Warlords, Inc.

by Noah Raford

  Nevertheless, we are still at an incomplete stage of global jurisdiction, with many lawless and law-deficient zones and some national jurisdictions, such as tax havens, that do not meet emerging global norms. From a global perspective, the existing situation is not systemically coherent, and the incoherencies become weaknesses that are easy to exploit asymmetrically.

  These weaknesses—which include such things as social injustice, inequity, and corruption—will not be addressed by reverting to the modes of an earlier stage but rather by more fully adopting the modes that are emerging. Warlords will not be countered by increasing firepower or arming all sides or even by waging war, because these things have become self-defeating for everyone—including the warlords themselves. In the long run, this is the message of the end of war.

  The warlords who hold sway in the global badlands are one aspect of incomplete global integration and represent a kind of litmus test for what needs to be done. The end of war means that a fully integrated world cannot be brought about by war among nations or even by a zero-sum competition of interests among nations (the old mode of diplomacy). Instead, if nation-states are to remain effective, they will find that their only viable forward role is as leading actors in enabling global integration.

  Warlords can develop asymmetric power either where conventional modes of operating by nations are failing under new conditions, a situation which might be called functional asymmetry, or where the conventional modes are not delivering on their implicit promises about outcomes, which might be called moral asymmetry. The end of war creates functional asymmetries if nations continue to pursue conventional activities such as global marketing of light weapons. And the implicit promise in industrial societies of steadily improving economic well-being and social justice means that exploitable moral asymmetries will be created if, say, income polarization in national economies continues to grow.

  To remove these asymmetries—and defuse the power of warlords—nation-states will have to act in a way that recognizes and delivers the promise of full global integration. They will have to be explicit about the social promise of a global society—and live up to it. This will mean developing a new “non-zero” meta-narrative about the benefits of cooperation to replace the existing “zero-sum” or winner-takes-all national rivalry. Nations need not lose their identity or their (already declining) autonomy, but they will certainly need to de-emphasize their self-defeating preparations for war and redirect their attention and resources to delivering on the values that give them social legitimacy.

  Full global integration can only be achieved by following a new narrative of mutual predicament and shared interest. It will be too complex to hold together based on coercion and exploitation. It must be about the whole, and it must work for everyone. It must be centered on the principles of personal freedom and systemic coherence, and it must reflect democratic principles and processes.

  Positive counterinsurgency in the global badlands must be tied to this new narrative. The security narrative of nation-states can no longer be about maintaining order elsewhere, as there is no “elsewhere” in a global society. To bring order to the badlands, global society must be brought into being. This too is essentially the message of the blowback from the War on Terror—that the clash of civilizations must be disarmed before the end of history can arrive.

  This will be a hard, counterintuitive lesson for nations: as the world moves toward global integration, the actors who will withstand the tide of history are going to be those who abandon war. If nations can do this, it will immediately give them an advantage over the warlords, draining the swamp by removing moral and functional asymmetries. Conversely, if nations attempt to justify continued war preparations—particularly if they resort to amoral measures such as false-flag operations—they will place themselves on the wrong side of history and will ultimately lose, not least by creating moral asymmetries for new “white hat” actors to employ.

  There is, in fact, no shortage of white hats. Civil society is busy pioneering the development of many of the positive, globally directed initiatives that nations could promote if they were to redirect existing defense budgets. From social enterprises to sophisticated skills in conflict resolution, the ideas and the means for transcending conflict are already available.

  It is said that without a vision, the people perish, and this will be true of both nations and people who cannot follow the new story of global integration. Perhaps the ultimate security message conveyed by this vision is that as long as there is war in the human heart, there will be war in human society. A change for the better is ultimately possible only if we have reached the point where each one of us is willing to allow compassion for our extended human family to take the place of all the hatreds, large and small, we harbor within us.

  12 The White Hats

  A Multitude of Citizens

  Paul Hilder

  An open society can be only as virtuous as the people living in it.

  —George Soros, 2008

  In environments of chaos and disruption, where law and order fall away, only one thing counts: power. Raw force is the most obvious currency. Violence, money, or fear seem to hold sway.

  Yet power in its essence is not first and foremost about what you can do to someone else. At its most fundamental level, power is not a warlord’s gun or a superior’s command. It is an invisible web of social relationships and expectations, a force field of trust, identity, and belief.

  What Is Social Power?

  Power is social before it is political, military, or economic. We all have social power, even if we don’t realize it. This power is constantly being reshaped, both collectively and individually, and social power can be used not just for ill but also for good. Ideas of networked social power underlie disciplines as diverse as social marketing, counterinsurgency, financial trading, nonviolent conflict, or governance.

  Everything begins with us: with people and our relationships. “Civil society” is perhaps most visible in peaceful revolutions. But social power and civil society are not absent in uncivil societies, nor are they dormant in mature, institutional democracies. They simply operate differently.

