On Monday, the White House Council of Economic Advisers (CEA) released a report examining the long-term decline in the share of prime-age men (aged 25 to 54) who are either working or actively looking for work. What economists call the labor force participation rate for this population decreased from 98 percent in 1954 to 88 percent today, the second largest decrease among OECD countries. This trend has raised concerns not only for its impact on economic growth, but also because it seems to track an increase in mortality over that time, particularly among white males, as economists Anne Case and Angus Deaton have found.

The CEA report documents a number of possible explanations for this trend, including increasing rates of women in the workforce, rising disability insurance claims, falling demand for less-skilled workers, and barriers to employment for those with criminal records.

The report’s national analysis alone, however, obscures tremendous variation across the United States in employment among this critical group.

According to data from the Census Bureau’s American Community Survey, in 2014, 81 percent of prime-age men nationwide were employed (this statistic differs from the labor force participation rate in that it omits those who are looking for, but not in, work). Yet among the nation’s 374 metropolitan areas for which data are available, that rate ranged from over 93 percent in the oil boomtown of Midland, TX, to just over 50 percent in Kings County in California’s Central Valley.

There are clear regional patterns to this important statistic. Many of the metro areas with the highest employment rates for prime-age men are smaller places located in the middle of the country, from the Upper Midwest, to energy-rich areas in Texas and the Plains states, to the Intermountain West. In several large, economically dynamic metro areas such as Denver, Houston, Minneapolis, San Jose, and Washington, D.C., rates of work among prime-age men are also very high.

Of much greater concern is the large number of metropolitan regions with very low rates of work among prime-age men. These include many small former industrial centers in states like Michigan, Indiana, and Ohio; areas of West Virginia and Louisiana that rely on declining-employment industries like mining; and long-struggling agricultural economies in Arkansas, Texas, and inland California.

These patterns echo findings from the CEA report that falling demand for labor is an important part of the long-term decline in prime-age male employment. In many places where a high school diploma alone once provided the gateway to a middle-class job, nearly one-third of men in this age group are out of work. This is also evident in the local relationship between educational attainment and work—where educational attainment rates are higher among prime-age men, members of that group are more likely to be employed. A 10-percentage point difference in employment rates separates the most highly-educated quarter of metro areas from the least highly-educated quarter.

Beyond education, size seems to matter, too. Large metro areas exhibit higher rates of work among prime-age men than small metro areas. Across the 100 largest U.S. metro areas, 83.2 percent of prime-age males are employed, compared to 79.8 percent in the smaller 274 metro areas. This relationship partly reflects that men in large metro areas have higher rates of educational attainment than those in small metro areas. Yet even men who have no more than a high-school diploma work at higher rates in large metro areas (64 percent) than similarly educated men in smaller metro areas (62 percent). Larger regional economies with greater economic diversity may stimulate stronger demand for workers at lower skill levels.

Several of the policies that the CEA report recommends to improve prime-age male labor force participation, such as bolstering investment in public infrastructure, reforming unemployment insurance, and boosting educational attainment could help boost rates of work in lagging U.S. metro areas. However, none directly addresses the fact that problems in male employment disproportionately affect small and often economically isolated U.S. regions. This evidence suggests that policies to help dislocated workers relocate to larger, more economically dynamic metro areas—particularly by improving the supply of affordable housing in those regions—should be part of a comprehensive strategy to help reverse the troubling long-term decline in men’s work.

      

In a recent analysis, I highlighted how employment and disconnection among young people vary by age, race, and place. In this podcast, I dig deeper into the data on the Washington, D.C. region. Although the area generally performs well on employment measures, not all young people are faring equally well.

Listen to the full podcast segment here: 

       

We can all breathe a big sigh of relief – the job market does not appear to be dramatically slowing.

After a very weak jobs report for the month of May – when only 11,000 jobs were created – the employment numbers bounced back strongly in June, with 287,000 payroll jobs created this month.

This represents the strongest monthly rate of new job creation this year, and is well above economist expectations of about 170,000 jobs created. The return of Verizon workers to their jobs after a strike last month accounted for only about 35,000 of these jobs. Employment growth over the past 3 months now averages 147,000 – a bit below last year’s rate but quite good in a labor market where there is now less slack than before.

Job growth was strong in a range of sectors, including leisure and hospitality, health care and information technology. Growth was also notable in professional and business services, retail trade and finance. Even manufacturing showed a small uptick in employment (of 14,000), after having fallen in previous months (due to the rising value of the dollar and economic slowdowns overseas). But construction jobs this month were flat and mining employment fell again, but only slightly.

On the household side of the ledger, unemployment edged up a bit, from 4.7 to 4.9 percent. But much of this was due to a small bounce back in the labor force participation rate, which had dipped in the previous two months. Other concerns, such as rising part-time employment among those preferring full-time work, were also eased as such employment declined this month.

If there was any disappointment in the report, it was in wage growth. Hourly wages rose by just 2 cents this month, or about 1 percent on an annualized basis. Wage growth had been stronger in the two previous months, suggesting that some labor markets were perhaps tightening up. Over the past year, wage growth has averaged 2.6 percent – above the inflation rate and a modest improvement over previous years in which we were slowly recovering from the Great Recession.

Overall, the June jobs report should ease concerns of a coming economic slowdown, which grew stronger after the “Brexit” vote in Britain. Indeed, this report restores the view that prevailed a few months before, of a slowly but steadily improving labor market.

       

June’s jobs gains, released this morning, show that 287,000 new jobs were added in June, an impressive rebound after only 11,000 new jobs were added in May (revised down from from 38,000 at the time of the release).

This year’s monthly job gains and losses can indicate how the economy is doing once they are corrected to account for the pattern we already expect in a process called seasonal adjustment. The approach for this seasonal adjustment that is presently used by the Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS) puts very heavy weight on the current and last two years of data in assessing what are the typical patterns for each month.

In my paper “Unseasonal Seasonals?” I argue that a longer window should be used to estimate seasonal effects. I found that using a different seasonal filter, known as the 3x9 filter, produces better results and more accurate forecasts by emphasizing more years of data. The 3x9 filter spreads weight over the most recent six years in estimating seasonal patterns, which makes them more stable over time than in the current BLS seasonal adjustment method.

I calculate the month-over-month change in total nonfarm payrolls, seasonally adjusted by the 3x9 filter, for the most recent month. The corresponding data as published by the BLS are shown for comparison purposes. According to the alternative seasonal adjustment, the economy added 286,000 jobs in June (column Wright SA), almost identical to the official BLS total of 287,000 (column BLS Official).

Data updates released today for prior months also reveal some differences between my figure and the official jobs gains from prior months. The official BLS numbers for May were revised down from 38,000 new jobs to a dismal 11,000. My alternative adjustment shows that the economy actually lost 6,000 jobs in May, down from 17,000 jobs gained at the time of the release. [i] The discrepancies between the two series are explained in my paper.

In addition to seasonal effects, abnormal weather can also affect month-to-month fluctuations in job growth. In my paper “Weather-Adjusting Economic Data” I and my coauthor Michael Boldin implement a statistical methodology for adjusting employment data for the effects of deviations in weather from seasonal norms. This is distinct from seasonal adjustment, which only controls for the normal variation in weather across the year. We use several indicators of weather, including temperature and snowfall.

We calculate that weather in June brought up the total by 25,000 jobs (column Weather Effect), but this should be considered a transient effect. Our weather-adjusted total, therefore, is 262,000 jobs added for June (column Boldin-Wright SWA). This is not surprising, given that weather in June was in line with seasonal norms.

It’s good to see the jobs numbers rebounding this month. The May number was somewhat affected by the Verizon strike. Also, it is important to remember that pure sampling error in any one month’s data is large, and that could explain part of the weak employment report for May. Averaging over the last three months, employment is expanding by about 150,000 jobs per month—a healthy pace, although a bit of a step down from last year.

a. Applies a longer window estimate of seasonal effects (see Wright 2013). The June 2015 to May 2016 values in this column have been corrected to remove a coding error that affected the previously reported values.

b. Includes seasonal and weather adjustments, where seasonal adjustments are estimated using the BLS window specifications (see Boldin & Wright 2015). The incremental weather effect in the last column is the BLS official number less the SWA number.

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[i] Note that, due to a small coding error, my alternative seasonal adjustment for May, at the time of the release, should have been 17,000 new jobs, not -4,000, as was reported in my previous post. In addition to the underlying data revisions, and correcting for this error, the revised alternative seasonal adjustment for May is -6,000 jobs added (second row of column Wright SA).

       

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Youth summer jobs programs have experienced a resurgence of interest and investment since the Great Recession, driven by concerns about high unemployment rates among young people, particularly those who are low-income, black, or Hispanic. Recent research points to summer jobs programs as a positive lever for change by reducing violence, incarceration, and mortality and improving academic outcomes.They are often a jurisdiction’s most high-profile youth employment initiative.

But good intentions do not always lead to results. Research has not yet linked summer jobs programs to improved employment outcomes, evaluations to date are silent on effective program design, and in the absence of agreed-upon standards and best practices, there is no guarantee of quality.They are complicated and labor-intensive to operate, and many jurisdictions had to re-build their programs after a long hiatus following the end of dedicated federal funding in the late 1990s.

On Thursday, July 14, the Brookings Metropolitan Policy Program hosted an event that explored core elements associated with high-performing programs and made recommendations to strengthen summer jobs programs. The event featured a presentation on the finding of a new paper by Brookings fellow Martha Ross and co-author Richard Kazis, titled, “Youth Summer Jobs Programs: Aligning Ends and Means,” followed by a response panel, comprised of leaders from metro areas across the country.  

Join the conversation on Twitter at #SummerJobs

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Presentation by Martha Ross

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From left to right: Richard Kazis, Nonresident Fellow, The Brookings Institution; Kerry Sullivan, President, Bank of America Charitable Foundation; Honorable Michael A. Nutter, Former Mayor, City of Philadelphia;  Ana Galeas, Summer Camp Counselor, DC Scores, and Participant, Mayor Marion S. Barry Summer Youth Employment Program; Michael Gritton, Executive Directlor, KentuckianaWorks

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• Welcome and presentation
• Panel discussion
• Closing remarks

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• Improving youth summer jobs programs

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• Uncorrected Transcript (.pdf)

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• 20160714_youth_jobs_transcript

       

Summer jobs programs for young people have experienced a resurgence of interest and investment since the Great Recession, driven by concerns about high youth unemployment rates, particularly among low-income, black, and Hispanic youth. 

Summer jobs programs typically last five to seven weeks and provide work opportunities to teens and young adults who otherwise might struggle to find jobs. They offer a paycheck, employment experiences, and other organized activities in the service of multiple goals: increasing participants’ income, developing young people’s skills and networks to improve their labor market prospects, and offering constructive activities to promote positive behavior. Most young people are placed in subsidized positions in the public and nonprofit sectors, although most cities also secure unsubsidized and private-sector placements, which typically come with higher skill and work-readiness requirements. Recent research finds that summer jobs programs have positive effects: reducing violence, incarceration, and mortality and improving academic outcomes.

But a strong program does not automatically follow from good intentions. Program design and implementation carry the day and determine the results. Moreover, research has not yet linked summer jobs programs to improved employment outcomes; evaluations to date are silent on effective program design; and, in the absence of agreed-upon standards and best practices, there is no guarantee of quality.

This paper is written to help clarify what is known about summer jobs programs and to provide information and guidance to city leaders, policymakers, and funders as they consider supporting larger and better summer efforts. Many jurisdictions are rebuilding their summer programs after a long hiatus that followed the end of dedicated federal funding in the late 1990s. Summer jobs programs are complex endeavors to design and deliver. Local leaders and administrators make a multitude of choices about program design, implementation, and funding, and these choices have a direct impact on quality and results. It is an opportune moment to assess the knowledge base and gaps about the operations and impacts of summer jobs programs.

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Jonathan Rauch describes the concept of honest graft in Washington politics and policymaking. Politics needs good leaders, but it needs good followers even more, and they don’t come cheap. Loyalty gets you only so far, and ideology is divisive. Political machines need to exist, and they need to work.

       

       

       

This paper lays out the fundamentals of a downtown turnaround plan and the unique "private/public" partnership required to succeed. Beginning with visioning and strategic planning to the reemergence of an office market at the end stages, these 12 steps form a template for returning "walkable urbanism" downtown.

Though every downtown is different there are still common revitalization lessons that can be applied anywhere. While any approach must be customized based on unique physical conditions, institutional assets, consumer demand, history, and civic intent, this paper lays out the fundamentals of a downtown turnaround plan and the unique "private/public" partnership required to succeed. Beginning with visioning and strategic planning to the reemergence of an office market at the end stages, these 12 steps form a template for returning "walkable urbanism" downtown.

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Ever since World War II, the American dream has encompassed the four-bedroom house with a white picket fence, tucked away in the suburbs. But this dream has gradually turned into a nightmare, with the increase of traffic, congestion and the general inconvenience of being detached from the city. Whereas people once rejoiced in camping trips to escape metropolitan living, we are now, as a culture, magnetized towards it as the appeal for walking more and driving less steadily increases.

KOJO NNAMDI:Chris you've dubbed this new style of living- "Walkable Urbanism." What is the evidence of a rising demand for it?

CHRIS LEINBERGER: There's demographic evidence; there's consumer research evidence; but probably the most compelling evidence is the price premium people are willing to pay to live in a walkable urban place, that the survey's show anywhere from a 40% to 200% price premium on a price per square foot basis for a walkable urban place as oppose to a competitive near by drivable suburban place.

KOJO NNAMDI: So it used to be that a condo or a townhouse was entry level product for people who couldn’t afford a real house, its beginning to be the other way around?

CHRIS LEINBERGER: In fact in 2003 for the first time in the country's history, condos on a price per square foot basis cost more than single family housing, and that includes all those old condo's that were built to be a alternative to a quote "real house" which was a single family house.  Its fundamentally changed and we've only seen the beginning of this train.

KOJO NNAMDI: I am intrigued about why people's preferences are indeed changing. In your book you give some of the credit to popular culture. Talk about the difference between the baby boomers- who grew up on 'Leave it Beaver,' the 'Brady Bunch' versus Generation Xer's who watch 'Seinfeld, and 'Sex in the City.'

CHRIS LEINBERGER: That’s just a reflection of the market reality. Hollywood does more consumer research than any business in the entire economy, and there out there doing focus groups constantly. So there reflecting what’s going on. Baby Boomers when they would see somebody- an image on the screen of some young woman flimsily dressed, walking down a dark street in a city, they would think- 'Oh my God, Hill street blues, and Blade Runner.' And the Gen-Xer's think, 'oh she is going to go to a new art gallery opening right down the street with all her friends.' Whole different perception of what a city life is like.

KOJO NNAMDI: A generational difference...

  
Listen to the full interview

       

I have been coming to Charlotte for 25 years, consulting for the likes of Crosland and Faison Enterprises, and have observed in Charlotte one of the most remarkable metropolitan transformations in the country. The economy has obviously changed, becoming one of the largest concentrations of U.S. financial institutions, thanks to the likes of Hugh McColl, Bank of America and Wachovia.

Your town has seen the metropolitan edge grow into South Carolina and up past Davidson. This sprawl is balanced by the splendor of uptown, or Center City, partially a benefit of McColl's focus on your downtown.

I returned to Charlotte two weeks ago, courtesy of the Charlotte Region Civic By Design Forum, sponsored by AIA Charlotte, to see what has happened since my last visit and to give a speech about the structural shift in how the country is building its built environment. As I mentioned in a column in the Observer before I came (March 8, "Charlotte, walk this way"), the metro areas are changing from just offering the Ozzie and Harriet version of the American Dream and adding a "walkable urban" Seinfeld version as well.

So what did I see in Charlotte?

First, I saw the beginning of the end of sprawl. Like much of the rest of the country, the over-production of automobile-driven suburban development at the fringe of your metropolitan area has reached its limits. The combination of outrageous commutes, high gas prices, and the increasing number of consumers preferring a walkable urban way of life have combined to end the geometric increase in land consumption.

The sub-prime crisis has just accelerated an underlying trend. That trend demonstrates that a lifestyle predicated on cheap gas, subsidized infrastructure and long commutes could not last.

Walkable, urban places

But what is emerging to take its place?Metro Charlotte seems to be following a national trend in creating and growing high-density, walkable urban places. The opening of the Lynx light rail line to the south is showing the way. It starts in a re-energized Center City with the one-of-a-kind performing arts center, museums, high-rise temples of commerce, sports venues, a convention center, high-end hotels, the central library, among other regionally significant treasures. There is now a "there there" in Center City.

However, housing is the true sign that a downtown is viable. For years, the few urbanites in Charlotte found refuge in the Fourth Ward, one of the special places in the South. However, resilient, safe and racially and socially integrated housing districts have emerged in the First, Second and Third Wards, as well as the beginning of luxury high-rise living in the heart of Center City. There even are small grocery stores and some of the best dining in the region. You are seeing the emergence of a Big City.

But it definitely is not confined to Center City.

Downtown-adjacent places such as Southend, arts-focused places like NoDa, and emerging Elizabeth Avenue and Midtown all are providing rich options. Each of these places has its own character. These places offer a somewhat lower density, but still walkable urban, alternative to Center City.

