Neil Connery
Good evening, everybody, and welcome to Chatham House for this panel discussion on the publication of this report entitled Conflict Economies in the Middle East and North Africa. This is a very detailed and fascinating piece of work, which I’m told has taken two years in the making. So, to try and do this justice in one hour, I think, is not going to be easy, but I promise you all of us will do our very best. Some of the report’s Authors on stage with us here this evening to talk about their work, and once we’ve heard from them, then we’ll open up this discussion to hear the points all of you want to make. Just a few introductions first. My name is Neil Connery. I’m a Correspondent with ITV News. I have been for more than 20 years. I’ve been a Moscow Correspondent, an Africa Correspondent. I’ve worked in the Middle East in Libya, Iraq, Syria and Yemen, four of the countries we’re looking at in this report. So, I’m here tonight, really, to open my mind, and I’m sure I’m going to learn a lot here.
I’m joined by Dr Christine Cheng, a Lecturer in International Relations from King’s College London, from Tim Eaton, a Research Fellow here on the Middle East and North Africa Programme here at Chatham House, and also, from Dr Renad Mansour, a Research Fellow also on the Middle East and North Africa Programme at Chatham House. So, good evening, and thank you to all of you for being here. Just a few housekeeping notes, very quickly, we are all on the record here, and this event is being livestreamed. If you want to dive into social media, you’re free to do so and comment on Twitter, using the hashtag #CHEvents. Can I just ask that your phones are on silent, if possible, if you can just check before we get underway? As I say, later on, we will be opening up this discussion, and we want to have as many points and issues as you’d like to raise, and finally, just to say that this report is available on the Chatham House website. So, you’ll be able to find all of the details there. Right, straight to business. Renad, if I can start with you, what do you mean by a conflict economy, and why do you think it’s so important that we study them?
Dr Renad Mansour
Thank you, and thanks to the team and, sort of, you know, the Middle East and North Africa Programme for putting together this report. To answer your question, I mean, we have a definition in there of what it means, but I think other than this idea about the, sort of, production, mobilisation and allocation of resources to embed some kind of violence, I think we’ll start off by looking at the big picture of why we’re doing this. And a lot of this comes from our, sort of, fieldwork and experiences on the ground, in these four countries, in particular, and Iraq, Syria, Yemen and Libya, where there are certain narratives that you hear about the analysis, particularly of the MENA region, that don’t seem to quite add up when you go and, sort of, hang out in, you know, Tripoli or Baghdad or Sana’a or other areas. And so there are some myths that I think it’s important to, kind of, fight against, or at least debunk, and the first one is this idea that conflict is driven primarily by ideology, and this idea that, for example, you have sectarianism and you have Sunnis and Shias fighting against each other, or you have, you know – and the different tribes.
What you actually see perhaps may seem chaotic at the national level or from an outsider’s perspective, but you see a lot of order on the ground, and you see a lot of these economic channels and a lot of these economic resources working their way, and I remember one of the first times, or one of the main times when I was so startled by this was when we were looking at ISIS financing. So, we’d uncovered a lot of documents and we actually got to speak to some people who are part of this process, as part of this report and previous work. And what we realised was that ISIS, this Salafi jihadi group, which is out to fight the Shia, right, the Shia are the main enemy, and everyone’s going around saying, “It’s all about the near enemies, it’s about, again, Shia.” ISIS’s main business contracts were with Shia, and so when you ask them, “Wait a minute, how can you do this?” They said, “Listen, if you give money to us, Sunni in Iraq, it’s not going to go anywhere. You might get arrested, de-Ba’athifications, many problems. You give money to a Shia in Iraq, and you know that’s going places.” So, there was a certain element of pragmatism that, kind of, supersedes the ideology that is often framed, and the same comes true, for example, when you look at Iran, the Shia Crescent. Iran has major businesses with Kurdish-Sunni groups, with Sunni groups, with all sorts of different ideological groups, and so, part of what we’re trying to do with this report is look at the Middle East and North Africa, from a perspective that’s a bit closer to realities on the ground, and even now, someone called me today, there are American contractors breaking US sanctions to engage in business with Shia militias linked to Iran, right? And so, you’d think that there’s all this going on, but on the ground, you have this order in business. Business is as usual.
The second kind of thing that comes out of this is this discussion about formal and informal, right? Is the truck driver a smuggler, or is he, or very rarely a she a transporter, right? So, you have these ideas of the black market, and what is the black market? But if you take that, sort of, let’s call it a Westphalian, or, sort of, at least a Western understanding of what is formal and what is informal, you can’t really apply it neatly to these four countries, because, you know, someone selling gasoline on the side of the road, nobody knows where that gas came from, but everyone uses it, and no-one thinks it’s black market. So, it’s about reimagining and getting rid of these binaries and dichotomies of, “This is a formal economic practice, and this is an informal economic practice, because this is the recognised Government and these people aren’t recognised, so their economics are informal.” So, that’s another, sort of, myth that I think this, kind of, helps to, sort of, pushback against, and that’s linked to a bigger conversation about what a state and what a non-state actor is, and moving more towards de facto.
Another idea is, all of a sudden, especially, I remember, with the rise of ISIS, this idea that, wow, there is this new economic model, and that ISIS is the world’s richest terrorist organisation, it’s all new, but if you – the research that we did actually showed that many of these networks had existed for a long time. I mean, this is the 1990s. This is Saddam Hussain setting up sanction to pass – bypass sanctions, setting up different tribal leaders and different political leaders who could – and economic leaders and businesspeople who could then get past sanctions. ISIS didn’t create this system, it inherited a system that was there, and what you see, across in these four countries, are these systems have existed for decades and decades, and it’s the group that owns the territory will need that system. And so, it’s kind of turning it upside down.