  Often you will not see social power unless you know where to look. But when you know what to look for, you’ll see it everywhere: in a bustling market square, in opinion polls about support for military forces or government policies, in a revelatory article and the way it spreads through social media, even in the way our children are educated—and in the things they say when they come home from school.

  In chaotic, tipping-point situations, the leverage of individual social actors and groups can be extraordinary. This power is too seldom recognized or understood today by most mainstream analysts of conflict, complex emergencies, and fragile governance, just as it is often ignored by market regulators and government officials.

  This gap of understanding is dangerous. It impoverishes our collective understanding of the threats to public good, and it leaves most people, including most politicians and policymakers, ignorant of the genuine wealth of resources available for positive social change. It also leaves some particularly fascinating social actors and networks operating in the shadows, without the transparency and accountability we need to ensure that they live up to their full potential as public servants. But most importantly, when citizens themselves do not understand their potential power, they cannot use it well.

  Social power is the most influential, least understood, and most potentially transformative force in the world today. Only if it can be better mobilized will humankind be able to drive the progress and develop the resilience we urgently need to navigate the coming decades.

  I believe it is time to shine the full light of day on citizens as transformational agents for change, to help many more people discover this possibility in themselves, and to help the democratic potential of social power be fully realized.

  White Hats Versus Warlord Entrepreneurs

  As a small contribution to that wider
project, this essay seeks to sketch the outlines of a group which, to use an old Western cowboy metaphor, we might call the “white hats”—the private diplomats, social and political entrepreneurs, and the growing multitude of citizens and organizations of global civil society. Sometimes they stand as the last bulwark against a tide of chaos. Sometimes they may just offer one of the best hopes we have for building a better tomorrow. I believe warlord entrepreneurs play a huge part in our world today, and a growing one. But I also see growing numbers of white hats riding out to surround them.

  Heroic storytelling is a powerful art. Most serious official analysis tends to focus on the placid valleys of official governance or on the transactional dimension of formal institutions. As the natural complement to this civilized scholarship, almost fetishistic amounts of media attention are paid to the “black hats”—uncivil actors such as al-Qaeda or the Movement for the Emancipation of the Niger Delta (MEND). Meanwhile, a slew of arguments—such as Robert Kaplan’s The Coming Anarchy—have been written to describe the frontier-lands between our civilization and the barbarians. If these are frontier-lands, the logic follows, conflict must be inevitable.

  History has not ended after all, we are told. Today, the twenty-first century and the stone age coexist—divided by thousands of miles, but connected by a globalized web of shipments of people and goods, information and ideas, and increasingly advanced technologies, which dissolves boundaries.

  This story has, at its heart, an idea of polarized and radically different social worlds: order necessarily finds itself opposed to chaos, and our heroes are the champions of a just order, fighting that chaos out on the frontier. Combined with the reality of extraordinary interdependence and potential vulnerability, it is a storyline that powerfully reinforces the defensive reactions of our market states, our national dreams, and our fortress identities—from Texas to Kandahar.

  This narrative is persuasive, and it is powerful. But it is also a dangerous and divisive lie. Two variants are “the clash of civilizations” or “the global war on terror”—tales that have been told from different angles not only by American foreign policy and military analysts like Robert Kaplan but also by frontier strategists like al-Qaeda’s Ayman al-Zawahiri.

  But the notion of the warlord entrepreneur has considerably broader explanatory power than may be obvious at first glimpse, including in market democracies. The people brokering and capturing flows of power in the undergoverned spaces of the world are not only figures like Palestinian liberation leader Yasser Arafat; Pakistani nuclear scientist A. Q. Khan; Jomo Gbomo, the shamanic spokesman of the MEND militants in Nigeria;1 or Osama bin Laden.

  The rather more interesting truth is that today there are countless warlord entrepreneurs living in the heart of Western democracies. They are taking pragmatic advantage of the undergoverned spaces in our most “sophisticated” and well-developed countries, as well as in some of the world’s poorest countries. They are taking freewheeling advantage of the undergoverned spaces of global power and markets. And they keep their eyes peeled for all kinds of opportunities.

  We have financial warlords like Lloyd Blankfein of Goldman Sachs, whose activities both in the lead-up to the 2008 crash and through the ensuing years of financial turbulence have appropriately come under increasing scrutiny. We have commodity warlords like the secretive trading companies who control a large proportion of the flows of the world’s food and raw materials. We have entertainment warlords like Rupert Murdoch or like Sepp Blatter, who now stands almost unopposed at the helm of a multi-billiondollar advertising and licensing empire, FIFA, having captured huge rents from the love of soccer felt by billions of people worldwide. And we have countless governmental, military, and security warlords scattered across a spectrum between public accountability and brutal self-interest.

