify the features of society that shape its prospects for peace – the peace factors. And here it turns out that, of course, there are features of relatively peaceful societies – including our own – that recur in a variety of different forms and guises. These are not only the principles of equality, however inadequately respected, but the deep foundations of the institutions that are the basis of how are societies run. (See the ground-breaking work on institutions, social violence and development of D. C. North, J. J. Wallis & B. R. Weingast, Violence and social orders: A conceptual framework for interpreting recorded human history, 2009.)

So, perhaps surprisingly, yes, warts and all, recessions and riots notwithstanding, there are things about western societies that make them attractive as development destinations. On the other hand, the destination looks different from country to country – sometimes slightly, sometimes significantly. And on the third hand, no, arriving at these destinations is not going to be achieved through recalibrating targets and spending more money on them.

Power and results

The first place to look for some practical conclusions from this quick look at some of the unstated assumptions underlying peacebuilding is not in the kind of actions that are undertaken. It is initially in the way they are understood and discussed. For example, the results agenda that now predominates in many governments’ overseas aid policies is predicated on an untenable assumption about power and effectiveness and has side-stepped thinking properly about the development destination. It could go badly wrong, especially as it gets transferred into the peacebuilding sector, by emphasising short-term results at the expense of understanding that these results are but small steps on a long journey. But if the results agenda can be contextualised by greater realism about power and a clearer view of destination, it could be very helpful. It will mean a downwards adjustment in the importance of individual results, which may sound bad to a politician, and greater attention to cumulative impact. The outcome could offer a useful map and compass for development aid and peacebuilding.

Destinations and the outsider

Of course, this presupposes a better discussion of destination. Here the problem for peacebuilding is the unwillingness of the much larger, better established development sector to change. Too often the international development community – NGOs, donors, international agencies – collude to present the key issues as essentially technical. But they aren’t and everybody knows they aren’t. This goes along with an unhelpful confusion between development and development aid – the latter is a small part of the former. Everybody knows it but only recently has it started to be respectable to say so. If there could be more honest and precise discussions about destination, it could be better understood that, so far as we know up till now, most peaceful societies have some features in common, which get to be arranged in very different ways by the ins and outs of culture and history. If a national political discussion identifies which way to go, the question then is how can outsiders help? There’s politics everywhere in this process, including in judging whether the national political discussion is a genuine one. But development and peacebuilding are political and it doesn’t help to duck it.

And then there’s the perplexing issue of the outsider – the assumption that peacebuilding is for others out there. Extending the mandate of peacebuilding to include the problems within the EU would bring a new range of approaches to bear on familiar problems. It’s at least an option worth exploring. Also of benefit, it would change the way in which the enterprise of peacebuilding is presented, discussed and operationalized. It is not an issue that is dead, even in Scandinavian social democracies. Instead of treading dangerously close to presenting peace as a good to be brought from here to there – which is nonsense – it would allow us all to get on even terms, sharing with partners in the still vital task of building a more peaceful and secure world.

Source: Open Democracy
Author: Dan Smith has been the Secretary General of International Alert since 2003.

One of the ten contributors to the report, released by the non-profit research organization, Institute for Economics and Peace, was Egypt’s Grand Mufti Ali Gomaa.

Uprisings across the Middle East influenced the sharp drop in the GPI of nations in the region, especially Bahrain, Libya and Egypt. Bahrain fell 47 spots on the list to 123 and Libya fell 83 spots to 143 — putting it in the bottom 10 countries on the list.

On a global scale, Egypt scored in the “medium” category alongside China, the United State of America, Brazil and Indonesia.

The Institute for Economics and Peace notes in the report, “Peaceful environments generally create competitive business environments, societies with lower levels of corruption and stronger social cohesion.”

The study also analyzed international news reports and how often reports of violence made the global stage. The study found violence in Egypt was most over reported (compared to the GPI score).

On average over half of international news reports on Arab Spring countries were only covering violence. The “international news tone” while reporting on Egypt was negative in about 45 percent of stories, neutral about 43 percent of reports and positive only about 12 percent of the time.