There is going to be a major hurdle to transforming SouthPark into what it wants to be, an upscale walkable urban place like Winter Park in Orlando or Bethesda near Washington, D.C. It was built for the easy movement and storage of the car, and a decision will have to be made as to whether it wants to be a drivable place -- or a walkable place. Right now, it is trying to be both, is neither fish nor fowl, and this will fail. The fact that there are no plans for rail transit nearby is just one of many signs that it is a very confused area.

Metro Charlotte's future

Regardless of whether SouthPark figures out what it wants to be when it grows up, there will be 8-10 regionally significant, walkable urban places to develop in Metro Charlotte over the next two decades. Each will have a unique character and different density. What they will have in common is that they are walkable (also bikable) for most residents' everyday needs and maybe even employment.

Only four or five have begun to germinate so far. SouthPark should be on that list but won't be until it solves its identity crisis. Where will the others emerge? Best bet is to follow the rails. Most will be anchored by a transit station.

I think I have seen the future of Charlotte. Continue to build out the light-rail system and encourage mixed-use, high-density zoning around the stations. You will find that your extraordinary growth of the past generation will continue but in a new and different manner since the market demands different options. You will also find that this new kind of growth will be economically, financially and environmentally more sustainable.

       

For over 100 years, the driving force of Ohio’s economy has been the state’s so-called Big Eight cities—Columbus, Cleveland, Cincinnati, Toledo, Akron, Dayton, Canton, and Youngstown. Today, though, the driving reality of these cities is sustained, long-term population loss. The central issue confronting these cities—and the state and surrounding metropolitan area—is not whether these cities will have different physical footprints and more green space than they do now, but how it will happen.

The state must adopt a different way of thinking and a different vision of its cities’ future—and so must the myriad local, civic, philanthropic, and business leaders who will also play a role in reshaping Ohio’s cities. The following seven basic premises should inform any vision for a smaller, stronger future and subsequent strategies for change in these places:

• These cities contain significant assets for future rebuilding
  
• These cities will not regain their peak population
  
• These cities have a surplus of housing
  
• These cities have far more vacant land than can be absorbed by redevelopment
  
• Impoverishment threatens the viability of these cities more than population loss as such
  
• Local resources are severely limited
  
• The fate of cities and their metropolitan areas are inextricably inter-connected
  

These premises have significant implications for the strategies that state and local governments should pursue to address the issues of shrinking cities.

Full Paper on Ohio's Cities » (PDF)
Paper on Shrinking Cities Across the United States »

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Drive through any number of outer-ring suburbs in America, and you’ll see boarded-up and vacant strip malls, surrounded by vast seas of empty parking spaces. These forlorn monuments to the real estate crash are not going to come back to life, even when the economy recovers. And that’s because the demand for the housing that once supported commercial activity in many exurbs isn’t coming back, either.

By now, nearly five years after the housing crash, most Americans understand that a mortgage meltdown was the catalyst for the Great Recession, facilitated by underregulation of finance and reckless risk-taking. Less understood is the divergence between center cities and inner-ring suburbs on one hand, and the suburban fringe on the other.

It was predominantly the collapse of the car-dependent suburban fringe that caused the mortgage collapse.

In the late 1990s, high-end outer suburbs contained most of the expensive housing in the United States, as measured by price per square foot, according to data I analyzed from the Zillow real estate database. Today, the most expensive housing is in the high-density, pedestrian-friendly neighborhoods of the center city and inner suburbs. Some of the most expensive neighborhoods in their metropolitan areas are Capitol Hill in Seattle; Virginia Highland in Atlanta; German Village in Columbus, Ohio, and Logan Circle in Washington. Considered slums as recently as 30 years ago, they have been transformed by gentrification.

Simply put, there has been a profound structural shift — a reversal of what took place in the 1950s, when drivable suburbs boomed and flourished as center cities emptied and withered.

The shift is durable and lasting because of a major demographic event: the convergence of the two largest generations in American history, the baby boomers (born between 1946 and 1964) and the millennials (born between 1979 and 1996), which today represent half of the total population.

Many boomers are now empty nesters and approaching retirement. Generally this means that they will downsize their housing in the near future. Boomers want to live in a walkable urban downtown, a suburban town center or a small town, according to a recent survey by the National Association of Realtors.

The millennials are just now beginning to emerge from the nest — at least those who can afford to live on their own. This coming-of-age cohort also favors urban downtowns and suburban town centers — for lifestyle reasons and the convenience of not having to own cars.

Over all, only 12 percent of future homebuyers want the drivable suburban-fringe houses that are in such oversupply, according to the Realtors survey. This lack of demand all but guarantees continued price declines. Boomers selling their fringe housing will only add to the glut. Nothing the federal government can do will reverse this.

Many drivable-fringe house prices are now below replacement value, meaning the land under the house has no value and the sticks and bricks are worth less than they would cost to replace. This means there is no financial incentive to maintain the house; the next dollar invested will not be recouped upon resale. Many of these houses will be converted to rentals, which are rarely as well maintained as owner-occupied housing. Add the fact that the houses were built with cheap materials and methods to begin with, and you see why many fringe suburbs are turning into slums, with abandoned housing and rising crime.

The good news is that there is great pent-up demand for walkable, centrally located neighborhoods in cities like Portland, Denver, Philadelphia and Chattanooga, Tenn. The transformation of suburbia can be seen in places like Arlington County, Va., Bellevue, Wash., and Pasadena, Calif., where strip malls have been bulldozed and replaced by higher-density mixed-use developments with good transit connections.

Reinvesting in America’s built environment — which makes up a third of the country’s assets — and reviving the construction trades are vital for lifting our economic growth rate. (Disclosure: I am the president of Locus, a coalition of real estate developers and investors and a project of Smart Growth America, which supports walkable neighborhoods and transit-oriented development.)

Some critics will say that investment in the built environment risks repeating the mistake that caused the recession in the first place. That reasoning is as faulty as saying that technology should have been neglected after the dot-com bust, which precipitated the 2001 recession.

The cities and inner-ring suburbs that will be the foundation of the recovery require significant investment at a time of government retrenchment. Bus and light-rail systems, bike lanes and pedestrian improvements — what traffic engineers dismissively call “alternative transportation” — are vital. So is the repair of infrastructure like roads and bridges. Places as diverse as Los Angeles, Phoenix, Salt Lake City, Dallas, Charlotte, Denver and Washington have recently voted to pay for “alternative transportation,” mindful of the dividends to be reaped. As Congress works to reauthorize highway and transit legislation, it must give metropolitan areas greater flexibility for financing transportation, rather than mandating that the vast bulk of the money can be used only for roads.

For too long, we over-invested in the wrong places. Those retail centers and subdivisions will never be worth what they cost to build. We have to stop throwing good money after bad. It is time to instead build what the market wants: mixed-income, walkable cities and suburbs that will support the knowledge economy, promote environmental sustainability and create jobs.

       

Editor’s Note: This piece originally was published on the Guardian’s Sustainable Business website.

I recently returned from Copenhagen, my first time to the Danish capital. Even a three day visit affirms why this city of more than 540,000 residents has received global recognition as a beacon of sustainable development. An incredible 36 percent of all commuting trips to work or school are made by bike along, in many cases, secure bike lanes that protect cyclists from cars and buses. Another 32 percent of city residents either walk or utilize the region's highly-efficient public transportation network of buses and trains.

This kind of sustainable development clearly yields significant environmental benefits. Copenhagen achieved the highest ranking in the 2009 European Green City Index, scoring in the top 10 in all eight categories, from energy efficiency to transport and environmental governance.

Growing green is obviously an environmental imperative. Yet the Copenhagen experience shows that it can be a market proposition as well, with a diverse set of economic and fiscal benefits accruing to cities that are at the vanguard of sustainable development. Cities like Copenhagen, in short, may be inventing a clean economy of place.

Monday Morning, the respected Scandinavian thinktank, recently released a report detailing the effect of building a city that is high in spatial efficiency and rich in transport choices. Some of the benefits are direct and local. Residents who cycle to work or school are healthier, so health care costs decline (by an estimated $380 million a year). Fewer cars on the road means less congestion and fewer accidents, so additional savings are realized.

Yet the big effect from sustainable development may be indirect and global, as specialized firms naturally rise and expand to meet the growing demand for clean services and clean products. Monday Morning's report finds that Copenhagen's clean sector has been a critical contributor to the region's economy in the past decade, with green exports outpacing all other sectors by growing at an astounding 77 percent between 2004 and 2009.

Cities in the U.S. are following suit. Portland, Oregon, is also internationally renowned for its commitment to sustainable development. The Portland metropolis has an expansive public transit system and an urban growth boundary to control development at the urban periphery. The city boasts a green investment fund to provide grants for residential and commercial building projects.

Now the city is striving, like Copenhagen, to reap the economic rewards of sustainable development through business formation, firm expansion, job growth and private investment. In February, Portland released its first regional export plan to double exports over five years by building on the region's distinctive economic and physical attributes. A critical pillar of this strategy involves increasing the export orientation of firms in the burgeoning clean technology sector to serve growing markets in Asia, Latin America and elsewhere.

Both Copenhagen and Portland recognize that urbanization is the dominant market-shaping trend of the century. By 2030 it is estimated that China will have one billion residents while India will have 590 million. These nations and others will demand products and services that enable development that is economically supportive, environmentally sensitive and spatially efficient. And those products and services may disproportionately emerge from firms located in cities, in mature economies and rising nations alike, which are first movers on sustainable development.

The economic benefits of sustainable development could be substantial. Last year, my program at Brookings measured the U.S. clean economy at 2.7 million jobs. That means the clean economy has more jobs than fossil-fuel related industries and is nearly twice the size of the biosciences field and 60 percent of the 4.8 million strong IT sector.

The U.S. clean economy is also incredibly diverse (sweeping across five broad categories and 39 separate clusters) and disproportionately located in the nation's top 100 cities and metropolitan areas.

Green architecture and construction services cluster illustrates the potential for growth and the reality of metropolitan concentration. This segment already employs over 56,000 people in the U.S. Some 90 percent of these jobs are located in the top 100 cities and towns (although those communities house only two-thirds of the population). The segment grew by a healthy annual average of 6.4 percent between 2003 and 2010 and includes firms such as Burns and McDonnell Engineering in Kansas City, McKinstry and Co. in Seattle, and Gensler in San Francisco. Conclusion: the clean economy of place constitutes a virtuous cycle between cities, companies, consumers and clusters.

Let me end where I began, in Copenhagen. The city is not resting on its cycling laurels but setting its sights higher, towards achieving a goal of carbon neutrality by 2025. Shakespeare was wrong: all is not rotten in the state of Denmark. Nurturing what is good — and green — embracing it and extending it could provide a platform for economic growth for decades to come.

       

An economic analysis of a sample of neighborhoods in the Washington, D.C. metropolitan area using walkability measures finds that:

• More walkable places perform better economically. For neighborhoods within metropolitan Washington, as the number of environmental features that facilitate walkability and attract pedestrians increase, so do office, residential, and retail rents, retail revenues, and for-sale residential values.

• Walkable places benefit from being near other walkable places. On average, walkable neighborhoods in metropolitan Washington that cluster and form walkable districts exhibit higher rents and home values than stand-alone walkable places.

• Residents of more walkable places have lower transportation costs and higher transit access, but also higher housing costs. Residents of more walkable neighborhoods in metropolitan Washington generally spend around 12 percent of their income on transportation and 30 percent on housing. In comparison, residents of places with fewer environmental features that encourage walkability spend around 15 percent on transportation and 18 percent on housing.

• Residents of places with poor walkability are generally less affluent and have lower educational attainment than places with good walkability. Places with more walkability features have also become more gentrified over the past decade. However, there is no significant difference in terms of transit access to jobs between poor and good walkable places.

The findings of this study offer useful insights for a diverse set of interests. Lenders, for example, should find cause to integrate walkability into their underwriting standards. Developers and investors should consider walkability when assessing prospects for the region and acquiring property. Local and regional planning agencies should incorporate assessments of walkability into their strategic economic development plans and eliminate barriers to walkable development. Finally, private foundations and government agencies that provide funding to further sustainability practices should consider walkability (especially as it relates to social equity) when allocating funds and incorporate such measures into their accountability standards.

The Great Recession highlighted the need to change the prevailing real estate development paradigm, particularly in housing. High-risk financial products and practices, “teaser” underwriting terms, steadily low-interest rates, and speculation in housing were some of the most significant contributors to the housing bubble and burst that catalyzed the recession. But an oversupply of residential housing also fueled the economic crisis.

However, a closer look at the post-recession housing numbers paints a more nuanced picture. While U.S. home values dropped steadily between 2008 and 2011, distant suburbs experienced the starkest price decreases while more close-in neighborhoods either held steady or in some cases saw price increases. This distinction in housing proximity is particularly important since it appears that the United States may be at the beginning of a structural real estate market shift. Emerging evidence points to a preference for mixed-use, compact, amenity-rich, transit-accessible neighborhoods or walkable places.

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Editor's Note: In this blog, Vera Songwe introduces the African Leadership Transitions Tracker, a new interactive that aims to start a broader conversation about leadership transitions and what they mean for the region and beyond.

On March 28, Nigerians voters will go to the polls to participate in their nation’s fifth election since the military handed over power to civilians in 1999. As Africa’s largest economy and an important oil exporter, this election comes at an important time for Nigeria and for the continent as a whole.

Events around this election have generated significant debate around electoral and voting processes on the continent such as the importance of a constitution, the cost, the frequency and level of contestability, and the power of incumbency in African elections. However, amid this dialogue, much less consideration has been devoted to where this election stands within the continuum of leader transitions Nigeria has experienced since it first gained independence in 1960. Nigerians have, in fact, gone through 18 leadership transitions in the last 55 years, including the untimely death of former President Umaru Masu Yar’Adua in May 2010, the multiparty elections that brought President Olusegun Obasanjo to power in 1999, and the first presidential elections that brought President Shegu Shagari to power in 1979. Nigeria’s high rate of leadership changeover should not, however, be considered illustrative of Africa’s overall story. On the contrary, a high level of diversity exists among countries in the region on this measure, with countries like Angola having had only one leadership transition since it achieved its independence in 1975, and Benin, on the other hand, undergoing an election, coup, or other type of leadership transition nearly every two years in the country’s 55-year post-independence history. However, overall in Africa today there are more peaceful and competitive leadership transitions than there have been over the last six decades. This contestability process is gaining ground across the continent, and while coups d’etat appear to be fading revolutions are gaining ground where competition has not taken hold.

The recent passing of Singapore’s 30 year-long leader Lee Kwan Yew credited with having taken Singapore from a third world country to a fully developed country in less than a generation, has brought the question of leadership and leadership transitions back to the fore. A 2010 report by Michael Spence’s Growth Commission heralds Lee Kuan Yew as the hero of Singapore’s growth story. The African Leadership Transition Tracker hopes to launch a dialogue on what the frequency, nature, and scope of leadership transitions mean for African countries’ growth, stability, and development trajectory overall. Moreover, how have transition trends in the region changed from the time of the African founding fathers and the tumultuous years of the 1960s to the present day?

As an initial step towards thinking this question through, Brookings’s African Growth Initiative is today launching the African Leadership Transitions Tracker as a resource both to inform readers about African political history and a tool to initiate analysis on what leadership changeover might mean (or not mean) for development. The Transitions Tracker specifically records all changes that have occurred at the head-of-state level in every African country between the end of the colonial period and the present day. We are hoping that recording this information and presenting it visually (and as a downloadable data set) will help start a broader conversation and support additional work on these issues. Brookings will update this data on a regular basis, and we welcome your feedback as we further refine this interactive. Moreover, the information we present today is by no means the full story—key variables are needed to complement this study, including, for example, the various political party affiliations of leaders within a country or cross tabulations with resources that seek to measure the level of citizen participation and engagement in these transitions. However, as further analysis takes place, we are hoping that the African Leadership Transitions Tracker will enrich dialogue about developments occurring in the region and place current news on elections or other types of changeover events within the broader context of the continent’s leadership story overall.  Over the next few months, we will be running a series of articles based on this data.  

Special thanks to Ehui Adovor, graduate student at George Washington University and the many AGI research assistants, analysts, and program staff that have supported this project, including Jessica Pugliese, Brandon Routman, Christina Golubski, Andrew Westbury, and Amy Copley.

      

Hong Kong has seemed quiet for the last four months. The foreign media moved on to other stories once last fall’s protest movement came to an end. But locally the debate over a new system to elect the territory’s chief executive has continued non-stop, and the situation is about to heat up again. On Wednesday Hong Kong time, the government will announce its proposal for electoral reform. Once it does, the pro-democracy opposition will face some difficult choices.

Here, in not too much detail, is a quick review of the background.

In 2007, the government of the People’s Republic of China, which has sovereignty over Hong Kong, announced it would accept an election of Hong Kong’s chief executive (CE) through universal suffrage for the 2017 election. It also said that candidates would be picked by a Nominating Committee. Pro-democracy politicians and the public at large, a majority of which supports a more democratic system, welcomed the universal suffrage part of this pledge but suspected that Beijing would use the Nominating Committee to restrict who got to run. What good is a one-man-one-vote election, they asked, if voters had to choose between candidates who are from the territory’s conservative establishment camp and will likely accommodate Beijing? (Good question.)