Another important point, which we want to stress is, and this links to the bigger conversation on violence, is removing violence in these countries doesn’t necessarily solve the conflict. We often rush to say we’re post-conflict as soon as you remove violence, but what you see are these systems become entrenched, and then they become institutionalised. And so, we’ve thought, necessary, as part of this report, and I know you guys will get into this, to differentiate between what is competitive violence and that more embedded violence. And so, you cannot just have a military solution to the issues in these countries, you need that to be accompanied by that, sort of, political and economic solution, which is what this report is trying to come out, sort of, to re-understand what that could be.
And to conclude, I don’t know how much time I have left, but I think I don’t have much time left, but to conclude, fundamentally, when we look at groups from, you know, the different militias in Libya to the – to Al Qaeda, for example, operating in Yemen, to ISIS, we often look at them as they are the core of the problem. But, actually, all these groups are symptoms to a bigger problem that we’re seeing in the region, and as we will describe in this report, and as I’ve described, that problem isn’t that there’s these groups, the problem, the core of the problem is the, sort of, the breakdown of the unitary state and the breakdown of all accountability in these four countries. And so, the solution there has to be not just fighting ISIS, but trying to rebuild these societies that have completely fractured in recent times.
Neil Connery
Renad, thank you very much for that. I’m sure we’ll pick up some of those points later on in the wider discussion. Moving onto Tim, the report we have before us here, it seeks to draw comparisons between the conflict economies in Iraq, Libya, Syria and Yemen, as we’ve heard. Is it possible to do that given the differences that we’re talking about here? I mean, how is it possible to pull that off?
Tim Eaton
Yeah, thank you very much. I think the first thing to state is that we’re not trying to say that all of these conflicts are the same. We recognise that there are major differences between them. The social and political contexts, of course, have major divergences. The economies and structures of the economies can be quite different, and, for example, Libya’s GDP per capita is six times that of Yemen’s, currently. Equally, the status of the conflict is very different as well. If you look at some of the statistics, something like 90% of Syria’s population are directly affected by conflict, which compares to less than 10% of Libya’s. So, we’re not trying to say that all of these conflicts are exactly the same, certainly not. What we’re actually saying is that when you start really looking at some of these structures, some of the similarities start to reveal themselves, and we realised quite early that we tried to look for other efforts to comparatively study these things in not only MENA, but other contexts, and we found very few of them. For the most part, people have focused on case studies, where that case study is unique and not translatable, which can make some sense, but is not particularly useful for a policymaker, who’s trying to apply some lessons and trying to understand how to tackle some of the issues in question.
And we realise that trying to compare all of Yemen to all of Syria, all of Iraq, to all of Libya really had, kind of, a limited utility. It was, kind of, a meaningless exercise, in that sense. But when we started to look at specific areas, we – there was, kind of, a light-bulb moment in that we noticed that we were seeing similar types of dynamics in similar types of areas. And, like, to put it bluntly, we realised that Baghdad’s conflict economy had more in common with that of Tripoli’s conflict economy than it did of Bosra’s, and we found that very interesting. So, we started to really dig into that, and where it left us was that, effectively, we realised that different geographies, different areas had distinct location-based patterns of violence and resource production, mobilisation and allocation. So, in short, the rents available in different types of areas, the ways in which people could make money and the ways in which people compete were, to some extent, determined by those geographies.
So, what we’ve tried to do in this report is really dig into that approach and use it as a framework. So, we’re not saying that these economies are all exactly the same. What we’re saying is, looking at what we call sub-economies, localities and the resource patterns of rents within them is a useful way for policymakers to understand the dynamics, and also understand some of the reasoning behind local actors’ behaviours. So, we’ve identified three sub-economies in our report: capital cities, the first, transit areas and borderlands is the second, and oil-rich areas, each of which we think has a distinct pattern of resource allocation, mobilisation and distribution. So, what you’re seeing on the screens is our attempt to try and visualise these areas and illustrate the key areas in the countries, who controls them, what flows between them. You won’t be able to see much from here, but hopefully, I’ll talk you through very briefly how we see these three sub-economies, and then perhaps, I’m sure, we can delve into it in a little bit more detail in the conversation that’s to come.
But, first of all, I think, talking about the capital cities, you realise that in each of the conflict economies in question, the control of the capital city is the prized asset, particularly in Iraq and Libya, where it’s hyper-centralised, and the distribution of oil overwhelmingly comes through the capital, or revenues, rather. You realise that control of the state, its institutions, its assets and access to jobs is really what everybody is competing for. In Syria and Yemen, where the state doesn’t have the same degree of largesse to distribute, the state uses the powers of the capital in different ways, often to subcontract to other actors, as a means of navigating its economic shortfalls. So, for example, in Syria, giving out contracts to loyalist elites, who will then in turn support the regime’s war effort, in using its legal authority to requisition land and provide that to the same types of elites, and similarly, using de jure status gained from being in the capital and recognised by the international community to access international organisations. In Syria and Yemen, that’s very significant, because, actually, a degree of control over aid flows is a significant proportion of the country’s GDP.
Also, in the capitals, we see that control of the monetary and financial authority of the state and private sector is centred in the capital. So, those who control the capitals control those levers of access to the international financial system, and what we, kind of, discern from this, to cut it short, is you see particular types of patterns. You see initial competitive violence in the capitals, which eventually translates into embedded violence, unequal systems of rent distribution, which are captured by certain groups or others. And, effectively, we see a pattern of institutional domination and control, the growth of protection markets, and control over institutions, which is then translated into infiltration of those institutions, and then control of the state.
