This is by no means an easy read but its bottom-line (bearing in mind that the author has been writing many books on this theme, this is the latest) is clear: Sound Mind in a Sound Body. Others would add Sound Soul and Sound Heart at well. In other words, the mind is carried in the host, the body, and the totality of the nervous system, the skeletal system, the muscle system, the bio-chemical soup system, are all critical to how well the mind functions and how well the mind — including the unconscious — heals in the aftermath of trauma.
5.0 out of 5 starsPioneering Work, Deserves a Great Deal of Attention, April 29, 2013
I am shocked that there are no reviews of this book. Brought to my attention by Berto Jongman, one of the top researchers in Europe with a special talent at the intersection of terrorism and related violence (e.g. genocide) and Open Source Intelligence (OSINT), he knew this is an area that is of very high interest to me.
The book passed my very first test, with more than ample references to Dr. Patrick Meier, a pioneer in crisis mapping, SMS translations and plotting by diasporas, and humanitarian ICT generally. I strongly recommend his blog and expect him to produce a book of his own soon.
The primary focus here is on social media via hand-held devices. It assumes a working Internet and does not have a great deal of focus on the urgency of achieving an Autonomous Internet, and more fully exploiting Liberation Technology and Open Source Everything (OSE), the latter my special interest along with M4IS2 (Multinational, Multiagency, Multidisciplinary, Multidomain Information-Sharing and Sense-Making).
Use Inside the Book to see the chapters and appendices. The author makes clear two major points early on:
01 Grassroots is where its at, not top down macro
02 Technology alone is not enough, organizing — the hard long road of grassroots organizing — is essential.
Backpacks Full of Hope: The UN Mission in Haiti describes the experience of a Chilean general as Deputy Force Commander of the United Nations Stabilization Mission in Haiti (MINUSTAH) during the particularly turbulent year September 2005 to September 2006. It details the realities of commanding more than 7,000 men from eleven countries while working to fulfill the mandate of the United Nations in Haiti—to ensure a secure and stable environment, to support the transitional government in a democratic political process, and to promote and protect the human rights of the Haitian people.
Despite the enormous challenges of a complex scenario that included local violence and extreme poverty, the UN command succeeded in its mission, stabilizing the local situation and paving the way for Haiti to hold a presidential election.
Originally published as Mision en Haiti, con la mochila cargada de esperanzas, this work provides a new audience with insight on the peace operation and sheds light on the long-term endeavour of civilians, military, and local and international agencies to support Haiti’s path to prosperity.
Top of the Fives, A Bold Departure Elegantly Executed
August 25, 2010
Erik Assadourian et al
I've become someone jaundiced about the State of the World series, while always respecting the persistence of Lester Brown (Peter Drucker called people like us “mono-maniacs” essential as change agents), but this one knocked me off my seat just with the table of contents. From there I went to the Notes and saw a number of books new to me. You can visit Phi Beta Iota the Public Intelligence Blog to see the 1,600+ that I have reviewed, sorted into 98 non-fiction categories.
My first note:
A triumph, the most interesting, diverse, and relevant of the series to date. A bold departure, “just in time.”
The book opens with a timeline over multiple pages with illustrations, and the notes are worthy. The timeline is compelling broad view that I found very helpful, and would like to see more of.
It's a real shame this book is not being represented properly on Amazon, in part because the UK publisher is just not geared up for the US audience. This is an important book. Below is the author's summary as appeared in TimesOnline 25 April 2010.
Easy money: the great aid scam
Foreign aid is big business and much of it simply vanishes. In a devastating new book, we reveal how millions are lost to waste, corrupt local officials and warlords who realise more blood means more money
In the swimming pool beside the neatly laid tables at the Mamba Point restaurant in Freetown, white women were doing aerobics and the conference hall was hosting a seminar called “The Traumatised Child”. Mantovani's strings played, ice cubes tinkled in our wine glasses and waiters slunk about with steaming platters.
It was summer 2002, a year after the signing of the peace accord that ended Sierra Leone's vicious civil war. We had steak — on the menu at 47,000 leones, or 15. That was over half a month's salary for the waiters serving us, the Unicef representative to my left told me.
For three full years Sierra Leone had been the darling of international donors and humanitarian organisations. Where all that money was going puzzled me, since the United Nations Development Programme (UNDP) had recently declared Sierra Leone, yet again, to be the world's poorest country.
“How do people actually survive here?” I asked my dining companions. They all burst into ebullient laughter. “Juju!” they cried in unison — sorcery. “Come on, let's pop another bottle of wine, guys,” the European commission representative shouted above the jovial hubbub.
Related Links
Haiti hell continues months after quake
Charity insiders know the score. “There's a market for good works, and it's big business. Call it the `moral economy' if you like,” says Nicholas Stockton, a former emergencies director of Oxfam.
