Journal of Rising Powers | Summer 2017 by Modern Diplomacy

â&#x20AC;&#x153;The society that separates its scholars from its warriors will have its thinking done by cowards and its fighting by foolsâ&#x20AC;? Thucydides

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a global south policy initiative vol 1, issue 2, summer 2017

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THE DIPLOMATIQUE INTERNATIONALE OF SEINFELD DR. MATTHEW CROSSTON

CAN THE DRC STOP THE NEXT EBOLA OUTBREAK? SAMANTHA MALOOF SUDAN SEEKS CLOSER COOPERATION WITH RUSSIA KESTER KENN KLOMEGAH CHINA'S TRANSFORMING AFRICA BY THE RAIL OR OFF THE TRAIL JOSEPH NDUNGU AFRICANS RISING: THE TIME FOR ACTION IS NOW CLEAN ENERGY IN SOUTH ASIA AND BEYOND MAHMUDUL HASAN

THAILAND AND THE INEQUALITY CHALLENGES RATTANA LAO INDIA, MYANMAR AND THE INDO-PACIFIC ECONOMIC CORRIDOR TRIDIVESH SINGH MAINI A REVERSE SIDE OF STRUGGLE AGAINST ISIS IN CENTRAL ASIA URAN BOTOBEKOV

UZBEKISTAN TO CREATE OWN MILITARY-INDUSTRIAL COMPLEX BY 2022 YURIY KOROL THE NEW GEOPOLITICS OF THE UYGHUR MOVEMENT GIANCARLO ELIA VALORI

THE GULF CRISIS: A LESSON IN REPUTATION MANAGEMENT DR. JAMES M. DORSEY ENSURING A LONG-TERM WIN AGAINST ISIS IN MOSUL ANNE SPECKHARD, PH.D. , GRACE WAKIM & ARDIAN SHAJKOVCI , PH.D. NEW SANCTIONS ON IRAN AND OPTIONS FOR REGIONAL COOPERATION IN MIDDLE EAST AMNAH AMJAD REBRANDING UNESCO: AN INTERVIEW WITH H.E. DR. HAMAD AL KAWARI UNESCO DIRECTOR GENERAL CANDIDATE DIMITRIS GIANNAKOPOULOS

THE ROAD TO 2018:MEXICO LISDEY ESPINOZA PEDRAZA BRAZIL IN THE SHORT STRIKES: THE ULTIMATE PRICE OF WELFARE LUISA MONTEIRO

CHINA, RUSSIA AND THE SHIFTING LANDSCAPE OF ARMS SALES SIEMON T. WEZEMAN COOPERATION OR CONNECTIVITY: HOW WILL THE SCO FUNCTION FROM NOW? WANG LI & PALAMDORJ BAYARTSETSEG THE CHALLENGE OF THE INDIGENOUS ARMS INDUSTRY: THE ASCENDANT AND DEPENDENT CLASSES DAVID DAVIDIAN POLITICIZED INTELLIGENCE/ WOUNDED DEMOCRACY DR. MATTHEW CROSSTON TELEGRAM: THE MIGHTY APPLICATION THAT ISIS LOVES AHMET S. YAYLA, PH.D.

CONTRIBUTORS Dr. Matthew Crosston Dr. Matthew Crosston is Vice Chairman of Modern Diplomacy and member of the Editorial Board at the International Journal of Intelligence and Counterintelligence. Samantha Maloof Samantha is a freshly minted graduate in International Relations based in Cairo, currently working as a research assistant in a small think tank looking at development and inequality in Africa Kester Kenn Klomegah Kester Kenn Klomegah is an independent researcher and writer on African affairs in the EurAsian region and former Soviet republics. Joseph Ndungu Joseph Ndungu holding his PhD in IR & Research Fellow at SIPA Mahmudul Hasan Mahmudul Hasasn is Lecturer of Law at the University of Development Alternative (UODA), Bangladesh. Comments are welcome to be sent directly at mahmudul.law[at]gmail.com Rattana Lao Rattana Lao holds a doctorate in Comparative and International Education from Teachers College, Columbia University and is currently teaching in Bangkok.

Tridivesh Singh Maini Tridivesh Singh Maini is a New Delhi based Policy Analyst associated with The Jindal School of International Aﬀairs, Sonipat (India). One of his areas of interest is India’s Act East Policy with specific reference to India-Myanmar ties. Uran Botobekov Doctor of Political Science (PhD), expert on Political Islam Giancarlo Elia Valori Advisory Board Co-chair Honoris Causa Professor Giancarlo Elia Valori is an eminent Italian economist and businessman. He holds prestigious academic distinctions and national orders. Dr. James M. Dorsey A senior fellow at the S. Rajaratnam School of International Studies, co-director of the University of Würzburg’s Institute for Fan Culture, and the author of The Turbulent World of Middle East Soccer blog Grace Wakim Research Fellow at the International Center for the Study of Violent Extremism (ICSVE) working on the ISIS Defectors Interviews Project and providing linguistic and subject matter expertise on the Middle East.

Ardian Shajkovci, Ph.D. Director of Research and a Senior Research Fellow at the International Center for the Study of Violent Extremism (ICSVE). Anne Speckhard, Ph.D Adjunct Associate Professor of Psychiatry at Georgetown University in the School of Medicine and Director of the International Center for the Study of Violent Extremism (ICSVE). She is the author of Talking to Terrorists, Bride of ISIS and coauthor of ISIS Defectors: Inside Stories of the Terrorist Caliphate; Undercover Jihadi; and Warrior Princess Amnah Amjad Amnah Amjad has done BSc (Honours) in Political Science from Lahore University of Management Sciences (LUMS), Pakistan. She has keen interest in international relations, counter-terrorism strategies and peace studies.

Luísa Monteiro MD Senior Editor, PR Manager Luísa Monteiro is a bachelor in Social Communication and is currently taking a Master's degree in Communication and Politics at PUC São Paulo. Siemon T. Wezeman Senior Researcher with the SIPRI Arms and Military Expenditure Programme. His areas of research include the monitoring of arms transfers, with particular focus on the Asia–Pacific region and North America, and the use of weapons in conflicts. Palamdorj Bayartsetseg PhD in International Relations, lecturer at NUM in Ulaanbaatar Wang Li Wang Li is Professor of International Relations and Diplomacy at the School of International and Public Aﬀairs, Jilin University China.

Dimitris Giannakopoulos Modern Diplomacy Editor-in-chief Journalist, specialized in Middle East, Russia & FSU, Terrorism and Security issues. Founder and Editor-in-chief of the Modern Diplomacy magazine.

David Davidian Adjunct Lecturer at the American University of Armenia. He has spent over a decade in technical intelligence analysis at major high technology firms.

Lisdey Espinoza Pedraza Lisdey Espinoza Pedraza is a political columnist and PhD candidate who has spoken at numerous international conferences on issues relating to international aﬀairs.

Ahmet S. Yayla, Ph.D. Adjunct professor of criminology, law, and society at George Mason University. He is also senior research fellow at the International Center for the Study of Violent Extremism (ICSVE).

editorial D r . M at t h e w C r o s s t o n Editor-in-Chief, JRP

Welcome to the second issue of the inaugural year of the Journal of Rising Powers. In our first issue, we focused a great diversity of issues and articles around two anchoring pieces that dealt with the South China Sea conflict, which was front and center across most global media outlets at the time. In this particular issue we engaged a diďŹ&#x20AC;erent approach: literally traversing the globe regionally and selecting stellar exemplars of work being conducted on issues often outside of the media spotlight or unjustly underemphasized across the diplomatic and think tank communities. We particularly enjoyed this approach because not only did it put a spotlight on many countries that most in the West never get much information about, it also created opportunities to explore issues that give our readers an immense diversity and breadth of coverage.

Not only does this issue touch upon the regions of Southeast Asia, South Asia, the Persian Gulf and greater Middle East, Africa, and Central/ South America, its thematic content acquaints us with such pressing topics as sanctions, counter-terrorism, diplomatic public relations, economic development, the military-industrial complexes of states NOT named the United States, inequality, clean energy, and global health epidemics. It is one of the unique things we love about the purpose of JRP: no limits and no constrictions in terms of content. We also take great pride in highlighting young and emerging scholars from the Global South. JRP is, after all, first and foremost, a Global South Policy Initiative. While the native language of many of our contributors is not English, and that can manifest itself within some of the phraseology and writing style, what it is more important to JRP is the quality of our content coverage and the eďŹ&#x20AC;ort to expose and elevate these new voices which have long deserved to be heard in Western corridors.

So, please enjoy the second issue of JRP. If one issue could be a fluke, then may two be considered a trend, an announcement that we are here to stay and eagerly looking forward to what the future holds, for our initiative and every single one of the contributors who is making this project something unique and impactful in the world of policy scholarship.

The Diplomatique Internationale of Seinfeld

D r . M at t h e w C r o s s t o n

The American situational comedy, Seinfeld, which basically dominated television in the 1990s and still enjoys a healthy residual life in reruns all around the world, remains an emotional and philosophical touchstone for just about anyone in the United States over the age of 40.

Its ability to find the hilarious in the everyday mundane, to point out ridiculous aspects of life that we have all experienced but never bothered to truly examine the real impact on our lives, is perhaps still unchallenged to this day vis-Ă -vis other comediesThis is why its place in the pantheon of humor will be eternal. But some of that comedic wisdom can actually be downright profound and practical for diplomacy and global aďŹ&#x20AC;airs.