In regards to international news coverage on the Arab Spring, the report notes that Nile News presented only 11 reports (below average) on the political movements outside of Egypt.

Grand Mufti Ali Gomaa concluded the report with an analysis titled “Egyptian Revolution, One year later, challenges and prospects.”

Gomaa addressed the Islamist’s sweeping win in parliament, saying the rise of these parties can be attributed to a number of factors “not least of which is the weakened state of serious political discourse, and as a result any viable political opposition, under the Mubarak regime.

“As a result, voters were not left with many options that they felt were respectful of their Islamic heritage and their religious sympathies,” Gomaa wrote.

Gomaa also said these parties, and their members, shouldn’t be grouped together since they represent different positions on main issues such as “the economy, minority rights, and the precise role of religion in the public sphere.

“Though I may often disagree with the particulars of their stances, their success should be no cause for serious alarm in the Western world. Indeed, we are optimistic that for the most part, flexibility will take precedence in their political programs over doctrinaire readings of ideology,” he wrote.

As the highest official of religious law in Egypt, he said, “The Islamic faith teaches us that optimism and activism are constituent features of what it means to live a good life —constantly striving to do good works, with a strong faith that those good works will contribute towards the wellbeing on one’s community.”

Although Egypt’s Global Peace index score dropped significantly, it is still ranked in the upper half of the list.

Source: Daily News Egypt

Egyptian Revolution Part 1: “The Flood” | English version from Thomson Reuters Foundation on Vimeo.

The documentary aims to capture the main events through personal experience of one Egyptian woman and her family. The three part series includes: ‘The Flood’, ‘The Clash’ and ‘The Fall’.

Initiated by the Peres Center for Peace, an Israeli institution, and Palestinian partners, the YaLa Young Leaders Facebook page has attracted more than 40,000 supporters since it was launched last summer. Participants in the online conversations have included Egyptians, Palestinians, Israelis, as well as people from Libya, Tunisia, Morocco, Algeria. Lebanon, Saudi Arabia, Iraq, Kuwait and the United Arab Emirates, according to organizers.

The conference agenda includes guidelines for resolving the Israeli-Palestinian conflict and proposals for online projects, including technological incubators, gaming development and music studios, as well as a planned Young Leaders Academy with Internet courses in such fields as government, economics and business.

The Facebook site was the brainchild of Uri Savir, a former chief Israeli peace negotiator who is president of the Peres Center. “If we leave peace to the current leaderships, we will go nowhere,” he said. “We have to give an opportunity to a much younger generation on social networks. I want to translate Tahrir Square, the social process (of the Arab Spring) into a peace process.”

Ahmed Essam, a 22-year-old Egyptian, said by telephone that he had joined the YaLa community (yala means “let’s go in Arabic) because he wanted “to discover the Israeli people, to talk to them and know their ideas and opinions.” He said that he and thousands of other Egyptian participants were evidence that many in Egypt do not share the anti-Israeli sentiment that erupted in the storming of the Israeli embassy in Cairo by protesters in September.

Several Israeli and Palestinian participants have met face-to-face in the West Bank city of Ramallah and on a joint trip to Spain.

“We discovered that basically we weren’t so different, and that as students we were going through the same stress of papers and exams,” said Naama Shpak, 26, an Israeli who graduated last summer. “They knew that I had served in the army, but that didn’t prevent us from becoming friends and having a conversation.”

Hamze Awawde, 22, a student at Bir Zeit University in the West Bank, said he had been criticized by Palestinians opposed to contacts with Israelis. “I tell them that without going this way, we will not have a better future,” he said.

Source: Washington Post Blog Post

Violence is disproportionately concentrated in communities characterized by high unemployment rates with no business opportunities, while simultaneously, hindering economic revitalization efforts, development, and new business growth. As with weeds in the garden, violence stifles new growth; for opportunity to take root, violence must be addressed. CeaseFire has long argued that to make progress in a conflict-ridden community or country requires that the violence be addressed first.