When we look at transit points and borderlands, it’s obvious what I’m talking about when I say a borderland, but transit points are slightly less obvious. When you look at the conflicts across the region in different ways, you see that conflict creates, obviously, front lines, barriers between different groups of actors. In certain contexts, there’s harder barrier than others, particularly in Syria, where we saw a degree of cantonisation. You effectively see front lines divide areas into what become different markets, and so that means that there are deficits of goods in some areas, surpluses in others, and the ability to trade from one area to another is a significant form of revenue, an arbitrage opportunity. And for many of the armed groups in question, in these transit areas and borderlands you see that the majority of their incomes come from effectively taxing the movement of those goods. And so, when we look at this, what we mainly see is competitive violence to control these areas, and we also see some surprising outcomes, really. You notice, for example, in Iraq, when territories were recovered from IS and controlled by elements of the security forces attached to the state, those security forces still find their own private means of taxing these flows, even though they’re under the pay of the state. So, you see a clear revenue-generation model there.
In the oil-rich areas, I think it’s been really interesting to compare this, because I think there’s a lot of misunderstanding among the internationals on oil-rich areas. Of course, each of the countries in question has oil-rich areas, but there’s often a conflation that control of oil infrastructure means access to all of the revenues that come from oil sales, but you realise quite quickly that that’s not the case. Oil has a very complex supply chain. In many cases, you realise that one group will control the oil rig, another group will control the refinery. You can’t sell crude easily, you need to refine it into a product. So, you see that the people who have the capacity to connect these or complete the supply chain of oil can make much, much more money and are a lot less dependent on other actors. Whereas, those who can’t are forced to depend on co-operating with other actors along the supply chain in order to access the funds. And you realise here, of course, that access to the international financial system and the international oil market is imperative. So, for example, those in Libya who control the oil-rich areas, but don’t have international recognition to allow them to sell directly to the international market continue to rely upon funds being redistributed from Tripoli. And when you translate this into behaviours, you actually realise that, in most of the oil-rich areas that we’re looking at, you see a lot less competitive violence. Put simply, you need to co-operate to make as much money out of these areas as you can, and you see that all of the actors, from ISIS to the PYD to the LNA, act very much pragmatically in order to do this. So, we think that that shows a degree of local agency in these areas as well, which is often misunderstood.
So, in sum, by looking at these types of rent structures and these types of revenue-generating opportunities and understanding how they work, we think that it’s a useful way of drawing comparisons and drawing conclusions of how the systems actually function on the ground, so that when the revenue-generation model of ISIS is presented as something completely new, you can see that, actually, it makes sense in the operating environment, and, actually, I think, as we’ve learnt, the tax that ISIS charge wasn’t a great deal different to the actors that preceded or followed them. So, for some of those actors on the ground, the conflict economy remains the same, despite how internationals may perceive it.
Neil Connery
Tim, thank you very much, fascinating what you say about oil economies. I think the people will, I think, pick that up in the discussion as well. Christine, the dynamics discussed in all of this are clearly very complex. What do you think the lessons are for policymakers from this report?
Dr Christine Cheng
So, I’m going to start just by talking about the role of the West on sub-economy dynamics, because I think that’s an important place from which we should think about where do we go from here. And the first thing to say is that the West, the UK, is not neutral or benevolent as an actor in these situations. We always have a preference, and it’s very clear, in a lot of these situations, that we act on those preferences, even when we’re not openly supporting one side or the other. It’s hard to be in these kinds of situations without, even just by our sheer presence, having some kind of an impact on the situation on the ground. So, that’s the first thing, we aren’t neutral and we’re definitely not benevolent.
The second thing is that when we’re coming out of all of these dynamics and the research that has been done, it’s very clear that we don’t have a good grasp of the local dynamics, right? This is – it’s – and we were talking about this earlier upstairs about why that’s the case, you know, it’s difficult for media to go into these places, for Journalists to go in, it’s dangerous, and it’s difficult for governments to go in, it’s difficult to research these places. It’s much easier for individuals, Researchers, to go in and to be able to find out some of these things, without calling attention to oneself. So, there are structural difficulties around getting better information, but, fundamentally, you know, we are just not as well informed as we need to be in order to be able to make decisions about policy in these places. So, the first thing is, we need – or the second thing is, we need to do a better job of getting good information on the ground.
There are some trade-offs here, and we talk about these in the report. The first is that achieving stability, so stopping that open fighting that Renad was talking about, doesn’t necessarily reshape the incentive structures that Tim was talking about, right? So, just because we stopped the fighting doesn’t mean that people on the ground are not trying to fix the economy in a particular way that is to their benefit, and these two things should be disaggregated in our minds, right? They are not the same. Just because one thing ends doesn’t mean that the other thing does.
And so, we need to think about who is actually holding power in these situations? How do we bring in those power holders and emerging power holders? How do we bring them into some kind of an agreement, or an elite bargain, if you will, and even, just, recognising that, I think, is very important, but, of course, while you’re trying to do that, while you are trying to take away power from some groups who have it, you’re going to cause quite a bit of a potential for a return to violence. So, not everybody’s going to give up their power easily, and in the process of trying to redistribute some of those rents in a more equitable way, you’re going to come up against quite a lot of resistance, and some of that resistance will be violent. So, in trying to redistribute more equitably, you could cause a different set of problems, right? So, we’ve got multiple problems going on here. We’re stuck between a rock and a very, very hard place, and recognising, at least, that this is a potential dynamic, I think, is a good start. There are no easy solutions here, I think, is the takeaway from the trade-offs discussion.
And then, also, to talk about what Renad was saying, in terms of embedded violence, right? So, we talk about embedded violence as this idea of the right to use violence. Who gets to use violence, under what situation? This is not about open fighting, necessarily, right? This is about coercion, and recognising how you use that coercion is a really powerful thing. So, the way in which we talk about it in the report, how you try to change that dynamic of embedded violence is to think about it in terms of accountability, right? How do we install more accountability into these kinds of systems? How can that kinds of accountability be enforced? And again, there are not any easy solutions to this, but thinking about it, in terms of accountability would be the way that we would suggest going about approaching it.
