Coronavirus

Peace in the time of Pandemic

January 6, 2021 by Constance Wilhelm

While the onset of the COVID-19 pandemic has affected professional and personal travel plans across the world, what happens when these plans can have a direct impact on cessation of hostilities in a conflict zone? What happens when a state or group may have an interest in allowing – or denying – individual travel in order to further their political aims?

Taking into consideration the current Afghan Peace Talks[1], as well as the ongoing political negotiations in Yemen, this article outlines how the pandemic has a potentially far-reaching impact on humanitarian assistance operations in conflict zones, and more broadly on peace.

Operational Environment

The pandemic has severely impacted the ability of aid actors to deliver assistance, including in countries facing enormous need. Beyond peace negotiations, humanitarian and development operations are also critical to providing security and opportunity to citizens in conflict zones. In Yemen, COVID-19 is yet another health challenge to a population already battling hunger, medicine and vaccine shortages, and diseases that have been long eliminated in other countries[2], all within a struggling medical system.

Afghanistan faces similar issues, where health clinics are already inaccessible for many citizens, especially women, and where scepticism concerning the virus further complicates limited medical capacity to treat it. At the same time, COVID-19 has not forced a break in fighting in the lead-up to the peace negotiations discussed below, with clear Taliban resistance to ceasefire attempts or a UN call for a humanitarian pause.

How does this affect peace and stability? While aid agencies struggle with their own operational limitations, they also operate in countries where they may not be popular with both governments and armed groups due to perceived ties with Western powers, and where securing access may already be a challenge. The pandemic is being wielded as an excuse to further deny access, travel, and movement to aid workers in areas where assistance is greatly needed. As such, this pandemic could deepen humanitarian crises, and threaten greater instability. This has been seen in Yemen and Afghanistan, but also in parts of Iraq, Syria, Somalia, and elsewhere. In Yemen in particular, Houthis have used the pandemic to not only restrict access to the country, but also to exert greater control on needs assessments, aid distributions, and any potential involvement of international actors in political process[3], all by holding a firm grip on permitted operations. These limitations can threaten the fair distribution of aid to the most vulnerable.

Beyond access under COVID-19, aid agencies also face a great challenge to their duty of care and best use of their resources. They must determine how much risk they are willing to take in sending their staff to field sites potentially exposed to conflict as well as severe health issues, possibly requiring medical evacuation. While organisations improve their understanding of the degree of risk posed by the pandemic to staff health and movements, many UN agencies and other NGOs[4] have responded with variations on a reduced footprint. Some are keeping staff in compounds (creating its own risk for staff due to the impossibility of social distancing) rather than sending them to more remote field sites. As familiarity with pandemic realities have increased and additional medical resources have been mobilized to treat sick staff, operational capacity has also increased – but humanitarians can still be denied access to their areas of intervention, with the perfect justification: it is for their own safety.

Pandemic Peace talks - Strategy and Logistics

This unique opportunity for affecting operational contexts neatly extends to peace talks, as the challenging logistics of bringing together warring sides to negotiate settlements in a third host country are intensified under pandemic conditions. In September 2020, discussions between Houthis and the Yemeni government over the release of Houthi prisoners moved forward in Switzerland. The Houthi and Yemeni delegations utilized UN Special Envoy planes departing from Saudi-controlled airspace to reach Switzerland and secured exceptions for diplomatic travel when no other movement was permitted, even as the Houthis themselves closed airports in Yemen and restricted movement for aid actors – including UN agencies. The Swiss government worked around national pandemic restrictions to allow representatives to speak directly to one another and to maintain their negotiations schedule.

The ongoing Afghan Peace Talks in Doha have been similarly impacted by logistical issues, with strategic implications. Under normal conditions, countries compete to host peace negotiations to protect their interests, ensure they are part of the conversation, and bolster their reputations as key geopolitical players. This confluence of actors and interests can pressure a negotiation and complicate participants’ calculations. However, during the pandemic, countries that might typically host peace negotiations become more focused on their urgent domestic needs and give less attention and resources to peace delegates. Where many great powers and actors may have competed to hold the Afghan talks prior to the pandemic, fewer countries are currently willing to assume the risk of hosting such an event. As such, the pandemic favours wealthy, autocratic systems such as Qatar’s that do not have to justify their decisions and risk-taking to their public. Also, a second round of talks is unlikely due to these logistical concerns[5], so Qatar’s willingness to host prolonged talks amid few alternative options creates pressure to conclude discussions during this round.

Qatar’s hosting has additional advantages: a strong Qatari national health authority able to handle testing and tracing, combined with the ability to indefinitely block off a 5-star hotel for talks, to mobilize private jets for transport, and to offer luxury accommodations for Taliban representatives and their families, all as representatives arrive from high-risk countries and are granted entrance health waivers for indefinite stays. This pandemic then serves Doha’s goals: they are at the centre of peace talks, ensuring international – including American – support despite being in a hostile neighbourhood. Senior diplomats leverage personal relationships with Qatari officials to get clearance to enter, while others less favoured find that their travel has ‘accidentally’ not been cleared. While externally entrenching their centrality to the negotiations, internally Qatari actors are also using their roles to leveraging power against one another. At the same time, Doha is a relatively less experienced host[6], which has opened the way for interested third parties to establish strong support groups and facilitate consultative, collaborative assistance to the talks to protect their interests.

