Author: Milan

In the spring of 2005, I graduated from the University of British Columbia with a degree in International Relations and a general focus in the area of environmental politics. In the fall of 2005, I began reading for an M.Phil in IR at Wadham College, Oxford. Outside school, I am very interested in photography, writing, and the outdoors. I am writing this blog to keep in touch with friends and family around the world, provide a more personal view of graduate student life in Oxford, and pass on some lessons I've learned here.

The environment as a security matter

Of late, it has become somewhat trendy to consider the environment as a ‘security’ issue. The most frequently cited example is the danger of massive refugee slows caused by environmental factors (such as climate change or desertification). Also common are assertions that people will soon begin fighting wars over natural resources. While massive environmental change can obviously spark conflict, I am skeptical about claims that this constitutes a major change in the character of international security.

To me, the first strain of thinking seems a lot more plausible than the second. There are already island nations that need to think seriously about what the 7-23″ rise in sea levels by 2100 projected in the fourth IPCC report will mean for their habitability. Environmental factors like soil quality and rainfall have helped to determine the patterns of human habitation and production for all of history, and it is unsurprising that changes in such things could have serious disruptive effects. Large scale population movements, both within and between states, are concerning because of the level of suffering they generally involve, as well as the possibility that they will have problematic secondary effects such as inducing conflict or spreading infectious disease.

The idea of resource wars is one that I think has been overstated and, to some extent, misunderstood. There are certainly resources that can and have been fought over, and resource issues frequently play a role in establishing the duration and character of conflicts. Armed groups with no economic base cannot long persist in the costly business of war-fighting. That said, the idea that states will go to war over something like water seems, in most cases, implausible. War is an exceptionally costly enterprise – much more so than new purification or desalination facilities. Also, most water problems arise from irrational patterns of usage, often themselves the product of a distorted cost structure. While equity compels that people should be provided with enough water for personal needs as a standard function of government, it simply makes sense that those using it on a very large scale pay for it at a level that accurately reflects the costs of production. If that happened, we would see a lot more drip-feed irrigation and a lot fewer leaky pipes. Some perspective is also in order: producing all of the world’s municipal water through oceanic desalination would cost only 0.5% of global GDP, and there is no reason to think that such a drastic step will ever be necessary.1

I am not saying that resources and conflict are unrelated: I am saying there is no reason to believe hyperbolic claims about the nature of international security being fundamentally altered by resource issues. It is also worth noting that conflicts over resources are often used as justifications to engage in actions that can be more sensibly explained by considering other causes.

Thinking about the environment as a security issue has implications both for prevention and mitigation behaviours. Because politicians and the general public place a special emphasis on matters of security, spinning the environment that way can be a form of rent seeking. Those who see the need to do more as pressing may find that this kind of resource transfer justifies selling the security side of the environment more than they otherwise would. On the mitigation side, it suggests that dealing with environmental problems may require forceful action to prevent or contain conflicts. Given the aforementioned costs of such actions, the case to take preventative action against probable but uncertain threats becomes even stronger.

[1] Shiklomanov, Igor A. “Appraisal and assessment of world water resources.” Water International. 25(1): 11-32. 2000

PS. People interested in the hydrosphere may enjoy reading the accessible and informative chapter on it in John McNeill’s Something New Under the Sun. this report from SOAS on water and the Arab-Israeli Conflict also makes some good points.

GoDaddy hosting trouble

Be warned, GoDaddy is having trouble with their servers again (especially the MySQL servers). This they confirmed when I called them a few minutes ago. Bits of the site keep popping in and out of existence, so bear with it while they continue to engage in whatever form of sorcery they have been building up towards for the last few days. All parts of the blog and wiki have been affected, and the tech support people say they don’t know when it will end.

“No, Donny, these men are nihilists, there’s nothing to be afraid of.”

During post-submission decompression, I have been reminded of what a brilliant film The Big Lebowski is. I have certainly seen it a dozen times, and will quite probably see it a dozen more times. Some of the lines in the film are priceless. Altogether, it is simply great storytelling, and a film I recommend to anyone with a sense of humour.

Looking at the Oxford experience of stress over time, it looks a great deal like an f(x)=tan(x) graph, if you disregard the portions in which the Y-axis is negative.

Introduction draft (v0.3) complete

Through the liberal application of Red Bull and Beethoven, a 4,802 word draft of my thesis introduction is ready to be dropped off tomorrow for my supervisor to read. I’ll give it one more read-over before printing it in the morning.

With seventy-seven days to go until submission, here is the state of the project:

Introduction: 4,802 words (5,477 with footnotes)
Chapter 2 – Problem identification and investigation: 2,753 words
Chapter 3 – Consensus formation in science and politics: 0 words
Chapter 4 – Remedy design and implementation 0 words
Conclusion: 0 words

Total: 7555 (25%)

Note: there are significant sections that were written in the old structure and have not found homes in the new structure yet. Most of them will land in Chapters 3 and 4.

My next chapter is due on February 28th. Just having the a draft introduction written makes me feel much more as though I am on top of this project, though parts of it will certainly need to be revised once the three substantive chapters have been written.

Tomorrow, I should also finish Kuhn and move on to Bernstein and Litfin. I also need to work out which bits of Haas need to be read most urgently.