And let me just offer you a couple of very specific policy recommendations to what Tim was saying. So, the first is dealing with capital cities, and one of – well, we’ve got several policies here, but I’ll just talk about decentralisation, and we talked about the fact that decentralisation is often used as a panacea for dealing with these issues, right? So, if you give power to local levels, then all of this goes away. And we argue against that, you have to be very, very careful about decentralisation and how you do decentralisation. Decentralisation, without accountability, is basically a recipe for the same kinds of disasters that you have at the, you know, at the central level, except now you’ve got lots and lots of fragmentation of that particular problem. So, be very careful, when you use decentralisation as a tool and think about the accountability mechanisms that come along with decentralising, if that’s the route that is to be taken.
And then, speaking to transit areas and borderlands, you know, one of our first policy recommendations here is to think about clear mandates and being accountable to local populations, and that sounds a lot easier than it is, of course. So, we’re talking about more inclusive and equitable distributions and funnily enough, you know, it goes back to the capital cities problem, actually. A lot of the resources are not making its way out to the borderlands, right? So, if you live at the edge of the country, chances are you’re just not benefitting very much, and local populations will then find other ways to make money, like Tim was talking about, in terms of smuggling across the border. So, the root of that problem goes back to that redistribution of resources, and thinking about it in that way. The problem isn’t located – the root of the problem isn’t actually located at the border, the root of the problem is located, actually, at the capital, and thinking about it, you know, as a whole, I think, will get us further.
And then, just the last thing, and speaking to the oil-rich areas that Tim was talking about, the West has one really, really powerful bit of leverage here, and that is granting access to international oil markets, and that’s something that we can use and potentially should use in particular situations. The part – the discussion about Libya and preventing oil sales in the East – from the East of Libya had an important role here, and there may be other situations where, again, we do actually have some leverage. But overall, I think we have to be very cognisant about the ability to influence events on the ground, ‘cause we don’t always have the kind of leverage that we think we do, and there’s often an imperative from Politicians, and sometimes even from policymakers, to do something.
Doing something, I think, is a response that can lead to doing more harm than good, and we talk about this in the report, but it’s very difficult to say no to your political bosses, when the media is, you know, throwing on the frontpage of every newspaper, “These people are dying, this, that is happening, you must do something,” and then the instant response is, “Well, let’s give humanitarian aid, let’s do this, that and the other,” and, in fact, all we are doing, in some cases, is entrenching those conflict dynamics and, actually, leading to more harmful outcomes for local populations, or, in the act of trying to close up some of these economies, all we’re doing is driving those economies underground, or leading to, you know, a humanitarian disaster of a different kind, right? Or that we will have to pay the price for in the future.
So, there are no easy answers in our report. There’s 70 pages worth of difficulties, and we hope that you will read through every single page, but, you know, this is very much a context-dependent. We’re saying, “Look at the local, try and understand. Ppeak to people if you can. Get to know what is actually happening in these places, and listen. Listen to the local people. They know more than we do in most of these cases, but, of course, be careful of being played, right? So, these are, you know, these are all dynamics that we’re going on right now, and we hope that you’ll enjoy the report.
Neil Connery
Thank you. Thank you very much, Christine. I just wondered, from a media point of view, how frustrated the three of you feel sometimes when you see coverage of conflicts in this region, and the failure or inability, often, of the media to get down to some of the issues in this report, because they are fundamental, aren’t they? I just wonder what we need to do better, what we need to learn as Journalists, in order to reflect what’s in here?
Dr Christine Cheng
I have thoughts, but…
Dr Renad Mansour
One thing – go on, then.
Dr Christine Cheng
Yeah, I’ll take a stab at it, because we were talking about this earlier upstairs. So, I think that the media’s incredibly good at communicating to a large audience in a powerful way. A lot of these narratives are not simple, and it’s really, really difficult to convey all of the complexity, and people don’t have much of an attention span for deep, complex issues. So, that’s part of the problem. The other part of the problem right now, in particular, is you know, two of the big countries that are able to act, the US and the UK, are consumed by domestic political issues, and there is zero bandwidth for paying attention to other places, right?
We’ve got disasters going on all over the world. I mean, I work on Africa mostly, and I cannot tell you how upset I am that nobody is paying attention to all of the things that are happening in Cameroon, in Central African Republic, and I could just go on and on, right? The Middle East actually gets more attention than many other places in the world, and yet, I still feel like it’s not enough, right? And part of that has to do with, just, you know, the structural situation right now. Hopefully that will change, but it might not, but in terms of how to tell these stories better, I think a really helpful thing to be able to do is to – for Journalists to have some time to actually read, and policymakers too, right? 70 pages is a lot, and I know policymakers, you know, I talk to them all the time, and they say, “That’s just not practical for me to go through, right? I don’t have time to deal with that. Can you give me the four-page executive summary?” But you’re not going to get the same level of detail, right? So, if you’re a Desk Analyst, you might get to read all 70 pages. Anybody above that, it’s difficult, and they’re struggling to find the time to do that. So, part of that is, I think, you know, using your role in vis – like, helping people feel emotionally why they should care, that’s a really powerful favour that you could for us and for the people on the ground. I think that would be, you know, a great way of thinking about it.
Dr Renad Mansour
One of the Authors was – likes to say this, Peter Salisbury always says – he always says, “Embrace complexity.” The amount of times that I’ve been on the media or I’ve been speaking to a Journalist and I’ve said something that I thought was, like, amazing, like, “No, no, can you just simplify that? It’s a great thought, but no-one is going to understand what you’re talking about,” and – but the challenge is if you take simplifications. If you, for example, say, “Iraq, this is Sunnistan, this is Shiastan and this is Kurdistan,” you’re going to run into problems. So, there needs to be a better trade-off, I think, with reaching to a mass audience, but also not falling into that danger of creating false narratives, or narratives that may actually contradict realities. So, I think there needs to be a better trade-off on that.
