Yaroslav Mikhaylov – Pike & Hurricane

Propaganda by Body Image

Yaroslav Mikhaylov — Tue, 06 Jun 2017 09:05:25 +0000

Political photos are usually a fairly boring subject, but modern internet trends and ubiquitous high-definition cameras have given us some very peculiar images – intentional or not – of some of today’s top political leaders. Some are caught shirtless at the back of a wedding and others are caught with their hands around a mysterious glowing orb, while another merely looks knowingly at packages of chicken. However, all of those images have one thing in common: they are designed to shape public perception of the subject. No matter how weird or peculiar, they try to make their subjects look good. Here are some successful and some unsuccessful attempts at propaganda by body image.

Politicians using images of themselves for political purposes is hardly a new phenomenon. Kings and political leaders as far back as the middle ages had portraits of themselves painted that exaggerated certain traits and concealed others in order to elicit a certain kind of feeling in their subjects. When one thinks of England’s Henry VIII, it is almost certainly Hans Holbein’s painting that comes to mind. In it, a well-dressed and muscled Henry is standing tall, a master of his domain practically daring the viewer to challenge him. The painting would make a great representation of Henry, if it wasn’t completely made up. Henry had just suffered an injury that left him physically weakened and, as a result, was losing strength and gaining weight. He had also lost control of the northern part of the country to a tax rebellion, making his defiant and in-control posture in the painting a complete farce. In short, the portrait was a brazen attempt at propaganda: “I’m still tough; let me show you!”. However, given that it is the image that we remember Henry VIII by 500 years later, one can say it was a quite successful attempt at passing a lie off as reality.

Being able to read their patrons and predict how they wanted to be portrayed was a key skill for medieval and early modern painters. Rembrandt van Rijn is considered to be one of the great Dutch masters, but even his legacy was not immune to the whims of the political leaders he was depicting. One of his most famous paintings is The Night Watch, depicting a group of Dutch upper class men engaging in their civic duty to defend the Dutch Republic. Like Holbein’s painting, it was also a lie: as the town’s mayor, Frans Banninck Cocq – the man in the center of the painting – would have almost certainly never seen actual combat. It was a success however, in no small part because it depicted the subjects exactly as they saw themselves. However, his most ambitious work was the giant 25 square meter painting of the revolt of the Batavians – the germanic people who lived in what is now The Netherlands during Roman times. The Conspiracy of Claudius Civilis, named after the leader of the Batavians, was met with far from the same acclaim as The Night Watch. Instead of depicting the Batavians, with whom the Dutch aristocracy identified, as civilized modern Europeans, he painted them as historically-correct rugged barbarians, led by a warlord Civilis. Instead of hanging the painting in the Amsterdam city hall, for which it was commissioned, it was returned to Rembrandt, who had to cut it down to a much smaller size before he managed to sell it for a small portion of its worth. While the two paintings were probably not intended as propaganda pieces, their different fates still show that powerful individuals are very aware of how they are depicted and strive to maintain an image that shows them in a good light.

When it comes to propaganda images, few are as bizarre and peculiar as those of North Korea’s ruling Kim family. While they do their share of autocratic speeches in front of mass rallies or military parades, it is the North Korean media’s steady flow of pictures of their leaders looking at things that stands out as the most peculiar. All of the images follow roughly the same format: Kim Jong Il or Kim Jong Un, surrounded by government and military officials hanging on to every word, looking at something comically mundane. From food to industrial machinery, there is practically nothing the Kims have not literally taken a look at. While it may seem like a strange form of propaganda to Western eyes, this ritual actually has great significance to the North Korean regime. One of the duties of North Korea’s leader is to observe various activities – mundane or otherwise – and suggest how they can be improved. The practice is referred to as on-the-spot guidance, and represents both the Kims’ vast knowledge and their ceaseless quest to improve North Korea. While its effect on the actual productivity of North Korea is debatable, it is nonetheless a brilliant, if perplexing, propaganda effort.

The reigning king of absurd propaganda photos is, however, Russia’s Vladimir Putin. Based on the official photos released by his staff, the president of Russia is the most interesting man in the world. He has done everything in the past two decades, from horseback riding and wrestling with tigers to piloting submarines and leading a biker gang, making one wonder when the arguably most powerful man in the world has time for the actual business of governing. The idea behind those propaganda shots, however, is easy to understand: Putin is a strong and powerful man, projecting an image of a strong and powerful Russia abroad. The unspoken corollary – that he is too strong to be opposed – is likewise an effective message in a country fond of revolutions. However, as Putin has aged – he is turning 65 this year – his displays of machismo have increasingly began bordering on ridiculous. It is very difficult to imagine him outscoring Olympic hockey players, for example, without seeing the whole thing as an exaggerated photo-opp. Nonetheless, Putin continues to be very popular both in Russia and abroad, making the mighty sexagenarian act a successful propaganda coup.

Putin’s shirtless world leader’s club has recently been joined by an unexpected new arrival – Canada’s Justin Trudeau. Yet while Putin’s photos depict him engaging in exciting and extraordinary activities, Trudeau is often not even the center of attention in his photos. Many of his most popular photos are of him in the background or joining ordinary Canadians in activities such as hiking or surfing. Even when he is pictured with other celebrities or world leaders, it is their reactions – usually very positive – to Trudeau that draw the eye. It is all, of course, much more likely to be a well-organized propaganda strategy than a series of lucky coincidences, but it nonetheless tells us a lot about how Trudeau sees himself – as a youthful and captivating frontman for Canada’s inclusive, welcoming and engaged society. Considering the collective Internet excitement every time a new photo of Trudeau pops up, the unorthodox strategy seems to be working quite well.

While some of the strange PR strategies seen in this article worked out well, it is important to keep your audience in mind, which is something that the US President Donald Trump’s team clearly did not when a photo emerged of him clutching a glowing orb together with Saudi King Salman bin Abdulaziz and Egyptian President Abdel Fatah al-Sisi. Meant to symbolize the opening of a Middle Eastern anti-terrorism surveillance center, the image of three men holding a globe in their hands may have served as an effective message in Egypt and Saudi Arabia, neither of which can be classified as a democracy. In the US and Europe however, the image was immediately met with ridicule, comparing Trump and his fellows to comic book villains. The story of the Orb should serve as a cautionary tale that a propaganda photo that goes viral is not always bound to be successful.