2. Privacy and home security are of the utmost importance

In a world that becomes increasingly interdependent and hyper-connected, with the commensurate eﬀect of not only limiting our ability to create private space but possibly questioning whether the concept of privacy will even exist in large degree in the future, some of the axioms used throughout Seinfeld’s run for comic relief might matter in gravity for the 2020s even more than they did in laughter for the 1990s. To wit:

1. It’s worth having an alias Just as with the show, this is not so much about having an alias in order to commit some heinous crime against humanity or engineer a massively corrupt embezzlement initiative. Rather, it’s more about having an alias in order to gerrymander an element of anonymity behind some of the more creative ideas we have and might be afraid to risk if we had to do them completely in the open with explicit attribution. People would likely be surprised just how little is negotiated and accomplished in diplomatic global aﬀairs up on the dais with a microphone in front of your face. In fact, there is probably a direct inverse ratio between the level of publicity and the subsequent depth of success: the strategic utilization of aliases might allow sides to engage more substantively in secret, outside of the glaring spotlight of media scrutiny and public criticism. This creation of operational space often proves critical

This axiom feeds rather naturally from the point above. If it can be valuable having an alias for purposes of keeping the external world from interfering and hindering true diplomatic progress, it is equally valuable being ‘master of your domain’ internally, as it were. Today’s world is not just epitomized by the ubiquity of technology in our everyday lives. More intriguingly (or disturbingly as the case may be), technology has made the ability to keep secrets and control your own narrative almost impossible to the point that many people now openly scoﬀ at the idea as pure fantasy. But this ability, to keep secrets in-house and control your own strategic narrative, is an incredibly important aspect to successful negotiations in global diplomacy. The world of American politics shows how devastating ‘leaks’ are to agendas and strategies. It renders what could have been an eﬀective initiative to something more chaotic and inconsistent. In the world of diplomacy, chaos and inconsistency are the enemies of success.and positive for negotiation.

3. It’s possible for your standards to be too high One of the most common plot-enablers of Seinfeld was when a good idea was allowed to run free and ended up mutating into a truly ridiculous plan of outrageously grandiose ambition, with absolutely no chance of success and total guarantee of hilarity to ensue. It is impossible to underestimate the value of this lesson for almost every state in the international community that aspires to elevating its position and prestige on the global stage.

Perhaps it is ironic, but the common individualist axiom of aiming too high so that when you fall a little short you will still be high up regardless doesn’t actually work in global diplomacy. Rather, this world works best when governed by actors striving to keep rationality, realism, and pragmatism in the forefront of their strategic minds. Overreach and image inflation are easily two of the most common flaws to derail what once could have been successful diplomatic overtures. So, please, let this axiom encourage states to be a bit more self-aware and humble in what they seek to accomplish.

4. You’ll avoid a lot of headaches if you just let people have their quirks The discovery and attempt to manage or change those ‘quirks’ became the source for some of the most insanely funny moments in the entire series of Seinfeld. However, in global aﬀairs and diplomacy, while it is crucial to learn as many of the quirks as possible, it is even more important to not attempt to ‘remake’ those quirks into something more palatable to or pliable by you.

Any such attempts are usually met with resentment and indignation and instantly sour the negotiation atmosphere between parties. And anyone who has been involved even remotely in the field of diplomacy, conflict resolution, and negotiation will tell you that the maintenance of a positive atmosphere of communication and trust is the most important, and precarious, initial element.In this beginning stage, it is often the small style details that can throw a meeting oﬀ-center, rather than any deep and important substance point. So, breathe deep, breathe easy, let the quirks run free. It’s not personal. It’s strategic.

5. Do the opposite to broaden your horizons In Seinfeld, more often than not, an attempt to ‘think outside the box’ for any of the main characters usually resulted in them getting into hot water and awkward situations resulting in embarrassment and/or hilarity. Quite the opposite would likely happen were diplomats more successful in moving more easily oﬀ of their talking points and buzzwords. The ability to think beyond your own comfort zone, to truly be able to ascertain and consider the perspective of the ‘other’, is in fact the unique skill innate to all of the greatest statesmen in the history of the

world. ‘Doing the opposite’ in the world of international diplomacy is not just eﬀective for being able to properly perceive the priorities of your counterpart, it also has an added benefit of tilting the negotiation field to your favor, as you have likely surprised the other side and left them scrambling to consider new tactics themselves. So, do the opposite to not just broaden your horizons but to strategically position your side for greater negotiating dominance. And there you have it. Five simple but oh-soprofound axioms from Seinfeld that were eﬀective in making the whole world laugh in the 1990s but might be able to make the whole world get along better heading to the 2020s. If we can have a Tao of Poo and a Zen of Motorcycle Maintenance (not that there’s anything wrong with that), then perhaps it is time to recognize the value and advancement that can be achieved with the Diplomatique Internationale of Seinfeld. After all, this world needs all the help it can get.

Can the DRC stop the next Ebola outbreak?

saMantha Maloof

Some unexpectedly good news came out of the long-beleaguered DRC on July 2nd, when the WHO declared an end to the Ebola outbreak that had started just 42 days before. The announcement prompted a global sigh of relief, as the outbreak was the countryâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s first since the catastrophic West African epidemic that raged in five countries between 2014 and 2016, killing more than 11,000 people.

But it would take a special kind of innocence to assume that the Ebola virus has finally been tamed. In fact, any public health expert worth their salt would agree that the international community is years away from having a functioning emergency response system to deal with intra or inter-continental pandemics. Not to mention that the quickly deteriorating political situation in the DRC raises serious doubts about whether the country will have the capacity to contain the next outbreak.

All things considered, the DRC’s win over Ebola looks more like the exception than the rule. Indeed, the DRC contained last month’s outbreak largely because the virus struck in the remote region of Likati, 1,300 kilometers away from Kinshasa, and infected only a small sample of people. As such, local and national health authorities were able to enact an eﬃcient and coordinated response: the second victim was immediately suspected of Ebola and the local health center rushed a sample to the national lab in Kinshasa. The workers there had the right expertise and connections and ran preliminary testing while also alerting international colleagues. After the first case was confirmed, the government notified the World Health Organization, which activated their emergency response mechanisms. The successful escalation was also boosted by a new weapon in the WHO’s arsenal: a $41 million contingency fund that the

health body set up following the lethargic response to the previous epidemic in West Africa. This fund helped the WHO and other groups rapidly rent helicopters for flying staff, generators, and other supplies into the affected zone. Lastly, all of this happened in a country that has been battling Ebola for over 40 years and has seen off eight separate outbreaks so far. Which is why the international community should not rest on its laurels, but should instead take urgent action to bolster the readiness of other African countries susceptible to fall pray to the virus. Indeed, Guinea, Liberia and Sierra Leone are still years away from building the capacity to fend off the virus, despite the fact that these three countries accounted for over 90% of Ebola cases during the 2014 outbreak. Then, the WHO’s foot dragging and political dysfunction in all three countries – two of which, Liberia and Sierra Leone, were still recovering from civil wars – led to the direct death of thousands.

If it had not been for charities like Doctors Without Borders (MSF) and private companies, which shouldered the bulk of the initial emergency response, the outcome would have been much worse. MSF led the frontline response and was the first to spot the initial cases in March 2014. Their volunteers were forced to handle the lion’s share of medical treatment, quarantine, and educational eﬀorts as the WHO ignored their calls for help. Meanwhile, the Russian mining company Rusal built and equipped a microbiological research and medical treatment center for patients with infectious diseases in Guinea, as part of a public-private partnership to boost the fight against Ebola and to strengthen the local healthcare system. The project spearheaded by Rusal, among the biggest investors in the country, helped result in a new vaccine that is being delivered to Guinea and will undergo trials later this summer. It just goes to show that while the private and non-governmental sector quickly mobilized resources, they are no panacea for the international coordination that global health bodies are supposed to oﬀer. Which brings us to a crucial point: stability is key in the proper management of epidemics. It would be a mistake to ignore the way political and economic agendas shape the way public health science is understood and implemented. If the international community really understood this feedback relation, it would take steps to stabilize the brewing civil war in the DRC. Indeed, last December, with 16 years in power under his belt, President Joseph Kabila decided to settle in after finishing his constitutionally

mandated last term, sparking deadly protests in the capital. Even after signing a subsequent agreement to step down and hold elections before the end of 2017, he has made no sign that he’s ready to do so. Instead, he’s been leading a smear campaign against the main opposition candidate for the presidency, Moise Katumbi, whom he regards as his biggest threat. The former governor of the Katanga province, Katumbi has garnered nationwide support in a country so large and divided that many have openly wondered if it’s even governable. Unfortunately, Katumbi has been living in exile in Europe since May 2016 and faces the prospect of imprisonment if he returns home, where he has been convicted on a number of trumped-up charges. Meanwhile, as the deadline for the government to call elections approaches, violence between security forces and militia members has been rising. A surge in violence in Kasai province, which comes on top of grinding conflict in the volatile Kivu regions, has caused the deaths of at least 3,300 people and the displacement of more than 1.3 million. Several weeks ago, the US and EU imposed sanctions on eight government oﬃcials and a militia leader implicated in abuses. But they will need to go further, expanding sanctions and working with the DRC’s neighbors to press Kabila to hold credible elections. This wouldn’t just be in the interests of the Congolese people, but is a precondition of laying the foundations of a functioning global health system. The next outbreak is therefore not a question of “if” but “when” - and containing it will depend on preserving political stability in the country. Otherwise, the humanitarian disaster of 2014 will simply repeat itself.

Sudan Seeks Closer Cooperation With Russia

Kester Kenn KloMegah

For decades, Russia and Sudan have maintained a strong economic and politically strategic partnership. And still, there visible and promising signs that both countries want to see the deepening of relations, especially in the economic sphere, in the years ahead. In this interview, H.E. Mr. Nadir Babiker, Ambassador of Republic of Sudan in the Russian Federation, discusses some of the significant aspects of the current relations with Moscow correspondent, Kester Kenn Klomegah

What’s the current level of Russia’s economic presence in Sudan and that of Sudan in the Russian Federation? In the first place, what are your government’s key priorities and expectations from Russia? - The Russian economic presence in the Sudan is strong in the field of mining. There are three companies, who received licenses for gold exploration, one of them started production in 2015, and the other two are still in the process of exploration. Other Russian companies are operating in the services sector, such as demercurization of the traditional mining sector, geological mapping, mineral labs, training and other mining services in Moscow. Also there are some Russian companies in the field of oil and gas services. There are agents for some Sudanese companies, who import from the Russian Federation. During the four sessions of the JMC between Sudan and Russia between 2013 – 2016, we signed 32 Agreements and MoUs in the field of mining, electricity and Dams, food security, banking, assembly of agricultural machinery, invest promotion, industry, environmental protection. All these sectors represent priority to us.