The following ensued:

• After several years of public debate, the Hong Kong government began a formal process consulting the public in December 2013. The key point of disagreement was over whether election candidates could emerge only through a Nominating Committee vote or through other mechanisms as well. Those who wanted other mechanisms believed that the Committee’s membership would be friendly to Beijing and pick candidates accordingly. Some of these skeptics were prepared to engage in civil disobedience to try to get their way.
• In late June 2014, the Hong Kong government announced the results of the consultation and the incumbent CE, C. Y. Leung, made a formal report to Beijing. This was the first step in a five-step process for constitutional revision, a process set by China. There is general agreement that Leung’s report understated the opposition to a nomination system that relied exclusively on the Nominating Committee.
• On August 31st, the Standing Committee of China’s National People’s Congress (NPC-SC) announced a decision on basic parameters for the new system (step two). Sure enough, it ruled out any supplementary nominating mechanisms. It also strongly suggested that the Nominating Committee would be constituted the same way as the 1,200-person Election Committee that had heretofore selected the CE and whose members were mostly friendly towards Beijing. The NPC-SC also limited the number of final CE candidates to two or three and dictated that each had to receive majority support from the Nominating Committee to become a candidate.
• The public response to the decision was sharply negative. The logical conclusion seemed to be that the new system was rigged in a way that Hong Kong voters have to pick among establishment candidates only, and that a pro-democracy aspirant had no way of getting nominated.
• In late September, students began a civil disobedience campaign that was marked by episodes of violence, and resulted in the occupation of three sets of major roadways in the territory. These lasted until early December, but the campaign did not persuade the government to back down on its basic approach.
• At the same time, the Hong Kong government, staying within the parameters Beijing announced on August 31st, began a second consultation process on its more specific reform proposals.

Why, you may ask, doesn’t Beijing just impose the system it wants? The reason is that it already committed that in step three of the five-step constitutional revision process, the government would introduce a bill in the Hong Kong Legislative Council reflecting its final proposal and that the legislature would have to approve it by a two-thirds margin. Even though the legislature is constituted in a way that gives disproportionate power to interests aligned with Beijing, the establishment camp currently does not have enough votes for a two-thirds majority. Consequently, the government must win over four or five moderate legislators from the democratic camp. In response, the more radical democrats have worked hard to keep the moderates committed to rejecting any government that is based on Beijing’s parameters, because it means that China gets to screen who gets to run. 

In light of this problem, the Hong Kong government did a clever thing. In the consultation document, it included the option of “democratizing” the Nominating Committee while remaining within Beijing’s basic parameters. It proposed to do this first by making the body more representative of Hong Kong society and reducing the proportion of seats held by business interests and groups otherwise linked to China. Second, it suggested a two-stage process of selection. In the first stage, the Nominating Committee would consider more “potential candidates” than the two or three that would ultimately be nominated to run in the election. To be picked as a potential candidate, an individual would need the support of only a minority of Committee members (how low was unspecified). This could increase the possibility of one or more democratic politicians emerging as potential candidates and then, in the second stage, at least one of them being selected as a final candidate. The result would be a competitive election.

Last week, Raymond Tam, the Hong Kong government’s secretary for constitutional and mainland affairs, indicated that something along these lines would be proposed by the government this Wednesday. He talked of using “the necessary legal room to maximize the democratic elements” and making the “entrance requirement" for potential candidates no higher than one-eighth of the membership. Additionally, there would be greater openness, transparency and accountability in the process of reviewing potential candidates within the Nominating Committee.

The devil, of course, will be in the details of the proposal (more on that later in the week). Moreover, Tam said nothing about making the Nominating Committee more representative of Hong Kong society. Did that element get set aside, and if so, what are the implications? If the membership of the committee is still biased in favor of the political status quo, would it matter if the process within the Nominating Committee is more competitive and transparent?

Whatever the proposal, the ball will then be in the pan-democrats’ court. Do they vote as a block to reject any process that allows the Nominating Committee to screen candidates? Do they then want to expose themselves to near-certain criticism that their recalcitrance denied the Hong Kong public the opportunity to vote for the CE? Or, do they take a chance on the more flexible approach that Tam is proposing, in the hope and belief that a pan-democrat will be screened in, which in turn would seem to set up a competitive election?

Read Richard Bush's response to the Hong Kong government's proposal for electoral reform »

      

As I anticipated in my post on Tuesday, the Hong Kong government on Wednesday announced the details for the 2017 election of the Chief Executive (CE). Based on press commentary from China, it is clear that the PRC government, which has sovereignty over Hong Kong, approves the package. But to understand the implications for democracy in Hong Kong, it is important to look at the details of the proposal.

Since Hong Kong became a special administrative region of China in 1997, the CE has been chosen by an election committee of between 800 and 1,200 individuals. Beijing had promised that starting in 2017 the CE would be elected by the voters of Hong Kong through universal suffrage. Yesterday’s proposal is the latest step in a transition process toward that system. (For all of the recommendations, see the speech of Chief Secretary Carrie Lam to the Legislative Council.) As I outlined in Tuesday’s post, the principal point of controversy for more than a year has been Beijing’s insistence that a nominating committee choose who gets to stand for election. Hong Kong’s democratic camp believes that the nominating committee will give China an opportunity to “screen out” individuals it does not like.

The most prominent element of the Hong Kong government’s proposal yesterday is a recommendation on the procedural mechanism by which the Nominating Committee (NC) would review candidates. This was important for two reasons. One, under the plan the NC will have the authority to pick two or three final candidates to actually run in the election. Two, Mrs. Lam made clear that that the NC’s membership would be similar to the 1,200-person election committee that has picked the CE up until now and is weighted in favor of people who are biased toward Beijing.

Thus, who the NC considers before making its final nominations becomes critical. That will determine whether the election will provide a choice between the majority who have long favored a quick transition to democracy, and those who have preferred to move slower; and also between those who believe that the current economic system benefits only the rich and should be reformed, and those who are happy with current policies.

The proposed procedural mechanism mandates that any individual who can get recommendations from one-tenth to one-twentieth of the NC will be a “potential candidate” and have the opportunity to articulate his/her policy views to the NC and the public in a transparent way. In effect, this means that the NC will likely consider between five to ten individuals for final nomination. And because pan-democrats will have be at least a minority of the NC membership, as they do in the election committee, they will be able to recommend at least one democrat as a potential candidate. That in turn creates the possibility that a democrat could become a final nominee and compete to become CE. In that case, voters who have supported democracy and believe current economic policies are flawed would have a candidate who shares their general outlook. This mechanism would seem to be consistent with what the spokesman of the U.S. Consulate-General said earlier today: “The legitimacy of the chief executive will be greatly enhanced if the chief executive is selected through universal suffrage and Hong Kong’s residents have a meaningful choice of candidates.”

Let me be clear: the pan-democrats do not like this proposal. They do not like a mechanism that amounts to screening by China, and this one certainly opens a backdoor for Beijing to veto candidates it doesn’t like. In addition, the pan-democrats would like to have a promise from Beijing that this is not the end of the reform process when it comes to electing the CE, but Mrs. Lam gave no hope on that score, even though she said future circumstances might require more change.

The pan-democrats were likely unhappy about the government’s refusal to propose changes on two specific issues. Both concern the sub-sectors that will make up the NC, which will be copied from the current election committee. These subsectors represent different parts of the Hong Kong community, but the balance of voting power favors subsectors that 1) represent various business interests, 2) support Beijing on most issues, and 3) are afraid of populist movements. Back in December, the government floated the idea of shifting the balance of power among the existing subsectors so that under-represented groups got more votes, but on one condition, that the existing subsectors agreed. In the end, no change was made here, perhaps due to the stated reasons that there was no social consensus to make this change and that doing so would only create more political controversy. The more likely reason is that the subsectors that stood to lose their relative power were not willing to have their oxen gored.

The second issue had to do with “corporate voting” within subsectors. In some subsectors the constituent members decide their choices based on the preference of the leader of the member organizations. For example, in a subsector made up of commercial firms, the CEO of each member firm decides how to cast the firm’s vote. The alternative would be to have a larger number of people associated with the firm contribute to the decision, up to all the employees. As a matter of principle, the pan-democratic camp has long called for an end to corporate voting, and while there was an opportunity to do so on this occasion, the government didn’t take it.

So, the pan-democratic bloc in the Legislative Council walked out during Mrs. Lam’s presentation to the Legislative Council and has vowed to vote against this proposal. And if all of them did vote against, that would kill the proposal, because it must pass the Legislative Council by a two-thirds margin and the establishment caucus does not have enough votes on its own. On the other hand, Beijing and the Hong Kong government do not need to win over the whole of the disparate democratic camp. They just have to peel off four opposition legislators to secure the necessary majority. Presumably these would be more moderate politicians who might conclude that the reform package is “good enough” compared to the alternative. That is, Beijing and the Hong Kong government say that if the package is vetoed, election of the CE would revert to the 1,200-member election committee, delaying a one-person, one-vote election for some time. The danger for these moderates in voting for the proposal is that they will be excoriated by their colleagues for defecting and betraying principles, to the point of facing a challenge from within their camp in the next legislative election.

Hong Kong public opinion and legislators in particular have to face a couple of critical questions. The first is whether a system that produces a contest between at least one establishment candidate and one democratic candidate is indeed “good enough.” The recommended system could be improved upon in several ways, of that there is no doubt. On the other hand, if this system works as optimists think it could, then Hong Kong voters will have a real choice in picking their leader, for the first time in history.

Second, would this mechanism indeed produce an election contest between at least one establishment candidate and one democratic candidate? Is there a way in which members of the establishment could nominally consider a democratic potential candidate and then deny him or her the nomination? In fact there is. The government’s proposal specifies that after all the potential candidates have been heard from, the NC members then select two or three nominees. Each NC members get two votes, and nomination requires 50 percent. So establishment members of the NC, after going through the motions of considering a pan-democrat, could simply not give that person the majority needed for nomination. The procedure and their numerical majority give them the power to do so.

But is such a bait-and-switch tactic wise politically? If this mechanism is sold both to the public and moderate democrats as a “good enough” way to produce a competitive election but the result is a contest between two individuals associated with the establishment and the status quo, how much legitimacy will the process itself and the person ultimately selected have? Will the polarization, obstructionism, and protests that have come to mark Hong Kong politics subside or grow? Will Beijing face more stability in Hong Kong or less?

In short, does this mechanism not put the establishment in a position that it almost has to nominate a moderate democrat if it is to enjoy broad community respect? And if the establishment is being challenged to do the right thing, so are the democrats. As imperfect as they see the current package, if it creates a good enough chance of electing one of their own, would the democrats not lose community respect if they reject it and deny voters a choice (they already know that Beijing and others will blame them for reverting to the old system)?

This dual challenge creates the possibility of a compromise. The missing ingredient, of course, is the mistrust that each camp has about the intentions of the other, mistrust born of the decades-long struggle over whether Hong Kong should have a genuinely democratic system. Providing that ingredient will be a challenge itself. 

      

John Kerry to travel to Kenya and Djibouti next week

Exactly one year after U.S. Secretary of State John Kerry’s last multi-country tour of sub-Saharan Africa, he is preparing for another visit to the continent—to Kenya and Djibouti from May 3 to 5, 2015. In Kenya, Kerry and a U.S. delegation including Linda Thomas-Greenfield, assistant secretary of state for African affairs, will engage in talks with senior Kenyan officials on U.S.-Kenya security cooperation, which the U.S. formalized through its Security Governance Initiative (SGI) at the U.S.-Africa Leaders Summit last August. Over the past several years, the U.S. has increased its military assistance to Kenya and African Union (AU) troops to combat the Somali extremist group al-Shabab and has conducted targeted drone strikes against the group’s top leaders.  In the wake of the attack on Kenya’s Garissa University by al-Shabab, President Obama pledged U.S. support for Kenya, and Foreign Minister Amina Mohamed has stated that Kenya is currently seeking additional assistance from the U.S. to strengthen its military and intelligence capabilities.

Kerry will also meet with a wide array of leaders from Kenya’s private sector, civil society, humanitarian organizations, and political opposition regarding the two countries’ “common goals, including accelerating economic growth, strengthening democratic institutions, and improving regional security,” according to a U.S. State Department spokesperson. These meetings are expected to build the foundation for President Obama’s trip to Kenya for the Global Entrepreneurship Summit in July of this year.

On Tuesday, May 5, Kerry will become the first sitting secretary of state to travel to Djibouti. There, he will meet with government officials regarding the evacuation of civilians from Yemen and also visit Camp Lemonnier, the U.S. military base from which it coordinates its counterterror operations in the Horn of Africa region.

Protests erupt as Burundian president seeks third term

This week saw the proliferation of anti-government street demonstrations as current President Pierre Nkurunziza declared his candidacy for a third term, after being in office for ten years.  The opposition has deemed this move as “unconstitutional” and in violation of the 2006 Arusha peace deal which ended the civil war. Since the announcement, hundreds of civilians took to the streets of Bujumbura, despite a strong military presence. At least six people have been killed in clashes between police forces and civilians. 

Since the protests erupted, leading human rights activist Pierre-Claver Mbonimpa has been arrested alongside more than 200 protesters. One of Burundi’s main independent radio stations was also suspended as they were covering the protests.  On Wednesday, the government blocked social media platforms, including Twitter and Facebook, declaring them important tools in implementing and organizing protests. Thursday, amid continuing political protests, Burundi closed its national university and students were sent home. 

Amid the recent protests, Burundi’s constitutional court will examine the president’s third term bid. Meanwhile, U.N. secretary general Ban Ki-moon has sent his special envoy for the Great Lakes Region to hold a dialogue with president Nkurunziza and other government authorities. Senior U.S. diplomat Tom Malinowski also arrived in Bujumbura on Thursday to help defuse the biggest crisis the country has seen in the last few years, expressing disappointment over Nkurunziza’s decision to run for a third term.

China invests billions in African infrastructure

Since the early 2000s, China has become an increasingly significant source of financing for African infrastructure projects, as noted in a recent Brookings paper, “Financing African infrastructure: Can the world deliver?” This week, observers have seen an additional spike in African infrastructure investments from Chinese firms, as three major railway, real estate, and other infrastructure deals were struck on the continent, totaling nearly $7.5 billion in investments.

On Monday, April 27, the state-owned China Railway Construction Corp announced that it will construct a $3.5 billion railway line in Nigeria, as well as a $1.9 billion real estate project in Zimbabwe. Then on Wednesday, the Industrial and Commercial Bank of China (one of the country’s largest lenders) signed a $2 billion deal with the government of Equatorial Guinea in order to carry out a number of infrastructure projects throughout the country. These deals align with China’s “One Belt, One Road” strategy of building infrastructure in Africa and throughout the developing world in order to further integrate their economies, stimulate economic growth, and ultimately increase demand for Chinese exports. For more insight into China’s infrastructure lending in Africa and the implications of these investments for the region’s economies, please see the following piece by Africa Growth Initiative Nonresident Fellow Yun Sun: “Inserting Africa into China’s One Belt, One Road strategy: A new opportunity for jobs and infrastructure?”

      

Hong Kong’s next vote for Chief Executive (CE)—scheduled for 2017—offers a narrow pathway for improving democratic governance. The question is will a few of Hong Kong’s democratic legislators recognize the opportunity and make the necessary compromises.

As I saw in a trip to the city last week, discussions about reforming the election process are already well underway. Up until now, the CE has always been chosen by a 1200-person selection committee, mostly comprised of members willing to follow China’s lead on major political issues. Now under consideration is a plan to elect the next CE through a one-person, one-vote election (universal suffrage). The number of eligible voters would jump from 1,200 to around 5 million.

The caveat from Beijing has been that the candidates for that election would be selected by a nominating committee to be modelled on—you guessed it—the old selection committee. Pro-democracy politicians have sought a more flexible and open-ended process. It was public opposition to Beijing’s nominating committee that set off the Umbrella Movement protests last September and the 79-day occupation of several downtown thoroughfares. The democrats’ opposition to the current plan is important because the tabled proposal must receive support from two-thirds of the Legislative Council to pass, and the government doesn’t have the votes. It needs four democrats to cross the aisle and vote for the package.

Outsized importance

Hong Kong is a small place (7.25 million people), but what happens to the universal suffrage proposal has rather large implications. I have often thought that how China calibrates its choices concerning Hong Kong’s political system says something about what kind of great power it will be. This is not the defining issue of China’s revival as a great power, to be sure. How Beijing uses its growing power economically, diplomatically, and coercively is more important.

Yet most of the objects of China’s exercise of power, particularly in East Asia, are countries with informed, patriotic populations who care about the security and independence of their countries. (The only real exceptions are the islands of the East and South China Sea whose only inhabitants are seagulls.) So China will have to balance any temptation to promote its interests in more assertive ways with a sensitivity to popular feeling. Indeed, its recent “big country” mentality has caused a backlash in the “small countries” it has tried to bend to its will.

Shifting politics

So Hong Kong should be a good test of China’s sensitivity level. It is constitutionally a part of China. Its population is predominantly ethnic Chinese. The overwhelming majority of people accept their lot as Chinese citizens and would do nothing to upset the status quo. They are inherently pragmatic and understand, most of them, the benefits Hong Kong enjoys by being a part of China, including the rule of law and some political freedoms.