Oscar Wilde said that “there is only one thing in life worse than being talked about, and that is not being talked about.” For politicians in today’s 24-hour news cycle, that adage continues to hold true. Thanks to the ubiquity of access to digital media, even in closed-off countries like North Korea, politicians have to compete with cats, ponies and Harambe the Gorilla for the public’s attention. With the internet’s natural attraction to the surreal and the peculiar, it is no surprise that some of the most well-known politicians in the world are those with weird and unusual media strategies. While shirtless Justin Trudeau is unlikely to enter the canon of world art the same way Hans Holbein’s Henry VIII did, the two are both part of the same ancient artistic tradition.

By Yaroslav Mikhaylov

Photo credit

Cover Photo: Amanda Lucidon, Official White House Photo, official government work

Image 1: Workshop of Hans Holbein the Younger 1497/8, Public Domain via Google Art Project

Image 2: Rembrandt van Rijn, Public Domain via Wikimedia Commons

Image 3: Rembrandt van Rijn, Public Domain via Wikimedia Commons

Image 4: Korean Central News Agency via kimjongillookingatthings, official government work

Image 5: Office of the President of the Russian Federation, official government work

Image 6: GoToVan, licensed under Creative Commons Attribution 2.0 Generic

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Feminism in a Historical Context

Yaroslav Mikhaylov — Wed, 10 May 2017 13:10:17 +0000

Social movements are inherently the result of their social context, and no movement serves a better example of this than feminism. On its surface, feminism may seem like a straightforward and self-contained social movement, but on closer examination it becomes clear that feminist movements can’t be separated from the historical context in which they developed. From the early opposition to slavery to modern anti-capitalism, most of the movements seeking to change the social order during the previous two centuries included women and women’s liberation in a crucial role.

In the mid-19th century United States, the feminist movement grew out of and was intertwined with the anti-slavery abolition movement. The activists of the 1800s saw parallel between the lack of rights experienced by slaves and those experienced by women. Male resistance to the political participation by women in abolitionist groups led them to carve out their own political spaces, as well as eventually focus entirely on the legal issues of women’s suffrage and legal equality. This characterizes the first wave of feminism as stemming from a wider push for social equality. Both the practical experience from the slavery abolition movement, as well as the idea that social change could be brought about through activism, were the key to making the early women’s rights campaigns a success.

Women were also intimately involved with efforts to combat the social ills of industrialization on both sides of the Atlantic Ocean. In the United Kingdom, women were one of the key constituencies of the radical Chartist movement, fighting for both democratic equality and social and economic justice. In the United States, the Progressive women of the early 20th century not only were involved in traditional feminist causes like suffrage and birth control access, but also wider social reforms like the minimum wage, the restriction on alcohol sales, and corporate corruption. To the female activists of the late 19th and early 20th century, the inequality between women and men was just a single facet of the larger social issues caused by the corrupt and decadent society they sought to reform.

One of the most radical social transformations of the 20th century was the Russian Revolution of 1917, which practically overnight transformed a traditional, religious and conservative Russia into an experiment in radical egalitarianism. Here, too, women and feminism could be found on the forefront of the social transformation. The new Soviet government immediately introduced a special department for women’s affairs – Department of Working Women and Peasant Women – led by women committed to gender equality. Under their purview, the Soviet Union became the first country in the world to fully legalize abortion, as well as introduced no-fault divorce, legal rights for out-of-wedlock children and child-support obligations for non-custodial fathers. However, even more radical was the participation of Soviet women in wartime activities. Approximately 66,000 Russian women fought in the Russian Civil War and as many as a million in World War II.

The most famous of those was the 588th Night Bomber Regiment, which was an all-female unit that flew refurbished crop duster planes in night-time raids on German positions. They were so feared that the German troops called them Night Witches, while the German high command would award the highest military award to any soldier that shot one down. By comparison, many nations today are still just taking the first steps to gender equality in their militaries. In practice, women were not nearly as liberated as Soviet legislative efforts would suggest. Gender roles still played a significant role in what jobs men and women got, women were paid less for similar work and the economy and politics were still heavily male-dominated spheres. However, feminism still clearly played a major role in the Soviet leaders’ image of the new society they aimed to build and female empowerment was seen as simply another aspect of the grand social revolution.

Later in the 20th century and into the 21st, women’s movements would still be entangled with the social issues debated at the time. Women’s liberation in the 1960s and 1970s United States was linked to the protests against the Vietnam War and the growing civil rights movement before developing into its own independent movement. Today, feminist and gender equality concerns play a major role in the work of the World Social Forum, which seeks to address the fundamental inequalities in the world economy. Even the opposition to the recent election of Donald Trump as the President of the United States has been heavily driven by the feminist movement. It is impossible to separate out feminism from the general concerns about what is wrong with the world today.

For the last 200 years, and probably for as long as humanity has been around, we have been imagining ways to make the world a better place – more just, more equal, more prosperous and more peaceful. The history of feminism follows this history of utopian visions, from a world without slavery and drunkenness to a world without exploitation and nuclear weapons. As the social problems that need to be addressed change, so does the feminism that flows out of them. It is possible to look at feminism as simply being a movement about men and women, but in doing so one would be missing the great canvas of human struggle for a better world against which it is set. As long as there is a human society, there will be a drive for social change, and as long as there is the need for social change, there will be feminism.

By Yaroslav Mikhaylov

Image credits:

Cover Image: The New York Times Photo Archive, Public Domain

Image 1: Public Domain

Image 2: George Grantham Bain Collection (Library of Congress), Public Domain

Image 3: Workers’ and Peasants’ Red Army, Public Domain

Image 4: Alex Layzell, licensed under Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 2.0 Generic

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The City Speaks, but to Whom?

Yaroslav Mikhaylov — Mon, 03 Apr 2017 11:00:24 +0000

A new and unfamiliar city can be difficult to navigate when different places have different kinds of street signs, unknown landmarks and directions in different languages. And even a city that is easy to navigate on foot can be hard to get around in a car, or vice versa. Now, ever more actors are demanding better navigation in the growing cities of the future, from airborne delivery drones to self-driving cars. The task of future urban designers is to accommodate both the automated and human inhabitants of cities and make sure neither is left behind.

This is not the first time that these two navigational priorities have clashed. In addition to their ideological differences, the two Cold War adversaries – the United States and the Soviet Union – were very different in how they organized the information they had about the physical shape of the world. The Soviets created incredibly detailed maps, while the American approach was a more high-tech, but a more familiar one as well: a system of satellites able to accurately pinpoint the location of an object called NAVSTAR, better known today as the Global Positioning System – GPS. The former was designed to be used by high-ranking military and government officials, focusing on human details like depth of ponds, width of footpaths and the kinds of weather the area could experience during different types of the year. The latter, conversely, was more focused on helping increasingly automated machines like airplanes find their way.

