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NATO’s 21st Century Agenda: In Conversation with Paul King

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by Hélène Kirkkesseli

On 11 March 2020, Strife had the pleasure of welcoming Paul King, Programme Officer/Editor at NATO’s Public Diplomacy Division, to discuss the Alliance’s history, as well as its current agenda. The event, which was well attended by MA and PhD students, was chaired by Strife Senior Editor Stanislava Mladenova, currently a PhD Candidate at the Department of War Studies and former member of the NATO international staff.

Just months after NATO’s seventieth anniversary, this event served as an opportunity to discuss the evolving security threats the Alliance must face. It looked at how, seventy years after its founding, NATO has learned to adapt to emerging challenges, beyond the physical and visible threats outlined in its Article 5, by tackling hybrid warfare and countering international terrorism through shared intelligence. The need to adapt to this new reality was clearly demonstrated by the 2007 cyberattack against Estonia, or the international terrorist attacks in the Alliance’s own capitals. These threats have to lead to NATO improving its awareness, preparedness, and response capabilities through, for example, the standing up in 2017 of the Joint Intelligence and Security Division in its Headquarters.

In terms of the Alliance’s enlargement, King highlighted the Alliance welcoming its thirtieth, and newest member – Northern Macedonia. NATO’s ‘open door policy’ under the Washington Treaty welcomes any country willing and able to meet accession requirements. NATO’s many partners have played an integral part in NATO’s political agenda, and its military missions. But this continued strength, and physical expansion, especially in the last three decades, have sometimes been perceived as threats, especially by Russia, with which the Alliance had cultivated a crucial relationship. This abruptly ended with Russia’s annexation of Crimea in 2014 – an act, which violated international law, as it changed borders by force.

Among the several questions from the audience and particularly one about China’s defence expansion, King reiterated what NATO Secretary-General expressed in December of 2019, that ‘There’s no way that NATO will move into the South China Sea, but we have to address the fact that China is coming closer to us, investing heavily in infrastructure.” King emphasised that NATO is a collective defensive alliance, and it has no interest in a conflict with China, which is undoubtedly a significant player in the world

This event reaffirmed that despite some criticism of the Alliance, and questioning its strength in the current global security climate, NATO’s agenda for the 21st Century is busier than ever. It is continuing to strengthen its ability to deal with old threats, most recently exhibited by more countries reaching 2% GDP of defence spending, but also evolving to meet the challenges of cyber, terrorism, and the shifting geopolitical military strength of China.

Hélène is currently pursuing an MA in International Peace and Security within the War Studies department of King’s College London. Prior to this, she graduated from the double Law degree program between the universities of Paris-Nanterre in France and Essex in the UK, specializing in international public law and EU law. Having previously interned at the DG for External policies of the European Parliament and the US Embassy to France, she is now focusing her studies particularly on the South Caucasus region. You can follow her on Twitter: @hkirkkesseli

The Future of Cyber Warfare - An Interview with Greg Austin

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by Ed Stacey

Lt. Col. Tim Sands (from left), Capt. Jon Smith and Lt. Col. John Arnold monitor a simulated test April 16 in the Central Control Facility at Eglin Air Force Base, Fla. They use the Central Control Facility to oversee electronic warfare mission data flight testing. Portions of their missions may expand under the new Air Force Cyber Command. (Image credit: U.S. Air Force/Capt. Carrie Kessler)

On 29 January 2020, the International Institute for Strategic Studies (IISS) hosted an event on its upcoming Measuring Coercive Cyber Power Project (available to watch here). Ed Stacey sat down with Greg Austin, Senior Fellow for the Cyber, Space, and Future Conflict Programme at the IISS, the day after the event, for a discussion on this new project, cyber power and offensive cyber operations.

For more information on the IISS and the latest analysis of international security, strategy and defence issues, visit them here or follow them on Facebook, Twitter (@IISS_org) and Instagram (@iissorg).

ES: What is the Measuring Coercive Cyber Power project?

GA: This is a project that began at the IISS before I joined and has been run by a couple of very experienced professionals. Its purpose is to understand the basic fundamentals of cyber power. In other words: what are its economic, scientific, technological, and organisational underpinnings?

ES: What are your main findings?

GA: The main findings are a little obvious in one sense, but also a bit surprising. We have done thirteen country studies which include a review of the United States (US), China, Russia, Iran and North Korea – fairly obvious countries, perhaps – and then other states like Indonesia, India, Malaysia, Japan, and Canada. What we have found is that the US’ cyber power is miles ahead of any other country in the world; that the economic, scientific, and indeed, social underpinnings of cyber power are more powerful in the case of the US than any other country. That lead really revolves around the Information Communications Technology (ICT) industry – the fact that technologies like the Internet were devised in the US and that a very unusual relationship exists between its defence sector, industry, and universities. This relationship really does not exist anywhere else in the world. And the US has also been in the ICT industry longer than any other country – at the higher levels at least.

Whilst China is often regarded as a peer competitor of the US, it was in a political mess between 1966-76 (the Cultural Revolution), which has hindered its development of cyber power. During this period, they closed down their universities and persecuted scientists and researchers, calling them ‘stinking weeds’ – and that was only about 45 years ago. It is very hard for China, which was already a poor and developing country back in 1966, to overcome this negative legacy – one of ten years of persecution of its scientists and researchers, and ten years of closed universities.

ES: Were there any results which you found surprising?

GA: What I did not fully appreciate because there is so much public media coverage of countries like Iran and North Korea, is that these countries really are bit-players. By this I mean that, whilst they can certainly cause a lot of damage in cyberspace, they only do so every couple of years. And so, what we have seen over about the last ten years is that whilst countries like Iran and North Korea get a lot of headlines with their cyber attacks, they carry out these attacks very infrequently. Yes, they cause great damage and great disruption, but they do not seem to have a strong pattern to their non-espionage cyber activity.

ES: If you completed this study in another ten or twenty years time, what changes would you expect to see in your results?

GA: I think the most likely change is for the US and its allies to increase their lead over these disrupter countries, like North Korea, Iran and Russia; and for China to still be sort of struggling somewhere in-between. I think there will be political reversals in China which will undermine the strong push that we are currently seeing towards ICT improvements and the thrust towards China’s ambition to become a dominate player in cyberspace.