Can you briefly tell us which economic sectors are attractive for foreign investors (e.g. U.S., EU, China, France) generally and what investment incentives are currently available for investors or foreign players? - The fields of oil and gas, mining, infrastructure and agriculture, are most attractive sectors for foreign investors. There are companies from China, India, Canada, Germany, France, Saudi Arabia, Qatar, UAE and Jordan, Malaysia and Indonesia. They invest in these sectors. Even before Republic of Sudan separated from South Sudan, the volume of bilateral trade between Russia and Sudan has significantly been low over the years. How would you estimate bilateral trade between Russia and Sudan now? The volume of bilateral trade between Sudan and the Russian Federation is below our expectations, for 2016 it was $ 186 million. It does not reflect the real potential of trade between the two countries.

Do you also consider promotion of small and medium scale businesses as part of strengthening economic cooperation between two countries? And, in your view, how can this be pursued eďŹ&#x20AC;ectively? But there is an increasing trend on trade between the two countries during the last three years, the last year it increased by 150% compared to 2015. That was the second jump since 2013. This year we are expecting more increase, there is more demand for the Russian wheat, we are introducing for the first time the Sudanese vegetables and fruits to the Russian market. What are the main problems and challenges in efforts for working towards its improvement? How can the trade imbalance, somehow, be reversed? - As I said, the potential is huge, we need to exert more eďŹ&#x20AC;orts in trade promotion, and in arranging business trips, as well as encouraging business people from both sides to participate in trade exhibitions in Moscow and Khartoum. We also managed to arrange visit for the concerned authorities from the Ministry of agriculture and animal resources of the Sudan to Moscow, to explain the arrangements and procedure of quality control of our exports and their compatibility with the international standards. What, in your view for example, your government position negotiating for trade preference that are available for African countries and that allows export of some products to the market in Russia? - Of course, yes, and thanks to the Russian government, Sudan exports will enjoy a preferential treatment.

- Actually, we are focusing on the small and medium scale business, because it satisfies our requirements for the transfer of technology, and there is a mutual desire from both sides to cooperate in this field. We also visited four different regions in the Russian Federation, to extend cooperation with industries in these regions. Interview by Kester Kenn Klomegah in Moscow.

China's transforming Africa by the rail or off the trail Joseph nDungu

Although China highly spoke of its first African built railway from Tanzania to Zambia during the Cold War heydays, it is a rare occasion for China to link a railroad to a grand design, such as “the Belt & Road Initiative” proposed by President Xi Jin- ping in 2013. Recently, after the completion of the railroad from Nairobi, the capital city of Kenya, to its key port city Mombasa, a three-part documentary produced by Xinhua News Agency in a title of “My Railway, My Story” made its debut on Kenyan television on 29th and 30th May respectively and on Chinese international television New China TV.

The major public state broadcaster in Kenya, the Kenya Broadcasting Corporation also showed the two parts "Bridges" and "Stations" documentary which revolve around the 79 bridges and many stations along the 480-km long railroad with stories of people who were dedicated to its construction during prime time slots. Kenyan observers lauded the initial two part documentary which aired and showcased spectacular Chinese workmanship in the construction of Standard Gauge Railway.

For sure, the legacy of the railway line would live on, as the SGR is set to transform the country's socio-economic bearing for many years to come. However, the question that comes into focus in the many minds of many and the subject of this article is why did China invested 3billion US$ into the huge East African rail-network and how does the world perceived the railroad in East Africa within the backdrop of Chinese-initiated â&#x20AC;&#x153;Belt and Roadâ&#x20AC;? strategy? Politically, 2017 marks a seminal year for the implementation of the outcomes acceded to at the Johannesburg Sino-Africa summit held in 2016, for China its plans to promote her comprehensive ties with Africa en bloc to proximate a strategic partnership are on course.

Due to this, the primary purposes of the railroad from Mombasa to Nairobi marked the attainment of consensus with African countries in view of further advancing long-term cooperation between China and Africa. Though, the first Chinese-built railroad in Africa was the Tanzania—Zambia Railway Authority (TAZARA) which was completed as a turn-key project between 1970 and 1975, and the project was financed through an interest-free loan of RMB 988 million (equivalent to US$ 500 million) from China then. Actually, it was Premier Zhou En- lai’s Safari during 1963-1964 that laid down the key tenets of China’s aid programs to Africa. Due to China's decades-long development programs, the majority of newly- independent African states not only extended recognition to Beijing as the legitimate government of China, but also demonstrated unwavering endorsement of Beijing’s ascension as a permanent occupant of a seat in the United Nations Security Council (UNSC). Since then, with its burgeoning power, China has become proactive and more ambitious in attempts to expand Chinese engineered infrastructure in Africa with the feature projects of building railroads and high-speed highways. Accordingly, the railroad from Nairobi to Mombasa and the subsequent transformation of African-Chinese cooperation are not only essential but also inevitable. Yet, unlike Western foreign-aid policies, which generally prioritize political issues and social values, Chinese external aid have been primarily driven to the economic issues. On one hand, this is consistent with China’s adherence to non-intervention in the domestic aﬀairs of other states, since China and its African friends have worked closely with the enhancement based on terms of “mutual

trust, win-win and cooperation”, as reiterated by the Chinese government. On the other hand, Kenyan oﬃcials are looking forward to a future of unprecedented transformation upon the launch of the Nairobi--Mombasa railroad.

As stated, the newly--built railroad line not only revolutionized the transport sector of the country, but more important in expanding to stimulate investments in advanced manufacturing in Kenya and the region involved. It is widely hold that this modern railway has already boosted Kenya's capacity, prestige and attractiveness to investors. Upholding the sentiments, Munene Mungai, a senior assistant director for infrastructure in Kenyan government, hailed the launch of SGR project for setting a precedent for other Africa countries aspiring to achieve middle-income status. ‘’Now Kenya is to enter a critical milestone in its history since the first modern railroad has been in operations’’. As Mungai told Xinhua news during a recent interview, "This is a new dispensation in our transport sector and Kenya will experience rapid transformation as the SGR is operational from the first day of June." As an economically strong state in East Africa, Kenya is banking on the SGR to ease congestion at the port of Mombasa and reduce cost of transporting bulk cargo and passengers to the hinterlands and the neighboring states.

Doubtless, they are asymmetrical in views of the territorial sizes and economic capacity, but the Chinese government regards as advantageous, African states' potential assumption of non-replaceable participants in the “Belt & Road initiative”. For this consideration, China and Africa have provided as joint statement declaring the establishment and promotion of bilateral relations based on a “comprehensive and win-win strategic partnership”. Among many other strategic measures and bold reform initiatives discussed at the multilevel talks between the two sides, China evidently expects that the railroad from Nairobi to Mombasa would be able to involve certain, if not all, African states into the new silk road economic zones and the 21st century maritime silk road, linking China to Africa through the Kenyan port of Mombasa. Eventually that would link both China and Africa to many other ports on at least three continents. In so doing, the great potential of sub-global if not global interaction would be achieved. In a long-run, the vision of the project, encompassing its land and maritime aspects, is a remarkable one to the community of participating states. Even at the concept stage, Kenya, especially on the coast region, greeted the collaboration with China with excitement, looking to seize the gargantuan opportunities oﬀered by the “Belt and Road Initiative”. As the project of the century, the “BRI” is expected to open up vast opportunities for Kenya and Africa as well.

Now, with the completion of the first phase of the Standard Gauge Railway funded by China and Kenya, Africa is well positioned to reap from benefits that will be realized. To that ends, local government oﬃcials, scholars and trade lobby groups are optimistic that cooperation based on the win-win principle will open new frontiers of progress in Africa’s various fields, and the development of further trade linking the Kenyan port of Mombasa with those in Europe, Middle East and China. As a part of this vision, China has been the main guarantor in the construction of mega infrastructure projects in East Africa including the standard gauge railway linking Mombasa in Kenya and Kampala in Uganda. Likewise, China is behind the development of Lamu Port and various projects on the Lamu Southern Sudan-Ethiopian transport corridor (LAPSSET). When fully completed, these infrastructure projects will position Kenya as a regional economic powerhouse. As a result, Kenyan policy makers continue to support the concept of a 21st Chinese Maritime Silk Road and have realigned it with the country's long term socioeconomic blueprint. With the construction of the second Chinese trans-African railway and China's 21st Maritime Silk Road, Kenya seeks to position herself as the gateway to east and central Africa while at the same time positioning itself as a point of exit for all products destined to Asia and Europe through port of Mombasa. Given this, China on her part as a rising power with the second largest economy in the world takes more responsibilities in the world aﬀairs. It is true that potentially the transformation of Africa by high-speed transport and communications that will lift large parts of the continent out of under development, as China sees the matter.

But, building up the transnational rail lines, though, demands the suppression of security threats that could disrupt trade flows and even mutual trust. It is widely held that “BRI” stems from China’s confidence in its rapidly-growing economic strengths while it also requires making long-term political stability possible. As African states have shown the strong and sincere desire to draw on Chinese expertise and financing to alleviate critical infrastructure bottlenecks, China as usual sizes up African states as strategic partners. True to this China’s policy-making is careful, conservative and consensus-driven, for its overriding concern is its economic growth which has been seen as the fundamental issue to the security of the country and the legitimacy of the ruling party.