We see what looks like one big happy family moving in concert into crisis zones to ease human suffering, but the most powerful link between humanitarian aid agencies is that of commercial competition. It's certainly a long time since the relief of suffering was carried out by people wearing sandals; now they dress in sharp business suits. Organisations that want to remain competitive need to know all about integrated marketing strategies, cost-benefit analyses and competitive incentives.
Those that fail to put in an appearance at each new humanitarian disaster miss out on contracts for the implementation of aid projects financed by donor governments and institutions, and are bypassed by competing organisations that do show up. Whether it's the construction and supply of refugee camps and orphanages, the repair of bombed roads and buildings, the re-education of child soldiers, or the inoculation of entire populations against polio, the non-governmental organisations (NGOs) that send official donors the most competitive bids for the huge amount of work involved will come out on top.
Start-up costs in distant, crisis-hit countries are sky-high. Aid organisations have to recruit and hire staff, rent and furnish housing and office space, and bring in Land Cruisers, aid supplies, satellite dishes, computers, air-conditioners, office equipment and generators. Once at work in a “humanitarian territory”, NGOs have to ensure they can remain active there for at least as long as it takes to earn back their investments.
The big handsome hero of a Nigerian soap shown on television all over west Africa isn't a pilot or a fireman but a project leader for Unicef. In every scene, the broad-shouldered hunk parades about in a dazzling outfit while beautiful women squirm at his feet. After all, a civil servant or local chief attached to an NGO project as an adviser or supervisor can earn a salary dozens of times higher than normal — and local administrators can easily “supervise” many competing projects simultaneously.
The relevance, quality and results of aid projects are not a priority. A co-ordinator for the European commission in west Africa explained to me: “The things local officials weigh up are: will they get access to imported aid supplies, training, study trips, per diems and people needing to rent houses and vehicles? Will an aid project put them in a position to hand out jobs to brothers and cousins? If the answer is no, it may take a very long time to get the necessary permits.”
A story I'd just told him about a wheelchair project in Liberia had made him feel even more dispirited. Medical NGOs had arranged for a batch of wheelchairs to be flown in, to ease the sufferings of war invalids. The chairs turned up in the streets of Monrovia modified into ice-cream carts and mobile shops. Vendors who had nothing wrong with their legs were using the chairs, while amputees went on dragging themselves on their hands and knees through the filthy streets. Local government workers had distributed the wheelchairs among their own kith and kin, who in turn had rented them out to small-time entrepreneurs.
The growing number of aid organisations and the rising value of the aid supplies and services they deliver to warring countries make humanitarian aid an increasingly important supplement to war chests: countries with no other sources of income turn the aid industry, supposedly neutral and unbiased, into a potentially lethal force that the belligerents need to enlist.
Take the $825m aid operation in Darfur, which in 2008 was reckoned by the UN to be the most expensive in the world. In March 2009, the International Criminal Court (ICC) issued an arrest warrant for the Sudanese president, Omar al-Bashir for playing an “essential role” in the murder, rape, torture, pillaging and displacement of a large number of civilians in Darfur. He faces the charge of crimes against humanity — yet the NGOs in Sudan are still the milch cows of Bashir's state apparatus.
An employee of an American NGO explained to me how it works. “It's an open secret among UN organisations and NGOs that the government earns several million dollars a quarter on visas, travel permits, work permits for humanitarians and permit extensions. Entering Sudan costs. Leaving Sudan: ditto.
“To set up an NGO you need approval from the Ministry of Humanitarian Affairs, whose minister was also indicted by the ICC for crimes against humanity. At every stage of the application process, you pay again. It drives me wild that the `humanitarian community' is so spineless in its dealings with the regime. If there was some collective spirit, we might be able to avoid becoming, in effect, sub-branches of the Sudan state.” But there isn't.
Only 30 minutes after the ICC ordered the arrest of President Bashir, the regime retaliated with an order for 13 NGOs to leave immediately. Oxfam GB lost £5m, £2m of it in possessions and accounts. Médecins sans Frontières admitted to having lost 2m (£1.7m). But none of the NGOs or the donor governments protested — they all hoped to be allowed to return to Sudan.
Meanwhile, between 2001, when the war on terror began, and 2008, more than 60 donor governments allocated a total of more than $15 billion to aid for Afghanistan — but exactly where the money ended up is unclear. Neither the donors nor their NGOs dare to visit the projects they finance. The result is an unfathomable channelling of aid billions that is highly susceptible to fraud.