  When the ideal of democracy seems like a distant dream, it may not always be easy to hold fast to. But it remains essential. Civil society and democracy are fundamental pillars of human growth and sustained flourishing. They can ground and harness the turmoil of self-interested energies, channeling entrepreneurial energy for the common good. But civil society, democracy, and the rule of law are far from fully realized, even in the heart of the West.

  Anyone seeking to build a better future must understand these basic facts. We cannot allow ourselves to be diverted by either the turbulent dramas of the frontier or the cozy stories that media-saturated market democracies tell us about our own order and safety. Most of our world is constructed close to home, by the warlords at the core of our world—not by the warlords of the periphery.

  The white hats, the agents of change that I will describe here, frequently pit themselves against the warlords who build their fortresses in market democracies and offshore havens. They seek to change the warlords’ behavior or to hold them accountable for their misdeeds. White hats sometimes operate on the geographic frontier, against those warlords of the periphery, but their role is equally important in the undergoverned spaces of so-called civilization.

  In this essay, I introduce a handful of white hat actors, focusing on two extremes of the white hat spectrum, of which I have some personal experience: private diplomacy and mass organizing. There is, of course, a rich landscape that connects these two extremes: social innovators and entrepreneurs, community organizers and bridge builders, democrats, writers, revolutionaries, consultants in business and market transformation, and architects of new governance.

  I have no space here to properly describe the fascinating activities of the white hat warlords (and yes, some warlords wear white hats), be they philanthropists like George Soros and Jeff Skoll, spymasters-turned-politicians like Israel’s Ami Ayalon, or social business magnates like Bangladesh’s Muhammad Yunus, who created the Grameen Bank—which prospered in microfinance thanks to its rootedness in social power and social benefit—and who has won enemies for his pains. There is a wealth of fascinating stories to be told about them. Soros alone is an extraordinary and ambiguous character: the speculator who crashed the pound out of the European Exchange Rate Mechanism and the donor who helped midwife peaceful revolutions in Eastern Europe. He has a deep understanding of social power, which is the golden thread connecting his financial-investment doctrine to his philanthropy, writing, and political views. And his worldwide network includes countless other figures—for example, Rob Johnson, a talented musician who helped organize the savings-and-loan restructure as a U.S. Senate staffer before working in the Quantum Fund, then helped organize the U.S. Democracy Alliance of progressive funders, and, most recently, set up the influential Institute for New Economic Thinking (with Soros backing) to help rebuild the disciplines of economics and global financial governance.

  What follows is unavoidably biographical—and autobiographical. Some of these white hats I have worked with; others’ stories I heard of at second or third hand. I will also suggest a few lessons learned. Take it with a pinch of salt. Every concept needs practical illustration, and every illustration is slanted. Nobody’s hat is entirely white.

  Lone Rangers and Badgeless Sheriffs

  In The Shield of Achilles, the American constitutional and military scholar Philip Bobbitt tells the story of a novel published in 1912, entitled Philip Dru: Administrator. The novel is dedicated to “the unhappy many who have lived and died lacking opportunity because, in the starting, the world-wide social structure was wrongly begun.” For those familiar with the libertarian legacy of Ayn Rand’s Atlas Shrugged, Philip Dru may be something of an antidote. (Since this essay was first written, interestingly enough, the U.S. Tea Party talk radio warlord Glenn Beck discovered Philip Dru and decided to place it at the heart of his fantastical demonology of liberal conspiracies.)

  The story runs as follows: Philip Dru is a young, idealistic graduate of West Point. He becomes a syndicated writer, drawing public awareness to social injustices and proposing solutions. Meanwhile, a political Machiavelli, Senator Selwyn, has conspired with robber-baron financier John Thor (a sta
nd-in for J. P. Morgan) to control the government through a huge political slush fund, which they manipulate to corrupt senators and an apparently progressive president.

  When this scandal is leaked to the press, the president’s recall is demanded, and a civil war breaks out. Philip Dru becomes a revolutionary general, takes over Washington, and decrees a series of democratic and progressive reforms. He reimposes control over corporate elites; creates rights to union membership, pensions, and unemployment insurance; and negotiates a world federation of peaceful democratic states. Finally, Dru refuses to stand in the elections he has organized, and he sails off into the sunset with the love of his life. Philip Dru is a utopian white hat fantasy of a citizen taking action to transform his own society, then stepping modestly back into private life.

  Why, in a world-historical tome of constitutional realpolitik that begins with Thucydides and the rise of the Westphalian era before chronicling the rise and fall of the dreams of multilateralism, international law, and world peace, does Philip Bobbitt spend any time on this fiction? Because, as it turns out, Philip Dru: Administrator was almost certainly authored by Colonel Edward Mandell House, President Wilson’s informal advisor and closest ally, and a man who has a strong claim to be one of the principal architects of the modern ideals of collective security, international law, and global civil society.