New York- I have a few new-ish academic citations I want to post here on the blog this week. It means the world to me that my frontline work lives on in academia and the think-tank world in part because of the immense physical (and mental) risks I’ve taken throughout my career. I put my life on the line for these stories in part because I believe it’s crucial that outsiders bear witness to armed conflicts that are either little understood from afar or misunderstood entirely when skewed narratives are aggressively propagated by powers with vested interests in their kinetic continuity.
My fieldwork in Kirkuk governorate, was cited in this December 2019 report by the Wshington-based Center for Civilians in Conflict (CIVIC). The report discusses the challenges civilians face when caught between the IS insurgency and a heavy handed approach by Iraqi security forces in the wake of their war against the former. Anyone who knows Iraq knows that the Kirkuk problem’ as I’ll refer to it is Iraq’s most intractable internal territorial issue. An urban centre of Arabs, Türkmen, and of course Kurds that is rich in energy wealth but desperately lacking in development, much less and long term political settlement between Baghdad and Erbil, means that the city and its eponymous surrounding governorate has languished in dispute for decades. Quelling it with the use of domestic hard power only causes sentiments to painfully simmer.
In June of this year my work in northern Iraq was also cited by The Journal of National Security & Law Policy. The article “From Treaties to Tweets: The (In)Formality of War Termination:” poses some incredibly relevant points to the overall strategic ambiguity of the terror wars since 9/11. It discusses how the wars of the 21st century either end with a unilateral declaration by one of the belligerents or don’t really end at all. In this era, most wars don’t end with a formal negotiated treaty where one side lays down its arms while the other declares a qualitative, perceptible victory.
This research paper, whether intentionally or not, gets at the very heart of not just the vague nature of the terror wars in contrast with the great wars of the 20th century, but at the the indirect, passive aggressive nature of the social media age we’re all awkwardly living in. World leaders take to Tiwitter/X before picking up the phone and calling one another at a time when stepped up diplomacy is direly needed. Rather than the purported utopian ideals of big tech’s founders espousing social media’s pairing with an internet democratic and dencentralised in nature, social media often acts as an accelerator for the most anti-democratic state and non-state actors in the world at present.
One can argue, quite cogently I might add, that much of the “expanding” ideology of IS in Iraq and Syria was incubated on social media platforms that did nothing to reign in its genocidal agenda. In fact these northern California-based profited handsomely from the carnage. Those black banners and prisoners in orange jumpsuits dominated my Twitter feed for years as recruits from Trinidad to Türkmenistan poured into its phony caliphate to murder Iraqis and Syrians en masse. Could this phenomenon have happened without social media? Yes. Could it have scaled up the way it did devoid of social media? Absolutely not.
And lastly my work in Mali in 2012 was cited in this report on Ansar Dine (alt/ Ansar Eddine) published by the Berlin-based Berghof Foundation in 2019. In the wake of the collapse on the Libyan state in 2011 and the extrajudicial execution of its flamboyant dictator, a significant portion of the neighbouring Malian state collapsed the following year. Both ethno-nationalist and salafi-jihadi Tuareg groups overwhelmed Kidal, Timbuktu (alt. TTombouctou), and Gao regions in the country’s vast, desert north later triggering a French military intervention in an effort to stabilise the then rump state in Bamako by the formal colonial power.
The paper posits scenarios for de-escalation involving dialogue, optimal negotiated outcomes with the leaders of hostile armed groups such Iyad ag Ghaly of Ansar Dine, and DDR programmes aimed at disarming rebels and attempting to bring them back into non-violent society. Discovering this piece 5 years on is, in a manner, a bit sad because things in Mali have worsened to a degree to where the era in which I worked there seems comparatively innocent. Western forces have since been expelled by the junta that overthrew the elected government in Bamako in 2021, only to be replaced by Russian mercenaries of the loathsome Wagner Group. Salafi-jihadi violence in Mali, Burkina Faso, and Niger has exploded as has the increase in civilian casualties in the messy COIN tactics employed by Russian PMC guns-for-hire.