Clinics never actually built, girls' schools where only boys are taught — everyone in Afghanistan can give examples of aid projects that have been financed but not realised. The majority of western NGOs never venture outside Kabul. Instead, they subcontract local and other NGOs to implement their projects, which in turn engage further subcontractors. A total of four intermediate organisations, each creaming off a portion, is common. Steadily seeping away, project finance passes from hand to hand until finally someone gets down to bricklaying, carpentry or ploughing. In the intervening stages, effective supervision of budgets is impossible.
CorpWatch, an independent research institute that investigates and exposes corporate fraud and corruption around the world, eventually managed to trace what had happened to the $15m USAID had earmarked for the building of a road from Kabul to Kandahar in the south. The money turned out to have been transferred from USAID, via the UN, to an American company that hired a Turkish roadbuilder. Each intermediate layer absorbed between 6% and 20% of the project funding, so that in the end only cheap, inferior materials could be purchased. According to CorpWatch, the stretch of tarmac that resulted was barely any improvement on the unsealed road it replaced.
At any given moment, several thousand aid projects are under way in Afghanistan. Jean Mazurelle, former director of the World Bank in Kabul, estimated that 35%-40% of all international aid to Afghanistan is “wrongly spent”. “In Afghanistan, the wastage of aid is sky-high: there is real looting going on. In the 30 years of my career, I've never seen anything like it,” he said.
When asked, aid workers and donors naturally say they control what happens to the money. But an Afghan accountant who carries out spot checks on control methods for USAID thinks this is highly unlikely. “I can tell one Afghan's handwriting from another's, but foreigners only see squiggles and dots. Sometimes I'm shown 150 receipts with the same signature,” she said. And photographs of USAID projects? “I sometimes see pictures of exactly the same project with different donors. Aid groups are happy to be financed three times over. After all, the donors don't come and look.”
This systematic lack of control of aid funding has been nicknamed “Afghaniscam”. Not only do Afghan racketeers rake off aid money unhindered, but in some areas Taliban fighters are able to use unsupervised aid funding to strengthen and expand their popular support.
The 21st-century aid business is booming as never before. And it's increasingly lucrative — which is why the 2001 announcement that Sierra Leone had once again been named the world's poorest country was the occasion for a festive gathering in Freetown. The poorest countries, you see, are eligible for enormous, special international aid programmes.
The cream of Freetown society had gathered to toast this dubious first prize in a conference room at a recently opened luxury hotel, the property of a Chinese investor. The vice-president handed a copy of the UNDP report to his president, “Pa” Kabbah, who waved it triumphantly. “Nice hotel, this,” the vice-president said. “But it gives foreigners the wrong idea. They'll start thinking we're a country of comfort and luxury.” The guests nodded in agreement.
Further along the same Freetown road is the Mammy Yoko hotel, currently serving as the HQ of the UN mission in Sierra Leone. That day, negotiations about a ceasefire were taking place there between the rebel movement, the Revolutionary United Front (RUF), and donor governments.
The RUF delegation seemed to consist of wiry teenagers. A month ago, they had still been prowling the bush; now they strolled in oversized western suits to the UN dining room. Now and then, they slapped each other on the back and laughed loudly, the way they'd seen important international functionaries do. The coastal strip, a quarter of the country, was under the control of UN blue helmets. The remaining three-quarters of Sierra Leone, a region of jungle and diamonds, would be left in the hands of at least four warring parties until an accord was signed. No matter: the international peace negotiators were more than prepared to meet RUF demands, since donor governments want to see results.
Many experts dismissed the warriors in Sierra Leone's bush as drug-fuelled maniacs, but some suspected that a rational, calculated strategy lay behind their destructive frenzy, which left 200,000 dead. They suggested it was a deliberate attempt to drive up the price of peace.
From the viewpoint of the warriors, the logic of the humanitarian era is simple. Without violence and devastation, no aid. And the more ghastly the violence and the more complete the devastation, the more comprehensive the aid.
EDIT of 7 Jan 09. I got halfway through another book last night and now understand the Princeton-based idea that the US has enough power to demand changes and that earlier “balance of power” constraints might not apply. On the one hand, this is an idea worth pursuing, but if you know nothing of strategy, intelligence (decision-support) and how to integrate Whole of Government and Multinational Engagement campaigns against the ten threats by harmonizing the twelve policies and engaging the eight demographic leaders, then this is just academic blabber. On the other hand, this is 100% on the money–if the USA were a Smart Nation with an honest government, now is the time to lead–but it's not going to come out of the ivory tower or politicals in waiting for their next job, it will come from the bottom (Epoch B), the poor, and the eight demographic powers (Brazil, China, India, Indonesia, Iran, Russia, Venezuela, and Wild Cards such as South Africa, Thailan, and Turkey, with the Nordics and BENELUX always lurking positively on the fringes.