Actors at the margins also lose; with COVID-19 travel restrictions in place, meetings on the margins – for example, side events on gender, minority rights and protections – are less likely to happen. Participation of civil society in peace talks becomes more tenuous, and inclusive representation at peace negotiations, which are already often seen as elite-driven or elite-bargaining processes, also suffer. When citizens do not have the opportunity to directly challenge leadership, it becomes more difficult to ensure that a range of views are accounted for in a potential settlement. In Doha, conference organizers fought to secure access for 30 Afghan journalists to attend the opening ceremony of the talks, allowing for some interaction between national press and the Taliban. This benefits the overall objective of the talks – with fewer sideline attractions, attention can be focused on the single outcome of reaching agreement – but inclusivity can suffer.

Another key difference in the current climate is that peace negotiations are commonly preceded by (secret) pre-negotiation discussions where key agenda items, red lines, and starting positions can be clarified on both sides. These have the advantage of accelerating formal talks once they begin but can also create tension should personalities or political positions combust from the start. Partly due to the pandemic, parties have arrived at the Afghan talks without pre-existing personal relationships, resulting in increased caution on both sides when interacting with one another, but also creating an opportunity to focus discussions free from personal distractions.

While it is too early to make comprehensive conclusions, the COVID-19 pandemic directly affects peace. It is being used as a justification to exert greater control over humanitarian activities in fractious contexts, further complicating operations in already difficult environments. The direction and execution of peace talks are being similarly constrained, resulting both in more concentrated but also less inclusive events. Whether these factors will increase chances for resolution remains to be seen. It is clear, however, that lessons drawn from this unique time can offer insights to practitioners once the post-pandemic chapter begins.

[1] Formally, the Intra-Afghan Peace Talks.

[2] Such diseases include measles, cholera, diphtheria, tuberculosis, and polio.

[3] Interview with UN official, UN OCHA, Yemen, 11 November 2020.

[4] Interview with UN official, UN OCHA, 11 November 2020.

Interview with NGO worker, Afghanistan, 15 November 2020.

[5] Six months ago, at least 4 rounds of talks in Qatar, Germany, Norway, and Uzbekistan were envisioned, with all but Doha ultimately being scrapped.

[6] Capacity to properly address protocol and logistics are also a concern, for example with Doha releasing press statements concerning the talks without first clearing them on both sides, or releasing invitations and agendas to participants that are only available in Arabic (Dari and Pashto being the official languages of Afghanistan).

Constance Wilhelm is a Senior Editor for the Strife Journal, and a doctoral researcher with the Department of War Studies at King’s College London, where she focuses on approaches to the return and prosecution of the European women that have joined Daesh. She is also an experienced researcher and Public and Humanitarian Policy consultant, specialising in conflict-affected areas and fragile states. She has worked with think tanks at Princeton University and New York University, with the Afghan Mission to the UN in New York, the OECD in Paris, humanitarian and international development organisations and consulting firms in Lebanon (leading teams in Syria), in Jordan (leading teams in Yemen), in Afghanistan, in Libya, as well as across both the Horn of Africa and the Sahel-Lake Chad region. Constance has an MA in Conflict Management and International Economics from Johns Hopkins School of Advanced International Studies (SAIS) and a BA from McGill University.

COVID-19, Immigration, and the Media in Britain

August 10, 2020 by Harry Sanders

by Harry Sanders

A long history of immigration runs through Britain’s healthcare sector (Image credit: Meager/Fox Photos/Hulton Archive/Getty Images)

The coronavirus pandemic’s global impact has left few unaffected. Perhaps the only silver lining of this pandemic is its highlighting of the essential work of migrants in the NHS and other healthcare services. While for years migrants have been the scapegoat of the UK’s many problems and have been the subject of immense prejudice and abuse; the positive impact of their contributions to society has finally started to come to light. Though the gushing affection and appreciation for our migrant healthcare staff are abundant on Facebook, Twitter, and other social media, it is important to consider if the same shift in tone has been present in our traditional media sources.

Prior to the outbreak of the coronavirus, the British press was notoriously - and at times unashamedly - opposed to immigration in its general stance. Following the election of David Cameron’s Conservative government in 2010, the number of news articles mentioning ‘migration’ or ‘immigration’ has been growing at a steady rate year-on-year, coinciding with Conservative immigration policy which aimed to reduce net migration to the tens of thousands. Throughout all of these articles written between 2006 and 2015, the most common modifier used to describe immigration was ‘mass’, followed closely by ‘net’, ‘illegal’, and ‘European’. The vast majority of these articles have been crafted with the specific aim of colouring all migration with the brush of illegal immigration, thereby characterising entire nationalities as criminals and aliens.