ES: What do you mean by cyber attacks or offensive cyber capabilities? Does this include, for example, information warfare?

GA: It certainly includes information warfare. Offensive cyber capabilities have a dualistic character. On the one hand, we can think of them as cyber attacks on cyber systems. On the other, certainly in American, Russian, and Chinese military thinking, information warfare effects (psychological effects as commonly understood) can also be delivered through cyberspace, in ways that we could not imagine thirty to forty years ago. And so, we are in a situation today where, as we struggle with the security of Information Technology (IT) systems, and ways of attacking and defending these systems, it is now also the case that politics is being played out in cyberspace.

ES: Is it problematic to call these capabilities weapons – to attach that label to them and the connotations that come with it?

GA: In an academic sense, it probably is. But I think the common person would understand a weapon as something that you can use to damage other people or things with. A hammer is a tool – it can be used for making things. But a hammer can also kill people. And code is the same: it can be a tool for making things and it can be a weapon that kills people. You can use code to turn off electric power stations and create negative health outcomes in hospitals. You can create negative health outcomes in hospitals by interfering with their basic computerised information. So, we are in an environment where IT, software and all the things around them can be seen as both tools for good and weapons for bad. I appreciate fully that arguments exist about the nature of violence and war; but I think, at the end of the day, the average person in the street – and certainly the average politician – would understand that the malicious things that are happening in cyberspace are weapons.

ES: Taking forward your example of a hammer: if I took a hammer and threatened you with it – that would deter you. Would this be the same in cyberspace, i.e. if a state has a ‘cyber-hammer’, does that deter other states?

GA: The interesting thing about the hammer example is that you could hold up the hammer and appear to be threatening me, but there would have to be a lot of circumstances in place before I would see that as any sort of threat and actually take it seriously. For instance, I would have to understand what your record is of actually carrying out those sorts of threats, and I would have to make a calculation about how afraid you would be of my retaliation. What we are seeing in cyberspace – for example, with the American’s ‘Cyber Deterrence Initiative’ (which is, in a sense, not only raising the hammer but actually attacking countries like Russia and China to try and undermine their offensive malicious cyber activity) – is that it is difficult to tell whether they are actually working as deterrence policies.

That initiative involves what the Americans call ‘defending forward’ – attacking into the Russian and Chinese systems. It has been going on for over a year (around eighteen months) but we do not have enough information in the public domain – we do not have enough evidence – to determine whether the Russians or the Chinese are actually being deterred. So, it is a good place to start the argument: ‘If I raise a hammer, do I deter you?’. But we have to study what happens next.

ES: What potential is there for cyber to disrupt established practices of deterrence? I have in mind, particularly, nuclear deterrence, which was discussed during the event – the idea of a nuclear missile being in flight and then hacked and potentially redirected.

GA: I have actually written an article on this subject with a Russian scholar where we tried to understand how Russian military leaders actually think about this. There is very little evidence in the public domain, but we found enough to believe that some Russian military leaders think that cyber capability shifts the balance between offence and defence, and encourages states with nuclear weapons to strike pre-emptively before losing their command and control, or guidance systems. Now, the evidence is far from comprehensive – these are, in a sense, fragmentary thoughts. But from the US government’s point of view, we have to believe that they are using every technological lever they have to devise attack packages that could cripple the Russian government’s command and control of their nuclear weapons.

ES: Given the uncertain nature of cyberspace – as a highly complex, interconnected and evolving domain – is it possible to wield offensive cyber capabilities strategically?

GA: I certainly believe that it is possible to do that – but that is one of the big debates in the academic community. After last night’s seminar, for example, we received an email from a retired senior military officer in the UK who made the proposition that it is not possible to use cyberweapons strategically – that they are really just some sort of tactical, disruptive asset. But, in fact, the US government and the Chinse government are on the record as saying, planning and doing things which demonstrate their belief that cyber military capability is a game-changer. And that is very well captured in the Chinese statement in 2015 that outer space and cyberspace are the commanding heights of all international security competition. That was a statement in their official 2015 military strategy, and it was not on page 33 in a footnote – it was right at the beginning.

ES: How likely if at all is cyber war?

GA: According to the US government, cyber war is already happening. They believe that Russia and China have already launched open conflict with the US in cyberspace. Mind you, China and Russia believe exactly the same thing about the US. Whether or not we call that war, or some other form of conflict, is a point of debate. To go back to Thomas Rid’s book: even though Thomas’ arguments were valid as he constructed them, there is a whole realm of strategic thought and activity which he did not fully take account of, and that we are now seeing much more in the open. States believe that they can use these tools, as weapons, in a way that does not provoke an armed response. But, as we see in the American case, this is provoking some sort of retaliation in cyberspace through cyber attacks. As we experience year after year of this sort of interaction – of heightening tension and conflict in cyberspace – I think we are going to reach the point where one or other of these great powers decides that enough is enough in cyberspace and starts to take some non-cyber retaliatory measures. And you could argue that we are already seeing that in the case of the US’ policy on the ‘tech war’ with China.

ES: You spoke yesterday about cyber operations in the 1998-99 Kosovo conflict as being the first act of cyber war, which is interesting because Stuxnet is frequently cited as the first. Is there a certain threshold in cyberspace that you could identify, perhaps in terms of effect, where a cyber operation becomes an act of cyberwar?

GA: There are a number of international lawyers, more than a handful, who believe that the US’ use of Stuxnet against Iran was a breach of International Law. It was an act by one state against another causing damage in the second state. If you are not causing physical damage, then most states do not appear to regard that as aggression – it is something else. But where the US actually causes physical damage – sabotage of what was ostensibly a civil undertaking: the enrichment of nuclear fuel – that in International Law is plainly and simply a breach. Yet to find a level of escalation above that which would provoke an armed response is another question.

When security agents of the French government sank Greenpeace’s ship, Rainbow Warrior, in a New Zealand harbour in the 1980s, the French were held responsible for that in an international arbitration and paid damages – it was a breach of international law. That is really the same sort of act that the US perpetrated against Iran – creating physical damage, sabotage, and in the New Zealand case, they killed a couple of people – a similar sort of international tort. But we have not got to the point where any state has committed a cyber attack on the level that the receiving state has judged it to be a justification for an armed military response.