Today, it is mapping services like Google Maps that are at the forefront of the new navigation battles. Google itself became a successful company by adopting a machine-centered approach to searching the web compared to its rival Yahoo!, which instead sought to organize the Internet using human ‘librarians’. Google’s algorithms are far from perfect, but given the size of the modern web they could index web pages at a speed that Yahoo! couldn’t match, making it the clear winner in the search engine wars of the 2000s.

Ironically, in the battle between human and algorithm at the center of the city of the future, Google is increasingly turning to the methods of its defeated rival. While the bulk of the work of creating and improving their city maps is outsourced to algorithms that harvest satellite images, Google StreetView photos and even users’ location data, it is then error-checked by human operators to make sure that the computer correctly identified difficult-to-analyze features like one-way streets, unconventional crosswalks or oddly-angled street signs.

Google’s efforts to improve its maps place it at the epicenter of one of the major issues for cities going into the future: machines are not very good at navigating them. That means that in order to implement many of the up-and-coming technologies such as driverless cars or drone delivery systems, we need to radically redesign our cities to communicate information not just to people, but to computers as well. Some such technologies, such as traffic lights that communicate directly with cars, are already being prototyped. However, that in itself raises a new problem: machines like driverless cars see the world in a very different way than humans. That means increasingly fewer cues to help walking or cycling residents find their way in unfamiliar neighborhoods. The proliferation of GPS has already made conventional navigation more difficult, with many suburban communities entirely omitting physical street signs and homeowners passing on visible house numbers. Just like navigating the internet, we have already outsourced much of the work of finding physical locations to mechanical aides.

This has profound implications for the future of urban design. First is a degree of redundancy: humans can’t figure out their exact location from satellites, while drones can’t read street signs. That means that information needs to be delivered in both a human-readable and a machine-readable medium, with both being fully in sync, especially when important properties like street names or direction of travel are changed. This can increase both the difficulty and expense of urban planning. The distinction between human-readable and machine-readable navigation marks also has effects across socioeconomic boundaries. The difficulties that come with navigating suburbs without GPS systems already serve as a class-based filter for the residents of those communities. It is easy to imagine similar urban communities that are difficult or even impossible to access without a self-driving car, for example, creating a new form of urban segregation and perpetuating inequality.

Both of these issues are facets of the same question: what purpose do our cities serve and who are we really building them for? Are they efficient hubs of commerce or comfortable places to live? In order to be successful, our cities have to do both: deliver a good living atmosphere and serve as centers of economic growth. By making it easier for machines to identify and deal with the myriad of urban obstacles that we simply take for granted, we can make our cities cleaner and more efficient. However, it is important that we do not remove the human element from the equation completely, lest we become trapped in machines’ cities instead.

by Yaroslav Mikhaylov

Image Credit:

Cover Image: Nic McPhee, licensed under Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 2.0 Generic

Image 1: JCT600 via their blog, licensed under Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 2.0 Generic

Image 2: smoothgroover22, licensed under Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 2.0 Generic

Image 3: jan buchholtz, licensed under Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs 2.0 Generic

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David Cairns, the United Kingdom Ambassador to Sweden, Tells Us How He Got There

Yaroslav Mikhaylov — Tue, 28 Feb 2017 10:47:26 +0000

On January 25th, Malmö högskola hosted His Excellency David Cairns, the United Kingdom Ambassador to Sweden. Mr. Cairns has had a long career with the British Foreign Office and shared some of his insights and experiences with the students. Pike and Hurricane also had a chance to sit down with the Ambassador and ask him about his career, the latest developments in world politics and, most importantly, how to get a job doing what he does.

He has nothing but good things to say about a career in diplomacy, calling it “pretty unrivaled in the variety of things you get to do and the places you get to go and, of course, the people you meet.” Though, he is quick to mention, it is not exactly the path to political power: “you are not the big boss. The bosses are politicians.” And there are other drawbacks to working in the public sector, he concedes, “you’re never going to be rich. But, as I said, the quality of what you get to be involved in far and far outweighs the material side.” Nonetheless, he absolutely recommends the diplomatic track to students close to graduating who are considering their options. Cairns considers it especially important to reach out to people who, for one reason or another, are not commonly represented in diplomatic circles, since they are also among the people that the diplomatic corps represent. “We are a very popular employer, but a lot of minority communities and sometimes women as well, might think that it is not for them. And actually, we want to represent the Britain of today, and that is a very multicultural society and we have to represent that to be relevant,” says he.

Cairns’ own journey to the British Foreign Office started at university, where he was studying Japanese. During his third year, he went on exchange to Tokyo with the intention of not just studying, but working as well, so he reached out to the embassy. “I wrote to the British Embassy in Tokyo, asking: ‘Can I have a job?’. And they said ‘No, you can’t have a job, but we will send your letter to some of the British companies who are there in Japan.” One of these companies hired him for the duration of his time in Japan, but he was still a regular visitor at the embassy, playing squash and attending holiday parties. Despite that, even though he applied for a job with the Foreign Office after graduating, he did not have high hopes. He instead got a job working for a securities firm. When he finally heard back from the Office a year later, he went into the interview with no stress or pressure. “I had a job, I was doing quite well, I was very relaxed and so, of course, it all went very smoothly. And they said ‘You are through.’ and ‘You want to join?’ and I said ‘Sure!’ and that was it,” he recalls. There were a few hiccups along the way, such as the language aptitude test – “On the basis of that actually, I wasn’t very good.” – but soon a position opened up and Cairns was on his way to Tokyo.

This was the part of a long career that took him to Japan twice, Geneva once and even to a British research base in Antarctica. He considers the latter to to be one of the memorable highlights of his career: “We spent a couple of days out on the ice, in tents, seeing the staff. And that is quite memorable I must say.” Now, Cairns is about a year into his four-year rotation in Sweden and is not spending too much time worrying about where he will be sent off next. “I try to enjoy the day, and enjoy being here in Sweden, which I am doing,” he says, “I’ve had a pretty lucky run so far, to be frank. We’ll see what comes up and how it comes up.”