For China the pace of transformation of Africa has been remarkable. Even though China’s short-term intension remains economic and diplomatic, it seems inevitable that China’s basic interests will eventually lead it to far greater involvement in the continent. Though diverse in both economics and politics, Africa remains sided with China on international issues, and this quasi-alliance strictly delimits the scope of Sino-African collaboration and the opportunity to assist in the formation of Chinese conceptions and strategy in the world politics for decades to come. It is unmistakable that Chinese leaders are well-aware of this advantage.

Africans Rising: The Time for Action Is Now

M D s ta f f

The fundamental imperative for Africa is to pursue inclusive growth, which will transform it from the continent of potential to the continent of prosperity, said Cyril M. Ramaphosa, Deputy President of South Africa, in the closing address to the 2017 World Economic Forum on Africa. Ramaphosa called on the continent’s leaders to think hard about “the type of Africa we are going to leave for future generations.” Will it be a place of ashes or of half-baked solutions, or will it be a product of leaders’ best eﬀorts to be responsive and responsible to their citizens?

“We must lead with respect and dignity,” he continued, “We are trustees and guardians of the continent for future generations.” The scourges of wastage, mismanagement and corruption must be wiped out and replaced with a united drive for inclusive growth, he said.

Winnie Byanyima, Executive Director, Oxfam International, United Kingdom, said she is “optimistic and hopeful” about Africa. She has seen people’s capacity to work together to improve their lives and, if they are given the right space to do so on a continental scale, they will seize the opportunity. Byanyima called for the cliché phrase “African Rising” to be changed to “Africans Rising”.

A comprehensive reform of the approach to education is one of the first calls to action, said Ramaphosa. Promotion of science and innovation must be central to learning, as must broadening access for all, but especially for girls and young women. And education cannot be the preserve of an emerging middle class, thus perpetuating inequality.Ramaphosa’s call to action to change Africa’s path echoed the comments of the meeting’s Co-Chairs, who formed the discussion panel of the closing plenary session of the meeting. “There is a real sense of urgency in Africa,” noted Siyabonga Gama, Group Chief Executive Oﬃcer, Transnet, South Africa. He suggested that governments should be run as if they are large corporates – with constant monitoring of performance in hitting targets, bold decisionmaking and the removal of impediments that slow down growth. For Gama, the priorities are to integrate Africa’s five economic zones into one giant economic marketplace. Integral to this is a major drive to build infrastructure and power-generation capacity.

Frédéric Lemoine, Chairman of the Executive Board, Wendel, France, referred to the infamous headline “Hopeless continent” and said it is no longer applicable to Africa. He said the continent’s massive challenges mean it is never going to be “a blue-sky scenario” but there is abundant cause for hope. He pointed out that Africa has been economically outperforming many parts of the world in recent times.

The South African government partnered with the World Economic Forum Internet for All project to accelerate the connection to the internet of 23 million additional South Africans by 2020.

The energy and the strength of young people in Africa are a compelling cause for optimism, said Rich Lesser, Global Chief Executive Oﬃcer and President, The Boston Consulting Group, USA. He said accelerated reform agendas in all areas of society and a growing emphasis on “human-centricity” are clearly evident. Ulrich Spiesshofer, President and Chief Executive Oﬃcer, ABB, Switzerland, summed up the mood at the end of the meeting: “The time for action is now.” Outcomes of the meeting included: Leaders of four African countries – Ghana, Kenya, Rwanda and Senegal – joined with private-sector executives and other stakeholders to recommit to mobilizing investment in agriculture through the Grow Africa partnership platform, which to date has mobilized $10.5 billion, of which $2.3 billion has been realized, reaching over 10 million smallholder farmers. The Forum’s Global Shapers community hosted a morning of Community Conversations, bringing Davos-style discussions to an audience drawn from the people of KwaZulu-Natal. The Solutions Summit brought together 200 members of the Forum’s Schwab Foundation for Social Entrepreneurship, Young Global Leaders and Global Shaper communities to discuss ways of scaling their impact.

The Africa Skills Initiative agreed to make business commitments in six vital areas: large-scale internships and apprenticeships at all skill levels; developing future-ready curricula; foundational education delivery; retraining for unemployed youth; research and development collaboration with universities; and expanding basic IT fluency to reach 1 million people by January 2018. Business leaders from the Partnering Against Corruption Initiative (PACI) and a number of African governments have agreed to create a pan-African network to carve out a strategic response to address corruption. Siemens, a Strategic Partner of the World Economic Forum, entered into a partnership with Uganda, Ghana and Sudan to assist in the areas in power supply, transport and healthcare.

Clean Energy in South Asia and Beyond

MahMuDul hasan

The causes of energy transformation are essentially the need and consumption of the energy resources in the increasing growing humanity, especially since the industrial era, whether in tangible or intangible form of energy products such as electricity or heat. Transformed energy was mainly from conventional energy sources such as nuclear energy or fossil fuels (mainly dependent on natural resources such as coal, oil and natural gas), which, with the exception of nuclear power, are forms of energy transformed for billions of years. Their natural renewal cannot catch up with the speed of their exhaustion.

A study conducted by the World Wildlife Fund (WWF) in 2002 predicts that all the available natural resources will be exhausted by 2050, if they continue to be exploited at the current rate. The energy transformation is increasingly growing and the technologies employed in this regard have already started to aﬀect the planet earth deleteriously. The rapid depletion of natural resources and the various environmental degradations associated with the production and excessive energy consumption first came to the attention of human society in the sixties of twentieth century. Warnings refuted initially as utopian and exaggerated were finally taken seriously together with developing international legal framework in order to protect, manage, understand and restore the diﬀerent form of the environment whether it is terrestrial, aquatic, marine or natural and cultural or spatial. Accordingly, the means and methods respecting the long-term, new and clean energy have been developed and have become attractive, especially since the oil shock in 1973. Some call them new energy or clean energy. Now there is an agreement on the common name of "renewable energy". The theme of renewable energy as a method and energy supply means having a vital interest for the status of the biosphere and the condition of life and survival on earth. According to OECD, renewable energy use inexhaustible

sources of natural energy such as solar radiation, wind, water and carbon cycles in the biosphere, internal heat flux of Earth, eﬀect of lunar and solar attraction on the oceans. These energy sources have renewability as a criterion. It also includes that the life cycle of production and processing facilities do not present risks or disadvantages in the short, long and even longer term, and that they are socially and economically sustainable. Today, the world is in a crisis. This crisis is both ecological and social. This crisis was named as global warming. This is the phenomenon of climate change and energy poverty that plague the world. The challenges are to determine the sustenance of life on planet earth and understanding the contribution of renewable energy sources. Global warming caused by the constant accumulation of greenhouse gases in the atmosphere has already begun to disrupt the ecosystems. In the last decade of the twentieth century, it has been observed that there is an increase on the average temperature of the oceans and the atmosphere on a global scale. An assessment conducted by Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) in 2007 confirmed that human activities are causing greenhouse eﬀect that is to say we observe increasing of the amounts of greenhouse gases such as carbon dioxide (CO2), methane (CH4), nitrous oxide (N2O) etc. that results in global warming. A study by Global Chance in 2017 establishes a connection between emissions of greenhouse gases and fossil fuels. IPCC assessment also estimates the share of greenhouse gas emissions due to the energy sector at 25.9%.

All areas of the environment are aﬀected. The atmosphere due to the burning of fossil fuels had started to cause air pollution, accentuating the greenhouse eﬀect and the decline of the ozone layer. The increasing water use and water pollution had started to modify the hydrosphere. Rising atmospheric and sea-surface temperature had started to modify the cryosphere. Our increasing use of land, for agriculture, cities, roads, mining – as well as all the pollution we were creating – had started to modify our biosphere and landscape. International Greenpeace speaks of about 150,000 additional deaths per year among the ecosystems due to the environmental degradation and loss of biodiversity persist. In addition to that, there are risks of long-term pollution and environmental degradation posed by the nuclear power that we can no longer ignore.

The IPCC report entitled “Climate Change” published in 2007 predicts major negative consequences for humanity this century due to approaching climate change, a reduction of potential crop yields in most tropical and subtropical areas, a decrease of water resources in most tropical and subtropical dry regions, a decrease in the source of water flow from melting ice and snow, following the disappearance of the ice and the snow, an increase in extreme weather events such as heavy rains, storms and droughts, and an increase in the impact of these phenomena on agriculture, an increase in forest fires during warmer summers, the extension of areas infested with diseases such as cholera and malaria, an increase of flood risk, both because of rising of the sea level and climate change, a higher energy consumption for air conditioning and reduction of potential crop yields at middle and high latitudes.

These effects will be felt worldwide, but they will be especially keen in South Asia – defined as Afghanistan, Bangladesh, Bhutan, India, Maldives, Nepal, Pakistan, and Sri Lanka. Flooding, food shortages, and stagnating economic growth are just some of the devastating impacts South Asia may experience due to advancing climate change, according to IPCC. At the end of March 2014, IPCC released its longawaited Climate Change 2014: Impacts, Adaptation, and Vulnerability, a report that compiles the current scientific literature on climate change. The report’s assessment of observed impacts — the climate change effects we are already seeing — ranks Asia as the biggest victim of natural disasters last year, accounting for nearly 30 percent of the global economic loss ascribed to natural disasters. South Asia’s vulnerability to these and future disasters is profound, principally for reasons of population and poverty. The majority of South Asian countries are low- or lower-middle income countries that already struggle to support the daily needs of their growing populations. Because poorer households dedicate more of their budgets to food, they are the most sensitive to weather-related shocks that can make daily staples unaffordable. Low-lying Bangladesh is vulnerable to flooding and cyclones in the Indian Ocean, which scientific literature suggests will grow more intense in coming decades. Rising sea levels are also likely to threaten rice cultivation. The United Nations Environment Programme (UNEP) estimates a one-meter rise in sea level would inundate 17,000 square kilometres of Bangladesh’s land, over ten percent of its total land mass.