ES: Do you think that current international law is fit for purpose with regards to cyber conflict?

GA: Yes, I think it is – and I think the Tallinn Manual 1.0 proved that fairly conclusively. A whole range of international discussions suggest it is fit for purpose. But international law is not a perfect institution. And as in the Law of the Sea where there is lots of room for interpretation, and as in International Humanitarian Law where there is lots of room for interpretation, there is equally lots of room for interpretation in law applicable to hostile activities in cyberspace.

ES: Is there room to develop norms or specific agreements on activities in cyberspace?

GA: I think the conversation about norms has been productive and useful; but states signing up to new black letter international legal norms seems highly unlikely. There are several meanings of the word norm. One is that a norm, in a sense, sets a moral tenor for conduct. Another meaning of the word, of course, is a norm as enshrined in black letter law. I think that the future of the normative conservation in cyberspace will be about setting the moral tenor of action, rather than coming up with new black letter law.

ES: Marcus [Willet] spoke yesterday about the potential for distinguishing between discriminate [e.g. Stuxnet] and indiscriminate capabilities [e.g. WannaCry], which I think would be a good place to start.

GA: Yes, I think that is an excellent point.

ES: Are the US pre-eminent in cyberspace and, if so, do you think this will last?

GA: One of the reasons why it should last is that the US currently sits at the top of the most powerful intelligence alliance human history has ever seen – and that does not look like weakening anytime soon. Moreover, major adversaries, Russia and China, do not appear to be interested in crafting an intelligence alliance – in fact, the Russian government is very explicit that it does not see its military relations with China as an alliance. So, I think that as long as the US can maintain that very powerful intelligence alliance – and all of the signs are that it will – then Russia and China do not have a hope.

Just to clarify why that is important: the foundation of all effective operations in cyberspace is high-quality intelligence about the enemy’s information systems, their vulnerabilities, and how those vulnerabilities exist at any specific point in time. It is no good collecting intelligence about, say, the Iranian nuclear centrifuges on one day in 2006 and then arriving back in 2009 with the attack package because they might have changed the software configurations. You have got to keep assessing and reassessing, almost on a daily basis: ‘How is the offensive environment looking?’, so that any attack package that you do develop can be used at a later date. That requires a huge intelligence effort, and it is that intelligence effort that the US and its allies can deliver far better than any single country in the world – even one that looks as powerful as China.

ES: Is it the case at the moment, particularly in the context of the tech war, that cyberspace is just a two-horse race between the US and China?

GA: I think that China sees it as a two-horse race and many people in the US see it as a two-horse race – but it is really not. Modern technology and ICT represent globalised knowledge. And what we see with the US and its allies is that they are far better at exploiting that globally available knowledge. Almost everything around modern ICT science is equally available to China, Russia, Iran, North Korea, and the US. The difference is that the US has sixty to seventy years of excellent performance in exploiting that knowledge and putting it into practice. What we have seen is that countries like South Korea, Malaysia, and Taiwan can come along and pick off pieces of that ICT pie and become world-class in that space. So, that is the phenomenon we are seeing: this sort of multi-horse race; or many horses in the race, all excelling in different parts of it.

We put together some information based on the 2019 Fortune Global 500 companies which shows that, out of the Fortune Global 500, the US has fourteen companies in the tech and telecoms sectors whereas China only has eight. And what is interesting about the other 28 companies in those sectors is that all but two of them belong to very close US allies – so, European, Japanese, South Korean or Taiwanese. Also really interesting about that data is that while mainland China has eight companies in the tech or telecoms sectors, Taiwan has seven… little Taiwan has seven! How many millions of people are there in little Taiwan versus big China with its massive financial resources? And it has only got eight. So, if it is a two-horse race then Taiwan could be considered to be in the race as well.

ES: How does the UK compare to other states at the top of the table?

GA: The UK is one of the top-ten countries in the world in, what you might call, the national security aspects of cyberspace. And it may well be in the top-ten countries in the world in other aspects of ICT development. But, rather interestingly, there are only two tech and telecoms companies in the Fortune Global 500 which are UK companies – I think one was BT and the other Vodafone – when, as I mentioned, you have got little Taiwan with seven. So, the UK is not that well positioned in some of the commercial aspects. That being said, we have got to be careful because the Fortune Global 500 reflects revenue from selling things and services. And, really, what is happening with companies in Taiwan is that they are selling many more expensive things than Britain.

While Britain sells a lot of good ICT services, they are just not sold on the scale that countries like South Korea and entities like Taiwan are. And then there is the question of, well, even if the UK’s not earning as much money from what it is doing in cyberspace, maybe what the UK’s doing is of much higher value. UK interventions are happening at a strategic level and it is no coincidence that companies like BAE Systems, BT and Vodafone are global brands that have a role in the economic, strategic, and scientific development of a very large number of countries around the world. So, Britain is a presence that cannot easily be summed up in gross statistics such as the Fortune Global 500.

ES: And finally, what role do you expect cyber to play in the UK’s upcoming Strategic Defence and Security Review?

GA: As I suggested last night, a lot really depends on leadership choices. You can have the objective reality of the technology but there is no revolution in military affairs unless you have got a military leader who recognises the military potential and exploits it. And it is a bit the same with economic policy. Australia provides an interesting case in point. Malcolm Turnbull, who was very briefly the Prime Minister of Australia, represented a level of technological awareness that no preceding prime minister or his successor have in any way, shape, or form. Malcolm Turnbull was probably the only member of his government, at cabinet level, who had any appreciation of technology. So, unless you have got that sort of leadership then it is going to be very tough.

Additionally, I am afraid to say that the Brexit decision was a repudiation not only of the concept of the EU but of the value of globally integrated science and technology. Just ask the people in the universities what they think of it, and the research community. People who backed the Brexit decision really represent the same sort of mentality as ministers in the Australian government who do not have a full appreciation of what is involved in modern science and technology – how it is an integrated, globalised activity. When you put up your national boundaries, you are really not equipping yourself or positioning yourself well for the future. Now, that does not mean that the British defence establishment cannot do that because the British defence establishment has a very different position as a part of the Five Eyes community. And that scientific and technical community – represented by the close military alliance – may deliver outcomes for Britain, and imperatives in a strategic and defence review, that go counter to the Brexit mentality. But I really think that the people who currently dominate the UK government are not the right people to lead Britain into a brighter technological future and are not the people to lead the British national security establishment to a brighter technological future – I am afraid to say.