This is even more unjust when one considers that many of the articles emphasising illegality are covering the plight of refugees; individuals whose right to be in the UK is enshrined in both national and international law. If the last decade of British politics is anything to go by, this narrative has been highly effective in influencing the opinions of their readership.

Anti-immigrant sentiment can still be seen in articles written immediately before the outbreak of coronavirus. This article from the Daily Mail, for example, reported on the Prime Minister’s pledge to restrict EU migrants earning less than £23,000 from entering the country and to move to an ‘Australian-style points-based immigration system’. The article’s discussion of ‘slashing’ the number of low skilled workers, and its quotation of a Downing Street spokesman as having heralded the ‘return [of] democratic control of immigration to the British people’, evokes a sense of pride and achievement at the prospect of losing half of Britain’s migrant workforce. ‘Slashing’ has a rhetorical effect here; its emphatic quality is designed to trigger an emotional response in the reader by highlighting the government’s merciless approach to cutting immigration. One must presume that the critical eye has wandered far from the details of this announcement, as little consideration is given to the economic implications of restricting any workers earning less than £23,000 – a salary far in excess of the national minimum wage.

Whilst it is important to recognise the clear ideological stance embedded into the article, it is perhaps unsurprising given the political affiliation of the publication. The Daily Mail is well-known as a right-wing newspaper, and as a result, an anti-immigration narrative can be seen as them simply catering to the views of their readership. By the same token, it would be unsurprising to see The Guardian taking a more tolerant view of immigration, in light of its left-leaning readership and left-wing editorial stance. The article discussed above is very much typical of the right-wing press’ pre-pandemic approach to migration; as a result, the key question concerns the extent to which the coronavirus has reconfigured the discourse. Has the public’s positive outlook on migrant healthcare staff influenced reportage, or is the enmity still very much present?

A ‘mixed bag’ would perhaps be the aptest description. Reporting on an asylum seeker’s ‘stabbing spree’ in Glasgow in June, the Daily Mail exhibited a surprising change in tone. Citing the asylum seeker’s mental state and the negative impact of lockdown in triggering post-traumatic stress, the Mail in this instance considered the socio-economic and psychological stresses which he faced and how they may have contributed to the incident. Remarkably the most noticeable used pejorative in the article, ‘hordes’ – so often reserved especially for immigrants – was instead used to describe the emergency services which responded to the incident. Rather than mindlessly painting a black and white picture of a man with a knife, a victim, and the heroic response of the police, fair consideration is given to the causes which led to the incident and – perhaps most importantly of all – it is framed as a wholly preventable event which was allowed to happen due to a lack of sufficient resources for social services.

A further immigration story to emerge during the coronavirus pandemic was the route to British citizenship offered to British National Overseas citizens in Hong Kong due to China’s imposition of a new security law. This prompted uncharacteristic coverage from a number of typically right-wing publications; the Daily Telegraph, for example, ran the headline ‘Giving British citizenship to 300,000 Hong Kongers will boost the economy’, a reversal of the cliched trope peddled in right-wing media that immigration leads to economic demise. Published in the midst of lockdown (29 May), it may be that this more balanced approach was borne out of the wider uptick in appreciation for what migrants contribute to the UK.

Immigration also entered the discourse when eastern Europeans were flown into the UK to help save the June harvest. This triggered media coverage verging on the satirical, with the Daily Mail- a publication with an entrenched opposition to Romanian migrants - running the headline ‘Romanians to the Rescue’. Given the travel restrictions that were in place at the time, a demonstration of support for immigration of any kind- let alone that of Romanian economic migrants- is hugely noteworthy; it communicates an awareness of how indispensably important immigration is to the UK.

Has the UK media U-turned on its deep-rooted prejudice against migrants and immigration? Not quite, though it is nevertheless important to note the positive impact which our migrant healthcare workers have had on public opinion and on the press. The Daily Mail is not the only publication guilty of such reporting as has been exhibited pre-lockdown, and sure enough in recent articles, the Daily Express has persisted in the trope of reporting the scale of immigration rather than its legality. It is also key to consider that many will see headlines such as ‘Gangs using coronavirus crisis to send migrants to the UK’ and share that information irrespective of the article’s content. Whether this article highlights the perceived threat of immigrants to the UK or the plight of the trafficked migrants is a moot point to anyone who will form an opinion before opening the link and preach their opinion on the issues as unchallenged gospel.

Whilst it is encouraging to see flickers of journalistic integrity return to the British press, our media, and the way in which we consume it, must change a great deal to begin reporting on political issues such as this in an unbiased and factual manner. Recent weeks have made it impossible to dispute the fact that migrants do in fact contribute massively to the UK, and rather than inflicting harm upon public services, are actually a key cornerstone upon which our public services stand. Going forward, it should be facts, not polarised opinions, that form the basis of immigration coverage.

Harry Sanders is a content writer for the Immigration Advice Service, an organisation of immigration solicitors.