But a significant majority also want genuine electoral democracy. If China had granted that ten years ago, the gratitude would have been profound. But the delay has had deleterious effects. Hong Kong’s politics have become more polarized and radicalized. Political mistrust is deep and moderates have been marginalized, especially in the democratic camp. Meanwhile, the new Chinese leadership is placing greater emphasis on national security, and Beijing’s propaganda organs warn of “foreign forces” (e.g. the United States) working behind the scenes to destabilize Hong Kong.

So far, therefore, the interaction between the Chinese central government and the majority of the Hong Kong public has not gone well as it could have. Things will come to a head in a couple of weeks when the Legislative Council votes on the electoral reform proposal. The democratic camp maintains an apparently strong united front and says it will vote as a bloc against the package, which will mean that Hong Kong reverts to the past “small circle” election of the CE.

During my visit I found a couple of brave souls who believe the game is not over; the dominant mood, however, was one of pessimism. If the package goes down, there will likely be no protests, since radical forces have at least blocked what they hate, even as they didn’t secure what they wanted. If the package passes, however, there will likely be protests akin to those last fall, but not as prolonged. Whatever happens, there will be a big demonstration on or around July 1, the eighteenth anniversary of Hong Kong’s return to China. The size of that rally will be a barometer of the intensity of public feeling.

A “narrow pathway” to success?

There is a curious aspect about the package that Legislative Council will vote on. As I outlined in a Brookings blog post in late April, the proposal actually creates a narrow pathway for the democrats to first nominate and then elect one of their own as CE.

It would require, above all, a willingness on the part of at least four democrats to set aside their dissatisfaction with the undemocratic defects of the current proposal (and they do exist) and focus on the democratic opportunity that it presents. Later on, it would require the democrat camp to unite in supporting a moderate candidate who would not invite Beijing’s automatic rejection and who would have broad public support (and such individuals do exist). It should also have confidence that the majority of voters are on their side and would vote for that candidate. This is not a sure thing. The pro-Beijing members of the nominating committee will have the power not to name that person as a candidate—but rejecting a moderate, popular democrat would put them in a very awkward position.

The independent people that I spoke to in Hong Kong last week agreed with me that the current proposal creates this “narrow pathway.” But they also deplored the reality that the mutual mistrust between the democratic and pro-Beijing camps has become a serious obstacle to a sensible compromise. Radicals dominate the democratic camp. Their influence often constrains moderate democrats who might otherwise vote, as an act of conscience, for the package.

Beijing could have conducted its engagement with the Hong Kong public and the democratic camp in a much more skillful way. The priority it places on control of Hong Kong has outweighed its pledges to institute democracy. That has not changed, and it has contributed to the radicalization of Hong Kong politics. Yet the radicals, who would rather fight than win, are now providing Beijing with a pretext to take no chances.

      

In early May 2015, U.S. Secretary of State John Kerry made a historic but little noticed visit to Somalia, a country no other U.S. secretary of state had ever visited. His trip symbolized both how far Somalia has come—from the blackest days of civil war, clan infighting, and famine in the 1990s; to the brutal rule of the jihadi group al Shabab in the late 2000s; to something getting closer to normal now—and how very far it still has to go.

The fact that a high U.S. official could enter the country at all speaks of real security improvements. During his visit, moreover, Kerry announced the reopening of a U.S. embassy in Somalia, which had been closed since 1991 when the government of long-term dictator Siad Barre collapsed. But the fact that Kerry’s visit was a brief few hours—during which he did not even leave the heavily-guarded Mogadishu airport—also points to deep and persistent security challenges. Moreover, his meeting with Somali President Hassan Sheikh Mohamoud and Prime Minister Omar Sharmarke comes at a time when the relationship between international donors and the Somali government has soured and the Somali people have grown increasingly weary of their government. The early optimism that the 2012 election of Mohamoud by appointed members of the Somali parliament would usher in badly needed changes in Somali politics, toward inclusiveness, effectiveness, and accountability, dissipated long ago.

Indeed, an observer’s bullishness about Somalia very much depends on his or her baseline. Compared to the early 1990s or 2011, when al Shabab controlled most of Mogadishu and most of central and southern Somalia, with only the semi-autonomous regions of Puntland and Somaliland escaping its grasp, Somalia is in much better shape. However, when compared to the spring of 2013, when I took a previous research trip there, the 2015 spring (my latest trip), and summer hardly look peppy. Security is tenuous, with al Shabab and the African Union Mission in Somalia (AMISOM) forces stuck in a draw, and politics has been regressing to many of the same old discouraging patterns.

The rest of 2015 and 2016 are important times for Somalia. They could either resurrect optimism about the country’s progress or reinforce disappointment. The current AMISOM mandate expires in November 2015. By 2016, as a compact between the international donors and Somalia government specifies, presidential elections are supposed to take place, a constitution redrafting is to be finished, and the transformation of a centralized state into a federal one with states formed is to be completed. From the perspective of the middle of 2015, this agenda looks daunting.

AL SHABAB’S BATTLEFIELD

After struggling against al Shabab for several years and hunkering down in a few blocks of Mogadishu, AMISOM forces, with the assistance of international private security companies and international funding, finally began to reverse the al Shabab tide in 2011. As clan militias defected from al Shabab, AMISOM succeeded in pushing the terrorist group out of Somalia’s major cities. U.S. air and Special Forces attacks against al Shabab leadership eliminated some key figures, such as the group’s amir, Ahmed Godane, in September 2014 and its previous leader, Aden Ayro, in May 2008.

That said, al Shabab is hardly defeated—even if its membership is thought to be down to around 6,000, with the most potent and hardcore Amniyat branch down to perhaps 1,500. (Such estimates, given by Somali government officials and international military advisors, need to be taken with a grain of salt, since the capacity of insurgent groups to replenish their ranks often outpaces the capacity of counterinsurgent forces to kill or arrest the groups’ members.) The group’s spectacular terrorist attacks in Kenya and Uganda, such as the one on Nairobi’s Westgate Mall in September 2013 and on a teaching college in the city of Garissa in April 2015, don’t necessarily mean that al Shabab has lost the capacity to operate in Somalia. In fact, if anything, al Shabab’s operations have become more targeted and more effective, and generate more casualties with the militant group losing fewer fighters. The fact that the group has deeply infiltrated Somali military and police forces helps it in that regard.

Although AMISOM still holds the major cities that it won back from al Shabab as part of the 2014 Operation Eagle and Operation Indian Ocean, al Shabab’s presence in supposedly liberated cities is often robust. The group extorts shopkeepers and intimidates the local population with threatening night letters that regularly appear in public spaces. People routinely receive cell phone texts such as “You forgot to pay your zakat (religious tax); tomorrow we cannot guarantee your security.” Such intimidation is prevalent even in Kismayo, a strategic port in the southern region of Juba that used to be a key source of revenue for al Shabab from customs and smuggling items like charcoal. Kismayo, and the newly-formed state of Jubaland, are controlled by Ahmed Madobe, who defected from his role as al Shabab commander several years ago and, with the support of Kenyan forces, took control of the area and declared himself president of the state.

Over the past year, al Shabab attacks have also escalated in Mogadishu. Assassinations are a daily occurrence. Many government officials have to live and work (often in the same room) in hotels close to the Mogadishu airport, a palpable symptom of the decline in confidence and sense of security since 2013. The fact that some assassinations are actually perpetrated by rival politicians, warlords, and businessmen, with al Shabab happily taking the credit, does not lessen the sense of insecurity.

Al Shabab also controls roads and limits AMISOM’s movement. Attacks on AMISOM convoys and IEDs are frequent. In fact, despite its two much-touted offensive operations last year, AMISOM is mostly in defensive garrison mode. Rarely does it actually fight al Shabab; in advance of AMISOM’s clearing operations, al Shabab often disperses. Usually, by the time AMISOM arrives, it finds a ghost village (sometimes destroyed by al Shabab). AMISOM leaves, and al Shabab comes back from the bush. Often locals, at best, sit on the fence and, at worst, continue to support al Shabab because of their calculation that al Shabab will ultimately be the dominant force in their area.

That does not mean that Somalis actually like al Shabab: Its brutality is still shocking; memories of the militant group’s aggravation of the 2011 famine are still vivid; and al Shabab has hardly been a competent ruler enabling local economic growth. Instead, the group often tried to suppress or undermine vital economic markets, such as in qat. And, thanks to its control of the roads, ordinary Somalis fear traveling on them. Those who are willing have to be prepared to pay bribes of about $30 dollars to travel to Mogadishu from Merka and over a $100 to travel from there to Kismayo. Only the wealthy can absorb such costs, increasing Somalis’ frustration and sense of insecurity. Likewise, urban Somalis are quick to point out that inflation, including the cost of basic food items, has significantly increased since deliveries must now either come by air, be smuggled in, or are levied with substantial extortion fees and illegal taxes.

STUCK IN THE SAND WITH AMISOM

On the other side of the fighting, AMISOM nominally numbers 22,000 soldiers from Burundi, Djibouti, Ethiopia, Kenya, and Uganda. It could and should be much more efficient in its fight against al Shabab. But it is not clear how many soldiers are actually on the ground at any one point. The capacity and training of the AMISOM deployments varies widely across the countries. Some of the forces, such as those from Burundi, do not speak English and have little training overall. Many of these militaries were built during their country’s own political revolutions and have had little deployment or battle experience since. Very few of the deployed troops have had any counterinsurgency training and they lack logistics, medevac, and intelligence and reconnaissance support. AMISOM was to be equipped with ten helicopters, with Uganda promising to provide four and the other United Nations member states the rest. Three, however, crashed into Mt. Kenya as they were flying from Uganda to Somalia, and Uganda is now in dispute with the international community over who will pay for the destroyed aircraft.

Moreover, the original expectation that a United Nations force would eventually replace AMISOM has long since died. Nor do the AMISOM forces necessarily want to get out of Somalia (or fully defeat al Shabab): The international funding they receive for their effort makes for good living for their soldiers and a substantial financial boost for their military institutions. Moreover, their presence in Somalia allows them to pursue their regional interests and enhance their importance with the broader international community.

AMISOM has weak headquarters to which few member countries pass on any information, let alone intelligence, or bother to coordinate. Some AMISOM commanders maintain highly personalized and sometimes outright subversive agendas: There are credible rumors that AMISOM units have sold fuel and arms to al Shabab or looted humanitarian convoys.

The fact that AMISOM is organized into five sectors operated mostly by one of the AMISOM member countries does not help with coordination and planning. The division of the sectors reflects the strategic interests of the intervening forces. Kenya and Ethiopia, although they have suspended some of their mutual rivalries, still mostly cultivate proxies in their sectors to create buffer areas, prevent the leakage of terrorism into their countries, disrupt support for separatists within their own countries, and project land and sea power. Offensive operations are decided mostly on a sector basis, with the forces in each area reporting and taking orders from their own capitals. Whether captured weapons are handed over to Somali forces varies by sector. So does how al Shabab terrorists are dealt with. There is little coordination among the sectors and little planning at AMISOM headquarters; in fact, they are generally only interested in working together when headquarters has something to offer to them, such as logistical support via the United Nations.

Not surprisingly, it has been hard for AMISOM to hold and build a “cleared” territory. At first, AMISOM forces exhibited little interest in providing any governance functions or even conducting stabilization operations, such as repairing bridges or providing clean water systems. They expected the Somali security forces and government to do so. But Somalia hasn’t been able to because local governance structures are frequently destroyed, blocked off by al Shabab, dominated by problematic powerbrokers, or lack resources. And so AMISOM has come under pressure from the United States and the international community to take over these stabilization functions.

Pushing AMISOM into stabilization operations is a difficult call. On the one hand, it should be the responsibility of the local and national government to administer its territory, and the credit for doing so should accrue to the Somali government, not to foreign forces. On the other hand, local communities are frustrated by the lack of security and services after AMISOM clears a territory. In either case, it isn’t clear that AMISOM militaries could do much better at governance, since they, too, lack resources and training. And the political sensitivities abound. Somalis do not see themselves as African, but rather as Arab; and al Shabab can easily label Burundi, Uganda, Kenya, and Ethiopia as Christian invaders. Although Somalis are deeply divided along scores of clan divisions, they also identify as nationalists, opposing foreign intervention.

If AMISOM does take on a stabilization role, it should be limited, discreet, and concrete, including short-term support for building water and other infrastructure. One of the current ideas is to deliver quick-impact projects only when some, even interim, local authority has been created and is supported by local peace committees consisting of clan elders, imams, women’s groups, businessmen, and civil society members. Even though the projects could still become fronts for graft, any accountability is better than none.

SOMALI NATIONAL FORCES IN TATTERS

Another major official combatant in the war is Somalia’s own forces, consisting of the army, police, and militarized intelligence service. They have not been able to provide stabilization operations on their own because, as still mostly a collection of disparate militias, they lack the capacity. They remain beholden to clans and powerbrokers, and lack both a national ethos and training. When pressure rises, they mostly fall apart or return to militia behavior. Underpaid and often not paid for months, they frequently resort to selling their equipment to obtain some income. They are also notoriously infiltrated by al Shabab. The paramilitary intelligence service run by the National Intelligence and Security Agency, and the preferred partner of U.S. and Ethiopian counterterrorism efforts, is somewhat better, but also rather brutal and beholden to clan politics.

Not surprisingly, the Somali people do not trust their national forces. Although the federal government nominally controls the national forces (while explicitly not controlling regional militia forces), its presence beyond Mogadishu is limited and it depends on AMISOM and international support for protection from al Shabab and rival powerbrokers. In order to wean itself off AMISOM, defeat al Shabab, and suppress regional conflicts, Somalia’s national forces would need to be significantly bigger than they are now at about 10,000 fighters. But donors, aware that a large percentage of foreign military aid disappears into personal pockets of Somali politicians, are reluctant to commit more money for larger Somali security forces.

The security forces of the semi-autonomous state of Puntland are somewhat more capable, but insecurity in Puntland, too, has been increasing since al Shabab was pushed into the state from central Somalia. Numbering perhaps about 4,000, the forces include a state-armed militia/police force known as darawish as well as other police forces and custodial forces. Many other unofficial entities also operate in Puntland, including the Puntland Security Force, which is paid by the United States to fight al Shabab and presumably reports to the Puntland president, and the Puntland Maritime Police Force, which is paid for by the United Arab Emirates. The latter was originally created to fight pirates, although recently it has also apparently been dispatched to fight al Shabab in the Galgadud area. The Puntland government has little interest in integrating these forces into the Somali national armed forces.

Somaliland remains the most secure part of Somalia with the best functioning government­—although, of course, the local leadership there continues to want to secede from the country and establish independence. Mediation talks in Ankara facilitated by Turkey collapsed in the spring of 2015. Since then, Somaliland has been preoccupied by presidential and parliamentary elections for the state government, which were to be held on June 26, 2015. But despite popular demand and strong pressure from international donors, the elections were delayed by at least 17 months due to a lack of preparedness, (as they had previously been in Puntland). This delay undermines governance and accountability in the state.

THE VICIOUS CIRCLE

It is not just security that has been sliding in Somalia for the past year and half. Equally, the sense of political momentum has dissipated. In 2013, there was a great deal of optimism among the Somalis whom I interviewed that Somalia hit rock bottom in 2011 and that the pernicious clan politics that plagued the country for the past three decades have ended. They placed a great deal of hope in their President, Mohamoud. A Somali professor and member of the country’s civil society, he was not a former warlord nor a member of the diaspora parachuted in. And although he was elected by a parliament of appointed (or self-appointed) clan elders and former warlords, he was not seen as beholden to any particular clan. The international community, including the United Kingdom and the United States, also embraced him.

But that was then. With little control over the country’s armed forces and budget, and unable to tackle pervasive and extensive corruption, the president fell back on one source of support: his Hawiye clan. And so the cycle of exclusionary politics began again, privileging access to business deals for his supporters and promoting clan backers for government positions.

Mohamoud’s government was soon paralyzed by the infighting between him and his prime ministers (a familiar story in Somalia over the past decade), whom he would repeatedly seek to replace. The Somali constitution makes the president the symbol of authority, but his role and relationship with the prime minister is not clearly defined. Ultimately, the constitution is generally interpreted as mandating a Hawiye president and a Darod prime minister. That design is meant to encourage inclusiveness. In truth, however, it mostly led to a struggle between the president and prime minister, mimicking the power fights between the two main clans.

The constant turnover of government officials at the federal and subnational levels is another major problem: With appointments often lasting only a few weeks, officials have far more interest in quickly making money and placing allies in other public sector positions than in governing effectively and building equitable and accountable state institutions—or any institutions for that matter.

To give itself legitimacy, the government has embraced a brand of conservative Islam that is not as far from al Shabab’s teachings as many would like. The president is reputed to have admiration for the Muslim Brotherhood in Egypt and is said to consider Mohamad Morsi, the imprisoned former Muslim Brotherhood–affiliated president of Egypt, a personal friend.