In terms of the key skills necessary to be a successful diplomat, Cairns singles out three most important ones: analytical skills, communication skills and people skills. “You, as students,” says he, “absorb a lot of information and then you distill that down into answering questions on, I don’t know, why were the Taliban successful, or what is happening in Syria. So we do the same, but with a slightly different angle, which is ‘What should we do?’” He mentions his own first-hand experience with that question, when he was invited to sit in on an office meeting with the top Foreign Office staff, including Foreign Minister Douglas Hurd, as a junior staffer writing down the meeting’s minutes. They were discussing whether to purchase American-made Tomahawk missiles when the Minister turned to him and asked his opinion. “That was pretty scary,” remembers Cairns, “I mumbled some rubbish, completely. It was terrible. But it was a super good lesson, because of what I learned from that was actually that this is what it’s all about. On this particular issue of ‘Should we buy this?’, the answer is ‘What do I think? What should we do?’”

That anecdote goes hand-in-hand with the second set of skills that he recommends budding diplomats to practice: communicating your ideas. He recalls that in his first year with the Office, he was already expected to attend meetings and conferences and articulate the UK’s point of view on relevant issues. Even today, communication remains a big part of the job for him, as a big part of his job is appearing on Swedish radio or television to give the UK’s take on relevant issues. Cairns also reminds that it is always important to have good interpersonal skills, “Enjoying being with people, being happy to get out and meet them, trying to be a good listener to them.”

Cairns brings the same positivity and optimism to questions about current events in the world as well, focusing on finding solutions that work best for everyone. “There is a lot of discussion about what to do about Trump,” he says, “Well, the answer for us is the same as what to do about Obama or what to do about Bush or what to do about Reagan: be involved, work with him as close as we can, so that we can further our interests as best we can.” He likewise appeals to the long history of engagement with Europe that Britain had when discussing the withdrawal from the European Union. “We’ve had an ambassador here in Sweden since 1535. We have had a relationship with the continent forever, and we will continue to do so.” he says, before elaborating that it is now up to the Europeans and the British to figure out the way that this new relationship will look. “It will be different, but it doesn’t mean that it’s going to be bad.”

However the events unfold, Cairns urges people, especially students, to get involved by either joining the foreign ministry, a non-governmental organization or going into politics. “I think the important thing for people like me and the next generation thinking about it is that the future isn’t written and you can be passive and let somebody else make it happen or you can get involved and try to make it as you think best.” So let’s sharpen up those analytical, communication and people skills and get out there, shall we?

Yaroslav Mikhaylov

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Microfinance: Breaking or Perpetuating the Cycles of Poverty?

Yaroslav Mikhaylov — Tue, 06 Dec 2016 10:13:49 +0000

Access to banking and finance has long been a symbol of the differences between the world’s rich and the world’s poor. The secret Swiss bank account has been a trope associated with the wealthy elite for over a hundred years and the 2007 financial crisis solidified the idea that banks and bankers worked for the well-off at the expense of the impoverished. However, another idea popularised in the mid-2000s sought to challenge that concept: microfinance.

Microfinance covers a wide range of financial instruments, all oriented at the large numbers of poor people in the developing world. Many do not have access to traditional banking services for many reasons: some because they live in rural areas that are not served by bank branches, others because their concerns are considered to be too small-scale for regular banks and yet more because they receive much of their income in kind rather than in currency. This puts them at a disadvantage compared to people in the developed world that can take out loans to make large purchases or start and expand businesses, as well as take out insurance policies and build up savings. Microfinance was designed to do just that: combine community outreach with internet technology to bring small-scale loans and insurance to the masses. This access to finance and insurance would, in theory, unlock the creative potential of the people in the cashpoor societies across the globe by giving them access to funds and financial instruments to drive their own development.

Microfinance was originally pioneered in the 1970s by the aid arm of the United States government – USAID – with the aim of including many of the developing and newly-independent nations in the global financial system in order to forestall Soviet influence, but was really pushed into the spotlight in the 1980s by Bangladesh’s Dr. Muhammad Yunus and his Grameen Bank.

He introduced many of the ideas now underpinning microfinance, first and foremost that the poor and the unsalaried of the Global South are not inherently uncreditworthy. He widely championed the idea, claiming that it would eradicate poverty in just a generation and save the world.

In the late 90s and early 2000s, the growing movement for microfinance combined with the newly-developing internet and mobile phone technologies to spread that access even further. In 2006 Yunus even won the Nobel Prize for his work on microfinance.

The impact of microfinance on financial inclusion has been significant. Between 2011 and 2014, the number of individuals without access to banking has dropped by 20%, representing a 500 million individuals having banking access. Much of this can be attributed to the expansion of microfinance into the previously underserved areas of the globe. Likewise, microfinance has been shown to increase business creation and occupational choice, rather than increased consumption of impulse purchases. It also has reported high repayment rates – upwards of 95% – though that number may not tell the whole story. From a market-based perspective, microfinance has truly been a success.

However despite such optimistic reports, ten years after Dr. Yunus’s Nobel Prize, the impact of microfinance has not even come close to meeting the high expectations of wiping out poverty completely within a generation. Many of the impoverished areas where microfinance was introduced, such as India and parts of Africa, did not experience any significant poverty reduction.

In some places, such as South Africa and Latin America, it has even contributed to the decay of existing community support structures.

Many microlenders also faced criticism over high interest rates, a for-profit revenue structure and even for concealing or underreporting defaults on payments to encourage further investment. Furthermore, like much of the rest of development efforts, microfinance has been criticized as corrupt and non-transparent, as well as being a vessel for imposing and enforcing the neocolonial division of labour.

It is easy to see why the microfinance movement did not live up to expectation. Poverty is a ‘wicked problem’ that has remained unsolved after millennia of attempts, with no simple solution. Microlending also suffered from an identity crisis: should it be considered a development program, a charity or a commercial enterprise? All three sorts of institutions have conflicting goals, success metrics and norms to which they adhere, producing difficulties for organisations that can act and be seen as any one of the three. And finally, a program designed around bringing access to the global financial market shares its fortunes with said financial market, which is still in the process of recovering from the global financial crisis. On the other hand, the impact of the microlending movement should not be underestimated. Even if it has not solved global poverty, it has given many people in the developing world the access to financial tools and institutions that were previously the exclusive province of the developed world. Whatever one may think of those tools and institutions themselves, microfinance has democratised access to them, which is a great achievement in its own right.

Yaroslav Mikhaylov

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Everything You Wanted to Know about the EU but Were Afraid to Ask

Yaroslav Mikhaylov — Mon, 03 Oct 2016 16:14:29 +0000

It seems like over the last year, between the refugee crisis and the Brexit referendum, everyone has opinions on the politics and the structure of the European Union. For those of you who have been out of the loop but want to join in the conversation, we’ve answered some basic questions about how the EU works to get you started.

Q: What is the EU, really?