Warning About Conflicts and Pandemics: How to Get Heard by Decision-Makers

July 1, 2020 by Christoph Meyer

by Christoph Meyer

As is often the case with warnings about conflict, there was a costly lack of timely responses to early warnings about the COVID-19 pandemic. Such delays are not necessarily just the fault of decision-makers. Expert warners can also do better. To be heard, they need to understand the world of policymakers, take risks and spell out expected consequences and actionable recommendations.

Could the mounting death toll, pain and costs from the coronavirus crisis have been prevented or at least lessened? Leaders and senior officials in the US and the UK have been accused of recklessly ignoring warnings, whilst Chinese officials even stand accused of suppressing them. The pandemic has been labelled the “worst intelligence failure in U.S. history” or UK’s “greatest science policy failure for a generation”. Future public inquiries will hopefully address not just questions of accountability but also, more importantly, which lessons should be learned.

Do Not Just Blame the Decision-Makers: Expert Warners Also Need to Do Better

However, even today there are striking parallels between the warning-response gap in conflict and mass atrocity prevention and the coronavirus crisis. Our extensive research on cases ranging from Rwanda 1994 to Crimea 2014 found a wide-spread tendency in the literature to overestimate the supply of “warnings” from inside and outside of government and to underestimate how difficult persuasive warning actually is. Warners are typically portrayed as altruistic, truthful and prescient, yet doomed to be ignored by irresponsible, ignorant and self-interested leaders. Imagine princess Cassandra of Troy trying to convince Mayor Vaughn from Jaws.

The first in-depth investigations of the decision-making on COVID-19 suggest that at least some of the warnings in the US case suffered from credibility problems whereas UK experts were criticised for not warning more forcefully, explicitly and earlier. This raises important questions about individual expert’s motivations, capabilities and strategies, but also about structural and cultural factors that can impede early, credible, actionable and, above all, persuasive warnings.

Expert Warners Need to Learn What the Obstacles Are for Their Messages to Be Heard

In our recent book we compare warning about war to the challenge of conquering an obstacle course against various competitors and often adverse weather conditions. The most successful competitors will be those who combine natural ability, high motivation, regular training, and risk-taking with a bit of luck. Many expert warners do not realise what the obstacles are, nor have they been trained to overcome them or are willing to take some of the professional risks involved in warning.

We found that the most effective warners tend to be those who (i) have acquired some personal trust as a result of previous personal contacts with decision-makers, (ii) can offer a positive professional reputation and track-record in their previous analysis and warnings, (iii) understand decision-makers’ agendas and “hot-buttons” (iv), share the same broad political or ideational outlook, and finally, (v) are willing to take some professional risks to get their message across.

Based on our research, we found that in order to increase their chances of being heard by decision-makers, expert warners should consider the following eight points.

1. Understand That Decision-Makers Work in a Completely Different Environment.

First and foremost, expert warners need to understand that senior officials inhabit a different world to themselves. Most experts tend to consume information from a relatively narrow range of quality sources focused on a specific subject area. They evaluate the quality of the method and evidence behind causal claims and, sometimes, the potential to solve a given problem. Warnings are relatively rare in this world. In contrast, decision-makers live in a world where warnings from different corners are plentiful and competing demands for their attention is constant and typically tied to requests for more government spending. They are trained to look for the interest behind the knowledge claim and are prone to see warnings as politically biased and potentially self-interested manipulation attempts. A New York Times investigation suggests, for example, that at least some of the coronavirus warnings were discounted as a result of perceived political bias regarding China.

2. Credibility Is Key to Who Is Being Noticed and Heard.

Even experts without an apparent or hidden agenda can and do contradict each other, including those working in the same field. On any given issue, there is rarely just one authoritative source of knowledge, but multiple individuals or organisations that supply knowledge. The cacophony gets greater when assessing the proportionality and unintended effects of the measures to control the disease, including the inadvertent increase of non-COVID deaths and severe loss of quality of life.

When politicians claim to be only following “expert advice” as was the case in the UK, they obscure necessary decisions about difficult trade-offs and dilemmas arising from diverse expert advice. Decision-makers need to decide whose advice to accept and to what extent. This is why credibility is key to who is being noticed and believed.

That means warners need to ask themselves whether they are likely to be perceived as credible or rather with suspicion by the people that ultimately take political decisions. If the latter is the case, they can try to target more receptive scientists sitting on official expert committee instead or organisations closer to decision-makers. They can publish pieces in news media likely to be consumed by politicians rather than those they might prefer themselves. Or they can boost their credibility by teaming up with others through open-letters or joint statements.

3. To Cut Through the Noise, You Might Have to Take Risks.

The next challenge is for warnings to stick-out from the everyday information and reporting “noise”. Officials may, for instance, choose an unusual channel or mode of communication. We know that ambassadors have used demarches as relatively rare and more formal formats to highlight the importance of their analysis rather than their routine reports.

Senior officials might cut through when they are ready to put their career and professional reputation on the line as Mukesh Kapila did when warning about Darfur in 2004 on BBC Radio 4. This lesson can also be drawn in the case of Capt. Brett E. Crozier who was fired after copying-in too many people into his outspoken warning about the spread of the virus on the aircraft carrier Theodore Roosevelt.