Tim Eaton
Yeah, I think sometimes it’s hard to find the language. So, we had a great event, about a month ago here, about the battle and for Tripoli at the moment, and one of the questions was about Khalifa Haftar’s Libyan National Army, or Libyan-Arab Armed Forces. The respondent on the panel said, “Well, it’s neither Libyan and it’s neither national and it’s not really an army,” and then for 15 minutes explained those forces. You don’t have that time, in a newspaper column, and I think sometimes just finding the language can be quite difficult for these things, and I think that it’s becoming so difficult reflects the degree of fragmentation that I think we’re seeing in some of the states, and, certainly, I would say, in Libya, that’s very challenging, because it’s, just, there are a lot of actors. It’s not clear, in a way, to easily communicate. So, I think that’s just a bit of a block at the moment for really getting to grips with some of these things, but we can do – I think things like this help in that way.
Neil Connery
Definitely, thank you. If we can open this up to the floor. I think we have a microphone to hand around. If you can just give us your name and the organisation that you’re from, we’d be really grateful. A lady over here first, if possible? Thank you.
Eleanor Bennett
Hello, Eleanor Bennett, SOAS. Could the panel expand on tools and strategies that are available to policymakers for preventing monopolies of power, and what examples would you give of this being effective in the past?
Neil Connery
Who fancies diving in first?
Dr Christine Cheng
I’m passing it on. Go on.
Tim Eaton
Okay, well, let me give you one example of the international community’s thinking on a particular topic, and where I think it went wrong and what that led to. So, there’s a lot of discussion about sequencing of, say, political settlements and peace deals, and I think a lot of the time we realise, when we speak to people, there’s an assumption that following a political settlement there can be a process of reform undertaken, once there’s stability. But, actually, what I think the conflict economy report illustrates is that, at that point, those elites that are in control of the system have no incentive to reform, and that, actually, that process doesn’t follow. So, if you look at Tripoli, since 2016, effectively, a number of armed groups were given a degree of impunity to act as they wished on certain issues, as long as they supported the Government, with the belief that the Government could bring stability, and then that would be able to be, sort of, expanded across the country. But what followed, of course, was that those groups sought to monopolise access to certain rents, they infiltrated the state, to the extent that one of the leader’s of the armed group’s son-in-law now is the person who holds the budget, or the Office of the Budget in the Ministry of Finance, which shows the proximity of those groups to power.
So, I think part of the tools is this trade-off, realising that that’s not how the change happens. I think that, for the most part, we’ve focused on, and perhaps Renad can talk about this from Iraq, rather than focusing on individual networks and, say, change agents to try and be someone who can deliver and change a structure, to actually treat the structures as structures, and have clear criteria, which inform the way that the international community approaches these things, which will then determine whether this is a policy that should be supported, whether it isn’t. And I think that that kind of institutional approach gets talked about a lot, but I don’t think there’s been quite enough appetite for it within the international community to really do it, and I know that you’ve got thoughts on that, so perhaps…
Dr Renad Mansour
I think – so, people – I mean, first of all, this type of work has been done quite substantially in Africa and Asia, but not as much in the Middle East and North Africa, and we had difficulties finding literature on this. I think an interesting example is Lebanon. Lebanon is an example of post-war settlement where the elite come together, entrench the system, remove violence, but continue the same kind of negotiations, to the point when protests emerge, when civil society emerge, the elite are able to come together and minimise it, and even if one killed the other’s father, or whatever, there’s still – there’s a pragmatism, at least, to it.
These four countries that we’re looking at aren’t there yet, right? They’re still, kind of – the competitions are more, in terms of violence, competitive. So, I suppose the question then becomes, what’s your strategic objective? Is the Lebanon model the objective? Is it just about monopolising, as you say, power in a way that would seem less chaotic, without really ensuring accountability or a judicial system that’s free and fair, or many of these mechanisms, democracy? So, what we’re saying is that while it is good to have less militias, there’s an over-focus on integration, which won’t happen. It’s never happened anywhere in the region, the region that we’re focusing on, but what there necessarily needs to be from now is the conversation of how to make these groups more accountable. Accountability, local legal councils, the judiciary, to us, is important a) to understand these processes, but then to reaching any kind of settlement, and that is necessarily supporting, as Tim says, institutions over a preferred personality, because the West likes the personality because maybe he speaks English, or he speaks the language of reform, and so they fall for it.
Dr Christine Cheng
Can I just say one thing there on maybe a slightly controversial way of putting this problem? So, we talked about the distribution of patronage, right? And we talk about this, in terms of more inclusivity and more equitable forms of distributing this. So, if you’ve got a monopoly, one of the ways that we talk about in dealing with that monopoly is actually to try to widen the base of who gets benefits from that particular monopoly. This is not a very kosher thing to say in the West, right? Effectively, we’re saying correction is okay, we recognise that there is corruption. If you want to think of it as corruption, you can think about it as patronage, right? And what you want to do is actually spread out the gains from that patronage to a wider network, right? That’s not a – that’s kind of a moving in the right direction as opposed to a wholesale change, and as I was saying earlier, you know, the more you push for that wholesale change, I think the more you’ll run up against a potential to violence again.
Neil Connery
Great, thank you very much. Gentleman over there, please, thank you. I will come to you in a minute.
Andre
Hello, my name is Andre [inaudible – 37:44]. I’m from National Institute for African Studies. We are investigating the Fulani herders in Northern Nigeria that are equipped now with machine guns, and they are claiming land in the South in Nigeria from farmers. In terms of the greed and grievance model, how would you associate this conflict, because this is linked to climate change, or because of the desertification in the North? So, now they need to feed their stock, and they are going southward. Thank you.