The Institute for Economics & Peace (IEP), a think-tank dedicated to exploring the intersections between business, economics and peace has been demonstrating the value of peace to the global economy since 2007. As they state on their website:

“Economic development, business and peace are interlinked. There is little doubt that peace creates more economic benefits to a society than violence or war. Peace is conducive to business and areas of minimal violence are attractive to business investors. At the same time, business can play a decisive role in building and strengthening global peace through job and wealth creation.”

IEP produces the annual Global Peace Index gauging ongoing domestic conflict in the United States, as well as international conflict. Taking numerous factors into consideration IEP looks at the safety and security in society, as well as the militarization in 153 countries. The 2011 findings indicate that if the world had been 25 percent more peaceful in the past year that the global economy would have reaped a US$2 trillion economic benefit.

IEP is the brainchild of Steve Killelea, an Australian IT entrepreneur, who sees the “Peace Industry” as essential to our survival as a species. Killelea isn’t an alarmist (which may make his concerns all the more alarming), but a pragmatic visionary. He not only has the perceptive forethought to see the inter-relations between economic, ecological, and human forces at work on a global scale, but as the largest individual donor to overseas aid in Australia to invest in practical solutions that can reverse these trends.

CeaseFire has followed IEP’s work for several years now. While the 2011 research indicates the world is less peaceful for the third straight year, IEP’s promote the economic as well as humanitarian importance of investing in peace should itself inspire hope.

Rwanda, which suffered a brutal genocide in 1994, is the only Sub-Saharan African country on track with its Millennium Development Goal to halve the proportion of people lacking in water and sanitation services by 2015. In Liberia, plagued by civil wars, the Nobel Prize winning President Ellen Johnson Sirleaf, an international Water and Sanitation Ambassador used her first speech following her re-election last year to address the importance of improving these services.

Rwanda and Liberia are showing that providing water, improved hygiene and sanitation has the potential to transform lives, reduce illness and ill health, and help rebuild and drive forward economies. Support – both from foreign governments including the UK, and from WaterAid and other NGOs – to provide these essential services represents a common sense low risk investment that makes a huge difference to developing countries.

As we said in a recent report submitted to the International Development Committee, “WaterAid believes that ensuring the provision of basic services – health, education, water and sanitation – is self-evidently a public good but also underpins the legitimacy and stability of nation states.”

In supporting the development of these services in developing communities, nation building occurs and supporters of this work will provide a truly enduring legacy.

In recognition of this, I’m pleased to see that the UK Department for International Development (DFID) is refocusing more of its resources on supporting fragile and post conflict states.

Countries with a history of violence are more likely to fall back into conflict and instability. DFID believes that if it supports and helps these countries to stay peaceful and stable, the costs both for the countries themselves and donors will be far smaller than having to deal with the consequences of a new conflict.

WaterAid provided evidence to the UK House of Commons International Development Committee (IDC) report, on this change in the UK’s aid policy, entitled Working Effectively in Fragile and Conflict-Affected States: DRC and Rwanda. While broadly supportive and welcoming of the new DFID policy it raised the issue of ensuring that UK money is not lost to fraud and corruption, something that in particular the Secretary of State for International Development, Andrew Mitchell MP, is rightly focused on.

WaterAid’s written evidence to the IDC enquiry, called on our experience of working in Rwanda as well as other fragile and post-conflict states such as Liberia and Sierra Leone. In particular we noted four strategies that we felt are important :

build on the strengths of fragile states–which are not necessarily fragile in all areas;
provide leadership with examples of the transition to development in other previously fragile states;
bring together the ministries responsible for water and sanitation services and those managing finance, planning and local government; and promote better links between the water and sanitation services sector and other country infrastructure systems to develop capacity.
Rwanda and Liberia – which UK aid has helped to stabilise and transform following emergence from conflict – are leading the field in bringing basic services like water and sanitation to their people and are virtually unrecognisable from their recent bitter pasts. Both countries have made an important start can serve as important examples to other countries about how development can foster both peace and progress.

Author: Barbara Frost

Source: Huffington Post