Indeed, the contest for political legitimacy in Somalia revolves around four elements: Who is more Islamic? Who is more nationalistic? Who delivers better security? And who is less corrupt and delivers better services? For years, the Somali federal government has struggled to win on any of these fronts. And it has exhibited little recognition of, or interest in, the problems of clan marginalization and poor governance, even though these grievances thrust Somalis into al Shabab’s hands.

To address some of these problems, under a 2013 compact between the international community and Somalia, Somalia was supposed to hit three milestones by 2016: hold presidential elections; adopt a new constitution; and form subnational states. All are important, and none is easy to do, much less do well, in the given timeframe. Yet international donors, not wanting to repeat their frequent sin of setting up conditions but still delivering aid after a Somali government fails to meet them, are loath to relax the 2016 timeline.

Pervasive insecurity makes holding national elections difficult. It also enables fraud and heightens feelings of purposeful exclusion. AMISOM has helped little when it comes to providing security for a vote. And the government has made few preparations itself. So far, there is not even a voter registry. In late May 2015, the Somali government launched a census effort (a step toward creating a voter registry). However, the census itself could lead to new conflict, particularly if the resulting counts of the Hawiye, Darod, and other clans and subclans make any one group unhappy—as is almost sure to happen. Meanwhile, the fact that the independent electoral commission is located within the presidential palace of Villa Somalia, even if for legitimate security reasons, makes it seem potentially biased and illegitimate.

But there is little alternative to holding a national election. Many Somalis want to see a change in government; and international donors are also increasingly frustrated with the current one. Perhaps the president could again be appointed by members of parliament, with all the legitimacy limits such a process brings. Ultimately, though, a vote and the creation of real political parties is important. It is the only way to realign Somali politics away from narrow clan parochialism and individual patronage networks and toward broader national representation and coalitions. But few Somali powerbrokers have an interest in allowing their formation; even under the best of circumstances, they will not materialize by the 2016 election.

It is also possible that the international community will agree to postpone the elections. It did so in Puntland, it now has to live with it in Somaliland; and it may do so again at the national level. Even if national elections do not take place, it is worth considering whether some subnational elections (such as for the mayor of Mogadishu) could be held to facilitate greater accountability.

The next task is revising the constitution in a way that increases inclusiveness. Donors do not want the redrafting process to drag on for years, as it has in Nepal for over a decade. Somalis are already disappointed with initial drafts, though: Quotas for women have disappeared from the constitution, and progressives have little faith that the current language—women should have a “meaningful representation” in all elected and appointed positions—will achieve progress. Moreover, the constitution drafters are still to tackle some of the most politically contentious issues, including how power (including arms, taxes, and other resources) will be distributed between the center and the newly forming states.

But the fact that Mogadishu has accepted federalism and power decentralization is perhaps the greatest political accomplishment in years. Competition over who controls Mogadishu and crucial resources has, for years, been a major source of conflict and corruption. Few outside of the capital, including Hawiye clans who dominate business there, want to be ruled by it.

However, there is as yet little agreement about the relative balance of power between the center and subnational states, including whether they will be allowed to retain their militia forces as some sort of paramilitary police. In the Jubaland State, Madobe, whose self-declared presidency was accepted by Mogadishu on an interim basis in 2013 for two years, has so far shown no inclination to give up control of any of his forces. In the Southwest State that has also been formed, local state officials decry the absence, incompetence, and untrustworthiness of national forces and clamor for their own armed services.

In both Jubaland and Southwest States, the state formation process was unable to avoid fighting between warlord and clan forces over which areas would be included in which state and under whose control. In Jubaland, the process ended with Madobe’s victory over the forces of Barre Hirale’s (who are still mostly hiding in the bush). In the Southwest State, the two local rivals created a coalition government, with over 60 ministers and plenty of built-in political dysfunction, nepotism, and paralysis. State formation still needs to be completed in other areas, such as the Shabelle. In April 2015, a state-formation conference was launched for the Central Regions State. Some representatives continue to question whether six states are enough and others are debating which state their territory should belong to.

How to generate revenues is another major challenge in the federalization process. Neither the state governments nor the national one trusts the other to share revenues: The states do not want to give up land taxes to the federal state; but the federal government strongly dislikes the idea of having to rely only on the tax revenues from fisheries and maritime routes. And the promise of potentially huge mineral resources under the Somali sand only makes the federal versus state competition more intense.

How control is devolved matters a lot. The biggest danger is that the exclusionary politics over spoils and war rents that have dominated Mogadishu for so long will be replicated at the local level. And given how the state formation processes have been going, there are reasons to fear that the clientalistic patronage networks that systematically discriminate against rivals will be reestablished at the state level. In some areas, especially in the Juba Valley, that is already underway, creating a significant number of internally displaced people and potentially allowing al Shabab to insert itself into the area on the side of the oppressed.

IT’S GOOD GOVERNANCE, STUPID

Over the past few decades, international actors have not paid enough attention to subnational governance in Somalia, and they are running that risk again. Many, including the United States, focus predominantly on the problem of al Shabab, even though al Shabab is merely the latest result of poor governance. Many of the crucial donors lack presence outside of Mogadishu, which limits their understanding of life at the regional, town, and village levels. Local peace committees of clan elders, imams, and representatives of civil society and the business community can be an important mechanism of better governance. But the international donors need to work with them, and to be aware of the politics behind the peace committees—such as, for example, of who is selected for them and who is excluded. Other international actors, such as Kenya and Ethiopia, often embrace problematic powerbrokers for the sake of their strategic and counterterrorism interests, even though these powerbrokers ultimately undermine stability.

Fundamentally, whether Somalia succeeds in breaking out of decades of conflict, famine, misery, corruption, and misgovernance depends on the Somali people. It depends on whether a sufficient constituency for better governance and less conflict eventually emerges or whether Somali businessmen and politicians continue to find the way to work around conflict or make money from it while the Somali people eke out survival amidst the harshest conditions without mobilizing for change. Since 2012, Somalia has had one of the best chances to pull off such transformation in years. It should not waste it.

This article was originally published by Foreign Affairs.

      

William Galston and E.J. Dionne, Jr. make the case for universal voting – a new electoral system in which voting would be regarded as a required, civic duty. Why not treat showing up at the polls in the same way we treat a jury summons, which compels us to present ourselves at the court? Galston and Dionne argue that universal voting would enhance the legitimacy of our governing institutions, greatly increasing turnout and the diversity of the American voter base, and ease the intense partisan polarization that weakens our governing capacity.

Citing the implementation of universal voting in Australia in 1924, the authors conclude that universal voting increases citizen participation in the political process. In the United States, they write, universal voting would promote participation among citizens who are not likely to vote—those with lower levels of income and education, young adults, and recent immigrants. By evening out disparities in the electorate, universal voting would put the state on the side of promoting broad civic participation.

In addition to expanding voter participation, universal voting would improve electoral competition and curb hyperpolarization. Galston and Dionne assert that the addition of less partisan voters in the electorate, would force candidates to shift their focus from mobilizing partisan bases to persuading moderates and less committed voters. Reducing partisan rhetoric would help ease polarization and increase prospects for compromise.. Rather than focusing on symbolic, political gestures, Washington might have an incentive to tackle serious issues and solve problems.

Galston and Dionne believe that American democracy cannot be strong if citizenship is weak. And right now, they contend citizenship is strong on rights but weak on responsibilities. Making voting universal would begin to right this balance and send an important message: we all have the duty to help shape the country that has given us so much.

Galston and Dionne recognize that the majority of Americans are far from ready to endorse universal voting. By advancing a proposal that stands outside the perimeter of what the majority of Americans are likely to support, Galston and Dionne aim to enrich public debate—in the short term, by advancing the cause of more modest reforms that would increase participation; in the long term, by expanding public understanding of institutional remedies to political dysfunction. 

Downloads

• Download the paper

Audio

• Dionne and Galston discuss their paper on universal voting

      

In a new research paper—The case for universal voting: Why making voting a duty would enhance our elections and improve our government—Brookings scholars E.J. Dionne, Jr. and William Galston make the case for universal voting—an electoral system in which voting would be regarded as a required, civic duty. Why not treat showing up at the polls in the same way we treat, say, a jury summons? Dionne and Galston argue that universal voting’s benefits would include enhancing the legitimacy of our governing institutions, increasing turnout and the diversity of the American voter base, and easing the intense partisan polarization that weakens our governing capacity.

What do you think of Dionne and Galston’s proposal? Specifically, if voting and registration rules were made easier, should voting in national elections be universal and mandatory for all eligible citizens?

To voice your opinion, click the image below and vote. We will share the results on social media.

       

I was honored today to speak at the kick off meeting of the new ReFormers Caucus. This group of over 100 former members of the U.S. Senate, the House, and governors of both parties, has come together to fight for meaningful campaign finance reform. In the bipartisan spirit of the caucus, I shared speaking duties with Professor Richard Painter, who was the Bush administration ethics czar and my predecessor before I had a similar role in the Obama White House. 

As I told the distinguished audience of ReFormers (get the pun?) gathered over lunch on Capitol Hill, I wish they had existed when in my Obama administration role I was working for the passage of the Disclose Act. That bill would have brought true transparency to the post-Citizens United campaign finance system, yet it failed by just one vote in Congress.  But it is not too late for Americans, working together, to secure enhanced transparency and other campaign finance changes that are desperately needed.  Momentum is building, with increasing levels of public outrage, as reflected in state and local referenda passing in Maine, Seattle and San Francisco just this week, and much more to come at the federal, state and local level.

       

President Obama is right to keep at it in Afghanistan, argues a new policy brief by Michael O’Hanlon, senior fellow and director of research for the Brookings Foreign Policy program.

Some have criticized the president’s decision to maintain a significant troop presence there (5,500 troops), instead of following through on the planned military withdrawal. But Afghanistan remains very important to American security, O’Hanlon contends, and the situation in the country is far from hopeless in spite of recent setbacks. We should reinvigorate American efforts in Afghanistan, he argues—not returning to levels seen in previous years, but ramping up somewhat from our current posture.

O’Hanlon calls Obama’s resolve in Afghanistan commendable, but writes that he and his administration are still making mistakes on U.S. policy toward the war-torn country. He advises that Washington make two specific changes to its military strategy in Afghanistan:

1. Allow U.S. and NATO airpower to target the Islamic State and the Taliban (currently, they can only fight those groups if directly attacked). The narrow rules of engagement constraining foreign forces were intended to push Afghan armed forces to defend their territory themselves. While a worthy goal, O’Hanlon says, these rules often prevent us from attacking ISIS (though the targeting strategy towards the group may be changing) as well as the Taliban. They also impose unrealistically high demands on Afghan forces and make too fine a distinction between an array of aligned extremist groups operating in the country.
2. Expand U.S. force presence from the current 5,500 troops to around 12,000 for a few years. In O’Hanlon’s opinion, our current numbers are not enough to work with fielded Afghan forces, and skimping on ground forces has contributed to security challenges in places like Helmand, for instance, which experienced new setbacks in 2015. More broadly, leaders in Washington and Brussels should stress the value of a long-term NATO-Afghanistan partnership, rather than emphasizing an exit strategy. This will signal Western resolve to the Taliban and other groups. While the next commander in chief should set the United States on a gradual path toward downsizing American troops in Afghanistan, he believes it would be a mistake for Obama to do so in the short term.

The long haul

O’Hanlon also argues that the United States needs to take a longer-term perspective on key political and economic issues in Afghanistan. On the economic front, there seems to be little thinking about an agricultural development plan for Afghanistan, associated infrastructure support, and land reform, among other challenges. On the political front, conversations often tend to focus on shorter-term issues like organizing parliamentary elections, reforming the Independent Election Commission, or modifying the current power-sharing arrangement. In the process, conversations about foundational political strategy focusing on Afghan institutions and the health of its democracy get short-changed. The parliament is in need of reforms, for instance, as is the political party system (which should encourage Afghans to group around ideas and policy platforms, rather than tribes and patronage networks).

O’Hanlon concludes that the situation in Afghanistan today, while fraught, is understandable given the Taliban’s resilience and NATO’s gradual withdrawal of 125,000 troops. We should not be despondent, he writes—rather, we should identify specific strategies that can help improve the situation. At the end of the day, Afghans must make the big decisions about the future of their country. But as long as the United States and its partners are still providing tremendous resources—and as long as security threats emanating from South Asia continue to threaten the United States—leaders in Washington should use their influence wisely.

       

       

       

       

       

       

       

       

According to multiple press reports, European Union leaders are poised to choose Italy’s Foreign Minister Federica Mogherini as the EU’s next foreign policy chief at a summit on Saturday. A previous summit to discuss the position ended in deadlock in July when the Baltics and several Eastern European states objected to Mogherini due to concerns that she was too soft on Russia and lacked foreign policy experience, as she has only been in her position since January.

Now decision day has arrived and Italy’s Prime Minister Matteo Renzi is determined to push her candidacy through even if some disagree. As one EU diplomat told the Financial Times, “You still have a group of countries who will be quite unsatisfied, but they don’t have a blocking minority.” In a comment that could have been made by Stringer Bell in “The Wire,” Italian Minister Sandro Gozi previewed this strategy in July, saying, “The possibility of a majority vote ... is part of the game and cannot be ruled out.”

This highly consequential foreign policy decision is being made on the basis of criteria that have nothing to do with foreign policy. No one claims that Mogherini is the best person to deal with Russia but asking who is is not seen as a relevant question. The sharing of the spoils of several top jobs between the parties means that it must go to a socialist and Europe’s socialist leaders want to help Renzi. There is pressure to appoint a woman because EU leaders have failed to nominate women for other top posts or for the rest of the commission. Merkel had concerns but she is apparently willing to let it slide if it means stopping Italy from diluting the EU’s budget rules. Others are doing their own deals. The bottom line is that foreign policy is almost entirely absent from the discussion.

In normal times, this would be a bit unseemly but not outrageous. These are not normal times however. It is easily forgotten in Rome and Paris but Russia poses a real and near-term threat to some EU members—Latvia, Estonia and maybe even Lithuania. These states have asked for more assistance and support from their allies in NATO and from other EU members. They are deeply concerned by Mogherini’s nomination. Italy has strong economic ties with Russia and has frequently opposed tougher sanctions. Mogherini’s visit to Moscow early this year and her language of respecting Russian interests raised concerns about exactly what those interests are and whether she understands where the fault lies.

In a clear reference to Mogherini, Lithuania's President Dalia Grybauskaitė said that the EU must not pick someone who is “pro-Kremlin”—an exaggerated charge, perhaps, but indicative of the sensitivity and concern her candidacy has caused. But above all is the view that others are better qualified to deal with the Russian challenge—not just in terms of years clocked on the foreign policy beat but in the substance of what they say and do about it. Carl Bildt, Sweden’s foreign minister, is a leading example. Polish Minister of Foreign Affairs Radek Sikorski is another. Bulgaria’s Kristalina Georgieva, currently EU commissioner for humanitarian aid, would be a good compromise candidate.

One would think that the views of these member states would be taken extremely seriously by the rest of the EU. Instead, isolating and defeating them is just another “part of the political game.” Needless to say, this is not a game. It is the most serious security threat Europe has faced in over two decades. Two hundred and twelve EU citizens were killed by a Russian missile fired by Russian backed separatists in July. Thousands have died in Ukraine as a result of the war Russia started. And in recent weeks, Russian forces have begun a formal invasion of Ukraine.

It is mind-boggling that in a week when Russia opened a third front in Ukraine, European leaders are even considering appointing anyone other than someone with a proven track record of understanding and meeting Russia’s challenge, let alone a person who has consistently underestimated the risk. It’s as if a climate skeptic from the oil industry was to be appointed as environment minister.

It is true, of course, that the foreign policy chief, whoever he or she is, will not make EU policy. That will continue to be the domain of individual member states, especially Germany. But appointing the wrong person will do no good and may do some harm. Appointing the right person could serve the purpose of rallying the member states, pressuring them to stick to their previous declarations, and being a powerful voice for Europe’s values and its interests in a peaceful and free continent.

The EU owes it to its own citizens to make a decision of this magnitude solely on foreign policy grounds. It should not sell out the Baltics to keep the gravy train flowing. This is no time for business as usual.

      

If you want to understand what drove the intense opposition to the nuclear deal with Iran in certain quarters of the American political establishment, as well as across the broader Middle East, all you have to do is look at the photos from Iranian president Hassan Rouhani’s inaugural tour of Europe this week. The most notorious shot shows plywood barricades concealing ancient Roman statues, apparently out of concern that their nudity would shock or offend the leader of an Islamic theocracy.

The alacrity with which Italian leaders jettisoned their values and historical legacy in hopes of gaining some advantage in Iran’s post-sanctions gold rush is precisely what nuclear deal opponents predicted and hoped to forestall. After all, a Europe that would so readily censor the treasures of its own glorious antiquity, in an obsequious gesture that was apparently unbidden by Tehran, is unlikely to jeopardize any budding business to penalize any Iranian infractions of the agreement, or to put pressure on Iran over any of its other objectionable policies.

As I wrote 10 months ago:

After a deal, the Islamic Republic will be back in business, its standing as an investment destination restored and its place in the community of nations effectively normalized. This is, of course, precisely what Tehran is seeking and what Hassan Rouhani was elected to the presidency to accomplish — redemption. An imperfect, incomplete redemption, but a new beginning nonetheless.