Dr Christine Cheng
Yeah, it’s so funny, I’m actually working with the student whose MA thesis is all about climate change and dealing with some of these local, kind of, pastoral conflicts. I mean, how does it relate to greed and grievance? Greed and grievance tells us a story about paying attention to economics as well as politics, right? So, the prevailing narrative used to be, and as we just discussed, as Renad was saying, it used to be about either ideology or ethnicity, and then, you know, in the late 1990s, we started talking about, “Oh, actually, there’s an economic element to this. We should be paying attention to political economy issues.” That’s effectively some of the things that we are trying to do in this paper, right? And talking about the interactions between these, that it’s not just one and that it’s not just the other, it’s the two together in combination.
Now, you’re throwing climate change on top of this, and I think that’s a really important driver, and will be for the next 50 years, right? This is something that is very latent. We are not paying enough attention to it, and it is causing a tipping point to happen, possibly, that might not have happened, or happening earlier than it might have otherwised happen – might otherwise happen. So, I don’t know about the specific case of the Fulani necessarily, but I can say that there are other conflicts, where it’s very clear that things like desertification or, you know, pastoral issues, caused by climate change, are changing the ways in which communities are relating to each other and causing deeper divisions, which aren’t – those aren’t the only factors that matter, but they’re part of this mix of factors, right? And that’s the issue, right? So, this is yet another stressor that is being brought up into this environment, and I would say that’s an appropriate way of thinking about it. We talk about it as an ecosystem of problems, right, in our work, and that there is an ecology of things going on here, and you can’t really just pull out one in particular. It’s often five or six or seven things that are all going on at the same time, and those are different, actually, in different places.
Tim Eaton
I think, just, very quickly, one of the things, which is understood, but not commonly stated is that, quite often, motivations can also shift over time. So, I think, you know, what may start off, as well as being more on the grievance end of the continuum than the greed. You can see, over time, that, actually, in many of the places that we’re looking, it creates economic incentives for the perpetuation of violence and the continuing competitive violence that we see. And to say that that competitive violence has material drivers is part of it doesn’t mean that we’re completely removing the grievance element to these things, but it is important to state that they work together and that you need to understand how those material contests are manifesting themselves, and I think this is something which ministries of foreign affairs have struggled to understand, because when we talk to them, you tend to find that those who focus on economic issues focus on macroeconomics, development economics. They don’t look at these informal dynamics often. Those on the political side are looking at political deals. Those that look at the security are looking at force strength of armed groups, but, actually, the economic connectors between those elements is nobody’s mandate at the moment.
Neil Connery
Did you want to pick up? A lady down here has a question, I think. Please, thank you.
Anita Lowenstein Dent
I’m Anita Lowenstein Dent, Teach2Teach International. If I may, I’ve got two questions. My first question is, to what evidence did you come across of cross-combatant trade? I’m particularly thinking about hostages and human trafficking and drugs. And my second question is, in reference to your comment on pre-existing, and therefore continuity of economies, and so it’s a broader question about what do you see within the new wars as being the change within those continuities, the significant change within those continuities?
Neil Connery
Thank you very much, thank you. Who wants to dive in first, anyone? Tim?
Tim Eaton
Oh, thanks. So, if I just understood your first question correctly, trade of combatants and…?
Anita Lowenstein Dent
Cross-combatant trade. So, across different combatant lines, regimes, state and non-state actors across, different types, and Al Qaeda to [inaudible – 42:59] to IS?
Tim Eaton
It’s actually remarkable how many examples we’ve got of that in the report. Pick on any chapter, could probably give you a couple, but one of the interesting ones in Yemen, which I thought was notable, our colleague, Peter Salisbury, who is our Yemen Researcher, noted that the town of Beihan is a very common, big smuggling hub for weapons, and Beihan is controlled by a group, which should be antithetical to the Houthis. But seems to actually be the area through which the Houthis receive many of their small arms, and Pete’s conclusion was that whoever controls Beihan, realised that you can make a lot of money by selling arms to the Houthis, and that’s a fact of life.
I think, in some areas, if you look at, say, Libya and human smuggling, quite often you can see a competition between various communities and armed factions for control of networks, and, actually, here there’s not much movement between them. But one of the interesting things that I found from our fieldwork was that, in some cases, you realise that the checkpoints in the South will charge different prices depending on the person going through it. So, if you’re a Toubou going through a Toubou checkpoint, it might be 100 denars, if you’re Tuareg, 500. So, you saw that some of the smuggling networks would have different drivers to go through the different checkpoints to save money along the way. It didn’t seem very ideological in that sense, but it was a very rational response to the market conditions. So, I think, you know, whether it’s the Katerjis or others who had been able to find means of trading crude to areas of – that that crude could be refined and then selling it back to PYD or ISIS areas, there are always opportunities for, like, the profiteers and the middlemen to operate, and the economic incentives for the actors to either do it directly or via a conduit, are too powerful to turn down, I think, in almost every case we’ve found.
Dr Renad Mansour
Yeah, I think there’s an interesting example from the case of Iraq. In some of these countries, we had our Researchers actually drive along to look at the different checkpoints and what’s happening where, and there’s a map in here that suggests that some of these, what were referred to as militias, non-state armed groups, but formal groups recognised armed groups, share checkpoints with the national army, the Iraqi security forces, because the issue is, at a border, you need to have a border, you know, you need to have the state there. The boundaries between different provinces, you necessarily need to have the state there, but, of course, that territory isn’t necessarily controlled by that Commander. So, you have a checkpoint where an armed group splits profits with a General from the, you know, third command, or fourth command. They split profits, right? So, you have this idea that this is a state, an Iraqi state that’s here, and oftentimes, you might not even notice that it’s an armed group. Sometimes they put their martyrs up and you’ll see coming in who it is. But that, kind of, shows you to the extent to which you have an ISF State General, who doesn’t get paid enough from the Central Government, who doesn’t have that much loyalty to the Central Government, who can make a lot of money, who can build his own patronage, you know, through co-operating, and you see this around the region.