Ed Stacey is a BA International Relations student at King’s College London and a Student Ambassador for the International Institute for Strategic Studies (IISS). The #IISStudent Ambassador programme connects students interested in global security, political risk and military conflict with the Institute’s work and researchers.

Greg Austin is a Senior Fellow for the Cyber, Space and Future Conflict Programme at the IISS. Prior to joining the IISS, Greg worked at the University of New South Wales Canberra, as Professor and Deputy Director of its multi-disciplinary centre for cyber security research. He was a Senior Visiting Fellow in the Department of War Studies at King’s College London from 2012 to 2014.

UK Government Policy in Facing the Coronavirus Threat: An Interview with Professor Calum Semple

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by Timothy Moots

As we are all acutely aware, on 24 March 2020 the Prime Minister announced restricted movement on the UK population to prevent the spread of the coronavirus. As students of war, we have much to learn from observing how governments respond to the pandemic. Like on the battlefield, public health officials today are grappling with how they defeat this potent adversary. Last week I was fortunate enough to get insights into the processes that helped develop UK strategy leading to the situation we are in today in an interview with a world expert on pandemics who is leading research into the battle against the coronavirus.

The expert I sat down with is Professor Calum Semple, Professor of Child Health and Outbreak Medicine at the University of Liverpool, and a member of the New and Emerging Respiratory Virus Threats Advisory Group (NERVTAG) to discuss his role in outbreak medicine, the coronavirus outbreak, and UK Government strategy.

TJM: What is your role in dealing with the coronavirus?

CS: I am the Chief Investigator on a study called Pandemic Influenza Community Assessment Tools, which is the process of getting data to validate triage tools in the community. I am also the Chief Investigator on the Clinical Characterisation Protocol, which is a much larger research project. It is a very different type of research as it feeds information into various government departments and agencies. It is not research conducted for a paper in six month’s time, rather Urgent Public Health Research is delivered now to inform policy decisions tomorrow.

This involves working out your data collection tools in advance and so when the outbreak happens the nurses and medics can collect information when it comes to the hospital, pass it back to the research team, update to data entry systems, and have an analysis which in an automatic fashion presents it to a dashboard for policymakers. This data can include anything from the length of stay of a patient in hospital to the proportion of patients under the age of 18. Upon uploaded by a nurse say in Devon, policymakers can get this data within 30 minutes allowing quick decisions made in real-time. This has never been done before. I am also a member of NERVTAG, an advisory group set up to advise the government on new and emerging respiratory viruses.

TJM: How did you come to specialise in outbreak medicine?

CS: The very first outbreak I was involved with was the HIV epidemic in the 1980s. This was during my PhD which was researching HIV. The outbreak evolved while I was working on the thesis, and this was my first experience of research taking a U-turn, which resulted in diverting resources and activity to focus on the pressing question at the current moment. This question was the need to identify a surrogate marker of drug efficacy and a surrogate marker of progression of the disease. This led to my PhD focusing on the development of quantitative viral load, which we patented and were the first people to publish on this. Today quantitative PCR for viral load is the most commonly used way of measuring disease progression and drug efficacy of HIV in the world.

The next outbreak was the Respiratory Syncytial Virus (RSV), which is a very regular and predictable outbreak every winter. However, I moved into influenza, where there was greater scope for public policy and public impact. Working as a government advisor on influenza and running multiple research projects, I learnt a lot about working in outbreak situations. It is no surprise that a lot of those involved had worked alongside or in the military. It provided better discipline in focusing not so much on the interesting science, but in an outbreak scenario what is the question that needs to be answered over the next two-three weeks which will change decisions about how we manage patients and implement policy decisions.

This brings me to the 2009 H1N1 outbreak, which caused a lot of frustration in that we could not get our studies running as fast as we wanted. So, a group of us set up the International Severe Acute Respiratory and Emerging Infection Consortium (ISARIC). Our mantra was to prepare for the next outbreak. This was done by producing the counter-studies you would want to run in an outbreak situation, which turns out to be quite a shortlist. Here you may want to run a clinical characterisation study (the who; what; where; when; and why), a drug trial, a vaccine study, a study on triage. We designed protocols for studies that didn’t name a particular pathogen, as it didn’t matter what the pathogen was, but it did contain sampling schedules, data schedules, and from this we developed the protocols. From here we took it to the World Health Organisation (WHO), which was subsequently taken on by them, as it would enable rapid research for a fast-developing outbreak.

This meant that when the Ebola outbreak came, we were able to conduct the research in West Africa in a matter of weeks and this totally changed the paradigm. The same group was more than ready to set up the research during the coronavirus outbreak. As soon as we got wind that cases were likely to come to Britain, research protocols were activated to gather data and process the first admissions in the UK.

TJM: You previously worked on the Ebola epidemic. What made the Ebola so unique in its transmissibility?

CS: Regarding transmission, what happened in West Africa was part of a burial ritual called “laying out”. Once you would die, your friends and relatives would wash you down, dress you up, put you in a coffin and have a ceremony. It actually was still going on in Britain as recent as 30-40 years ago, and it is still a tradition in isolated parts of Europe where there are not enough undertakers to deal with the dead. In West Africa they take this very seriously.

But what complicated this in West Africa is the “secret society culture”. This is much more than the Masons in the UK. These societies are very important in where you go to school to getting your job and promotions at work. Often you will find that departments in organisations have a large number of members that are part of one secret society, whereas hospitals may have large numbers of members from other secret societies. Members of a secret society, who are typically your peers, will be involved in laying your body out. They will wash you down very carefully, with great care, love, and attention, and it is a very important part of the grieving process.

However, the exposure to the human body fluids meant that everyone who was involved in laying out the body was exposed to catching Ebola. What complicated things is if you were very important you might have over 200-300 people attend outside your house wanting to be involved in the process. The body fluids that had been washed down would be taken outside and distributed amongst the people – some people would dip their fingers in it, others would have it sprayed in faces – and this was a part of associating themselves with the deceased and their spirits. One example is we have one healer who died and at their funeral around 360 people contracted the virus from direct exposure to the body fluids. It was not limited to burial rituals, however. Other examples include in the hospital where you can catch it from a woman giving birth or someone vomiting. The virus spread very quickly and hit very hard.