A: That is a complicated question and the answer depends on the context in which it is being discussed. It is not a single country, though it can occasionally act as such in some international negotiations and there exists an EU citizenship. However, it is more than just a series of treaties between the 28 member countries, since it has its own governing bodies, elections and areas of competency. It is, ultimately, a novel and, so far, unique form of international organization, which is part of what makes it sometimes difficult to understand.

Q: What does the EU actually do?

A: This question has come up often: what has the EU done for us recently? There are many different ways in which the EU affects ordinary life. The primary way is through the internal market: making it as easy for people, goods, services and capital to move between EU countries as within them. This allows citizens of any EU country to live, work or study in any other one, and requires a complex set of rules in order for it to be both feasible and fair. The EU also acts as a partner on many infrastructure, research or conservation projects in member states. Parts of the Malmö Central Station were built using EU funds, for example.

Q: Is the EU a democracy or is it run by bureaucrats?

A: Another complex question: it is, to some extent, both. Proponents point to the direct elections to The European Parliament and the fact that it is the nations’ elected governments that select members of the Council of Ministers. Critics, however, note that the European Commission and the European Court of Justice are not elected, but are instead appointed by representatives of the member states. Also important to note is the low turnout: only 42.61% of eligible voters voted last election and in some nations the number was as low as 13%. So whether you consider the EU to be a fully democratic federation or run by men in smoke-filled rooms, there is a good argument to be made.

Q: Does the EU come in and tell nations what to do?

A: The EU is often criticized for getting involved in the domestic affairs of the member states, but it does not do so wherever and however it wills. The EU and the member states have delineated areas of competence. The EU is allowed a free hand only when it concerns the common market and its operations, including things like monetary policy and competition rules. On matters like tourism, industry or education the EU has to cooperate with states in accomplishing what it wants, and is not at all allowed to interfere with states’ research or foreign aid initiatives. However, in most areas, such as transport, the environment or consumer protection, the EU member states only hold precedence until the EU decides to make laws, at which point the EU law takes precedence. Ultimately, that means that over time, the EU’s area of influence over laws has grown, which has made its perceived intrusions easier to criticize.

Q: Did the EU really make a law about how curved bananas must be?

A: Yes, but it was far less egregious than it has since been portrayed. Regulation No. 2257/94 clarified how different grades of bananas were to be marketed. Specifically, it required that the highest-grade bananas should be free from ‘abnormal curvature’ without defining what, exactly, that meant. This, however, was interpreted by some commentators as a hopeless attempt to standardize the infinite variety of nature. Ironically, the similar regulation for cucumbers has mostly avoided scrutiny, despite specifying a limit on curvature of 10 millimeters per every 10 centimeters of length.

Yaroslav Mikhaylov

Cover photo: Niccolò Caranti, licensed under Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 2.0 Generic

Image 1: Rock Cohen, licensed under Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 2.0 Generic

Image 2: Yaroslav Mikhaylov, own work

Image 3: Kevin O’Mara, licensed under Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs 2.0 Generic

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Your Privacy on Sale – the Commercial Spyware Market

Yaroslav Mikhaylov — Wed, 01 Jun 2016 13:13:45 +0000

When during the Arab Spring, protesters equipped with Facebook, Twitter and other social media applications began toppling authoritarian leaders all over the Middle East, commentators and political scientists alike hailed them as the new tools that would help protesters and activists throughout the world democratize their nations. However, the Arab Spring also exposed the darker side of Western technology that was coming to the developing world. In government buildings, protesters found the tools which those regimes used to spy on their own citizens – highly advanced spyware and tracking suites developed by for-profit Western companies and sold, perfectly legally, to Arab dictators for the express purpose of keeping tabs on political activists.

Egyptian pre-Arab Spring strongman Hosni Mubarak was a customer of the British-German Gamma International and their FinFisher spyware, while Lybia’s Muammar Qaddafi used software purchased from the French company Amesys to spy on journalists and human rights campaigners. Even more egregious were the actions of the Italian company Area SpA, which was installing new surveillance equipment for Syria’s Bashar al-Assad as late as March 2011 – at the same time as the Syrian army was killing protesters demonstrating against the regime.

Many of these applications entered development during the growth of government-sanctioned surveillance following the September 11^th terrorist attacks against the United States. But the technology originally developed for the likes of the American NSA and the British GCHQ did not remain in the hands of governments for long and now a multi-billion dollar industry sells solutions for everything from cell-phone tracking to Skype call interception and Facebook Messenger hijacking to those who have the money to pay, including dictatorships and other authoritarian governments with histories of habitual human rights violations.

And this business has been growing steadily over the last 15 years. The whistleblower website WikiLeaks has started publishing a feature called Spy Files in 2011 detailing the booming market for digital surveillance. The intrusive digital surveillance industry even has its own trade show with a somewhat euphemistic name Intelligence Support Systems (ISS) that convenes every few months to match vendors with potential buyers and allow companies to show off new products at seminars like “Offensive IT Intelligence Information-Gathering” or “Tactical GSM Interrogation and Geo-Location System”.

That is not to say that these products do not have legitimate uses for governments and law-enforcement officials. Large-scale government uses of spyware such as the Stuxnet virus used to disable Iranian nuclear centrifuges or the PRISM mass metadata collection program tend to dominate the media discourse. However, the vast majority of the uses to which such surveillance has been put are far more banal. The US government relied on an as-yet-unnamed surveillance company to break into an iPhone of a terrorist-affiliated mass shooter, while the police in New South Wales, Australia use the same FinFisher software as Hosni Mubarak’s security services to covertly examine suspects’ computers for evidence of drug smuggling, money laundering or child pornography.

However, in the hands of repressive regimes, these surveillance tools pose an entirely new set of challenges. Of particular importance is the borderless nature of the Internet, which allows dictators to repress not just the activists within their own country, but to target political refugees and dissidents abroad as well. In 2011, a Bahraini political activist living in exile in the United Kingdom discovered with the help of a security expert that the government of Bahrain had infiltrated his computer with FinFisher software and was using his online identity to discredit him and collect information on other activists. Similarly, the Moroccan government hired the Italian company Hacking Team to get access to the computer of a France-based democracy activist to extract the contact info of his sources in Morocco. The activist and four of his contributors have now been arrested by the Moroccan government and are awaiting trial on national security charges. Even in Sweden, the national security service SäPo has listed foreign threats against refugees and asylum-seekers as an item of significant concern in both its 2013 and 2014 annual reports.