On the question of continuities, as I say, particularly in Iraq and Libya, a lot of the lucrative trade comes from the export of gas and oil, and as Tim was saying, the maps that we have, you have companies, you need a trucking company, you need a drilling company. There’s all these different companies, and you’ll often find, through this process, that there are boards, and on those boards you might find people who have links to political elite. Actually, you will, and this is some of the work that we’ve been doing. And then the question comes, what do they do next, right? I mean, a lot of these people are put out of a job. I mean, there’s some reports about how one of them would set up part-time, a militia person, a part-time beauty salon, you know, worker, owner. So, there’s all these interesting stories. I think you had a few too. These are real people. You know, you view them as, “Wow, militia this, or armed this,” but these are real people with real jobs, with real families that are looking to make profit in a system, in a state that they don’t feel responds to their basic needs.
Tim Eaton
I was quite struck there. I’ve been interviewing some human smugglers, and when the third person told me that he was formally an Interior Designer, I started to…
Neil Connery
Thank you very much. Thank you.
Dr Renad Mansour
It’s very common.
Neil Connery
Thank you. Gentleman down here, please. Thank you, sir.
Alberto Portugheis
Thank you. My name is Alberto Portugheis, and my question is, kind of, encouraged by the fact that I have a movement for world demilitarisation, ‘cause I really don’t see how we can make any progress in the world, from any point of view, human, economic, etc., by making, selling weapons and war fighters and warships, etc. And you said it yourself, that military it’s not the solution, and – but you looked for the economic solution, but how can we do that if the two are the same, because you talked now about militia people who need to make a bit of money, but the Politicians are the ones who actually make the money? And in all countries of the world, not only in the Middle East, or Northern Africa, and we pay them bribes, we pay them all commissions, whatever, and because – and to sell, and we have embassies, we have our embassy in Beirut, everywhere, and the admission of the Attaché, the trade Attaché, the military Attaché is by contract. So, how can you – it will go on forever. In 100 years’ time, people will still be making the same meetings and the same discussions, if we don’t get rid of this venom of humanity.
Neil Connery
Thank you very much. Thank you. So, how do we separate, really, I think is the essence here, the economics and the politics?
Tim Eaton
I think one of the things that we realised quite quickly is we brought together a group of policymakers and asked them what they thought about these issues, and almost everyone immediately went to enforcement mechanisms, sanctions, rule of law approaches, and, of course, those kinds of tools are in the arsenal of the international policymakers. But, actually, when you ask them about what positive efforts or things to shift the incentive structures in a positive way, there isn’t really a lot out there. There doesn’t seem to have been enough thinking. So, for example, if you look at Libya’s Southern borders, where there’s been a big emphasis in effectively securitising them and shutting down human smuggling networks, what’s not being said is that those areas are no longer able to get the money from the central state that they once were. They don’t get the access. They’re not being able to collect their salaries, and there are changes in, you know, the economic system, where it doesn’t make sense to move low-value goods through the desert like it once did centuries ago. So, everything’s shutting down many of these communities’ access to resources, but nobody’s talking about what can replace that. So, I think those are the kinds of things where there is room for policymakers to be lent on, and where we can make some good arguments to try and identify areas where you can encourage peaceful co-operation, encourage economic co-operation, which can at least diminish some of those conflict drivers. I think that’s a point that we try and make in quite a few places in the report.
Neil Connery
Thank you very much. Sorry.
Dr Christine Cheng
I think the problem is just that I don’t think we have a good grasp on what the, you know, ‘informal economy’ looks like, and we don’t know how to measure it, and so we don’t. And that’s basically what the numbers reflect, right? So, when you look at what the GDP is for any of these countries, it really doesn’t – they’re not able to capture all of the things that we’re talking about, not all, but many of the things that we’re talking about in this report, and that’s a problem with how we think about economies, and until we’re able to do that and just, like I said earlier, get a better handle on what is going on in these places, and how to actually measure the economy better, what the ‘informal grey, black markets’ look like, I’m not sure that we can, you know, figure out good policy solutions.
Neil Connery
Thank you, and lady at the back. Sorry, gentleman at the back next to her. Sorry, I thought you had your hand up as well.
Member
Yeah, I was just going to ask, various things.
Neil Connery
Sorry, okay.
Ibrahim Olabi
Thank you, sir, for this. Ibrahim Olabi, I’m a Barrister at Guernica 37, and I run an organisation called the Syria Legal Development Programme, which does – works on sanctions on Syria, and making sure that, hopefully, UK taxpayer money does not end up with the kind of cronies that Tim was talking about. My question is the interlink between those countries and other regional proxies that would assist states in managing conflict economies. So, for example, just as an example, Cham Wings is an airline owned by the cousin of Bashar al-Assad. It now resumed flight to Benghazi. We’ve seen sanctioned individuals in Syria move to Dubai and for trade agreements. So, the role of proxies, regional proxies in maintaining the conflict economies, I’d be interested to see – hear your thoughts on that.
Neil Connery
Thank you. Thank you. Do you want to go round?