TJM: What is the difference between the coronavirus and Ebola?

CS: Well Ebola is what we call a viral haemorrhagic fever. This is because the virus gives you a fever and it can make you bleed. But bleeding isn’t the most common symptom, it is actually vomiting and diarrhoea. Ebola can spread from blood, sweat, tears, diarrhoea, and lots of different body fluids. It does not have a clear respiratory spread and people don’t tend to cough and sneeze the virus up. For Ebola its actually profuse production of body fluids where the virus is and where it is coming from. Ebola is actually relatively easy to contain. Once you have identified someone who has been sick you can isolate and prevent contact.

Whereas with the coronavirus you cough, sneeze, and splutter. You do this for possibly 5-7 days before you take yourself out of society because you are feeling unwell or because you are recovering. People infected with coronavirus can walk around for 7 days incubating the virus and then have another 5 days where they have what is called a prodrome (an early symptom indicating the onset of a disease) and during that time remain active in the community spreading the virus, but not so sick that they take themselves to bed or get admitted to hospital. This makes the virus far more transmissible in a community. The virus survives on surfaces, in the house, outside. In dry air it survives for around fifteen minutes. Then people touch the surfaces, then touch their mouths, pick their noses, scratch their eyes. We all do this about twenty times an hour. This brings the virus to the respiratory tract where again it is perfectly suited to taking hold. It’s a very different virus to Ebola. And the transmissibility of corona is far greater than that of Ebola.

TJM: What have we learnt from military command and control structure that can be applied to Corona?

CS: A lot was learned from how the British Army and Relief Agencies interacted with society in Sierra Leone. The sort of planning instigated by the military created a very clear line of what needs to be delivered and what needs to be changed within the community, and it was absolutely critical to delivering rapid research and achieving rapid outcomes. It’s a very different method of patient management. You’re not just thinking about the individual patient – the individual patient is very important – what you’re thinking about is the message you are sending out in managing these patients. Do your messages encourage people in the community to come forward and seek appropriate healthcare, or will it encourage people to avoid the appropriate healthcare and seek traditional healers and ministries?

This is very much the same way in how you engage with the British public and pressing upon them the importance now of not going to the pub and staying at home. Because the reality is staying at home will saves lives. An issue is people thinking that the coronavirus does not affect them, and don’t immediately understand that going out and socialising will mean the virus will spread and people will die. This is because there will be fewer people around to care for people with other diseases. Car crashes, heart attacks, difficult pregnancies still happen. The reality is an overwhelming impact on health resources and general population health means that the doctors and nurses don’t have the scope to care for everyone they want to. This is just part of the medical aspect. If the approach was not taken you may end up with societal effects that have far greater secondary impact then we could have predicted and could have far more reaching impact than the health impact.

TJM: Is the UK really taking a different approach to other countries? If so why?

CS: The UK certainly did take a different approach in the lead up to the shutdown. I am quite pleased that we did not go for a kneejerk shutdown in the 3-4 weeks before we did. That period allowed a degree of calmness and preparation to go on at a very important stage. Where otherwise we could have had a huge, essentially, “phony war”. There was a phony war during the 2009 outbreak, where we saw a spike in GP attendances and health-seeking behaviour that arrived 3-4 weeks before the real flu arrived. This overwhelmed GPs who were prevented from doing their regular work and providing standard healthcare for those who needed it. The way the government policy managed information and society this time was far more sophisticated and prevented a phony war.

The careful considered management by the Chief Medical Officer (CMO) Professor Chris and Chief Scientific Officer (CSO) Sir Patrick Vallance in the month leading up to the lockdown prevented the excessive health-seeking behaviour that could have caused an earlier overwhelming of GPs and A&E practitioners.

TJM: Do you think the government has done a good job so far?

CS: I think the government has done a good job in cautiously and systematically raising fear in a controlled manner, and this can be seen from the very careful messaging from the CMO and CSO. You can work this out from the press conferences and news clips, which were deliberately telling people about the severity of the crisis. It was realistic and conducted sensibly.

This approach got people to start stocking up – and yes some people were panic buying – but most people stocked up. Over the last 3 weeks of stocking up to the situation we are in now, it has made the lockdown a lot more manageable. Most people have filled their larders, and no one can say they weren’t warned about it. Supermarkets have been warned in advance and are able to cope with the disruptions in demand.

Think about how you manage and keep an army in readiness. There is a level of preparation, training, regular exercises to keep the army in readiness. Equipment, which is not used is checked, serviced to ensure it actually works. And this is the same for us. We have a stockpile of medication and a stockpile of masks, the equivalent to the beans and bullets in the depots.

TJM: Is “herd immunity” Government policy?

CS: It was never policy. It was an assumption by lots of speculators from the side-lines. I never saw a concept that we are going for herd immunity – this is not the case. The terminology used by Prime Minister Boris Johnson was “flattening the sombrero”. It sounds rather crude, but it is not a bad way of explaining how you flatten an epidemic curve. It is unavoidable that we will get exposure. But what is going to cause greater societal disruption is a sharp spike in epidemic activity that will overwhelm services. And this is not just about health services but also national services. [The minutes of NERVTAG are publicly available.]

TJM: Were we really unprepared by not investing in ventilators?

CS: At what point in the last 100 years would you have predicted the global healthcare systems would have needed an extra X amount of ventilators? Even if you wanted to buy an extra hundred, rather than the 10,000 quoted in the press, it would have been impossible to predict this. Ventilators are not household items like microwaves, they are not made in mass in a factory, and nor are we able to go out and shop for them on the market. They are complicated sets of equipment that are bought on a well-resourced planned renewal project. At the same time, there is no way that any advisor to a government would say let us keep X amount of excessive numbers of ventilators in a warehouse, requiring them to be switched on every several months to check they work, service them, and replace parts. It is far beyond any policymaker’s capability to do that.

However, the irony to that is, that it would have been in our interests to do it with the economic effect on businesses over the next few months. If I was a politician, I would not have had warehouses with ventilators. But what we do have, are warehouses stocked with PPE, anti-biotics, anti-virals, which are essential and can be maintained.

TJM: What about PPE?