Many external experts as well as intelligence analysts, such as Professor for Epidemiology, Mark Woolhouse, are satisfied just to be “heard and understood”. They do not seek for their advice to be accepted, prioritised and acted upon. However, sometimes a more pro-active and risk-taking approach is needed as was arguably the case with COVID-19 according to Professor Jonathan Ball: “Perhaps some of us should have got up in front of BBC News and said you lot ought to be petrified because this is going to be a pandemic that will kill hundreds of thousands of people. None of us thought this was a particularly constructive thing to do, but maybe with hindsight we should have. If there had been more voices, maybe politicians would have taken this a bit more seriously.”

4. Spell Out a Range of Expected Consequences.

Given leaders’ constant need to prioritise, experts need to spell out the range of expected consequences. They need to dare to be more precise about what the likelihood is for something to happen, the timing, scale and nature of the consequences. Too often we found warnings to be rather vague or hedged. Similarly to the account by Balls, an in-depth Reuter’s investigation also suggests that UK ‘scientists did not articulate their fears forcefully to the government’ and could have spelled out the probable deaths involved earlier.

5. Focus on What Matters to Decision-Makers, Not Yourself.

Warners need to focus on what matters most to decision-makers, not to them. One of the most successful warnings we came across in our research on conflict warnings highlighted not just the humanitarian suffering, but also how this escalation would resonate with important domestic constituencies such as evangelical Christians and how it might harm electoral chances. NGOs focused on conflict prevention and peace may find it easier to make their case if they also highlight the indirect and less immediate effects of instability on migration, jobs and security.

6. Understand the Reference Points and Contexts That Decision-Makers Work With in Any Given Situation.

Warners should try to understand and, if necessary, challenge the cognitive reference points that underpin leaders’ thinking. In the area of foreign policy, decision-makers often draw on lessons learnt from seemingly similar or recent cases from the region. For instance, preventive action against ethnic conflict in Macedonia in 2001 benefited from fresh lessons learnt from the Kosovo conflict. Spelling out what precisely is similar or different in present threats in relation to lessons learnt from previous familiar cases can encourage decision-makers to question and change their beliefs.

In the current crisis, one reason why senior officials in Europe may have underestimated the danger of coronavirus was that their reference point and planning assumption was a flu epidemic. Many also still remembered that the UK was accused of overreacting to the much milder than expected swine flu in 2009. In contrast, leaders in many Asian countries had other more dangerous viruses as their cognitive reference points and underpinning their pandemic plans.

7. Know What Kind of Evidence and Methods Decision-Makers Trust the Most.

Experts should try to understand what kind of evidence and methods decision-makers and their close advisors consider the most credible. In foreign affairs, decision-makers often trust secret intelligence based on human sources more than assessment based on expert judgement using open-sources. Other decision-makers like indicators and econometric models as compared to qualitative expert judgements. If unfamiliar with these particular methods, they could seek to collaborate with those experts who are can translate their findings into the most suitable language.

8. Include Actionable Recommendations With the Warnings.

The best warnings are those that contain also actionable recommendations. Decision-makers are more receptive to warnings that give them information on which they can act today, ideally including a range of options. The influential model by the Imperial College team appeared to resonate so well not only because of the method they used, but also because it gave decision-makers a clear sense of how death rates might develop for different policy options under discussion.

The dilemma for warners is that they can undermine their own credibility by suggesting policy options that are considered politically unfeasible. According to a Reuters account, the lock-down measures adopted in China and Italy were considered initially inconceivable for the UK and thus not considered in-depth early on. Warners do need to resist a narrow understanding of what is feasible and sometimes need to push to widen the menu of policy options considered.

It Is Also up to Government Bureaucracies and Decision-Makers to Be Open for Warnings

All of this is not to deny that the key explanation may ultimately lie with unreceptive decision-makers who cannot deal with uncomfortable advice or who create blame-shifting cultures in which many officials just seek to cover their backs. We should approach any justification why leaders did not notice or believe a warning with a healthy dose of scepticism. Politicians can be expected to ring-fence at least some of their time to regularly consider new and serious threats to the security and well-being of citizens, regardless of distractions by media headlines. There should be clarity about who is responsible to act or not to act on warnings. They should ask probing questions of experts that bring them reassuring news to tease out key uncertainties and down-side risks as was allegedly lacking in the UK case. They need to ensure there is sufficient diversity in the advice they are getting through expert committees, create channels for fast-tracking warnings and opportunities for informally expressing dissent with prevailing wisdom. Leaders have a responsibility to build cultures in which high-quality warnings can be expressed without fear of punishment or career disadvantage.

One of the questions to be addressed in postmortems will be whether the relationship of politicians to the intelligence community in the US and to health professionals in the UK was conducive to timely warning and preventive action. Have experts allowed themselves to be politicised? Have they cried wolf too often and on too many issues? Or, conversely, have they been affected by group-think and hesitated to ask difficult questions sooner and more forcefully? Keeping expert warners in the picture matters greatly to learning the right lessons from the crisis. The best experts with the most important messages need to find ways of cutting through, regardless of who happens to sit in the White House, Downing Street, the Élysée Palace or the Chancellery. Only with the benefit of hindsight is warning and acting on it easy.