Some action is being taken by Western nations to limit the spread of such capabilities. The Wassenaar Agreement, signed by most nations in the developed world, mandates export controls on a number of goods, including telecommunications surveillance software, to states or groups engaging in armed conflicts or human rights violations. The EU, at the end of 2014, went even further, requiring all exports of intrusion software to have export licenses in the same way that exports of weapons or rocketry components do. The affected states, however, respond that they need such capabilities to combat terrorism and downplay the effects on civil society or political freedoms.

The software vendors themselves are also reluctant to give up the lucrative contracts available as more and more nations join the network surveillance arms race. Hacking Team’s founder David Vincenzetti tried to move his company to Saudi Arabia, which has not signed the Wassenaar Agreement. Another non-signatory – Israel – has also proven attractive as a home base to both current and new players in the cyber-security field and now accounts for 20% of all cyber-security investments in the world according to Tom Ahi Dror, a project leader at the Israeli National Cyber Bureau.

The debate and controversy around the topic reveals the fundamental duality of the relationship between society and technology. Just as social media has become an effective organizational tool for democratic reformers, so has it helped terrorists and criminals carry out their activities under a cloak of privacy. All across the world, in both developed and developing countries and in both democracies and dictatorships, ‘public safety’ is used as an excuse to violate the privacy of their own and other nations’ citizens; the differences are only in how different regimes define public safety. This shifts the problem from a technological one to a moral one: when we, as citizens of democratic states, approve our own governments’ use of spyware to protect us, we also approve the use of the same technologies by authoritarian states toward their own definitions of safety. This leaves us with a powerful question: is it really worth it?

By Yaroslav Mikhaylov

Image Credit:

Cover: Christiaan Colen, licensed under Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 2.0 Generic.

Picture 1: Michael Coghlan, licensed under Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 2.0 Generic.

Picture 2: CPOA, licensed under Creative Commons Attribution-NoDerivs 2.0 Generic.

Picture 3: National Security Agency, public domain.

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One Belt, One Road – China’s Path to the West

Yaroslav Mikhaylov — Mon, 02 May 2016 12:16:12 +0000

In the early 15^th century, the Chinese admiral Zheng He sailed west from China, getting as far as the Arabian Peninsula and the east coast of Africa. It was one of the largest voyages of its kind during this time. Now, after six hundred years, China is once again following this trade route as it realises its newfound status as a major world power. Together with its efforts to revive the traditional Silk Road trading route, this constitutes China’s new One Belt, One Road trade and influence policy poised to directly challenge the global economic, military and cultural dominance of the Western world.

One Belt, One Road is a program of international agreements and infrastructure projects introduced by the Chinese President Xi Jinping in S eptember 2013 that is to culminate in the creation of two trade routes between China and Europe, Africa and beyond. One starts from Southern China and follows Admiral Zheng He’s sea route through Southeast Asia, India, Africa and the Red Sea, forming a maritime belt across the Eastern Hemisphere. The other is a land route going from the west of China through Central Asia, Iran, Turkey and Russia before reaching Europe, much in the same way as the Silk Road traders did since before the Roman Empire arose in the Italian Peninsula. On the face of it, it is merely a trade and infrastructure program designed to deliver China’s prodigal industrial output to the markets of Asia, Europe and Africa, but it is also designed to expand China’s influence across the hemisphere in a wide range of fields.

A key component of the One Belt, One Road program is the Asian Infrastructure Investment Bank (AIIB), launched in June of last year. Its official goal is to provide loans for infrastructure development in Asian nations – especially the ones across the One Belt, One Road routes – in order to make it easier for Chinese goods to flow into and through those nations. However, it is also a direct competitor to the American- and European-dominated World Bank, offering “programs of development [that] will be open and inclusive, not exclusive. They will be a real chorus comprising all countries along the routes, not a solo for China itself” according to Xi Jinping. And just as the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund became vessels for exporting Western policy preferences to the developed world, the AIIB is likely to also become a way for China to shape the international financial order more to its liking.

Sultan Han is a large 13th-century Seljuk caravanserai located in the town of Sultanhanı, Aksaray Province, Turkey. It is one of the three monumental caravanserais in the neighbourhood of Aksaray and is located about 40 km (25 mi) west of Aksaray on the road to Konya.

The One Belt, One Road project also seeks to export Chinese culture and a more Sino-centric view of world history. Silk Road-associated cultural sites are being promoted by pro-Chinese organisations across Central Asia and many have been nominated for the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization (UNESCO) World Heritage Site status. A long-standing criticism of UNESCO is that its World Heritage Site list is very Eurocentric, so while inclusion of more Chinese or Chinese-influenced sites may make it more representative, it still demonstrates a shift in how we conceive of history – one that is far more favourable to China.

A large part of the One Belt, One Road plan consists of forging partnerships and creating institutions, but another big component of it is also acquisition of physical assets along the route. To help protect its shipping along the coast of Africa, China has begun constructing a large military base and harbour in Djibouti. This places China in a very exclusive club of nations that have military bases on more than one continent. And, according to China’s Foreign Minister Wang Yi, this is only the start of China’s overseas military expansion. However, he has also insisted that China’s intentions are a peaceful “product of inclusive cooperation, not a tool of geopolitics, and must not be viewed with an outdated Cold War mentality”, though how China uses its newfound influence remains to be seen.
Chinese companies have also been expanding their control of shipping infrastructure across the globe. Some of their attempts were successful, such as the purchase of the Greek port of Piraeus by China Cosco Holdings. Others were less successful, such as a Chinese billionaire’s attempt to buy 300 square kilometres of Iceland, ostensibly for a golf resort though more likely for trade or military purposes. The offer was rejected by Iceland’s government as illegal under Icelandic law. Another failure was an attempt to build a canal between the Pacific and the Atlantic Oceans in Nicaragua that would have been twice as wide as the one running through Panama, but which was abandoned after its backer lost a significant portion of his wealth during a market downturn. Despite their failure, the projects’ scope and distance from China suggest the expanding global reach of Chinese investment capital.

However, China’s road to global influence has been far from smooth. Much China coverage over the last year has been about the developing crisis in the South China Sea, where China claims control over naval territory that is also claimed by Vietnam, Malaysia, Philippines and Brunei, as well as the Republic of China – better known as Taiwan in the West. China has been supporting its claims by constructing artificial islands and deploying fighter planes and land-based rockets to them in an attempt to secure the region through military force. This has drawn opposition from the United States as hindering the freedom of navigation in the region, increasing tensions in the area even further. If this dispute is not resolved, it could severely undermine the sea-based half of the One Belt, One Road project.