CS: Local supply issues. There are different types of PPE. Now the PPE you have for the higher risk procedure is different to the PPE for standard procedures. Human nature is to grab the one considered to give the highest level of protection regardless of whether you need that or not. Infections do not work that way. If you are not treating a patient needing to have their lungs washed out, or a tube put down their throat with your face twenty cm away from their mouth while doing it, then you do not need the protection offered by an FFP3 respirator with face shield. If you are doing simple straight forward care you will be fine with a face shield and standard mask.

But that’s not what people do they tend to grab respirator because they perceive it for greater protection. You don’t need a bulletproof vest to go down to the shops, you only need the bulletproof vest if bullets are flying. You only need the FFP3 masks for aerosol-generating procedures, where one gets up close and personal to the aerosols. But people pick these masks thinking it gives them greater protection. But it’s not, it is simply preventing someone who needs that mask from having it. We have kept a huge number of FFP3 masks in reserve for years, but at the current rate, they are being consumed too quickly as people are using them inappropriately. And this is a difficult message to get across.

There may be local supply cases, but the idea we are somehow negligent is very different. Junior doctors have been very good at communicating these shortfalls using the various social media tools to share this. At most places, we do have the equipment but it needs to be used appropriately. The right level of PPE needs to be used for the right circumstances.

TJM: In your experience, what kinds of communications are most effective when engaging populations and getting them to do things – rational or emotive?

CS: Are all people the same? Some people are young, some people are old, some work on emotion prompts, some people work on facts. The biggest mistake is that one communication strategy will work. Instead, what you need is a blend – everything from the Twitterati to the Radio 4 audience. Some people don’t listen to the radio, they rely on social media like Facebook and other sources. I think that clever messaging is blended. A lot of people like the CMO Professor Whitty, as he is seen as the nation’s doctor. But at the same time, he is not going to be everyone’s cup of tea. He may be seen as a “pale male”. Is he going to engage a young ethnic minority male in a deprived inner-city London? Will he reach out to a single mother in Birkenhead?

The way you reach out to these parts of the population is through using a mix of social influences, various magazines, and social media apps like Instagram. This is a very different messaging style to what the Radio 4 generation is used to. The government needs to learn more sophisticated communication strategies that are involving social influencers to make sure its message is being read by all corners of the population. In my personal opinion there is a big scope for improvement. Public health messaging has to change, especially to adapt to this.

TJM: Finally, how can governments prepare themselves for pandemics?

CS: Set up advisory groups like the New and Emerging Respiratory Virus Threats Advisory Group. The reason it is called that is that it does exactly what is say on the tin, advises on new and emerging respiratory virus threats. The group is tasked with questions such as what is coming, and if it is coming what it might look like, and how can we prepare. And it is exactly what we did.

Professor Calum Semple, Professor of Child Health and Outbreak Medicine at the University of Liverpool, and a member of the New and Emerging Respiratory Virus Threats Advisory Group (NERVTAG)

Timothy Moots is a Senior Editor at Strife and a PhD Candidate at the Department of War Studies, King’s College London.

International Women’s Day Special: an Interview with Professor Vivienne Jabri

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By Sofia Lesmes

8 March 2019

International Women’s Day is celebrated annually on 8 March to raise awareness for women’s rights. (AFP/Getty Images)

 

In a special International Women’s Day edition, Strife’s Sofia Lesmes sat down with Professor Vivienne Jabri to discuss the legacy of International Women’s Day, the intersection of feminism and the arts, and feminism’s important role in conflict and its study.

Professor Vivienne Jabri is a professor of International Politics at the Department of War Studies and was founding Director of London Interdisciplinary Social Science Doctoral Training Partnership (LISS DTP). Her research focuses on international political theory, critical social and political theory, postcolonialism, and feminist perspectives, with specific interest in the politics of conflict, violence and security practices. In 2016, she was the co-curator of the exhibition Traces of War at the Inigo Rooms, Somerset House.

S: International Women’s Day has been in existence since 1911. How do you see the role of the day evolving into 2019?

VJ: It’s interesting how a day that celebrates women is actually controversial. March 8th is not always internationally recognised as International Women’s Day. For feminists internationally, it celebrates the agency of women; it’s a day to celebrate what women bring to the political sphere, to business, and to all walks of life in a larger context of society. In some societies, it’s a day of celebration of women per se, so women receive flowers, for example, and you might consider that to be rather apolitical. But within a global context, it has become a political event because it’s seen as part of the feminist armoury for celebration as well as protest. It’s certainly a day that I consider to be very important as a feminist and scholar in international politics.

And you would think that in the twenty-first century, we wouldn’t need such a day to emphasize women’s position in society or the inequalities that still exist between the genders. We are increasingly talking about misogynistic acts that women go through because they are women — issues that are very much present in our current public discourses, if you consider the levels of daily and routine violence that is directed at women, the use of violent language through social media, and the murder of women in politics, including amongst others, Jo Cox in the UK; the feminist and LGBT campaigner in Brazil, Marielle Franco; Aquila Al-Hashimi in Iraq; and Sitara Achakzai, a leading campaigner for women’s rights in Afghanistan. It’s important to celebrate the day, but it’s also important to remember it is as part of the continuing struggle for women’s equality.

 

S: Your research has focused on feminism and the political sphere of international relations. How do you see internationalist feminism aligning with the range of conflicts around the world today?

VJ: So, feminism in international relations contributes a great deal in relation to understandings of conflict and security, and it has become a very large research agenda within international relations as a discipline. In terms of my own work, I take a feminist discourse and the history of feminist thought, within wider critical thought, in order to understand war and politics, to see what war does to the political context internationally. Though the titles of my works do not always have the concept of ‘gender’, feminist political thought is a great influence. I’ll give you an example of how that works because it’s not always straightforward. If you consider interventionist war, it brings up a discourse of protection. The interventions in Bosnia, Iraq, Afghanistan, Syria, or in other parts of the Middle East, were legitimised through a discourse of protection, of civilians generally, and in Afghanistan, of women. It’s a powerful legitimising discourse that enables such interventions to take place. So where does feminism come in? In the history of feminist thought, the construct of ‘protection’ immediately suggests a power relationship; it suggests that women lack agency and, therefore, call for the protection of men. Protection as a concept is very gendered, and it is understood as such in feminist thought. So what’s happening in these interventionist contexts is the infantilization of the populations involved, just as you have the infantilization of women in the discourse of protection. Interventionist warfare uses the trope of care and protection in order to legitimise what are in effect militarised interventions that primarily affect populations. In Iraq, an early estimate of casualties as a direct consequence of the intervention suggested around 600,000 civilians had been killed.