But redemption is precisely what [Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin] Netanyahu and other opponents of an Iranian deal are determined to prevent. They appreciate that once the current network of multilateral sanctions is unraveled, it will never be reinstated, absent some extraordinary provocation by Tehran. The presumption, then, is that the threat posed by Iran’s regional ambitions will never be successfully blunted. For Netanyahu—and for many in the American policy community—that is an unacceptable outcome. They believe, as the prime minister declared on Tuesday, that “If Iran wants to be treated like a normal country, let it act like a normal country.”

Netanyahu and other opponents of the deal did not achieve that goal. Much of the U.S. unilateral sanctions regime remains intact, and these measures—along with some residual uncertainty about the longevity of the nuclear deal—will restrain the horizons of Iran’s economic and geopolitical reintegration into the international community. But for all practical purposes, the Islamic Republic’s redemption is complete.

The alacrity with which Italian leaders jettisoned their values and historical legacy in hopes of gaining some advantage in Iran’s post-sanctions gold rush is precisely what nuclear deal opponents predicted and hoped to forestall.

So in the wake of this broad normalization, how can the world continue to nudge Tehran toward “acting like a normal country”? For starters, by restraining the impulse to placate ideological excesses of Iranian politics—or, for that matter, those of its neighbors.

The Italian deference to Rouhani is not without precedent: similar measures were taken last year to protect the delicate sensibilities of Abu Dhabi’s crown prince. And it was not without foundation—in 1999, photos of a previous Iranian president, Mohammad Khatami, enjoying an Italian state dinner provoked a furor among opponents of his reformist agenda because they revealed wine glasses on the tables.

However, there were an infinite number of ways for circumventing these civilizational conflicts without repudiating Italian artistic glory. To avoid a repeat of his Roman fiasco, Khatami simply adapted his future European visits to incorporate a greater number of official breakfast meetings, where abstinence was more easily ensured.

Iran’s rehabilitation without full-fledged reformation compounds the already urgent challenges of an unstable Middle East. Its reintegration can be a stabilizing force, but only if Tehran reconciles itself to the world, rather than the reverse.

       

Editors’ Note: While much has been made of U.S. plans to counter ISIS in Libya, little is known about the role the Italians are playing, write Matteo Garavoglia and Leore Ben Chorin. Italians and Americans should better coordinate their efforts. This post originally appeared on The National Interest.

The ISIS buildup in Libya is undeniable. U.S. Commander General of Africa Command David Rodriguez testified to the Senate Armed Services Committee on March 8 that the Islamic State in Libya represents a serious and growing threat to the security and interests of America and its allies throughout the region.

While the United States, Italy and other coalition members continue to pressure Libyans to endorse a U.N.-brokered national unity plan, the same coalition members are starting to weave together plans for the “day after,” should a unity government be formed. Should such a government request international assistance, only hours or days will pass before more coalition forces will be on the ground, in the air and at sea. Among these coalition partners and throughout this buildup, Italy is bound to play a key role in the coalition. This is because of colonial ties, the influx of migrants that seek daily to cross the Mediterranean, the two countries’ geographic proximity and their shared economic interests.

While much has been made of U.S. plans, little is known about the role the Italians are playing and the assets they bring to the coalition. In January, Italy and the United States reached an agreement allowing American armed drones to fly from its Sigonella Naval and Air Station in Sicily, while over fifty Italian special operations forces were deployed in Libya two weeks ago. This is on top of the over forty Italian intelligence officers sent to Libya since July 2015, and the long-standing Italian presence on the ground, aimed at collecting human intelligence. More forces are expected in the weeks to come. The Italian contributions complement Washington's unrivaled convening power to seek a diplomatic path toward a unity government. Additionally, the United States has superior overhead imagery capabilities and the ability to carry out two-thirds of all precision strikes needed to counter ISIS.

[T]wo different clocks are ticking: a diplomatic one to establish a Libyan unity government, and a military one to counter ISIS. The two are out of sync.

Within this context, two different clocks are ticking: a diplomatic one to establish a Libyan unity government, and a military one to counter ISIS. The two are out of sync. Rome is unwilling to assume a leading role in Libya until a unity government is in place. Washington will not wait indefinitely to step up operations against ISIS. At the same time, the Italians are acutely aware that an ISIS stronghold in Libya would present a fundamental threat to their security. Equally, the Americans are reticent to further stretch themselves politically and militarily and would welcome strong Italian leadership. The diplomatic and military clocks must be aligned for Rome and Washington to effectively work together.

Italians and Americans should coordinate their efforts by playing “good cop, bad cop.” Rome should emphasize to the Libyans that forming a unity government would enable them to play a more proactive role in shaping the agenda of an Italian-led international engagement. At the same time, Rome should highlight that there is a limit to the extent that Italy can restrain Washington from escalating a military intervention beyond the control of all Libyan stakeholders. While continuing to support diplomatic efforts, the United States should up the tempo of its military preparations and surgical interventions. This would put pressure on bickering Libyans by showing them that they are running out of time to reach an agreement. Cajoling Libyans into forming a unity government would better align the American and Italian efforts to fight ISIS. Most importantly, it would give Libyans a say in the future of their country.

       

Editor's Note: This article originally appeared on Lawfare.

Faced with the breakdown of national armies in Iraq, Libya, Syria, and Yemen, Arab states have increasingly turned toward alliances with armed militias to ensure security. Popular, anti-government protests and insurgencies for the most part precipitated the breakdown of regime military institutions, yet pre-existing internal ethnic, clan, and ideological cleavages helped to hasten the breakdown. The beleaguered state security forces have now entered into a variety of alliances—tacit or active—with militias they deem sympathetic to their interests, often organized on the basis of entrenched ethno-sectarian or tribal identities. Such militia forces supplement and at times even stand in for the weak or absent army and police as providers of local security.

On the one hand, militia forces have in certain circumstances proven effective at counterinsurgency and counterterrorism. On the other hand, they have also committed atrocities against civilians that hamper long-term efforts to build trust and stability. Their greatest risk is that, by eroding the central government’s monopolization on force, they jeopardize the territorial cohesion of the state.

In Iraq, the rise of powerful communal militias has paralleled the growth of the threat from the Islamic State. This has presented the United States with a quandary: how to combat the Islamic State by mobilizing local Sunnis while at the same time safeguarding the broader integrity of the Iraqi state and its security institutions. The national guard concept, which successive Iraqi governments have tried in the past, was seen as one way to do this. A national guard force would retain the militias’ local knowledge and roots, both unique tools necessary for a successful counterinsurgency against the Islamic State. At the same time, the guard would (at least in theory) be subject to increased oversight and control by the central government.

Other fractured Arab states, most notably Libya, have tried to implement a national guard model as a way to harness militia power, but this too has failed. Variations of hybrid, provincially-organized military forces exist in Yemen and Syria. While each case is different, the failure of national guards bears certain similarities. Examining the Iraqi case in particular can highlight the potential utility of national guards but also the parallel political and institutional reforms that are necessary to make the concept work.

False Analogies and False Starts in Iraq

The idea of creating a national guard in Iraq has been a centerpiece of U.S. engagement since the dramatic advance of the Islamic State on Tikrit and Mosul in 2014. President Obama specifically mentioned U.S. support for a national guard as a means to help Iraqi Sunnis “secure their own freedom” from the Islamic State. Much of U.S. thinking about the Iraqi National Guard (ING) was guided by the example of the Sunni Awakening of 2006 and 2007, when the United States actively recruited and “flipped” Sunni tribes that had supported the al-Qaeda-inspired insurgency. In return for guarantees of autonomy and military, financial, and political backing, the Sunni tribes were able to turn the tables on the insurgent fighters and impose a measure of peace and stability. The 2014 initiative essentially sought to reproduce this arrangement. The idea was that given proper incentives, the Sunni tribes would again fight the radical Islamists who threatened their supremacy. Over the long term, such national guard forces could be integrated formally as auxiliary troops in a federal structure, comparable in many ways to the U.S. National Guard.

Yet the Awakening analogy failed on a number of levels. The Shi’i-dominated Iraqi central government had never been enthusiastic about empowering Sunni tribes in the first place. With the dismantling of the Iraqi army in 2003, security had effectively devolved to party, tribal, and sectarian militias. Many Iraqis wondered why the United States would seek to create new militias, especially ones recently tied to al-Qaeda and other terrorists. As Iraq scholar Adeed Dawisha described, the gains in security came“not because of the state, but in spite of it.”

As the U.S. began withdrawing from Iraq in 2009 and 2010, then-Prime Minister Nuri al-Maliki quickly moved to dismantle the Awakening-associated militias. Only a handful of former militia fighters received their promised positions in the police, army, or civil services. Some former militia leaders were arrested on seemingly politically-motivated charges of terrorism or subversion. Efforts to enact a Sunni-dominated super-region comparable to the federal status of the Kurdish Regional Government in the north were rebuffed, despite the provisions of Iraq’s constitution that allowed for the creation of such an entity. Politically marginalized, some Sunnis returned to their alliance with the radical mujahideen.

The election of the new prime minister Haydar al-Abadi in 2014 raised the promise of renewed Sunni-Shi’i reconciliation. Abadi expressed support for the national guard initiative and forwarded a bill to parliament in 2014. Thousands of volunteers came forward from the Sunni tribes in the west and U.S. and Iraqi officials met with tribal leaders to help solidify support. The United States began to enlist support from Iraq’s Sunni neighbors to provide training and support for the ING.

Yet resistance within Abadi’s own political coalition stymied these efforts. The National Guard bill foundered in parliamentary committee, with open questions about the extent of control vested in provincial governors and the chain of command subordinating the ING to the ministries of interior, defense, or the prime minister himself. Officers of the Iraqi Security Forces (ISF) regarded the militias as unfit for duty and as rivals for budget and resources. Iraq’s constitution specifically prohibited the formation of militias outside the framework of the armed forces (with an exception of the peshmergaforces of the Kurdish Regional Government). Moreover, there was concern that once the Sunnis were authorized to organize a militia, other ethno-sectarian communities, such as Christians or Turkomen,might try to follow suit out of fear of falling under the mercy of their more powerful neighbors. The ING, then, could undercut any pretense of the Iraqi state possessing a monopoly over the use of force.

At base, though, many of Iraq’s Shi’i leaders simply believed that they didn’t need Sunni support. With the ING initiative stalled in parliament, the Shi’i factions have actively cultivated Shi’i militias as part of the Popular Mobilization Forces (PMF, or Hashd al-Shaabi). The origins of the PMF can be traced to a statement by Grand Ayatollah Ali Sistani, Iraq’s senior Shi’i cleric, which explicitly called on the faithful to take up arms to defend Iraq in the face of the Islamic State onslaught in 2014. Muqtada al-Sadr’s Jaysh al-Mahdi, the Badr Organization, and other political factions quickly took the opportunity to reconstitute or expand their private armies.

Backed by Iran’s expeditionary al-Qods Force, PMF militias played a prominent role in the spring 2015 offensive against the Islamic State in Tikrit. By spring 2015, PMF counted around 60,000 men under arms. Still, the performance of these militias has been less than stellar. In the spring 2015 offensive on Tikrit, PMF forces failed repeatedly to dislodge Islamic State resistance, despite enjoying superiority in numbers. U.S. air support proved critical to allowing the offensive to proceed. Some PMF units quit the fight instead of working under American air cover. Others were involved in a campaign of terror against Sunnis, looting, kidnapping, and killing those suspected of collaborating with the Islamic State.

Awakening Again?

The prospects for the mobilization of Iraq’s Sunnis are not dead—yet. A handful of Sunni tribes joined the PMF during the Tikrit offensive. In Anbar, likely the next front in the campaign against the Islamic State, U.S. and Iraqi officials have cultivated ties with local Sunni tribes and organized some 8,000 men into Sunni PMF units. Some tribes have made their service conditional on guarantees of greater autonomy and the removal of Shi’i militia forces. Yet the intake for training programs remains slow and drop-out rates high. On the one hand, tribes continue to resent the central government. On the other hand, they fear retribution should the Islamic State return.

Abadi’s visit to Washington in April 2015 focused on expanding and enhancing security cooperation with the United States. The United States has insisted that the PMF be brought more fully under the control of the Iraqi Security Forces and that PMF units reflect the demographics of the provinces and districts in which they operate. This would mean that in ethnically-mixed areas, such as in Nineveh or Babil, each ethnic group would have its own militia proportional to its size in the locality. The Iraq Train and Equip Program (ITEP) is slowly coming online, funneling American money and weapons to various local militia forces as well as ISF.

Cooperating with the United States has been a delicate balancing act for Abadi. While Kurdish and Sunni leaders see U.S. military support as a means to their own ends, Abadi’s own Shi’i political camp—as well as his allies in Tehran—are far more wary. When the U.S. Congress passed a bill in May 2015 effectively mandating the Defense Department to bypass Baghdad and provide support for Sunni and Kurdish fighters directly, Abadi protested that this constituted a grave violation of Iraqi sovereignty.

Still, reliance on the ragtag PMF alone is not sustainable in the long term. Operating far from home and with limited training, these overwhelmingly Shi’i forces cannot be expected to become an army of occupation in Sunni areas like Tikrit or Fallujah. Ultimately, local partners will be necessary to build and maintain peace and stability. The national guard, then, may well re-emerge as a more sustainable structure for administrative and security devolution.

Lessons Learned From Failure

While analysts and policymakers naturally focus on cases of success, there are important lessons to be learned from Iraq’s failures. For countries like Iraq where central armies have more or less broken down and a bevy of militias has emerged in its stead, as in Libya, Yemen, and Syria, the national guard could represent a path to reconstituting fragile state authority.

But for this to happen, several broad principles need to be heeded:

• National guards cannot simply be conceived as short-term, improvised solutions to immediate security crises. Rather, the creation of national guards is part of the impetus of security-sector reform (SSR) and post-conflict demobilization, disarmament, and reintegration (DDR) of armed groups.
• National guards must overcome the legacies of past authoritarian experiences where pro-government militias were often seen as mere thugs for the regime, not a disciplined professional fighting force. In particular, the older officer class of regular forces may see them as competitors. To build trust among the population and other military institutions, national guards should be accompanied by revisions to chain of command establishing clear relationships of authority between the guards, the police, the army, and other security agencies, and subordinating all security services to civilian authorities.
• National guard initiatives must also be accompanied by moves toward political power-sharing arrangements. The success of national guards ultimately depends not just on their short-term tactical effectiveness but on the degree of local buy-in. Constitutions can provide a structure for bolstering confidence between a central government and subnational militia forces. Since militia membership and cohesion is often based on geographic linkages—to town, municipality or province—national guards may well be a part of federalist power devolution, especially in countries with overlapping ethno-sectarian and regional cleavages.
• Western governments can assist in setting up and training national guards, but they must ensure that proper political and institutional reforms are also undertaken. In many cases, Western states provide models for how decentralized, federally-organized military forces can complement national armies and local police. The United States, for instance, has a great deal of experience with its own federalized national guard structure and can draw on this example in its train-and-equip programs. There are other potentially useful models as well, including the British Territorial Army, a part-time, volunteer force that was integrated into the British Army in the early twentieth century; the Danish Home Guard, which incorporated anti-Nazi resistance militias into a national command structure after World War II; or the Italian Carabineri, which is often discussed as a potential model for dealing with Libya’s unique security challenges.

Outside assistance to national guards must avoid exacerbating existing communal and political fault lines. Helping peripheral and minority groups set up their own armed forces can, on one hand, embolden these groups to resist the central government and, on the other hand, spur resentment from the central government and fear of future disloyalty or rebellion. These concerns become even more acute when national guards are seen as proxies for outside powers. With this in mind, the U.S. and outside powers should calibrate their assistance to both regionally-based national guards and central government forces to ensure rough parity between the two. This could entail making funding, equipment and training for the central security services contingent on a proportional commitment to strengthen the guards.

National guards are political institutions, not just military instruments. They can have far-ranging consequences for political stability and cohesion. While no panacea for the challenge of building effective states, they can play an important role in addressing security concerns and moving toward more meaningful power sharing.

      

Editor’s Note: The following is a transcript of the House of Representatives’ Special Select Committee hearing on the Benghazi scandal, taking place in a parallel universe not very far away. It is satire, obviously, but perhaps only because of an almost random quirk of fate.

Representative Trey Gowdy: I would like to call this hearing to order. We are gathered today to get to the bottom of the horrific events of March 18 to 25, 2011, when over 100,000 inhabitants of Benghazi were cruelly killed in the worst act of genocide since Rwanda. Libya has since descended into a catastrophic civil war on a par with Syria, and yet Colonel Gadhafi is still in power. Worse, the situation has exacerbated extremism and threatens to spur Islamic terrorism throughout the region. The recent intervention of Russian forces in the Libyan civil war ensures that any chance the United States had of ending Gadhafi’s cruel tyranny has been missed. 

This was the greatest moral and strategic failure of U.S. foreign policy in 20 years. And yet there has been little or no accountability. Former U.N. Ambassador Susan Rice was even promoted to Secretary of State, while former National Security Council staffer Samantha Power stepped down, apparently in quiet protest at the president and Secretary Hillary Clinton’s weak and morally vacuous policy. Ms. Power's new sequel "A Problem From Hell" has now been made into the Oscar-winning movie "Hotel Benghazi." This scandal, this moral failing is now seared into the conscience of our nation.