Original review:
I tried hard to find enough in this book to warrant five stars, but between the pedestrian threats, buying in blindly to the climate change fraud, assertions such as “There is no prospect for international stability and prosperity in the next twenty years that does not rest on U.S. power and leadership,” and the general obliviousness of the authors to multiple literatures highly relevant to their ostensible objective of answering the question “how do we organize our globalized world,” this has to stay a four. It has some worthwhile bits that I itemize below, but on balance this is an annoying book, part cursory overview, part grand-standing proposals for new organizations, and part job application–at least one of these authors wants to be the first High Commissioner for Counter-Terrorism.
Had the author's actually sought to tailor their suggestions to the above elegant threat architecture, this could have been a much more rewarding book. As it is, it strikes me as a book written around a few ideas:
As a publisher who is also an author, I continue to be outraged by the prices being charged for “trade” publications. This book is properly-priced–other books on GIS I would have bought are priced at three to four times their actual value, thus preventing the circulation of that knowledge. Those publishers that abuse authors and readers refuse to respect the reality that affordably priced books are essential to the dissemination of knowledge and the perpetuation of the publishing industry.
The book loses one star for refusing to address Google Earth and elements of the Google offering in this industry space. While Google is predatory and now under investigation by the anti-trust division of the Department of Justice, to ignore Google and its implications for cloud management of data in geospatial, time, and other cross- cutting contests, is the equivalent of poking one eye out to avoid seeing an approaching threat.
Having said that, I found this book from ESRI charming, useful, and I recommend it very highly, not least because it is properly priced and very well presented. Potential clients of ESRI can no doubt get bulk deliver of this volume for free.
Return on Investment factors that ESRI highlights up front include:
+ Cost and times savings
+ Increased efficiency, accuracy, productivity of existing resources
+ Revenue generation
+ Enhanced communications and collaboration
+ Automated workflows
+ More efficient allocation of new resources
+ Improved access to information.
The book consists of very easy-to-read and very well-illustrated small case studies, most previously published in Government Matters, which appears to be a journal (there are a number listed by that title).
Here are the highlights of this book for me personally:
+ Allows for PUBLIC visualization of complex data
+ Framework for “seeing” historical data and trends
+ Value of map-based dialog [rather than myth-based assertions]
+ Allows for the visualization of competing perspectives past and future
+ Illuminated land population dynamics, I especially like being able to see “per capita” calculations in visual form, especially when per capita can also be sliced by age, sex, income, religion, race, and so on.
+ Mapping derelict vessels underwater is not just a safety function, but opens the way for volunteer salvage and demolition
+ GROWS organically by attracting new data contributors who can “see” the added value of contributing their data and then being able to see their data and everyone else's data in geospatial terms. This is a POWERFUL incentive for information-sharing, which more often than not receives lip service. GIS for me is the “key” to realizing sharing across all boundaries while also protecting individual privacy
+ Shows “pockets” of need by leveraging data gaps in relation to known addresses (e.g. immunizations, beyond 5 minute fire response, etc.)'
+ Gives real meaning to “Intelligence Preparation of the Battlefield (IPB)” and–not in this book–offers enormous potential if combined with a RapidSMS web database that can received text messages from hundreds of thousands of individuals across a region
+ Eliminates the time-energy cost of data collection in hard copy and processing of the individual pages into an aggregate database.
The book discusses GIS utility in the routing of hazardous materials, but avoids the more explosive (pun intended) value of GIS in showing the public as well as government officials where all the HAZMAT is complacently stored now. For a solid sense of the awaiting catastrophe, see my review of The Next Catastrophe: Reducing Our Vulnerabilities to Natural, Industrial, and Terrorist Disasters.
The book also avoids any discussion of the urgency as well as the value of GIS in tracking and reducing natural resource consumption (e.g. water usage visible to all house by house), and the enormous importance of rapidly making it possible for any and all organizations to channel their data into shared GIS-based aggregations. For a sense of World Brain as EarthGame, see my chapter in Collective Intelligence: Creating a Prosperous World at Peace the chapter is also free online at the OSS.Net, Inc. website forward slash CIB.
The latter remind me that GIS will not blossom fully until it can help the humanities deal with emotions, feelings, and perceptions across tribal and cultural boundaries. Right now, 23 years after I first worked with GIS in the Office of Information Technology at CIA, GIS is ready for the intermediate leap forward: helping multinational multiagency data sets come together. ESRI has earned deep regard from me with this book and I will approach them about a new book aimed at the UN, NGOs, corporations, and governments that wish to harmonize data and in so doing, harmonize how they spend across any given region, e.g. Africa. This will be the “master leap” for GIS, enabling the one billion rich to respond to micro-needs from the five billion poor, while also increasing the impact of aggregated orchestrated giving by an order of magnitude.
Top of the Fives, A Bold Departure Elegantly Executed
Short Article from the Author, April 28, 2010
Bubba Book