Similarly related to my work on subjectivity, it (my work on feminism) analyses what war and conflict do to the subject of politics. Once again, feminism has a great deal to say on subjectivity, particularly post-structural feminism. Feminism has always understood subjectivity as a product of power relations, especially, I would say, within the post-structural understanding. The aim there is to problematise the notion of the subject in politics, to understand the complexity of the subject and the situatedness of the subject in relation to matrices of power.

So, why is feminism important to me? It tells us a great deal about how power operates in its very microcosm. While realism, for example, may look at power relations in a broader perspective that takes ‘the state’ for granted, international feminist theory looks at power in a way that is microcosmic, that unravels how structures of power impact on the body, the self, and gendered socio-political and economic relations. Indeed, a Foucauldian understanding of power is also microcosmic, but not necessarily as specific as feminist conceptions of power.

 

S: The exhibition you co-curated in 2016 focused on the traces that war and conflict leave on daily lives, and the unlikely places that a war can affect. If feminism is moving the private into the public and the personal to the political, how do you see this in its relationship with the traces that war leaves in daily lives?

VJ: The idea of the trace is suggestive of war having an impact — a continuing one — on bodies, bodily movement, psyches, landscapes, and language. This was important to capture in Traces of War, because whereas war understood conventionally is a crisis that is happening ‘over there’ on a battle field, war’s impact on space and time goes well beyond that battlefield. Such impact is inherited across generations, and its traces, as we sought to reveal in the exhibition, permeate the everyday, or the seemingly everyday, and the routine. What that means is that the assumed distinction between war and peace is not as clear cut as the dichotomy might suggest, and, as you know, feminism has always been interested in the everyday. If you think about Simone de Beauvoir, she distinctly writes about the everyday positionality of women and how the socio-political constellation of forces impacts the lives of women and their unequal status. In an exhibition on ‘traces of war’, the challenge was to engage with how the trace can carry within it deeply rooted forces that perpetuate war and its injurious acts, impacting on memories, bodies, articulations of subjectivity, bodily movement and trauma, the language of love in the midst of war, and imperial and postcolonial landscapes that inflict and bear continuing warfare.

In an exhibition like Traces of War, you also have a discussion with your co-curator (in our exhibition, Cecile Bourne-Farrell) and with the involved artists, since each one had a unique perspective. Jananne al-Ani looked at traces of war upon landscapes, where she’s specifically focused on postcolonial perspectives. Her work focuses on aerial views of landscapes, essentially to show that even in a supposedly peaceful setting such as the Kent countryside, there are layers and layers of warfare that can be found in excavation of the land. And the genius of someone like Jananne Al-Jani is that she evokes those layers of warfare and colonialism from the air because she’s not excavating like an archaeologist would. The idea of excavation is very important when we want to understand relationships of power globally. We learn from Michel Foucault that to understand how power operates in the present, you excavate archaeologically into the past in order to understand the conditions that have generated power relations today. The question of power and subjectivity was also crucial in our exhibition, and this theme was also evident in the works of Baptist Coelho and Shaun Gladwell.

 

S: There is no shortage of different approaches to the intersection of feminism and international relations. How do you see different approaches converging when it comes to conflict and war?

VJ: There are different conceptualisations of feminist theory in international relations and within the broader feminist movement. I think it’s important to continue to problematise the relationship between the public and the private, for example in the sphere of social media, where the right to privacy is most blatantly challenged and where violent misogynistic threats are made against women. Often, the way in which women are attacked is through sexuality, which is a very highly gendered discourse that seeks to limit, and not to mention completely undo, women’s agency.

It’s important to recognise that misogyny is so deeply rooted even in societies where you might think that we’ve achieved, in terms of legislation and public policy, a certain level of equality between the sexes. This is evident in what’s happening in the present political context, both domestically and internationally, where women become targets of violence and exclusionary practices, and this is especially the case for women involved in rights campaigns. For the contemporary extreme right in the US and Europe feminism as such has become a target.

Regarding conflict and locations of war, the research question on how women’s agency in a context of war is articulated is highly salient. Women are certainly a part of warfare; they join up with conflict groups and are a part of militaries, and questions relating to women ‘joining up’ must unravel how gender plays a part. Then, there are broader questions on how women’s agency and gendered institutional practices influence war and politics. These questions are all to do with how gender impacts governing practices — and that’s what the feminist agenda is all about. Going back to someone like Cynthia Enloe, who remains a major voice in feminist international relations, Ann Tickner and Christine Sylvester — these are founding voices in feminist international relations and should be included in every International Relations and War Studies reading list. Then there is the current generation of feminist voices in international relations: people like Dr Hannah Ketola and Dr Maria O’Reilly, both of whom were my PhD students and produced brilliant research on gender in the post-conflict context. I would say feminism is one of the most flourishing fields in international relations.

Sofia is a final year student reading History & International Relations and a BA representative for Strife. She has worked as an intern at her local U.S. House District office, in addition to having extensive experience in the private sector. Her academic interests include analysing the U.S. and UK’s ‘special relationship’ from a historical perspective, coercive diplomacy, and ethnic conflict in the former Yugoslavia. You can follow her on twitter @slesmes98.

Professor Jabri’s latest book is The Postcolonial Subject (Routledge, 2013). An overview of Traces of War is available here.

Read more about more about International Women’s Day and its charity partners here.

Image source: https://www.standard.co.uk/lifestyle/when-is-international-mens-day-2019-uk-imd-womens-day-a4085441.html.

In the Line of Fire: A Conversation with Photojournalist Fabiola Ferrero

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By Atina Dimitrova

1 March 2019

A female security officer holds her shield after a man kicked her repeatedly on an opposition demonstration in Caracas on April 2st, 2017. (Fabiola Ferrero)

 

Caracas-born photojournalist Fabiola Ferrero talks to Atina Dimitrova about her dangerous career and how she deals with documenting tragedy.