This Special Select Committee was stood up 18 months ago and has been working diligently since that day to build on the work of multiple other congressional inquiries to get at the truth of this national shame. We know that the Obama administration had intelligence about the risk of genocide in Benghazi but it decided not to act. Indeed, the entire world knew. The questions we want answered are: What did the administration know about the approaching genocide? And when did it know it? 

We are joined by former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton. Madam Secretary, we appreciate you taking time off from the campaign trail. I understand you have a short statement. 

Secretary Hillary Clinton: Thank you, Representative Gowdy. This is my fourth time appearing before the U.S. Congress on this issue; 37 members of my staff and family have appeared, and my dog is currently fighting a subpoena. So I will keep this brief.

While we deeply regret the Benghazi genocide, we must remember that we had incomplete information about Colonel Gadhafi's intentions. We were faced with a difficult choice: Should we intervene to stop an uncertain atrocity, committing U.S. troops to an uncertain mission with no exit plan and no vital national interest? Or should we try to shape events without the use of U.S. forces, using the many other tools at our disposal? 

We decided that U.S. military intervention was not prudent. We were worried about a failed state and losing U.S. personnel on the ground. The administration instead sought to mobilize the international community to prevent any genocide and ultimately to bring Gadhafi and his henchmen to justice at the International Criminal Court. 

We continued throughout my tenure as secretary of state—and until this day—to work to bring the civil war to an end and to help the moderate Libyan opposition to overthrow the regime. 

We made some tough calls and we must acknowledge that we were not always right. Knowing what we know now, I wish that we had acted more forcefully. Indeed, I was personally in favor of a no-fly zone to protect Libyan civilians. But hindsight is twenty-twenty and the president decided to stay out. 

Representative Gowdy: Madam Secretary, with all due respect, Gadhafi's intention was quite clear. Just days before the slaughter he said, and I quote: “All of these germs, rats and scumbags, they are not Libyans.” He told them "It's over…We are coming tonight…We will find you in your closets, ” adding: “We will show no mercy.” U.S. NGOs on the ground provided detailed information of troop movements. What more evidence did you need of imminent war crime? Why did you not act? Isn’t the role of the secretary of state to persuade the president? 

If something went wrong, I would be the first to say war is unpredictable and involves risk. I am confident the Congress would have fully supported you.

Secretary Clinton: Congressman, with all due respect, Congress at the time steadfastly opposed our intervention. Had we acted and had the aftermath been messy—as we fully expected—I have no doubt that you would be calling me here to account for that, noting that our own assessments showed we had no capacity to bring stability to Libya. What if we had lost U.S. military personnel or diplomats? What if a U.S. overthrow of the Gadhafi regime merely led to more and different chaos and violence, as we saw in Iraq?

Representative Gowdy: Madam Secretary, the greater shame is clearly inaction in the face of a moral imperative. I can assure you, and I feel confident I speak for all of my colleagues, that had you acted, we would have had your back, come what may. If something went wrong, I would be the first to say war is unpredictable and involves risk. I am confident the Congress would have fully supported you. 

Secretary Clinton: Thank you Congressman, but you will excuse me if I still have some doubts on that score. I guess we’ll never know. 

      

On Thursday, when former Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton appears before the Senate Benghazi Committee for a new round of hearings, reporters with vivid historical imaginations will be pining for an epic battle. Melodramatic journalists may recall the 1950-1951 Kefauver Committee investigating organized crime, which introduced politicized television dramas to millions of Americans. They may evoke the 1954 Army-McCarthy hearings, when the aristocratic Boston lawyer Joseph Welch cold-cocked the anti-communist Senator Joe McCarthy by asking: “Have you no sense of decency, sir, at long last? Have you left no sense of decency?” They will yearn for the constitutional grandeur of the 1973 Senate Watergate hearings, which exposed Richard Nixon’s corruption. Alas, most likely, we will endure yet another round of the 1990s’ tawdry Clinton follies, which diminished both parties and helped trigger our current political depression.

Although Hillary Clinton often performs well under pressure and probably has rehearsed a dramatic soundbite or two to rile her partisan base, these hearings are bad news for her campaign. The email server scandal has gotten more traction than the Clintonites would have expected. It stirs fears that both Hillary and Bill Clinton are so convinced of their own goodness, their own idealism, their own contributions to the public good, that they exempt themselves from the rules ordinary Americans must follow. The scandal also reminds many of the Clintons’ moral blindspot, their ethical sloppiness that led them into the cozy, overlapping, ambiguities, and occasional lies behind the Whitewater mess, the Travelgate coverup, the Paula Jones sexual harassment, the Monica Lewinsky obstruction of justice, and a host of lesser Clinton catastrophes.

Many Americans had Clinton fatigue by 2000, despite Clinton’s record high approval ratings. And with our Canadian neighbors just having voted in Justin Trudeau due to Stephen Harper fatigue, Hillary Clinton should remember that American voters want a fresh start after enduring a decade and a half of terrorist fears and economic woes, preceded by a scadal-plagued, hyper-partisan period of peace and prosperity in the 1990s.

Democrats also should worry that Hillary Clinton’s best defense is pretty offensive. She will play the partisan card. In the final question of the Democratic debate, Anderson Cooper asked “Which enemy are you most proud of?” Hillary Clinton answered: “Well, in addition to the NRA, the health insurance companies, the drug companies, the Iranians. Probably the Republicans.” In his presidential announcement-esque I’m-not-running speech Vice President Joe Biden pointedly said: “I don’t think we should look at Republicans as our enemies.” How does a candidate who compares Republicans to Iranians woo centrist voters in crucial swing states? And you can imagine the general campaign commercials asking: How does a president who demonizes her rivals work with them after Election Day?

Republicans should not be too cocky about these hearings either. The male senators pounding away at millions of American women’s best chance at a female president should beware the Anita Hill effect. During the 1991 fight over the sexual harassment allegations during Clarence Thomas’s Supreme Court nomination hearings, hostile senators interrogating Thomas’s female accuser looked like bullies who, in the parlance of the time, “just didn’t get it.” For the last six years, the Democrats have cleverly cast the Republicans as the party of no. In the 1990s, the Clintons cleverly cast the Republicans as a party of Ken Starrs, prosecutorial prigs abusing congressional and federal powers to subvert the political process and undermine the Constitution.

Moreover, Hillary Clinton’s defense during the last set of hearings more accurately reflects the public mood. Four brave Americans died. Their Islamist terrorist murderers are the guilty ones, not whatever mistaken spin the Obama administration may or may not have put on it subsequently.

Since the 1990s, gotcha journalism and politics have ruined politicians’ reputations and soured Americans on politics. Unlike the Watergate scandal, which produced heroes defending the Constitution like Judge John Sirica and Senator Sam Ervin, the Clinton scandals, and especially the Monica Lewinsky debacle, tarnished everyone involved. Journalists and Republicans looked like bullies, invading people’s privacy, treating personal indiscretions as high crimes not even misdemeanors. Feminists and Democrats sounded like hypocrites, excusing sexual harassment and the White House as a hostile workplace for women as long as the perpetrator was a pro-choice liberal. The people’s business suffered. In post Watergate America, the Pig-Pen-like cloud shrouding the Clintons, and their supporters’ “everybody does it” defense, had once naïve Americans now cynically grumbling, “they’re all guilty of something.”

Inevitably, after the Thursday hearings, too many Republicans and Democrats will assess the results based on quickie polls suggesting who “won” or “lost” the exchange, and whether Hillary Clinton’s popularity rises or falls. Washington should start tracking a different set of poll results. Back in the 1950s and the 1960s, the vast majority of Americans trusted their government. The most recent Gallup poll has only 19 percent of Americans surveyed agreeing that “you can trust government to do what is right.” Those metrics suggested that both Democrats and Republicans, all the presidential candidates, the president, Congress, and the Supreme Court, have disappointed the American people. A healthy democracy needs citizens with more faith in their government, we don’t need more recriminations, the criminalizing of politics, or more partisan clashes. Perhaps it is time for Senate Republicans to join Democrats in creating a bipartsan committee to investigate that problem, and begin by inviting all presidential candidates to testify about what they will do to make Americans believe in Washington again.

       

Editors’ Note: While much has been made of U.S. plans to counter ISIS in Libya, little is known about the role the Italians are playing, write Matteo Garavoglia and Leore Ben Chorin. Italians and Americans should better coordinate their efforts. This post originally appeared on The National Interest.

The ISIS buildup in Libya is undeniable. U.S. Commander General of Africa Command David Rodriguez testified to the Senate Armed Services Committee on March 8 that the Islamic State in Libya represents a serious and growing threat to the security and interests of America and its allies throughout the region.

While the United States, Italy and other coalition members continue to pressure Libyans to endorse a U.N.-brokered national unity plan, the same coalition members are starting to weave together plans for the “day after,” should a unity government be formed. Should such a government request international assistance, only hours or days will pass before more coalition forces will be on the ground, in the air and at sea. Among these coalition partners and throughout this buildup, Italy is bound to play a key role in the coalition. This is because of colonial ties, the influx of migrants that seek daily to cross the Mediterranean, the two countries’ geographic proximity and their shared economic interests.

While much has been made of U.S. plans, little is known about the role the Italians are playing and the assets they bring to the coalition. In January, Italy and the United States reached an agreement allowing American armed drones to fly from its Sigonella Naval and Air Station in Sicily, while over fifty Italian special operations forces were deployed in Libya two weeks ago. This is on top of the over forty Italian intelligence officers sent to Libya since July 2015, and the long-standing Italian presence on the ground, aimed at collecting human intelligence. More forces are expected in the weeks to come. The Italian contributions complement Washington's unrivaled convening power to seek a diplomatic path toward a unity government. Additionally, the United States has superior overhead imagery capabilities and the ability to carry out two-thirds of all precision strikes needed to counter ISIS.

[T]wo different clocks are ticking: a diplomatic one to establish a Libyan unity government, and a military one to counter ISIS. The two are out of sync.

Within this context, two different clocks are ticking: a diplomatic one to establish a Libyan unity government, and a military one to counter ISIS. The two are out of sync. Rome is unwilling to assume a leading role in Libya until a unity government is in place. Washington will not wait indefinitely to step up operations against ISIS. At the same time, the Italians are acutely aware that an ISIS stronghold in Libya would present a fundamental threat to their security. Equally, the Americans are reticent to further stretch themselves politically and militarily and would welcome strong Italian leadership. The diplomatic and military clocks must be aligned for Rome and Washington to effectively work together.

Italians and Americans should coordinate their efforts by playing “good cop, bad cop.” Rome should emphasize to the Libyans that forming a unity government would enable them to play a more proactive role in shaping the agenda of an Italian-led international engagement. At the same time, Rome should highlight that there is a limit to the extent that Italy can restrain Washington from escalating a military intervention beyond the control of all Libyan stakeholders. While continuing to support diplomatic efforts, the United States should up the tempo of its military preparations and surgical interventions. This would put pressure on bickering Libyans by showing them that they are running out of time to reach an agreement. Cajoling Libyans into forming a unity government would better align the American and Italian efforts to fight ISIS. Most importantly, it would give Libyans a say in the future of their country.

       

Editors' Note: It has perhaps never been more important to question the prevailing wisdom on the 2011 United States-led intervention in Libya, writes Shadi Hamid. Even with the benefits of hindsight, he argues, many of the criticisms of the intervention fall short. This post originally appeared on Vox.

Libya and the 2011 NATO intervention there have become synonymous with failure, disaster, and the Middle East being a "shit show" (to use President Obama’s colorful descriptor). It has perhaps never been more important to question this prevailing wisdom, because how we interpret Libya affects how we interpret Syria and, importantly, how we assess Obama’s foreign policy legacy.

Of course, Libya, as anyone can see, is a mess, and Americans are reasonably asking if the intervention was a mistake. But just because it’s reasonable doesn’t make it right.

Most criticisms of the intervention, even with the benefit of hindsight, fall short. It is certainly true that the intervention didn’t produce something resembling a stable democracy. This, however, was never the goal. The goal was to protect civilians and prevent a massacre.

Critics erroneously compare Libya today to any number of false ideals, but this is not the correct way to evaluate the success or failure of the intervention. To do that, we should compare Libya today to what Libya would have looked like if we hadn’t intervened. By that standard, the Libya intervention was successful: The country is better off today than it would have been had the international community allowed dictator Muammar Qaddafi to continue his rampage across the country.

Critics further assert that the intervention caused, created, or somehow led to civil war. In fact, the civil war had already started before the intervention began. As for today’s chaos, violence, and general instability, these are more plausibly tied not to the original intervention but to the international community’s failures after intervention.

The very fact that the Libya intervention and its legacy have been either distorted or misunderstood is itself evidence of a warped foreign policy discourse in the U.S., where anything short of success—in this case, Libya quickly becoming a stable, relatively democratic country—is viewed as a failure.

NATO intervened to protect civilians, not to set up a democracy

As stated in the U.N. Security Council resolution authorizing force in Libya, the goal of intervention was "to protect civilians and civilian populated areas under threat of attack." And this is what was achieved.

In February 2011, anti-Qaddafi demonstrations spread across the country. The regime responded to the nascent protest movement with lethal force, killing more than 100 people in the first few days, effectively sparking an armed rebellion. The rebels quickly lost momentum, however.

I still remember how I felt in those last days and hours as Qaddafi’s forces marched toward Benghazi. In a quite literal sense, every moment mattered, and the longer we waited, the greater the cost.

It was frightening to watch. I didn’t want to live in an America where we would stand by silently as a brutal dictator—using that distinct language of genocidaires—announced rather clearly his intentions to kill. In one speech, Qaddafi called protesters "cockroaches" and vowed to cleanse Libya "inch by inch, house by house, home by home, alleyway by alleyway."

Already, on the eve of intervention, the death toll was estimated at somewhere between 1,000 and 2,000. (This was when the international community’s tolerance for Arab Spring–related mass killings was still fairly low.)

As Obama’s advisers saw it, there were two options for military action: a no-fly zone (which, on its own, wouldn’t do much to stop Qaddafi’s tanks) or a broader resolution that would allow the U.S. and its allies to take further measures, including establishing what amounted to a floating no-drive zone around rebel forces. The president went with the latter option.

The NATO operation lasted about seven months, with an estimated death toll of around 8,000, apparently most of them combatants on both sides (although there is some lack of clarity on this, since the Libyan government doesn’t clearly define "revolutionaries" or "rebel supporters"). A Human Rights Watch investigation found that at least 72 civilians were killed as a result of the NATO air campaign, definitively contradicting speculative claims of mass casualties from the Qaddafi regime.

Claims of "mission creep" have become commonplace, most forcefully articulated by the Micah Zenko of the Council on Foreign Relations. Zenko may be right, but he asserts rather than explains why mission creep is always a bad thing. It may be that in some circumstances, the scope of a mission should be defined more broadly, rather than narrowly.

If anything, it was the Obama administration’s insistence of minimizing the mission—including the absurd claim that it would take "days, not weeks"—that was the problem from the very start. Zenko and others never make clear how civilians could have been protected as long as Qaddafi was waging war on them.

What Libya would look like today if NATO hadn’t intervened

It’s helpful to engage in a bit of counterfactual history here. As Niall Ferguson notes in his book Virtual Alternatives, "To understand how it actually was, we therefore need to understand how it actually wasn’t."

Applied to the Libyan context, this means that we’re not comparing Libya, during or after the intervention, with some imagined ideal of stable, functioning democracy. Rather, we would compare it with what we judge, to the best of our ability, the most likely alternative outcome would have been had the U.S. not intervened.

Here’s what we know: By March 19, 2011, when the NATO operation began, the death toll in Libya had risen rapidly to more than 1,000 in a relatively short amount of time, confirming Qaddafi’s longstanding reputation as someone who was willing to kill his countrymen (as well as others) in large numbers if that’s what his survival required.

There was no end in sight. After early rebel gains, Qaddafi had seized the advantage. Still, he was not in a position to deal a decisive blow to the opposition. (Nowhere in the Arab Spring era has one side in a military conflict been able to claim a clear victory, even with massive advantages in manpower, equipment, and regional backing.)

Any Libyan who had opted to take up arms was liable to be captured, arrested, or killed if Qaddafi "won," so the incentives to accept defeat were nonexistent, to say nothing of the understandable desire to not live under the rule of a brutal and maniacal strongman.

The most likely outcome, then, was a Syria-like situation of indefinite, intensifying violence. Even President Obama, who today seems unsure about the decision to intervene, acknowledged in an August 2014 interview with Thomas Friedman that "had we not intervened, it’s likely that Libya would be Syria...And so there would be more death, more disruption, more destruction."

What caused the current Libyan civil war?

Critics charge that the NATO intervention was responsible for or somehow caused Libya’s current state of chaos and instability. For instance, after leaving the Obama administration, Philip Gordon, the most senior U.S. official on the Middle East in 2013-'15, wrote: "In Iraq, the U.S. intervened and occupied, and the result was a costly disaster. In Libya, the U.S. intervened and did not occupy, and the result was a costly disaster. In Syria, the U.S. neither intervened nor occupied, and the result is a costly disaster."