[Update: 5 February 2007] I am starting to look forward to April, when the task will be to cut what I have written down to the correct length. (v0.4) of the introduction, which I just submitted, crept up to 5,018 words (5,894 with footnotes).

Thesis typeface: three options

While it may seem trivial to some, I do think it is worthwhile to put some effort into the selection of the font in which my thesis will be written and ultimately printed. For reasons of aesthetics and ease of reading, a fairly classical serif font is the sort being considered. Within that genre, there are three options I am considering most strongly at the moment.

Continue reading “Thesis typeface: three options”

Marshaling paragraphs

Library at the Oxford Union

Sorry to go on and on about the thesis, but for some reason it has been dominated my attention recently. It has now taken on the character of being much like those large maps of Europe on which officers push around little tanks with long wooden poles. The tanks are there, the terrain is there, but their positions with respect to one another keep changing. A section on the nature of environmental ‘problems’ is somewhere near the border between the introduction and the first substantive chapter. Other bits have yet to be deployed into the theatre of operations, despite being fairly well constituted in and of themselves. Others are like the fledgling brigades of the new Iraqi army: assembled, in some sense, but far from ready to operate as part of a larger operation.

The draft introduction being submitted tomorrow is best seen as a first attempt to deploy a coherent strategy, with plenty of bits to be filled out later. The central issue is working out a broad way by which to coordinate the operations of disparate units, so as to develop sensible (if not entirely comprehensive) coverage of the terrain in dispute.

[Update: 8:30pm] This evolving draft section from my thesis may also be of use to general readers of this blog: Appendix I: Glossary and Table of Acronyms For those times when you can’t keep remember what was happening when UNECE (part of ECOSOC) negotiated the CLRTAP to deal with POPs (including PCBs).

5.5 years in residence

Barring a few brief periods, I have now been living in university owned residences since September 2001: that is to say, five and a half years. First, it was a shared room in Totem (originally with a roommate who is now doing the M.Phil in Economics at Oxford, though who I did not speak to between when he moved out in December 2001 and when I first saw him here). Then, there was a single room in Totem Park and two stints in Fairview Crescent, one living with intolerable hockey players and another with a much more compatible crew. Between the Totem and Fairview periods, I lived for six weeks in the residence of L’Université de Montreal, while doing the Summer Language Bursary Program.

From September 2005 to April 2006, I lived in Library Court – part of Wadham College, Oxford – before moving out, largely on account of bad vegetarian food and inadequate and filthy kitchen facilities. Since then, I’ve been living with Alex and Kai in a flat below the Latin American Studies Centre, with a window looking out into our extremely large back yard, in north Oxford. The whole building belongs to St. Antony’s College, and it is to them that our termly payment of fine silks, wine, and a few head of cattle must be made.

On the basis of my experience, I can authoritatively reveal the best and worst things about institutionally owned residences. The best thing is the experience of living with fellow students, though, as the hockey debacle illustrates, that is hardly enough to make them kindred spirits. Also appealing is the cost structure: not so much that they are cheap, but that the prices are stable, you don’t have to haggle, and internet access and utilities are virtually always included. The worst things, from my point of view, are not having enough space for your books, living with walls so thin as to not muffle conversations at normal speaking volume (an education in itself, especially in Fairview), and the general requirement that you move quite frequently, further restricting the extent to which any space really becomes your own.

Within ten years, it is my hope that I will have a place to live where I have the space and confidence in long-term residence to justify unpacking and cataloging the books I have been picking up over these last two decades or so. That, and the chance to sleep on something other than a cheap single mattress. They never offer much in the way of back support.

Brief Oxford Union exploration

Antonia Mansel-Long in the Oxford Union

I made a first foray into the Oxford Union tonight. I really expected the whole place to resemble the smoky room where I imagine the Suez Canal seizure plan of 1956 to have been formulated. While the ground floor library had approximately the right feel, it was not, in fact, quite so ostentatious.

That said, it is probable that we of no political influence simply cannot access the parts of the building where future prime ministers are selected over cigars and snifters of brandy. I doubt that President Musharraf spent the time after his recent presentation in any of the rooms we ducked into.

Overall, the visit made me feel vindicated about choosing not to pay their ridiculous membership price.

Notes on a Scandal

Flower in the Oxford Botanical Gardens

To call Notes on a Scandal a ‘thriller,’ as many have done, is to strike close to the reasons for which I found it largely unsatisfying as a piece of cinematic work. While decently acted, the story just couldn’t justify the drama that the producers tried to spin around the story. It turned out more like an example of amplified tabloidism, rendered a bit surreal through the inappropriate Philip Glass soundtrack (though my sense that the music made the plot seem trivial may derive from how I associate Glass inescapably with the bombing scenes in The Fog of War).

While the film was not without interesting elements – how a narrator can both be exceptionally aware of the workings of the world around her and profoundly ignorant of how others perceive her – they are ultimately not enough to redeem it as a piece of storytelling. If you’re going to make a film about people violating societal taboos, they ought not be so wishy-washy about it. Nobody wants an uncommitted, neurotic villain, nor one with no particular artfulness through which to be redeemed.