China also faces significant international opposition to its plans, especially in Europe. Many European countries criticise China for its human rights violations, while China in turn publicly criticises nations that have hosted the Dalai Lama. He is a very popular figure in many Western nations, but China considers him a criminal for supporting the creation of an independent Tibet. Until these issues are resolved, they limit the extent to which increased economic integration with China is acceptable to European nations and the European public.

One Belt, One Road is an ambitious project that aims to change the nature of the global political, economic and social order to reflect the rising importance of China on the world stage. As part of this project, China builds new military bases, purchases infrastructure and even lobbies UN cultural bodies. In short, it is acting like a major world power. After many decades of relative political and economic isolation, One Belt, One Road represents a re-emergence of China into international affairs beyond its own back yard. If the One Belt, One Road project is successful, it will mark the beginning of a new era of international politics and if it is unsuccessful it will be a symbol of hubris of a want-to-be superpower. Either way, it will force a radical rethink of China’s standing among the world’s nations.

Image Credit:

Cover Photo: Chief Mass Communication Specialist David Rush for US Navy Pacific Fleet. Public Domain.

Picture 1: Splette, Wikimedia Commons. Public Domain.

Picture 2: José Luis Filpo Cabana, Wikimedia Commons, licensed under CC BY 3.0

Picture 3: Goran tek-en, Wikimedia Commons, licensed under CC BY 3.0

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NATO Membership: Better Defence at a Lower Cost

Yaroslav Mikhaylov — Sat, 02 Apr 2016 11:10:33 +0000

This opinion piece is part of a two-part series. Click here to read the anti-NATO article.

Since Sweden signed the Memorandum of Understanding with the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) in September 2014, a lively debate has emerged in Swedish government and civil society about whether it is time for Sweden to move to a full membership of the alliance. NATO is a military alliance originally created in the early days of the Cold War to defend Europe’s democratic states from an attack by the Soviet Union. Though it was never called into action during that conflict, it remains to this day as an alliance of Western European and North American nations including many members of the European Union and three of the five Nordic countries. Only Sweden and Finland are not members.

There are many ways in which joining NATO could benefit Sweden and its national defence, but this article focuses on three major ones: an increase in efficiency of the Swedish armed forces for both domestic and expeditionary missions, codifying and normalizing Sweden’s already-existing ad-hoc arrangements and joint missions with NATO, and as protection against the continuing threat that Russia poses towards the Nordic states.

From the start, we have to remember that Sweden is a small country, especially compared to global powers like the United States, Russia or China. It lacks the funding and manpower to have the large and varied military required to stand up to a major power. Without membership in an alliance, Sweden itself has to pay for and maintain a wide range of modern military capabilities that it rarely uses. Membership in NATO would allow Sweden to rely on its allies for some of the more expensive capabilities such as strategic air lift or signals intelligence. This in turn would enable Sweden to field more effective and up-to-date military forces at a far lower expense than if it had to maintain the same level of capabilities on its own. It would also make it easier for Sweden to participate in joint operations, that, due to its small size, almost all of its military activity consists of.

Furthermore, Sweden would gain additional leverage when exporting the products of its own technical expertise to the alliance, such as its SAAB Gripen fighter plane that has already been adopted by several NATO states. Working together with other NATO countries can show off the effectiveness of Sweden’s domestically-developed technology and entice other members to adopt it. Sweden would have greater say in what equipment gets used in joint NATO operations, allowing it to further promote Swedish products. These concerns mean that full membership in NATO would benefit not only the Swedish defence forces, but Sweden’s economy as well.

Opponents to Sweden’s NATO membership frequently cite Sweden’s historical neutrality as a reason to avoid the foreign entanglements that alliance ties bring. However, Sweden is already deeply involved in global security issues in ways that can hardly be described as neutral. Firstly, as a member of the European Union, Sweden is already part of a defensive alliance through Article 42 of the Treaty on European Union. Outside of Sweden and Finland, only Austria, Ireland and Cyprus are members of the EU without being members of NATO. Since an attack on any single NATO member is considered as an attack on every NATO member and an attack on an EU member is an attack on all of the EU, Sweden is already indirectly pledged to defend NATO and vice versa.

Sweden also acts far less neutrally now than it has historically. It has plenty of military commitments outside its borders and many of them are in cooperation with the EU, NATO or both. Swedish armed forces are deployed in over 20 countries with 14 missions outside of Sweden. This is not to mention the already-existing cooperation between Sweden and NATO, including intelligence sharing, joint military exercises and cyber defence. Joining NATO would not impose many new military commitments on Sweden, but it would make the existing ones clearer and easier to manage.

While Europe is no longer a potential battleground for a world war between opposing ideologies, NATO remains oriented towards defending Europe from threats from the East. Since the dissolution of the Soviet Union, some scholars and politicians have suggested that Europe no longer needs to be protected from Russia and many critics of Sweden’s potential NATO membership have turned to those missives as support for their cause. However, in many ways, Russia is still one of the biggest military threats to Sweden. Sweden’s domestic intelligence service SäPo, for instance, named Russia as Sweden’s number one security threat in 2014.

This is no surprise given the Russian armed forces’ incursions into both the Swedish waters and airspace. Especially worrying was its 2013 practice for a nuclear attack on Stockholm. Clearly, Russia already views Sweden as a potential enemy even without it becoming a NATO member state, dispelling the idealistic notion that neutrality will keep Sweden from being drawn into a potentially nuclear conflict. Notably, the Russian bombers practicing the nuclear assault were intercepted not by the Swedish defence forces, but by Danish aircraft flying as part of a NATO mission, highlighting just how important cooperation with NATO is to Sweden’s national security.

Opponents of Sweden’s NATO membership point out the various costs and dangers joining the alliance would impose on Sweden. However, Sweden already faces the same risks NATO opponents decry. It is already participating in many missions abroad and it is already a potential target for Russian aggression. However, joining NATO will allow Sweden to streamline those foreign commitments and make its armed forces more efficient by reducing the redundant capabilities it needs to invest in. It will also provide new markets for Sweden’s domestic defence industry as full membership would give Sweden more influence on NATO procurement processes and help build trust in its exports. Most importantly, however, membership in NATO would give Sweden agency and allow it to take part in shaping the modern world rather than simply observing from the sidelines.

Related articles:

Sweden, NATO and Cyber Security – Interview with Carl Bildt

Photo credits:

Cover picture: Spc. Justin De Hoyos, U.S. Army. Public domain. Edited by Michael Schätzlein.

Picture 1: Alan Wilson, licensed under CC BY-SA 2.0

Picture 2: Spc. John Cress Jr., U.S. Army. Public domain.