 

As fifteen guerrillas surrounded her and forced her to hand over her protective vest, gas mask, helmet and camera equipment, Fabiola Ferrero tried to block the anxiety from her mind. Her attempts to remain calm failed after ten minutes, when she started feeling angry instead. Despite that incident in her home country Venezuela in 2017, Fabiola continued covering the anti-government protests there. Because of her determination to report, the facts prevailed.

Fabiola Ferrero has spent her career uncovering the truth, despite the danger she faces to do so. (Alejandro Cremades)

A freelance photojournalist who grew up in Caracas, one of the deadliest capital cities in the world, Fabiola, 27, says, ‘These types of situations happen often here. I was ten years old the first time somebody pointed a gun at me during one of the conflicts here.’

Staring into space as if trying to collect her memories, Fabiola shares her stories from Caracas over Skype. The distance between her and me in London is about 7,500km. She explains that threats delivered to journalists and citizens are common. ‘My goal is to bring to light the dynamics of Latin America and how we behave in hostile conditions,’ says Fabiola. ‘I want to help the others understand how we manage to live under circumstances which are completely against us.’

Fabiola’s life in Venezuela was marked by violence and social injustice, which she started reporting on in her youth. She says that journalists are sometimes attacked just outside their homes by armed groups. ‘I don’t have any friends in the country. They all left,’ she says slowly. ‘The biggest diaspora of our history is happening right now. Almost two million people have left since Hugo Chávez took power in 1999.’ She takes a long pause. ‘My family left as well.’

Her voice trembles. But Fabiola is proud to continue covering the conflict for international news outlets such as the BBC, The Wall Street Journal, and Bloomberg. She does not want to let events go unreported in South America or on other continents, as she believes that every individual story symbolises the universality of pain. ‘When you face tragedy, it tells you all what it is to be a human,’ she says.

Two members of the militia, a ‘defense group’ created by late President Hugo Chávez, during the commemoration of the third year anniversary of his death, on March 5th, 2017. Even though the country is going through a severe food crisis, the defense and military budget is 9 times the food budget. (Fabiola Ferrero)

She has explored how communities react to violence for both national and international audiences since 2015. Fabiola collects people’s anecdotes on her camera, and some of these stories have been part of group exhibitions in the UK, the Netherlands, Germany and Venezuela.

‘I need to accept the fact that I can’t always detach myself and that I don’t own the truth. I can only try to be as honest as I can,’ she says. A TV news bulletin in Spanish is playing in the background in her home in Caracas, as Fabiola explains the complexity of the conflict and the numerous ways in which it could be interpreted.

She learnt the secrets of her craft at the Caracas-based Andrés Bello Catholic University while obtaining her journalism degree. ‘You could be inspired by your professors and you could learn a lot from reading, but no one in a classroom could teach you how to react when somebody tells you that they’re going to kill you by the end of the day. The only way to learn is going to the streets and reporting.’

What she describes did in fact happen to Fabiola when she was working on a story for The Wall Street Journal. The piece was about 100,000 illegal miners and armed gangs in Venezuela. They were believed to be paying local military commanders for protection and gasoline supplies. During this mission, armed men who were taking care of Fabiola and her colleagues made a joke that they were going to show them in the gold mines and then throw the team into a lagoon by the end of the afternoon. Fabiola acknowledged that it was a possible scenario. She tried to stay as focused as possible in order to take powerful photos of the mines regardless of what was about to happen. And she was glad that what the armed men said proved to be a trick to scare her and that her team was not in danger.

Angel plays on the table while he eats jelly as part of his treatment for cancer. He travels every two weeks from his home town San Cristóbal (close to the Colombian border) to the Capital, Caracas. It is a 14-hour trip by bus at night, so he can get chemo. There is an estimated 85% of medicine shortage in the country. (Fabiola Ferrero)

Despite the difficulties she has faced in her career, Fabiola’s face radiates so much determination. She is also proud to have worked on a story about a five-year-old child in Venezuela who has cancer. Every two weeks the family has to make a 14-hour bus journey from their home town, San Cristóbal, near the Colombian border, to Caracas for the child to receive chemotherapy. Fabiola covered the story for Yahoo News to raise awareness of the severe medicine shortage in Venezuela. ‘Those types of stories are hard to work on,’ adds Fabiola. ‘I have to try really hard not to absorb people’s sadness as my own. I sometimes just get so involved with people when I photograph them, so when I get home I’m completely drained and sad.’

One such difficult period made her leave Venezuela in 2016 for almost a year. Fabiola went to Spain where her brother lives, and she tried to clear her mind from all the unpleasant experiences she had in Venezuela. While abroad, she decided to publish a photobook, called Oblivion. ‘I did it to heal myself; to be completely away from photojournalism,’ says Fabiola.

Men get together to celebrate with guns the ‘second funeral’ of their loved ones. The second funeral is a ritual the Wayuu indigenous community makes 10 years after a family member is buried. They take out the bones from the grave, clean them, and bury them again in a more personal place, so he can finally go to ‘Jepirra’, the Wayuu’s sacred place. Located in the Guajira desert, in the border between Venezuela and Colombia. (Fabiola Ferrero)

But the passion to explore the psychological consequences of crisis in Latin America recently prompted Fabiola to go back to Venezuela. She is now also photographing communities in Colombia that are completely forgotten by the state. Fabiola shows how people try to live normally during conflicts that have lasted for five decades. ‘It’s very difficult to believe that the reality will change because of our pictures,’ says Fabiola. ‘But there are ways to work directly with communities to help them question their identity and create self-image. Hopefully in the future I’ll do more reporting on that and expand my work throughout Latin America. I don’t know about legacy. But hopefully I’ll improve some people’s lives.’

The time is ticking away. There are twenty minutes left before Fabiola has to go on her next assignment. She risks her life to promote change. Armed with her camera and strong inner values, Fabiola nibbles a chocolate bar and gets ready to go. While rubbing her eyes — she is sleep-deprived again — she concludes, ‘I want to use photography to heal others with my work.’

 

Atina is an MA International Relations student at King’s College London. She is also a freelance social media editor at MailOnline and a freelance broadcast journalist at the BBC. She is the author of two novels and has work experience across a range of media outlets, such as The Guardian and News UK. You can follow her on Twitter @atinadimitrova1.

All photos have been published here with the permission of the photographer.