The problems the IPCC has identified will become obvious in South Asian economies sooner rather than later. Unfortunately, the cost of action will only rise if delayed. To insulate themselves from these potential threats, South Asian nations will have to invest heavily in both mitigation and adaptation. One set of efforts would be to mitigate climate change by reducing greenhouse gas emissions through improvements in energy efficiency and promotion of renewable energy. Operating renewable energy sources may bring two-fold benefits for this region. They are less polluter; therefore, renewable energy is one of the most effective tools South Asia has in its fight against climate change. Also, they are conducive to sustainable development because they are sustainable and available in abundance. The evidence is that they are environmentally and technically accessible reserves in the world and large enough to provide about six times more energy than the world currently consumes. Thus, renewable energy could supply the people of this region with energy, including those who currently have no access to energy without the need to make expensive network connections. Even a significant increase in demand can be satisfied with their enormous potential. While renewable energy contributes environmental protection, it has a huge potential for regional energy trade – it does help spur economic growth, enhance job creation, boost business activity and fund to poverty eradication. The international trade in energy allows countries to balance this important demand and supply, exploiting their own unique comparative advantage while meeting increasingly diverse energy requirements.

Despite substantial potential, South Asia is one of the least connected regions in the world in regard to energy trade, according to Asian Development Bank (ADB) report on Energy Trade in South Asia in 2011. Though South Asia is one of the fastest growing regions in the world with economic growth forecasted to gradually accelerate from 7.1 percent in 2016 to 7.3 percent in 2017, a World Bank (WB) report said, it is still struggling to meet energy demand. Despite such encouraging figures, the facilities and services available in some South Asian countries are inadequate to address the growing demands of their economy and population, thus increasing the strain on scarce resources and contributing to high poverty figures and a relatively low standard of living. The majority people without a sustainable access to the basic energy services were estimated around 1.2 billion worldwide – 16% of the global population – in 2016, mainly from developing countries, particularly in Africa and South Asia, according to World Energy Outlook (WEO). Energy supply and security are major challenges on the road to sustainable development in the South Asian region. Furthermore, the challenge is likely to get more complex as energy demand is growing to keep pace with an expanding population and economy. The South Asian countries have huge potential for renewable energy sources. Geographically, South Asian countries are located in a region of diﬀerent climatic conditions such as tropical, humid etc. which provides easy access to a variety of renewable energy sources. It has been reported that hydropower potential in Nepal, the massive wind power potential in Afghanistan, and solar power potential in India,

Pakistan and Bangladesh can help the South Asian region go a long way in fulfilling its energy needs. This enormous potential is still insuﬃciently taken into account in this regional energy markets. Today, according to International Energy Agency (IEA) annual report in 2013, renewable energy represents 13.2% of the total energy consumption in the world and in South Asian countries, according to ADB report on Energy Trade in South Asia in 2011, less than 5%, while other energy sources continue to carve the part Lion. Bangladesh ranks among the lowest in South Asian region with 2.74 percent of energy production from renewable energy sources, according to ADB’s report in 2011. The report also summarises Bangladesh’s heavily dependence on natural gas with 88.45 percent.

Despite the huge potential and benefits of promoting energy eﬃciency and increasing the share of renewable energy in the gross energy production, there are obstacles at both the national and regional level, which must be overcome. One of the barriers is low investment in renewable energy because it involves high initial capital costs, and the monetary benefits from such projects take time to materialize.

Low priority given to renewable energy in national planning and weak implementation framework, weak environmental regulations, fossil fuel subsidies etc. are among some crucial challenges in national level policy adoption. There is also very limited knowledge and expertise regarding renewable energy technologies. Policies are often not conducive to business and do not incentivize private sector participation. Political challenges include an agreement on the energy authority in the area and deliberating options for energy trade. The regional security framework is another impediment to the adoption of sensible mitigation and adaptation strategy as distrust between India and Pakistan still exists, and some countries in this region are constantly fighting against terrorism. While geopolitical and geographic constraints are challenging to overcome, they are not unconquerable. Regional cooperation must address variables such as private sector participation, huge investment cost, affordability, political will, climate change, right of way and inaccessibility. The key here is to expand the existing bilateral framework for energy trade into a multi-lateral one, and work towards energy security and look into low-carbon solutions. Focal offices should be established at the federal/central level in each country under the auspices of South Asian Association for Regional Cooperation (SAARC), as there is a need to effectively coordinate between various agencies of national and sub-national governments and organisations including SAARC Energy Centre (SEC), SAARC Meteorological Research Centre (SMRC) etc. The same office may be declared as a liaison with international development partners, civil society and the private sector.

Current and planned policies, programmes and projects may be reviewed to align them with the objectives of Sustainable Energy for All (SE4ALL), a global initiative launched by the United Nations (UN) in 2011. Energy efficiency practices and standards are the most relevant areas in South Asia. By sharing ideas, they may address energy system losses and inefficient consumption at commercial and household levels. Similarly, the comparative analysis of legislations and policies relating to demand side energy efficiency and conservation may be carried out in order to progress in this direction. Each country should prepare a national energy research agenda to be pursued by academia and other scientific research organizations. There is a tremendous need to foster research culture to develop costeffective home grown solutions for renewable technologies, energy efficient appliances and energy conservation practices. Additionally, legal and financial advisory services may also be provided through technical assistance programmes. Through initiating heavy investment in renewable energy sector, the public sector can save substantial resources and set a trend to be followed by private businesses and households in each nation. Hence, there is an urgent need to attract private sector investment in energy sector. Energy trade models and practices in other regions of the world may also be examined for relevance to South Asia. Energy trade may emerge as a cornerstone of regional integration and connectivity. South Asia is also advantageous in terms of its close proximity with Middle East and natural resource rich Central Asia.

Thailand and the inequality challenges

r at ta n a l a o

Politicians, policymakers and members of the public have recently given much attention to the government's Thailand 4.0 economic model which aims to make the country ready for a digital economy. However, there remains a range of challenges that will impede the realisation of this lofty goal. Among them are the overall quality of Thailand's education, which is below the global average, as well as the growing inequality in the country's education system. These problems will remain roadblocks to the 4.0 agenda. Addressing education inequality is vital if Thailand aspires to achieve this goal. How can our education system prepare our students to become skilled and competitive workers rather than focusing on promoting the "brightest students" from a few selected schools?

What are the problems? Isn't heavy spending suďŹ&#x192;cient to improve our education? This is not about how much money is spent on education, but how it is used.

It is not that Thailand does not have the resources to do it. Thailand has spent massive financial amounts on education. The government, for example, spent 19.35% of its annual 2.58-trillion-baht budget in 2015 on education -- the largest proportion of the budget portfolio. Unfortunately, the huge spending has not translated into improved learning as our students still scored below global averages in key subjects as shown by various international tests. Results of these tests demonstrate the fact that Thai students still fell behind their peers in neighbouring countries when it comes to their performance in maths, science and English. In the "Learning Curve, Lessons in Country, Performance in Education" report published by Pearson, it is illustrative that Thailand's educational system is ranked 35th among 40 countries that participated in 2014. In the latest Programme for International Student Assessment (PISA) score results published by the Organisation for Economic Cooperation and Development in 2016, Thailand is ranked 55th out of 72 countries in the overall result. In maths and science, Thailand is ranked 54th and 57th for reading.

"It is not the amount of money that we are lacking, it is how the money is not eďŹ&#x192;ciently and eďŹ&#x20AC;ectively spent -- this is the problem," Pumsaran Tongliamnark, a policy analyst from the Budget Bureau, Ministry of Education, said at a recent seminar. While the test results reflect the shortcomings of Thailand's education system, the most worrying aspect of this debacle is the grave inequality that persists at every level of the system. Thailand is caught in an education paradox -should the country focus on pushing the best and brightest students to compete on the world stage or should we be concerned with those who are falling behind? Is it possible for Thailand to achieve both goals? Before talking about the digital economy and the fourth industrial revolution, let's get the foundations straight. The elephant in the room is the issue of inequality in our education system. The problem of inequality is more pressing for small primary and secondary schools, each with less than 20 students in each grade, in rural areas. There are 15,224 schools that fit into this category. Although the number of small schools has declined by more than 20% since 1993, they continue to be the majority of schools.

Problems faced by small schools are a matter of grave concern. These schools lack both suﬃcient state funding and teachers aﬀecting the quality of teaching and the performance of their students. Often, one teacher has to teach multiple subjects and multiple grades. Kirida Bhaopichitr, research director for the International Economics and Advisory Service of Thailand Development Research Institute, pointed out that students from small schools achieved lower scores than their peers from larger schools. The 2012 PISA scores revealed that there were greater improvement in scores among students from schools in big cities than those from small schools in small cities. While the former improved at the rate of 21.3% from the last test, the latter are falling behind with only a 16.1% improvement.

An observation by Stephen Holroyd, the principal of Shrewsbury International School in Bangkok, is more compelling. While the country laments the tragedy of Thai educational performance, the growing sector of international elite schools in Thailand is "isolated" and insulated from the problem, said Mr Holroyd. Year after year, these elite schools continued to send their best and brightest aﬄuent students to Oxbridge and Ivy League universities. The problem of education inequality goes beyond basic education. It transcends to the level of higher education as well. While the media has reported much on the low ranking of Thailand's top universities compared to international counterparts, a more serious problem lies in the disparity between diﬀerent educational institutions in the country.

With more than 173 higher education institutions, only a handful of institutions continue to capture the imagination and aspiration of Thailand's top students. This leaves a huge gap in student quality among diďŹ&#x20AC;erent institutions. Meanwhile, the state's policy on higher education has mainly focused on making the top universities more competitive. While the competitiveness of higher education institutions is important, attention and resources should also be given to lower-ranked ones including Rajabhat universities. As things stand, the state's budget allocation for limited admission universities is 10 times higher than that given to Rajabhat universities. The diďŹ&#x20AC;erent level of resources that go into different types of universities ultimately create inequality in students' performance.