The problem here is that U.S. intervention did not, in fact, result in a costly disaster, unless we are using the word "result" to simply connote that one thing happened after a previous thing. The NATO operation ended in October 2011. The current civil war in Libya began in May 2014—a full two and a half years later. The intervention and today’s violence are of course related, but this does not necessarily mean there is a causal relationship.

To argue that the current conflict in Libya is a result of the intervention, one would basically need to assume that the outbreak of civil war was inevitable, irrespective of anything that happened in the intervening 30 months.

This makes it all the more important to distinguish between the intervention itself and the international community’s subsequent failure—a failure that nearly all the relevant actors acknowledge—to plan and act for the day after and help Libyans rebuild their shattered country.

Such measures include sending training missions to help the Libyan army restructure itself (only in late 2013 did NATO provide a small team of advisers) or even sending multinational peacekeeping forces; expanding the United Nations Support Mission in Libya’s (UNSMIL) limited advisory role; and pressuring the Libyan government to consider alternatives to a dangerous and destabilizing political isolation law.

While perhaps less sexy, the U.S. and its allies could have also weighed in on institutional design and pushed back against Libya’s adoption, backed by UNSMIL, of one of world’s most counterproductive electoral systems—single non-transferable vote—along with an institutional bias favoring independents. This combination exacerbated tribal and regional divisions while making power sharing even more difficult.

Finally, the U.S. could have restrained its allies, particularly the Gulf States and Egypt, from excessive meddling in the lead-up to and early days of the 2014 civil war.

Yet Libya quickly tumbled off the American agenda. That’s not surprising, given that the Obama administration has always been suspicious of not just military entanglements but any kind of prolonged involvement—diplomatic, financial, or otherwise—in Middle East trouble spots. Libya "was farmed out to the working level," according to Dennis Ross, who served as a special assistant to President Obama until November 2011.

There was also an assumption that the Europeans would do more. This was more than just a hope; it was an organizing principle of Obama administration engagement abroad. Analysts Nina Hachigian and David Shorr have called it the "Responsibility Doctrine": a strategy of "prodding other influential nations…to help shoulder the burdens of fostering a stable, peaceful world order."

This may be the way the world should operate, but as a set of driving assumptions, this part of the Obama doctrine has proven to be wrong at best, and rather dangerous at worst.

We may not like it—and Obama certainly doesn’t—but even when the U.S. itself is not particularly involved in a given conflict, at the very least it is expected to set the agenda, convene partners, and drive international attention toward an issue that would otherwise be neglected in the morass of Middle East conflicts. The U.S., when it came to Libya, did not meet this minimal standard.

Even President Obama himself would eventually acknowledge the failure to stay engaged. As he put it to Friedman: "I think we [and] our European partners underestimated the need to come in full force if you’re going to do this."

Yet it is worth emphasizing that even with a civil war, ISIS’s capture of territory, and as many as three competing "governments," the destruction in Libya still does not come close to the level of death and destruction witnessed in Syria in the absence of intervention.

In other words, even this "worst-case scenario" falls well short of actual worst-case scenarios. According to the Libya Body Count, around 4,500 people have so far been killed over the course of 22 months of civil war.

In Syria, the death toll is about 100 times that, with more than 400,000 killed, according to the Syrian Center for Policy Research.

We’re all consequentialists now

For the reasons outlined above, Libya’s descent into civil conflict—and the resulting power vacuum, which extremist groups like ISIS eagerly filled—wasn’t inevitable. But let’s hypothesize for a moment that it was. Would that undermine support for the original intervention?

The Iraq War, to cite the most obvious example, wasn’t wrong because it led to chaos, instability, and civil war in the country. It was wrong because the decision to intervene in the first place was not justified, being based as it was on faulty premises regarding weapons of mass destruction.

If Iraq had quickly turned out "well" and become a relatively stable, flawed, yet functioning democracy, would that have retroactively justified an unjustified war? Presumably not, even though we would all be happy that Iraq was on a promising path.

The near reverse holds true for Libya. The justness of military intervention in March 2011 cannot be undone or negated retroactively. This is not the way choice or morality operates (imagine applying this standard to your personal life). This may suggest a broader philosophical divergence: Obama, according to one of his aides, is a "consequentialist."

I suspect that this, perhaps more than narrower questions of military intervention, drives at least some of the revisionism over Libya’s legacy. If we were consequentialists, it would be nearly impossible to act anywhere without some sort of preordained guarantee that a conflict area—which likely hadn’t been "stable" for years or decades—could all of a sudden stabilize.

Was the rightness of stopping the Rwandan genocide dependent on whether Rwanda could realistically become a stable democracy after the genocide was stopped? And how could policymakers make that determination, when the stabilization of any post-conflict situation is dependent, in part, not just on factual assessments but on always uncertain questions of the international community’s political will—something that is up to politicians—in committing the necessary time, attention, and resources to helping shattered countries rebuild themselves?

The idea that Libya, because it had oil and a relatively small population, would have been a relatively easy case was an odd one. Qaddafi had made sure, well in advance, that a Libya without him would be woefully unprepared to reconstruct itself.

For more than four decades, he did everything in his power to preempt any civil society organizations or real, autonomous institutions from emerging. Paranoid about competing centers of influence, Qaddafi reduced the Libyan army to a personal fiefdom. Unlike other Arab autocracies, the state and the leader were inseparable.

To think that Libya wouldn’t have encountered at least some major instability over the course of transition from one-person rule to an uncertain "something else" is to have a view of political development completely detached from both history and reality.

A distorted foreign policy discourse

The way we remember Libya suggests that the way we talk about America’s role in the world has changed, and not for the better. Americans are probably more likely to consider the Libya intervention a failure because the U.S. was at the forefront of the NATO operation. So any subsequent descent into conflict, presumably, says something about our failure, which is something we’d rather not think about.

Outside of the foreign policy community, politicians are usually criticized for what they do abroad, rather than what they don’t do. As former Secretary of Defense Robert Gates put it, "[Qaddafi] was not a threat to us anywhere. He was a threat to his own people, and that was about it." If the U.S had decided against intervention, Libya would have likely reverted to some noxious combination of dictatorship and insurgency. But we could have shirked responsibility (a sort of inverse "pottery barn" principle—if you didn’t break it, you don’t have to fix it). We could have claimed to have "done no harm," even though harm, of course, would have been done.

There was a time when the United States seemed to have a perpetual bias toward action. The instinct of leaders, more often than not, was to act militarily even in relatively small conflicts that were remote from American national security interests. Our country’s tragic experience in Iraq changed that. Inaction came to be seen as a virtue. And, to be sure, inaction is sometimes virtuous. Libya, though, was not one of those times.

       

Five years have passed since several Arab countries revolted against their repressive regimes, and peace and stability are nowhere in sight. The unraveling of their political systems pushed these countries into challenging transition processes where violence is always a serious possibility. Yemen and Libya’s civil wars present blunt examples of failed transitions, raising concerns about protracted political instability, not only in those two countries, but potentially in neighboring ones as well. Tunisia theoretically managed to complete its transition successfully. It ratified a new constitution, addressing the need for a new social contract, and held two rounds of elections. Tunisia also passed a transitional justice law to provide a framework for adjudicating both victims’ grievances and perpetrators’ crimes of the past political era. Nonetheless, Tunisia finds its stability challenged by increasing levels of polarization between its various societal segments.

The fact of the matter is that political transitions take a long time—years if not decades—and transitioning countries face the risk of violence. Arab Spring societies are unlikely to transition to sustainable peace and stability as long as they are wracked by deep divisions. Therefore, national reconciliation is paramount to reducing the societal polarization that currently cripples Libya and Yemen and threatens Tunisia’s progress. To attain enduring peace and stability, post-revolution states must engage in inclusive national reconciliation processes, including a national dialogue, a truth-seeking effort, the reparation of victims’ past injuries, dealing with the former regime, and institutional reform. Women, civil society, and tribes, among other social forces, can support the transition process. Yemen, Libya, and Tunisia have each taken specific approaches to trying to reconcile their post-revolution societies, raising or diminishing the chances of civil war or a healthy transition.

An inclusive national dialogue is the starting point of a comprehensive national reconciliation process. It gives transitioning societies an opportunity to develop a vision and theoretical framework for their futures, gives legitimacy to transition processes, and encourages negotiation and compromise. Tunisia held a homegrown national dialogue driven mainly by civil society organizations and Yemen completed an eight-month, U.N.-assisted national dialogue conference. Libya’s engagement in U.N.-led negotiations raised questions over whether all parties had representation.

As each society suffered decades of repression and has a number of unanswered questions, investigating—and dealing with—the truth about the past is also essential. Relatedly, determining how to handle former regime elements has profound implications for post-revolution transitions. While Libya opted to purge all those who served in Muammar Qaddafi’s regime through adopting its “Political Isolation Law,” Yemen chose to grant President Ali Abdullah Saleh immunity from prosecution in return for his abdication—sacrificing justice to preserve peace. However, Saleh later returned to politics, allying with the Houthis to take over the state, meaning Yemen ultimately achieved neither justice nor peace. Tunisia, on the other hand, has adopted a transitional justice law that mandates, among other measures, the investigation and prosecution of the state’s crimes since 1955. While the resulting Truth and Dignity Commission has received thousands of complaints from victims of past abuses, progress has otherwise been slow, as the body has struggled to establish an effective organizational structure or execute a clearly defined work plan. Controversy over the selection of commissioners and an overall lack of publicity has also hindered the truth-seeking process.

Reparations are another important part of the pursuit of justice and healing. Done correctly, they can bring previously marginalized and abused segments of society back into the mainstream, where they can make positive contributions to the development of the country. Yemen and Tunisia experienced extensive human rights violations during the decades-long reigns of Saleh and Zine El Abidine Ben Ali, while lacking the resources to engage in meaningful and comprehensive rehabilitation of victims of past abuses. This left the two countries’ transition processes struggling with a major component—the victims—feeling further marginalization added to their past traumas. Libya, however, who has the resources to fund a process of thorough rehabilitation of victims of its dictatorship, slid into civil war that prevented the proper addressing of past wounds.

Even if these societies overcome their polarization at the personal level, however, they will not accomplish successful transitions unless their healing is accompanied by institutional reforms. “Regime renovation” rather than “regime change” in Yemen presented a serious obstacle to deep reforms of state institutions, eventually leading to some segments of security units taking part in Saleh-Houthi coup against the transitional government. After the collapse of the Qaddafi regime, revolutionaries and militias demanded a purge as a method of institutional reform—similar to de-Baathification in Iraq. The purge contributed to the outbreak of a civil war. Tunisia, on the other hand, approached institutional reform from a different angle and succeeded in putting together a sound formula, but it is facing serious challenges to implementation.

Ultimately, a variety of actors have played key roles in Libya, Yemen, and Tunisia’s national reconciliation processes. In all three countries, women have been integral to bringing about change, and must continue to be involved in reshaping their countries. As agents of change, women helped to initiate the uprisings in Yemen and Libya, and have already proven to be effective agents of reconciliation. In Yemen and Libya, tribes are key stakeholders that must be incorporated after decades of manipulation and marginalization. Depending on the way they become involved, tribes could play key role in either stabilizing or destabilizing transitions. Domestic civil society groups have been essential to Tunisia’s progress so far, and are fast developing in Yemen and Libya. Their continued involvement—and assistance from international groups—will go a long way toward consolidating new states that honor human and civil rights.

The processes of national dialogue, truth seeking, reparation, accountability, and institutional reform, especially if supported by key agents of reconciliation, including women, civil society, and tribes, can combine to create the momentum needed to bridge divides and help post-Arab Spring societies move toward sustainable peace, stability, and development.

This piece was originally published on the Yale Press Blog.

For more of Ibrahim Fraihat’s analysis on Yemen, Libya, and Tunisia after the Arab Spring, read his new book “Unfinished Revolutions” (Yale University Press).  

       

"At the end of the day, we need to remember that Daesh is more a product of the civil wars than it is a cause of them. And the way that we’re behaving is we’re treating it as the cause.  And the problem is that in places like Syria, in Iraq, potentially in Libya, we are mounting these military campaigns to destroy Daesh and we’re not doing anything about the underlying civil wars.  And the real danger there is—we have a brilliant military and they may very well succeed in destroying Daesh—but if we haven’t dealt with the underlying civil wars, we’ll have Son of Daesh a year later." – Ken Pollack

“Part of the problem is how we want the U.S. to be more engaged and more involved and what that requires in practice. We have to be honest about a different kind of American role in the Middle East. It means committing considerable economic and political resources to this region of the world that a lot of Americans are quite frankly sick of… There is this aspect of nation-building that is in part what we have to do in the Middle East, help these countries rebuild, but we can’t do that on the cheap. We can’t do that with this relatively hands off approach.” – Shadi Hamid

In this episode of “Intersections,” Kenneth Pollack, senior fellow in the Center for Middle East Policy and Shadi Hamid, senior fellow in the Project on U.S. Relations with the Islamic World and author of "Islamic Exceptionalism: How the Struggle over Islam is Reshaping the World," discuss the current state of upheaval in the Middle East, the Arab Spring, and the political durability of Islamist movements in the region. They also explain their ideas on how and why the United States should change its approach to the Middle East and areas of potential improvement for U.S. foreign policy in the region. 

Show Notes

Fight or flight: America’s choice in the Middle East

Security and public order

Islamists on Islamism today

Temptations of Power: Islamists & Illiberal Democracy in a New Middle East

Ending the Middle East’s civil wars

A Rage for Order: The Middle East in turmoil, from Tahrir Square to ISIS

Building a better Syrian opposition army: How and why

With thanks to audio engineer and producer Zack Kulzer, Mark Hoelscher, Carisa Nietsche, Sara Abdel-Rahim, Eric Abalahin, Fred Dews and Richard Fawal.

Subscribe to the Intersections on iTunes, and send feedback email to intersections@brookings.edu.

       

It’s easy to imagine a future in a decade or less when most people will have a smartphone. In our recent paper Pathways to Smarter Digital Financial Inclusion, we explore the benefits of extending financial services to the mass of lower-income people in developing countries who are currently dubious of the value that financial services can bring to them, distrustful of formal financial institutions, or uncomfortable with the treatment they expect to receive.

The report analyzes six inherent characteristics of smartphones that have the potential to change market dynamics relative to the status quo of simple mobile phones and cards. 

Customer-Facing Changes:

1. The graphical user interface.
2. The ability to attach a variety of peripheral devices to it (such as a card reader or a small printer issuing receipts).
3. The lower marginal cost of mobile data communications relative to traditional mobile channels (such as SMS or USSD).

Service Provider Changes:

4. Greater freedom to program services without requiring the acquiescence or active participation of the telco.
5. Greater flexibility to distribute service logic between the handset (apps) and the network (servers).
6. More opportunities to capture more customer data with which to enhance customer value and stickiness.

Taken together, these changes may lower the costs of designing for lower-income people dramatically, and the designs ought to take advantage of continuous feedback from users. This should give low-end customers a stronger sense of choice over the services that are relevant to them, and voice over how they wish to be served and treated.

Traditionally poor people have been invisible to service providers because so little was known about their preferences that it was not possible build a service proposition or business case around them. The paper describes three pathways that will allow providers to design services on smartphones that will enable an increasingly granular understanding of their customers. Each of the three pathways offers providers a different approach to discover what they need to know about prospective customers in order to begin engaging with them. 

Pathway One: Through Big Data

Providers will piece together information on potential low-income customers directly, by assembling available data from disparate sources (e.g. history of airtime top-ups and bill payment, activity on online social networks, neighborhood or village-level socio-demographic data, etc.) and by accelerating data acquisition cycles (e.g. inferring behavior from granting of small loans in rapid succession, administering selected psychometric questions, or conducting A/B tests with special offers). There is a growing number of data analytics companies that are applying big data in this way to benefit the poor.

Pathway Two: Through local Businesses

Smartphones will have a special impact on micro and small enterprises, which will see increasing business benefits from recording and transacting more of their business digitally. As their business data becomes more visible to financial institutions, local firms will increasingly channel financial services, and particularly credit, to their customers, employees, and suppliers. Financial institutions will backstop their credit, which in effect turns smaller businesses into front-line distribution partners into local communities.

Pathway Three: Through Socio-Financial Networks

Firms view individuals primarily as managers of a web of socio-financial relationships that may or may not allow them access to formal financial services. Beyond providing loans to “creditworthy” people, financial institutions can provide transactional engines, similar to the crowdfunding platforms that enable all people to locate potential funding sources within their existing social networks. A provider equipped with appropriate network analysis tools could then promote rather than displace people´s own funding relationships and activities. This would provide financial service firms valuable insight into how people manage their financial needs.

The pathways are intended as an exploration of how smartphones could support the development of a healthier and more inclusive digital financial service ecosystem, by addressing the two critical deficiencies of the current mass-market digital finance systems. Smartphones could enable stronger customer value propositions, leading to much higher levels of customer engagement, leading to more revelation of customer data and more robust business cases for the providers involved. Mobile technology could also lead to a broader diversity of players coming into the space, each playing to their specific interests and contributing their specific set of skills, but together delivering customer value through the right combination of collaboration and competition.