This article is a reposting of Christoph Meyer’s article with the kind cooperation of Peacelab, please follow this link to see the original.

Christoph Meyer is the co-author (with Chiara De Franco and Florian Otto) of “Warning about War: Conflict, Persuasion and Foreign Policy” and leads a research project on Learning and Intelligence in European Foreign Policy. Support from the European Research Council and the UK Economic and Social Research Council is gratefully acknowledged.

Coronavirus and Intelligence Failures: Lessons Learned from a Global Pandemic

May 22, 2020 by Gemma MacIntyre

by Gemma MacIntyre

An officer with U.S. Customs and Border Protection Office of Field Operations gestures with gloved hands as he speaks with an arriving international traveler at Dulles International Airport in Dulles, Va., March 18, 2020 (Image credit: CBP Photo/Glenn Fawcett)

The transformative effect of Covid-19 upon the world is becoming more clear by the day. Since the first recorded cases in China’s Wuhan starting in December 2019, the disease has transcended borders, thereby claiming 170,000 lives to date, affecting millions more, and forcing entire states into lockdown. The severity and pace of the virus so far have led many to ask the question: why were governments so slow to respond? This frustration is particularly salient given reports that multiple scientific, medical, and intelligence experts alerted authorities about this novel coronavirus months prior to politicians initiating our current states of emergency. This delay has led many to label Covid-19 as an intelligence failure, perhaps the most notable in history.

The American President Donald J. Trump has come under significant attacks for delaying preventative measures - and prioritising economic interests over the advice of health and intelligence authorities. An article in the New York Times from mid-April 2020 stated that the US intelligence community ‘identified the threat, sounded the alarms and made clear the need for aggressive action’ in early January 2020. Yet, contrary to this urgency, Trump was reluctant to impose a lockdown. This hesitance came primarily for economic reasons but was similarly influenced by his well-documented tendency to overlook the guidance of expert authorities. Similarly, in Britain, Prime Minister Boris Johnson has been chastised for skipping up to five Covid-19 related meetings, having a detrimental impact on the UK’s rate of response (The Sunday Times 2020). It has been reported that while Britain was initially well-prepared for a pandemic outbreak; austerity cuts and fears of a no-deal Brexit distracted the government from its health-focused objectives. Crucially, had the British Government taken earlier action, it would have been able to respond much more effectively.

However, it is not enough to associate the spread of Covid-19 entirely with political personalities (albeit, they do play a role). Rather, one has to explore the various reasons why, despite warning signals, this deadly virus has been able to have such a dramatic impact, wreaking global havoc in its spread. Globally, it seems, few expected what was to come. Upon reflection of where global health ‘sits’ in the international security paradigm, it seems the reasons for intelligence failure are much more complex and deeply-rooted. On the one hand, global health has been perceived as the foundation of international prosperity. Without strong health infrastructure, the productivity of the international community’s labour market cannot function. Sub-Saharan Africa provides a case in point: many of the development challenges within the region stem from health problems. Yet, the mention of global health as an international security challenge is scarce.

Over the course of the twenty-first century, UK and US intelligence analysts have rightly emphasised important security challenges, such as international terrorism, cyber security, and inter-state war. Interestingly, despite its importance to global prosperity, health has rarely been perceived as an international security threat: more often, it is perceived as a by-product of, or contributing to, other security issues. Arguably, the reason for this is that, unlike other security challenges, pandemics lack the same sort of human capacity to be controlled. This characteristic has made viruses such as Covid-19 less apparent in international security studies; yet, paradoxically, more difficult to contain. Viruses cannot be tracked via policing or intercepting devices: nor can they be interrogated or detained.

Nevertheless, the health-focus of intelligence communities should not be minimised by these challenges. Rather, this new strain of coronavirus invites a new strain of security studies: one that, as the world becomes ever more interconnected, is paramount to global health. Since 9/11, academics and practitioners have affirmed the need to refine methods of intelligence-gathering. To track covert, international networks - including terrorist, drug, and cyber-related groups - intelligence communities have to, in the words of Charles Cogan (2010), take a ‘hunter-gatherer’ approach. This involves actively going out to monitor those suspected of posing any sort of legitimate security threat, and enacting sufficient preventative measures. But how does one ‘hunt down’ a virus? Its intangible, diffuse nature, coupled with the ease at which globalisation facilitates its spread, presents novel challenges to intelligence communities (Bruntland, 2003).

The main tactic used by states to contain Covid-19 has been to enforce lockdown measures on entire populations and economies. Short of proven vaccines, this strategy is essential; but it does not address the root issue: that of preventing contaminated animals, particularly bats, from spreading the disease (The Guardian, 2020). The challenges associated with tracking viruses, at the very least, underscores its importance in international security. Even more so, it presents new lessons and opportunities.