Dr Renad Mansour
I think one of the things that we’ve – I mean, the role of proxies, and you can judge to what extent you can call them proxies and how much they are proxies versus allies, but nonetheless, I think what you have are different groups and that move across borders, and some people call it a land bridge, some people call it a way to, kind of, gain influence, but with the kind of collapse of the unitary state or the break on the unitary state, you have all these different competing centres and all these different competing politics, and it’s true, you cannot divide. You meet a group, it’s a political group, but it also has an armed wing, and it also has an economic wing, and it is in that area. And so, if any other group from outside comes to that area, it has to deal, necessarily, with that group, right? I mean, people will be surprised, as I mentioned earlier, there are US companies and contractors allegedly working with Hassam [inaudible – 53:56] and Iranian proxies in Iraq. Why? I mean, to anyone who’s there would be you have to. How can you not? In these neighbourhoods, there are these groups that you have to, right? So, I know you’re, you know, you work in law, and law is quite, at least, more black and white than what the stuff that we do, but I think it is different to, kind of, apply that type of understanding when you have such, what would appear to be, chaotic on the surface.
Neil Connery
Thank you. I’m sorry to rush, but I’m just conscious of the clock, and I know other people want to make some points. The lady down here, please, thank you.
Dr Jehan Baban
Thank you very much. Dr Jehan Baban, President of the Iraqi Environment and Health Society-UK. Thank you very much, very interesting and very, very nice talk. Now, we talked about the climate change. I think this is one issue. The other important issue, which is the environmental degradation in the area, which is especially in Iraq and Syria and Yemen. I mean, I can’t – and the three countries, actually. The water scarcity, the air pollution and, also, you know, this is causing a terrible situation, in terms of technology and improve the economy. So, to sort out the economy for the future, for those countries, I think the first thing we need to do is to focus on improving the life of the people there, and putting the people back to normality to live in clean air, clean water, and I think what is your opinion on that, please?
Neil Connery
Thank you. Christine?
Dr Christine Cheng
I think I would wholly agree with that. I mean, there’s nothing that you would say there that I think anybody would disagree with. I think the question is how? And I feel like I know what Renad would say. He’d say, we need to restore the central state, right? That’s probably – that’s my read on what he would say.
Dr Renad Mansour
Don’t call me out. They’re going to think I’m a Ba’athist if I…
Dr Christine Cheng
I think there are lots of different answers to that, but, you know, there are lots of different possibilities, depending on how statist you are and how much you believe in the ability of the state, and I think, you know, in large part, the state has been able to deliver services in the Middle East and to, you know, to some extent, in North Africa, then that could be part of a solution, and maybe that’s one way of thinking about it. There may be other ways of thinking about it that are less centralised.
Neil Connery
I’m probably going to be told off for this, but I’ll take one more question, if that’s okay? Gentleman there, please.
Callum Matthews
Callum Matthews, I’m a student at King’s. So, in 2011, when South Sudan became an independent country, UN Diplomats, who are helping to write the constitution, said that there’d be a zero tolerance of corruption, and in the same year, $10 million went missing in South Sudanese oil revenue. So, if you’re a policymaker on the ground responsible to your MFA or your Ministry of Foreign Affairs, how do you go about describing that, for want of a better word, corruption? Is it you calling for a change of rhetoric around it, or longer policy reports? How – I know there’s no simple answers, I’m just wondering practically, how you get around it.
Neil Connery
Thank you.
Dr Renad Mansour
I think, very briefly, one of the fears in these four countries is, they’re just so happy to be over violence that whatever comes later it’s, “Okay, we’ll deal with that later. We’ll kick it down,” and I think that’s what you see in these four countries. It’s, “Okay, corruption, we know it’s there,” and when you speak from Washington to London they all say, “Yeah, corruption is a problem,” but, for example, Iraqi protestors in 2015 in the South had a slogan that said, “The corrupt equals the terrorists,” right? It is at the peak of when ISIS is killing how they perceive Shia, and here you have Shia saying, “Our leaders are terrorists because they’re corrupt.” So, there is a movement against corruption. So, when we go to, sort of, what international policymakers should do, is to view the problem as corruption as a fundamental core to why we have conflict.
Tim Eaton
Yeah, I think the points were made in the report that you see when you have systems of embedded violence that are inequitable, usually leads to further cycles of violence. So, often, you’re only staving off that competitive violence for a limited period, and that’s the thing being indicated in Iraq. With respect to the question, I think what it also highlights is, you know, the international community’s waxing and waning of certain standards and what they’re willing to deal with to get a deal through, and, actually, in many cases, you realise that they don’t actually have specific criteria. So, for example, in Libya at the moment, there’s – there are many people asking, “Why isn’t Haftar being sanctioned?” because in September, a smaller actor from the city of Misrata was sanctioned for attacking Tripoli in a very minor instance in comparison of scale, and it’s clear that there’s a contradiction there. So, they’re not applying the same criteria, and this leads a lot of the Libyans to think it’s a joke. Six or so Libyans have been sanc – have individual sanctions upon them. Almost all of them remain in country, and two of them in post. One of them continues to be funded by the EU, despite being under UN sanctions.
So, I think that kind of approach, when you say it like that, sounds ridiculous, but there doesn’t really seem to be a lot of criteria for how to approach these issues and how to make the trade-offs, and acknowledge that these trade-offs exist. And I recognise that what I’m about to say is an easier said than done thing, but the logical conclusion, from what we’re saying is that, rather than just prioritising only the reduction of competitive violence into an elite bargain and then hoping that a fictional process of reform will materialise, the international community actually needs to think about the political economy of these conflicts, amid political settlement negotiations, so that when you’re thinking about South Sudan, when you’re thinking about the distribution of oil revenues, you’re going to have criteria of things, which you can bring into the discussions, into the negotiations, so that you could actually get a stable base from that political agreement, which could be expanded. So, that’s a lot of the work that we’re doing on Libya at the moment. It’s very much easier said than done, as I note, but I do think that all of our case studies indicate that elite bargains that don’t really address any of the elements of these economic systems, won’t really be very sustainable.
Neil Connery
Tim, thank you very much. I’m afraid the clock is done for us. Can I thank, on behalf of everybody, our panel here, to Christine, to Tim and to Renad, as well, and thank you for all your questions and contributions [applause]. Thank you very much.