Thitinan Pongsudhirak, director of the Institute of Security and International Studies, pointed out that education reform is a cliche, but this makes it also imperative. While education is a challenge in all countries, it has become critical in Thailand. If reform is not undertaken to better educate the Thai workforce from a young age, Thailand may well enter a period of longterm decline and economic stagnation, he said. If Thailand is committed to achieving Thailand 4.0, it needs to get the basics right. It needs to give greater and more serious attention to the inequality spanning the education system.

India, Myanmar and the Indo-Pacific Economic Corridor Tridivesh singh Maini

China’s ambitious One Belt One Road project is drawing a lot of attention due to its scale as well as strategic implications. What is often overlooked is eﬀorts being made by other countries in the context of enhancing connectivity within Asia, Japan’s Partnership for Quality Infrastructure (PQI) may not appear to be as grand as the OBOR, but it has the ability to create not just top class infrastructure, but also enhance the level of connectivity within Asia.

Indo-Pacific Economic Corridor: Role of US, India and Myanmar The US has also been seeking to enhance connectivity between South Asia with South East Asia and beyond, through the Indo-Pacific Economic Corridor (IPEC). The project complements India’s Act East Policy, and also its desire to play a role in the Indo-Pacific. In 2015, a release by the State Department clearly highlights IPEC as an important priority for the US. Says the statement, "Complementing India’s Enhanced Look East Policy, the United States envisions an Indo-Pacific Economic Corridor that can help bridge South and Southeast Asia – where the Indian and Pacific Oceans converge and where trade has thrived for centuries’. While the US and India are key stakeholders, other members include Bhutan, Bangladesh, Nepal. The US has also recently asked Sri Lanka to become part of this project Myanmar, India’s bridge to South East Asia is a key player within this project. India and Myanmar have had a number of high level interactions with Indian Foreign Minister, Sushma Swaraj visited Myanmar, this was followed by Myanmar President Htin Kyaw visit to New Delhi. Amongst the key issues, there was an emphasis on accelerating the India-MyanmarThailand Trilateral Highway, and upgradation of key sections of the highway.

During the ASEAN Summit at Laos, Prime Minister Modi spoke about the emphasis his government is laying on robust connectivity between India and ASEAN. Significantly, the PM proposed the setting up of a Joint Task Force on connectivity to work on extension of IndiaMyanmar-Thailand trilateral highway to Cambodia, Laos and Vietnam. Aung San Suu Kyi US visit While during the upcoming visit of Myanmar State Counsellor Aung San Suu Kyi to the US, the focus is likely to be on the lifting of sanctions and key challenges which Myanmar is facing.The economic reforms being undertaken are also likely to be discussed and the US President is likely to encourage enhanced trade relations with the outside world as well as connectivity. A number of US investors are keen to invest in Myanmar, and they could benefit through Myanmar’s integration with other markets in South East Asia as well as South Asia. While IPEC may not find specific mention during their meeting the project seems to be high on the US agenda. Only recently, Neha Desai Biswal Assistant Secretary of State for South and Central Asian Affairs while commenting on the US role in IPEC stated: “We see ourselves as a convener and a partner. We can help identify projects that have multiplier eﬀects, bring all stakeholders to the table, support and catalyse the early stages of development, and provide the necessary technical support to make sure it gets done right,”

Role of India and US All stakeholders need to play an important role. India needs to focus not just on land connectivity with Myanmar, but seamless connectivity within India itself. India needs to accord higher priority to stong maritime connectivity between Southern India and South East Asia, this can complement the current eďŹ&#x20AC;orts to connect North Eastern India with Myanmar. Apart from physical connectivity, India also needs to integrate with the larger Asia-Pacific

region by becoming part of APEC (Asia Pacific Economic Cooperation). The US needs to back Indiaâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s membership a number of other countries like Australia have strongly backed the same. For any substantial progress, the stakeholders will also have to decide the appropriate forum for IPEC. While Myanmar, India, Bhutan, Nepal and Bangladesh have been working jointly in BIMSTEC, it is doubtful whether this would be appropriate. A forum bereft of infighting is needed for ensuring that IPEC is successful.

Conclusion In conclusion, while India-US and other countries in ASEAN may have found common ground in the strategic sphere, there is no clarity with regard to enhanced connectivity and integration. 'The US and other key stakeholders in IPEC should not get distracted by OBOR. The thrust should be on accelerating connectivity between South Asia and South East Asia through a pragmatic vision and eďŹ&#x192;cient implementation.India and Myanmar which would benefit significantly from IPEC would be advised to take the lead.

A reverse side of struggle against ISIS in Central Asia U r a n B oTo B e kov

How did members of opposition emerge as jihadist? Often, the authorities of the Central Asian states fight against supporters of the so-called "Islamic states" by using the actions of their political opponents to prosecute their family members. In particular, under the slogan of combating Islamic extremism Tajik President Emomali Rakhmon has been repressing the leaders of Islamic Revolutionary Party of Tajikistan (IRPT) and their family more than two years.

It should be noted that the IRPT was the largest opposition party in the country and the only Islamic political party that oďŹ&#x192;cially registered in Central Asia. Two years ago, on September 29, 2015, the Supreme Court of Tajikistan declared the IRPT as a terrorist organization that threatened the security and stability of the state.

Now the activities of the IRPT are prohibited, its leader Said Abdullo Nuri signed a peace agreement with the President Emomali Rahmon at the end of the civil war in Tajikistan in June 1997. The court decision stated that the party was directly associated with the attempt of mutiny, undertaken in September 2015 by the Deputy Defense Minister, General Abdukhalim Nazarzoda. The rebellion was suppressed, and in mid-September the authorities arrested virtually the whole IRPT leadership. Only the leader of the party, Kabiri Muhiddin, escaped arrest because a few months before these events he had left for Europe. On June 2, 2016, the Supreme Court of Tajikistan sentenced the Deputy Leaders of the IRPT Umarali Hisainov and Mahmadali Haitov to life imprisonment, 11 party activists up to 28 years of imprisonment.

The court found them guilty of terrorism, religious extremism, a coup dâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;ĂŠtat attempt, the overthrow of the constitutional form of the government and murder. According to Amnesty International, the trial did not meet the requirements of fair trial and is clearly of a political nature. The UN condemned the verdicts to the leaders of the IRPT. Today, the whole arsenal of the stateâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s punitive machine is directed not only against activists of the party, but also against members of their family. Authorities took the passports from many wives and children of convicted IRPT members, so that they could not leave the country. Many relatives lost their employment. The fiscal authorities of the country have closed or confiscated medium and small businesses, which belonged to members of the IRPT. The property of the party was also confiscated. More than 10 relatives of the party leader

Mukhiddin Kabiri were detained, including his 95-year-old father Tillo Kabirov, who died in October 2016. After this, the U.S. Commission on International Religious Freedom expressed concern over the repressive policies of the Tajik government against the relatives of the leader of the IRPT. State television and pro-governmental media call convicts "enemies of the Tajik people." Due to the call of oﬃcers of the government, from time to time Tajik youth burn portraits of opposition leaders, throw stones at their homes, throw eggs at the relatives of convicted IRPT members. All this is reminiscent of the times of Stalin's repression which were subjected not only to "enemies of the people" but also members of their families. Because of fear of physical violence and political repression, more than 1,500 IRPT activists and their family members left the country. On June 12, 2017, the IRPT political council made a statement from Germany expressing its outrage at the persecution of relatives of its activists in Tajikistan and urged the world community to intervene. But this is hardly aﬀecting the government. Thus, the President Emomali Rahmon skillfully used the threat of Islamic radicalism and the struggle with ISIS jihadists to eliminate the political opposition represented by the IRPT. In the absence of real political competition, the Head of the state strengthened his authoritarian power, appointed his son the mayor of the capital, daughter - the head of the presidential administration. The president decided to create the most comfortable conditions for the transfer of power by inheritance using a monarchical pattern of repressive methods not only against opponents but also their closest relatives.

No One Writes to the Colonel Halimov Four brothers of the past commander of the Special Police Force of the Ministry of Internal Aﬀairs of Tajikistan, Colonel Gulmurod Halimov, who joined ISIS militants in April 2015 due to religious belief, were killed. It is known that Abu Bakr al Baghdadi appointed him to the post of "Minister of Military Aﬀairs" of the Islamic state. Because of his rich background he became the iconic agitational figure of the Caliphate, who several times urged Tajik migrants in Russia to join the jihad. He stated that they had become "slaves of the disbelievers ", instead of being "slaves of Allah", after which he called his compatriots to go to Syria for war. At one time, the US State Department announced a $ 3 million reward for the information on the whereabouts of Halimov. On April 15, 2017 the British magazine “The Times” reported that the Tajik colonel was liquidated in consequence of the air strike in the west of Mosul, but so far there is no concrete confirmation of this. On July 5, 2017 full blood brothers of the disgraced colonel Gulmorod, Sultonmurod Halimov and Fozil Halimov, and his nephew Afzal Abdurashidov and their close relative Naim Rahmonov were murdered by covert means of interior ministry member. They were buried by the relatives in Darai Foni village without washing and “Janoza” ceremony. Under Islamic canons the man who fought on Allah track and fell down on the battlefield is called “Shakhid”. So, shakhid will not be washed (do the ghusl) and buried in their clothes. Also three his brothers, Ali, Komil and Nazir, were arrested.