A key lesson provided by Covid-19 is that without medical expertise or predictions; policy-makers will be left in the dark. Unlike other security issues which rely namely on intelligence communities and policy-makers to contain them; assailants like Covid-19 require the inclusion of scientists and medical experts, to not only appreciate but act upon the severity of the threat. This requires a shift in the understanding of intelligence in an epidemiological context, both within intelligence communities, and external to them (RUSI, 2020).

Another lesson has been the benefit of digital surveillance. In authoritarian regimes such as South Korea, Israel, and China, their governments have utilised technology and data to track the spread of the virus and monitor citizens in lockdown. Yet, while China and South Korea have maximised this digital surveillance opportunity; Western democracies remain indebted to the value of transparency. A UK NHS app used to monitor people’s activities has been considered; however, controversy remains over the potential exposure of personal data. Ulrich Kelber (Germany’s Federal Commissioner for Data Protection and Freedom of Information) has condoned stringent surveillance measures as ‘encroaching’ and ‘totally inappropriate’ (Foreign Policy, 2020). Ultimately, although transparency remains critical, states may have to overcome this initial unease to make the most of technology opportunities - so long as they are used appropriately, in line with democratic values.

Lastly, the insight provided by intelligence is critical to ensure states are prepared. Historically, intelligence has been used to alert leaders of the appropriate level of investment into national security. Yet, it seems in spite of intelligence warnings, many of those on the front line have been left without the equipment to fight. This idea was referenced by Bill Gates during a 2015 TED Talk, when he affirmed that states had to be prepared to tackle a pandemic just as they would a military emergency. Gates stressed the need for investment in research and development, health infrastructure, and medical reserves, all well in advance of a global outbreak.

Nonetheless, while Gates’ predictions ring eerily true - changing the way states prepare for global pandemics requires not only a shift in intelligence-gathering methods, but in understandings of international security as we know it. Re-defining the priorities of the intelligence community, and conceptions of international security, is essential to combat this pandemic, and the inevitable future ones as well.

Reference List

Arbuthnott, G., Calvert, J., and Leake, J. (2020). ’38 Days: When Britain Sleepwalked into Disaster’. The Sunday Times

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Upon graduating from the University of St Andrews in International Relations and Management in 2019, Gemma MacIntyre is now studying an MA in Conflict, Security and Development at King’s College London. Through her academic studies and voluntary experience with VSO UK in Nigeria, she has developed a strong interest in the impact of governance on development. Throughout her MA, Gemma has had the opportunity to explore a variety of security and development areas: including peace-building; humanitarian diplomacy; intelligence in war and peace; and the impact of conflict on global health. Gemma hopes to pursue a career in humanitarian or security policy-making.

Religion as an Impediment for Social Distancing in Bangladesh

May 20, 2020 by Shuva Das

by Shuva Das

Thousands of Bangladeshi Muslims gather for the funeral of a popular Islamic preacher on Saturday, April 18, 2020. (Image credit: CNN)

For a few months now, countries from across the globe sustained lockdowns in various forms to slow the spread of the novel coronavirus known as the SARS-CoV-2. This development exposed a clash between some requirements of the prescribed measures for social distancing and the traditions of major religions such as Christianity, Islam, and Hinduism. In the world’s eighth-most populous country, Bangladesh, as elsewhere, the pandemic keeps the entire nation at high risk with a persistent rise of cases from 8 March 2020 onwards. In April, the United Nations issued a warning to Bangladesh, arguing that the country could face two million deaths from the fatal virus.

Yet the measures that Bangladesh adopted so far to maintain social distancing in its ongoing lockdown have remained ineffective at best. Several reasons stand out, yet chief among these are daily shopping, financial considerations, and religious commitments. In the densely populated country, daily gatherings of people effectively emasculated the social distancing measures, with crowds coming together in markets without virtually any caution. Besides, since scores of people live hand to mouth, the allegedly corrupted government system for relief distribution and the uncooperative stance of many private industries including the monumental garment sector further aggravated the poor implementation of the lockdown; and with it, the plight of the country’s citizens. Thus, people of this economic line cannot but attend to their work.

Moreover, religion also appeared as a significant hurdle and concern for social distancing measures in the majority Muslim country because of certain sensitive issues pertaining to the (observation of) religion. In this article, I will explain this particular aspect.

Islamic preachers of Bangladesh in Waz Mahfils (instructive and explanatory Islamic discussion) presented outlandish divine conspiracy theories for the outbreak of coronavirus. Their coronavirus-related speeches are widely shared sensations on social media pages of Bengali speaking people around the world. Over the eruption of the coronavirus in China, Kazi Ibrahim, a prominent Islamic preacher, claimed that an Italian Muslim resident held a heavenly conversation with the virus in his dream. According to Ibrahim, the coronavirus told the dreamer that the almighty Allah sent it as soldier to attack the Chinese for repressing and harassing the Uyghur Muslim population.