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Drones: A Foreign Policy Game-changer?

Yaroslav Mikhaylov — Tue, 01 Mar 2016 08:14:47 +0000

Unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs), colloquially known as drones, have existed since the mid-20^th century but have really entered the public spotlight with the September 11^th terrorist attacks and the start of the War on Terror. Coming in different shapes and sizes, modern military UAVs are the result of decades of technical and doctrinal development that promised to change the nature of how states conduct war and foreign policy. While many promises made by proponents of drone warfare have indeed come to fruition, drones still have many drawbacks both as military and political instruments. So just how has the rise of unmanned aerial vehicles changed world politics?

The basic definition of an unmanned aerial vehicle is any aircraft that can take off, fly and land without a person on board. This definition is very broad, but necessarily so, since military drones can range from a 400-gram Wasp surveillance drone to an enormous RQ-4 Global Hawk that weighs 15 tons and has the wingspan of a Boeing 757, with the most well known ones – the MQ-1 Predator and the MQ-9 Reaper – falling somewhere in the middle. Most military UAVs are made by American companies and used by American militaries or their allies. However, in recent years, many nations have begun either developing their own combat drones or purchasing them from other nations. Most drone exports come from the United States, but Israel and China also hold considerable share of the market. Chinese drones specifically have become very popular thanks to their low price and loose export regulations.

The experiences of both the first Gulf War and the interventions in former Yugoslavia and Africa revealed the possibilities offered by air power, smart munitions and superior reconnaissance in modern warfare. However, these same experiences also exposed the difficulty of sustaining public support for military operations abroad in the post-Cold War world. UAVs were the synthesis of those two experiences. They could provide intelligence and remote strike abilities without the possibility of politically problematic combat deaths. These capabilities became especially important given the increase in intrastate and asymmetrical conflicts in the 90’s and the 2000’s.

The biggest advantage of using UAVs for intelligence gathering and military attacks is obvious – there are no live humans exposed to battlefield dangers. Operations carried out using manned aircraft or on-the-ground agents can result in soldiers dying or being captured by the enemy. That can be difficult to explain to the voters at home. Even worse, it can result in a serious diplomatic incident if the mission is being carried out on the territory of a neutral or ostensibly friendly nation. For these reasons, drones have been the weapon of choice for the United States in places like Afghanistan, Pakistan, Syria and Yemen. And because drones are remotely operated, they can remain in position for 12 or more hours – much longer than manned aircraft – since their pilots can easily hand over the controls to a colleague.

But if UAVs are so effective and do not place the lives of pilots and operatives at risk, it begs the question as to why have regular manned aerial strike or intelligence capabilities at all. It turns out that, for all of their upsides, drones have major technical and political downsides. For one, they tend to fall out of the sky for little reason. The United States Air Force has reported significant reliability issues with their fleet of drones and, in 2013, a US Army report stated that its drones crashed at nearly ten times the rate of manned aircraft. And while much of it can be attributed to mechanical issues, especially issues with the connection between a drone and its controller, many other accidents are the result of human error. Drone Wars UK’s Drone Crash Database is dominated with entries labelled “Pilot Error” where the drone’s controller accidentally steered it into mountains, shipping containers and once even a C-130 cargo plane. This is not surprising considering that UAV pilots spend over three times longer “in the air” than their manned aircraft counterparts. And in the American drone pilot corps at least, this problem is getting worse with 240 pilots leaving the job and only 180 new replacements arriving in 2014. Among reasons for leaving, the retiring operators cite long hours, fatigue and the general high-stress work atmosphere.

These are, however, hardly the only problems with military use of UAVs. For over a decade now, human rights groups have criticised drone strikes for causing unnecessary civilian casualties. This has been doubly problematic when UAVs have been used in ‘gray area’ conflicts like those in Pakistan or Yemen since these attacks are outside of normal wartime regulations. Finally, drones have proven, due to their low speed, very vulnerable when their targets are equipped with anti-air weaponry. This has recently been demonstrated by the loss of an American Predator drone to Syrian air defences and the shooting down of a UAE drone over Yemen during the conflict there. This limits drones’ effectiveness to areas where friendly forces can guarantee them safe skies.

Even in those nations that provide freedom of movement for other nations’ UAVs or host drone operators, the support for drone warfare is rarely unanimous. Opposition groups and civil rights organizations in places that host American drones or their pilots, like Germany and Italy, regularly decry their nations’ complicity in what they criticise as illegal attacks. And in nations where drone strikes are being carried out, like Pakistan or Yemen, popular anger against the strikes has been directed against their leaders. Pakistan’s government continues to suffer from instability, especially in the country’s north-west, while Yemen’s government was overthrown, plunging the country into civil war.

So what are the foreign policy implications of drone warfare? In a realist sense, they reinforce the advantage wealthier and more developed nations hold over smaller and less developed nations, since UAVs allow the former to carry out surveillance and military intervention against the latter at little cost. However, because combat drones are very vulnerable and rely on their targets’ lack of ability or political will to deploy air defences against them, this limits their effectiveness in interstate warfare. Since all but the weakest of states possess some form of air defence, the only enemies against which drones are effective are non-state actors without air defence capabilities. Likewise, the need for friendly skies and bases in the region of operations require a significant level of interstate cooperation to make drone use possible anywhere significantly beyond national borders. This gives less-powerful states in strategically-important positions, like Turkey or Pakistan, increased leverage over their great power allies, since without their consent, whether implicit or explicit, UAV operations through out their territory would be impossible.

The increased sophistication and frequency of use of UAVs was supposed to change how states conducted their foreign and security policies, but after a decade of experience, the changes wrought by drone warfare seem far more evolutionary than revolutionary. Rather than reducing the manpower requirements of modern militaries, drone operations have increased them and, rather than reduce the impact of public opinion on military operations, drone strikes have caused considerable opposition both at home and abroad. For realists, UAVs do little to alter the existing balance of power, while proponents of a more cooperative foreign policy use the requirements of drone warfare as yet another point in favour of the policies they already espoused. In short, drones have become just another tool in the security policy toolbox rather than the paradigm-changing super-weapons they were hyped up to be.

By Yaroslav Mikhaylov

Image Credit:

Cover: Gerald L. Nino, United States Customs and Border Protection, in public domain.

Image 1: Staffan Vilcans, licensed under CC BY-SA 2.0

Image 2: Staff Sgt. John Bainter, United States Air Force, in public domain.

Image 3: Sgt. David Hodge, U.S. Army, in public domain.

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