According to law enforcement authorities of Tajikistan, relatives of Halimov Gulmorod intended to cross the Tajik-Afghan border in the vicinity of Chubek village and join ISIS. Allegedly on the Afghan side of the Pyanj River, the brothers and relatives of Colonel Halimov were awaited by Islamic state militants. But the probability of this version raises deep suspicions, as the authorities of the country have started using punitive technologies against the innocent relatives of Colonel Halimov. For example, in June 2017, the Dushanbe City Court sentenced the son of a runaway colonel, Gulmurod Behrouz who had just graduated from school, to 10 years in prison. According to the investigation, the young man maintained contact with his father and wanted to flee to him who was in Syria. But at the trial which was held in closed mode, no evidence was given of his guilt. He himself declared his innocence. According to him, after his father's escape, he had never contacted him, and he found out about his father’s fate from social media platforms. According to the statement of the first wife of the runaway colonel Nazokat Murodova, due to financial diﬃculties she could not hire a lawyer for her son. Her son did a small business to help his family financially, and now they are left without a breadwinner and live in the grip of poverty. She does not intend to appeal the verdict to a higher court, since she does not believe in the justice of the judges. She added that the authorities fulfilled the political order and made her son a victim in the fight against Islamic radicalism, although by the law her son should not be responsible for the actions of his father.

On July 4, 2017, the authorities of Tajikistan arrested another nephew of the "ISIS military minister", F. Halimov who was extradited from Russia to Dushanbe. He is the son of one of the six brothers of the runaway colonel. He is accused of recruiting Tajik youth for jihad in Syria on the side of the Islamic state. The analysis shows that the personal mistake of Colonel Gulmurod Halimov to join ISIS made a social outcast not only of his blood brothers and family members, but also of all fellow villagers in Darai Fony village in the south of Tajikistan, where he was born and raised. Today, all the power of the repressive apparatus of the state is directed against the inhabitants of this village. One of the residents of this village, on condition of anonymity, informed us that Stalin's repression had returned to them, when the People's Commissariat for Internal Aﬀairs shot down "enemies of the people" without trial and investigation, and expelled members of their families to Siberia for hard labor. ISIS is a convenient lever for the authorities of Central Asia in the fight against political opposition Unfortunately, lawyers, local human rights organizations, the Human Rights Association in Central Asia and the regional oﬃces of Human Rights Watch are forced to turn a blind eye to the obvious facts of human rights violations in lawsuits related to Islamic radicalism. Opposing the authorities may turn into accusations against them as ISIS extremists. Recently it happened, for example, the well-known Tajik lawyer Buzurgmekhr Yorov who defended the leaders of the Islamic Revival Party of Tajikistan, and himself was sentenced to 23 years imprisonment on October 6, 2016.

He was found guilty of "fraud", "a mass appeal for overthrowing the constitutional order", "incitement of national or religious hatred." The court also condemned for 21 years the lawyer Nuriddin Makhamov, who defended his colleague Buzurgmkhar Yorov. Thus, the authorities wanted to teach a lesson for all lawyers and human rights defenders who wanted to protect "Islamic radicals" in the future. Recently, authoritarian rulers of the Central Asian states have successfully mastered a new trend, blaming all of their political opponents for links with the jihadists of the Islamic state. It turned out that this is a very convenient screen to justify its repressive actions. In the case of criticism by Western European countries, the United States and international organizations about human rights violations, democratic norms and censorship of freedom of speech, authoritarian leaders of Central Asia unanimously aďŹ&#x192;rm that they are fighting ideological supporters of ISIS. Indeed, if the entire civilized world fights against Islamic extremism and international terrorism, the Western powers will not defend the one who is accused of having links with Islamists. Thus, the rulers of the five Central Asian republics have learned to benefit from the world struggle against religious extremism, through which they strengthen their power and pursue oppression against their political opposition. In January 2017 one of the critics of the government of Kyrgyzstan, former parliamentary deputy Maksat Kunakunov was sentenced to 10 years imprisonment with the confiscation of his personal property "for the attempted coup and the financing of the local cell of the international terrorist group ISISâ&#x20AC;?.

Closer to the presidential elections in Kyrgyzstan which will be held in October 2017, the conveyor of political repression against opposition leaders has intensified. So, on April 17, 2017 Pervomaisky district court of Bishkek sentenced strong opponents of the president, opposition politicians Bektur Asanov, Kubanychbek Kadyrov, Ernest Karybekov and Dastan Sarygulov to 20 years imprisonment for "attempting to overthrow the constitutional order and to seize power."

The accused at the trial which was held in closed mode categorically rejected the accusations and said that the authorities pursued them for their opposition activities. Also, political repression touched prominent leader of the opposition Ata Meken party Tekebayev Omurbek and Sadyr Japarov, who were arrested on the eve of the presidential election. Today, the trial of them continues. But it is already clear that he cannot take part in the upcoming elections. Thus, President Almazbek Atambayev used the threat of Islamic radicalism for the repression of the political opposition and for the transfer of power to his successor the current Prime Minister, Sooronbai Jeenbekov.

With the emergence of the so-called "Islamic state" in the Middle East and the activation of the Taliban militants, ISIS in Afghanistan, the political regimes of Central Asia have found a convenient political tool to influence public sentiments and to distract society from economic problems. As you can see by the analysis, the heads of the region through the threat of ISIS have been and are clearing the political field of opponents, pursue their opponents and strengthen their authoritarian regime. By the decision of improvised courts, the oppositionists easily turn political figures into criminals by accusing them of being ISIS supporters. The authorities are at work to further develop such methods that develop a negative attitude towards the opposition party in their society. The presidents of the five former republics of the Soviet empire whose population is Sunni Muslims, dream of having an opposition only characterized under the ISIS grouping, so that overseas society does not raise questions about their methods of fighting in order to continue "maintaining stability."

But the authorities must understand that the constant accusation of the opposition in connection with Islamic radicals is beneficial, first of all, to local Wahhabis and Salafis who bear the idea of building a Caliphate in Central Asia. Supporters of Al Qaeda and ISIS will try to join their ranks at the expense of those who suffered from the repression of the authorities and the injustice of corrupt courts. The repression of the opposition gives additional radical arguments to the recruitment of new jihadists into the hands of radical Islamic groups. In order to successfully resist the ideology of radical Islamism, the authorities need to improve the social and economic conditions of the population, carry out radical reforms of the judicial branch of government and law enforcement agencies, and eradicate corruption in state structures.

Uzbekistan to Create Own Military-Industrial Complex by 2022 Y U r i Y ko ro l

As part of the 25th anniversary celebrations of the creation of Uzbekistan as an independent state, newly elected president Shavkat Mirziyoyev declared his intention to create a native military-industrial complex. In his January 14 declaration to the people in Uzbek media, Mr. Mirziyoyev announced an imminent program to re-equip his nationâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s armed forces to face the challenges of the 21st century. These reforms would be tailored to fit the unique needs of the Uzbek military to more eďŹ&#x20AC;ectively address current and future threats. Another, perhaps more important set of reforms, has to do with improving legislative eďŹ&#x192;ciency regarding military matters by delegating certain tasks to senior politicians and by reorganizing the military structure to favor more independent regional operations.

Mr. Mirziyoyev’s announcement was ambitious, to say the least, but his idea of a military-industrial complex is likely very diﬀerent from that of most western notions of what such a system should look like. Uzbekistan has no large scale native arms producers. The country’s military, the largest in Central Asia, is entirely reliant on inherited Soviet era equipment. In addition, its annual military budget, reported to be approximately $2.4 billion (2015 est.), is entirely inadequate to create an arms producing industry in such a short period. In his statement, Mr. Mirziyoyev was perhaps purposefully vague in outlining equipment updates. Instead, he focused on increasing Uzbekistan’s maintenance and repair capabilities for its current equipment as well as updating educational doctrines to train the next generation of service members. The sometimes vague comments were intended to also outline the Uzbek military’s role in the region and in the world. It is exactly this role which must be clearly examined in order to better determine what attributes Uzbekistan’s military may have in the future.

Its geographic proximity to states like Russia, China, and the United States, which has been fighting a prolonged war in neighboring Afghanistan, all but ensured a struggle for influence over Uzbekistan which the country has had varying degrees of success in balancing. Despite being an on and oﬀ again member of the Russian-dominated Collective Security Treaty Organization (CSTO), which Uzbekistan ultimately left in 2012, it seems that the nation has now taken a firm stand against military cooperation with foreign powers. This policy includes the removal of all foreign bases located on the territory of Uzbekistan. The 2005 removal of an American airbase in the southern city of Karshi following international outrage at the Uzbek authorities’ violent handling of mass protests in Andijan indicates that Uzbek leadership may not want the increased media scrutiny and deteriorating foreign public opinion which often comes with western deployments in authoritarian countries. The only military organization of which Uzbekistan is currently a member is the loosely formed Shanghai Cooperation Organization (SCO). This membership does not currently commit Uzbekistan to any foreign deployments or base hosting responsibilities, but it does allow access to international military exercises with powerful militaries like those of Russia and China.

Isolationist Policy Reforms Uzbekistan is somewhat unique among former Soviet states in its handling of foreign policy which will likely shape its future military structure accordingly. The 25-year-old republic goes to great lengths to abstain from military entanglements by avoiding international alliances and mutual defense treaties.

Outside of military exercises, long term international commitments would not be beneficial for the types of military threats that Uzbekistan faces. Apart from a border dispute with Kyrgyzstan, there are no regional adversaries that an Uzbek military may counter. Instead, terror-

ism and the illicit drug trade are likely the most practical threats against which to build a future military. Logically, regional reorganization would be more eﬀective in combatting such unpredictable security threats and the country’s current security infrastructure would not be best suited to handle it. As stated previously, Uzbekistan has the largest military in Central Asia by a substantial amount both in terms of conscripted manpower and equipment; however, it is structurally almost unchanged from Soviet doctrine which was designed to fight large ground wars. Its large stockpile of equipment reflects that doctrine with hundreds of main battle tanks and dozens of fighter planes; tools which have limited value in smaller scale tactical counterterror and policing operations. Uzbekistan likely needs a smaller professional force which is spread throughout its regions.