Another popular Islamic scholar Tarek Monowar told in a speech that a singer execrating Azan (prayer) has lately visited Bangladesh and performed at a stadium. Monowar then vented the coronavirus was looking for enemies of Islam to terminate them. Another cleric came up with an idea that except for adherents of Islam, the rest of the world would soon be infected by the virus. Other similarly invented tricky statements after the virus spread in Iran and also other Muslim countries including Bangladesh. Iran is supposedly paying dearly for its presumed distortion of the Islamic faith, while Muslims of other countries must not be pious enough to be saved.

Such kind of remarks by these so-called religious scholars injects blind faith among the laity and was lambasted by renowned atheist scholars like Richard Dawkin and Christopher Hitchens for long. A professor of Islamic Studies at Dhaka University, Bangladesh, said to the New Age, a national daily newspaper, those spurious speeches of the clerics ─ who, without any expertise nor knowledge about the disease gave an expert opinion on the matter ─ wrongfully represented Islam, a religion of peace and harmony.

What the Islamic pundits of Bangladesh try to establish through their lectures filled with manipulation and bigotry is to erroneously show the superiority of Islam and to increase their followers. In this regard, there is an indirectly substantial resemblance between Bangladeshi Islamic scholars and India’s Hindu nationalists belonging to Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP), the present ruling party of India. Some leaders of the BJP have prescribed cow urine and dung for the prevention and remedy of the coronavirus. Not surprisingly, cow urine drinking party was arranged by Hindu hardliners on 14 March 2020, to seek divine intervention against the scourge of the virus. Also, they boast that the traditional greeting system with “Namaste”, vegetarian eating culture, and traditional treatment of medicine (Ayurveda) of Hinduism have protected India from any epidemic.

In reality, India, however, experienced several pandemics, namely cholera, dengue fever, and malaria. Through such false, irrational narratives, the messages of Indian Hindu nationalists are generating intolerance and religious hatred among Hindus against the Muslim minority in the country. Similarly, the Muslim preachers of Bangladesh can breed the same bigotry sentiments among Muslims to the other religious groups. Such groundless statements by the Bangladeshi Islamic scholars are a looming threat to the social distancing measures of the country. Its population has a very tender mindset and they are highly gullible to religious teachings by the clerics. In so doing, social distancing measures are ignored by a vast number of Muslims, with many people prioritising their religious practices above safety measures against the virus to score more “points” in securing their ticket to Paradise.

On 18 April 2020, after defying the lockdown order of government, around 100,000 people participated in the funeral of a famous Islamic preacher in eastern Bangladesh, this against the backdrop of the ongoing outbreak in the country. The swarmed event caught the attention of the international media and rightfully drew a lot of criticism. The police could not do anything to prevent the unexpected flood of the mass. In turn, the government immediately tried to exonerate themselves by withdrawing several important police officers from the region. It is a method similarly used by the authoritarian Chinese government to uphold their positive image during a bad situation, by blaming or suspending responsible government officials.

The above-mentioned gathering was a follow-up of a recent mass prayer in Bangladesh where an estimated thirty thousand Muslims attended to seek holy intercession against the virus. Two big consecutive failures of the government to prevent the mass religious gatherings indicate not only their haplessness but a form of appeasement policy to Islamic groups. Yet it is an old pain. Every ruling government of Bangladesh maintains such a policy in order to secure Muslim votes and regime support.

In addition, though the Bangladesh Islamic Foundation, a government organisation affiliated with the Ministry of Foreign Affairs, urged people not to take prayer in mosques with more than five to ten people. This specific order has been breached in many places, even with several violent incidents. One person has recently died and several others got injured in a violent clash over who could pray at the mosque. Here, it is important to mention that general people of the country have seemingly nothing but God for their mental gratification and their battle against the pandemic.

As per Islamic instructions, if any persons including the sick could get affected by a risk of death or epidemic, it is allowed to pray at home. The Prophet Muhammad also gave clear instructions to Muslims in quarantine: ‘If you hear of an outbreak of plague in a land, do not enter it; if the plague breaks out in a place while you are in it, do not leave that place’. Islamic instructions like this ought to be reiterated by religious scholars; to prevent a massive number of people from attending a funeral, a religious gathering, or prayer places amid the epidemic.

The failure of the Bangladesh government to address religious gatherings, fanaticism, propaganda, and religious manipulation led to an ineffective implementation of social distancing measures. It was reported earlier that unchecked religious practices triggered infection considerably in some countries: in Korea by Shincheonji Church; in India by Tablighi Jamaat; in Israel by Ultra-Orthodox Communities; and so on. Bangladeshi people and its government ought to learn from these countries. The government should also counter those lockdown-disrupting clerics by legal decrees and establish a strong monitoring system to filter out any misinformation from social media. As always, it will remain true that ‘religion is for individuals while the pandemic can be for all’.

Shuva Das holds a BSS (Hons) degree in International Relations from Bangabandhu Sheikh Mujibur Rahman Science and Technology University in Gopalganj, Dhaka, Bangladesh. His articles have appeared in Synergy: The Journal of Contemporary Asian Studies and in The Oxford University Politics Blog, among others.