This force would ideally consist of contract soldiers who are continually trained in counterterrorism operations over the course of years and decades, not single 12 month rotations typically expected of conscripts. Training may be supplemented by taking part in counterterrorism exercises with countries like Russia and China through Uzbekistan’s membership in the SCO. Mr. Mirziyoyev’s proposed equipment maintenance and upgrades would also serve to maintain Uzbekistan’s traditional fighting capabilities, if not to create new ones. Ultimately, Mr. Mirziyoyev’s proposal of creating a native military industrial complex by 2022 may be optimistic at best, but there are a number of concrete steps that the Uzbek leadership can take to make its military more eﬀective and ideally suited for the likely threats it may face in the near future.

The new geopolitics of the Uyghur movement

g i a n c a r l o e l i a va l o r i

Recently the Uyghur organizations abroad are increasing pressures to convey the image of China as a "State of torture". We do no certainly want to deny that the Muslim population in Xinjiang, which at the time of Mao's Long March was simply called "the Western Region", does not tolerate some restrictions, but it is anyway true that the Islamist and jihadist networks are largely present in the region and that, as always happens in these cases, they have visible structures covering the invisible ones.

And not necessarily the visible ones are bigger than the invisible ones. The amount of "invisible agents" in the case of a terrorist and jihadist organization is far greater than you can think of. Finally, while recently Greece vetoed the EU's condemnation of China for its "repression of human rights", it is equally true that the congerie of human rights is a cornucopia where you can put everything and the opposite of everything. Moreover, it is hard to establish a subjective and natural "law" without an equally universal and shared order placing it into a framework of binding rules. Unfortunately the strict nature of Roman Law the perennial sphere of every sound legal reasoning - is not so widespread as it would be currently needed. Instead of the Latin Ratio, there is a new "right of feelings" or even of "impulses and drives", which now characterizes the EU position - a law heir to the one represented

by the drunken leaders of the Germanic tribes under their oak. A commercial, devised by the now endless private agencies safeguarding said "human rights", has even created an artificial link between mass migration from Africa to the EU (but above all to Italy ruled by foolish leaders) and torture. Not to mention the implementation of the human rights ideology to the LGBT minorities in the West, as well as the use of this theory of human rights for the now huge masses of immigrants from Africa to Europe, or even to minorities that although existing for centuries, are used against Asiaâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s development projects, such as the Baloch people in Pakistan against the "Sino-Pakistani Corridor" and the Sindh and Punjabi ethnic groups between Pakistan and India, as well as the Kachin people between China and Myanmar, a region where China is also investing massively.

In short, the non-State areas among the largest nations are used as clockwork mechanisms to destabilize or regionalize major economies in a phase of economic growth. And this is already a clue. Obviously this applies also to the Uyghur issue. It is also worth recalling that, according to the Turkish police, the bomber of New Year's Eve attack in Istanbul was an Uyghur - and Daesh-Isis mostly uses Uyghurs for its actions in Turkey. Central Asia, Afghanistan, Pakistan and Western China are all areas belonging to the region that has been identified as "Khorasan" by the Caliphate. In fact, the terrorist of the "Reina" nightclub attack in Istanbul was identified as an Uyghur, but with the significant name of Abu Mohammed Khorasani. An Uyghur who had been trained in Syria, then returned to Xinjiang and later moved to Kyrgyzstan with his family. From there he had arrived in Istanbul approximately one month before the attack. According to the Chinese and Turkish security forces, at least 300 Uyghurs have become members of the SyrianIraqi Caliphate. If we consider that, apart from training, every jihadist needs a protection and cover network of at least 40-50 people, we can calculate that there is a not negligible number of jihadists in Xinjiang. Moreover, criminal gangs also regularly sell fake Kyrgyz passports to the Uyghurs fleeing Xinjiang to join the jihad.

There is already collaboration between Taiwanese and Uyghurs for actions against China, including non-military ones, while Rabija Kader, the founder of the World Uyghur Congress, would already like to proclaim the "East Turkestan Republic" against which, last March, Xi Jinping called for the construction of a "big steel wall" to control and isolate Xinjiang. So far Chinaâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s policy towards the Uyghurs has been designed to integrate Xinjiang into the phase of fast economic expansion that has taken place throughout the country, as well as establishing shared security and economic relations with the neighbouring countries of the Uyghur region. In the "New Silk Road" project, Xinjiang is seen as the primary corridor for energy and trade between mainland China, Central Asia and the Middle East. Furthermore, we must also consider that one of the reasons that led to the war in Syria was the proposal made in 2009 by Qatar - an Emirate which is currently de facto at war with Saudi Arabia and many of its allies - for a gas pipeline from its North Field, at the border with the Iranian field, crossing Saudi Arabia, Jordan and Syria up to Turkey, to finally supply the European market. The following year, however, Bashar al-Assad decided to support the Iran-Iraq-Syria line, the so-called "Islamic pipeline" which, however, would have been an alternative to Gazprom Therefore, while this happened in Syria, with a careful management of internal chaos, of destabilization and of Gene Sharpâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s technique of "nonviolent action", that would be nothing compared to what may occur in Xinjiang to slow down, block and destroy China's energy and economic project with the "New Silk Road".

This is the second clue. China will shortly invest 25 billion US dollars in the streets of the region characterized by the old Turkmen ethnic group. The Sino-Pakistani Corridor, another key Chinese project, starts with a 900 billion US dollar infrastructure investment for the TashkurganGwadar line - and once again the starting basis for the line, as well as most of its immediate borders, are at risk of jihadist terrorist infiltration which, however, will always have its natural platform in Xinjiang.

It would be the solution to China's huge water problem. The Xinjiang coal reserves account for 38% of Chinese total reserves. Currently oil and natural gas in the Uyghur region account for 25% of the Chinese total reserves. And it is hard to believe that this region, which serves as a base and primary land corridor for the great Chinese Road and Belt project, cannot become the starting point triggering oﬀ a new "chaos strategy" in the near future. This is the third clue.

Let us not consider the do-gooding rhetoric of the European Parliament, which on June 22 last, with its EU-China Human Rights Dialogue, called for greater attention by the Chinese government to "civil society" (a concept fully alien to China’s old and modern political culture), as well as to the protection of "activists", who are often agents of the enemy soft power, with a view to drafting or revising useless treaties. Europe is a continent which cannot distinguish between friends and foes, neither its own nor its allies’. A continent that will not last. Moreover, the Uyghur region also has as many as 122 minerals, often with the largest reserves throughout China. Even rare metal reserves, which are currently decisive for developing new information technologies. Not to mention precious stones, gold, jade and salty materials which are needed for the production of glass and paints. The same holds true for the 25 billion cubic meters of water, which are essential in the rest of China, with glaciers having a surface of 24,000 square kilometres, which could provide 2,580 million cubic meters of additional water.

Initially, the Uyghur terrorists of the Bishkek bombing and of the Urumqi revolt were largely trained in Pakistan. Moreover, Al Qaeda trained Uyghurs in Afghanistan so as to send them back to their areas of origin to carry out terrorist attacks. Furthermore, with a view to diﬀerentiating their energy sources from the increasingly dangerous Middle East, both China and Japan look to Central Asia's oil and gas with great interest. China, in particular, needs a safe corridor for the Azeri, Kazakh, Uzbek and Kyrgyz oil and gas. Blocking the Xinjiang line or making it unsafe is the best way to force China to the prices, political tensions and military crisis of the Middle East countries.

Hence, incidentally, this is the reason underlying the farsighted Chinese policy towards Israel. At geopolitical level, for the new Central Asiaâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s "big game", the United States can rely on the only projection force of the Armed Forces, while the Russian Federation has the strategic advantage of its position and its long relations with many countries in the region. China has the chance of being the most capitalized country in Asia and also having Armed Forces capable of controlling the territory and projecting its power onto the Pacific and the South China Sea, as well as onto the South. But it has a weak point, namely the great ethnic diďŹ&#x20AC;erences which, unfortunately, materialize above all on its borders. At this juncture, we could consider for China a Horatii and Curiatii- style policy. Separating the ethnic groups, making some of them friendly, while hitting the target minority with the necessary harshness.

Certainly, the participation of ethnic minorities in current China's rapid economic development - as is currently already happening - is a further good strategy. However, this creates a class of new wealthy people linked to the government, while the new impoverishment will inevitably create new insurgency areas. Instead of believing in some "human rights" militants, paid by who knows who, it would be useful for Europe to tackle the geostrategic problem of supporting Central Asiaâ&#x20AC;&#x2122; stabilization, by cooperating with the Sino-Russian axis to avoid the jihadist contagion and, above all, the contagion of the powers that support or use it.

â&#x20AC;&#x153;The society that separates its scholars from its warriors will have its thinking done by cowards and its fighting by foolsâ&#x20AC;? Thucydides

www.moderndiplomacy.eu

The Gulf crisis: A lesson in reputation management dr. JaMes M. dorseY

Lurking below the surface of the Gulf crisis, are rival, yet troubled, attempts by Qatar and its detractors to use sports to boost soft power and/or launder tarnished images of their autocracies. Ironically, the crisis threatens to have levelled the playing field in a bitter media and public diplomacy war that was covert prior to the seven-week-old Saudi-UAE-Bahraini-led diplomatic and economic boycott of Qatar. If anything, the Gulf crisis has emerged as a case study of the pitfalls of reputation management in which sports is an important tool. On balance, it so far has had diďŹ&#x20AC;erent eďŹ&#x20AC;ects on the reputations of three of the key protagonists.

It has also served to highlight the pot-blamesthe-kettle-character of the Gulf crisis, most recently with the disclosure that North Koreans were employed not only in Qatar on World Cup-related projects, but also on a UAE military base that hosts US forces. The disclosure of relations with North Korea is awkward at a time of increased tension between North Korea and the United States over the pariah stateâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s ballistic missile and nuclear program. A Washington-based Saudi dissident group, the Institute for Gulf AďŹ&#x20AC;airs, recently published a memo reportedly from the State Department as well as emails from the hacked account of Yousef al-Otaiba, the high-profile UAE ambassador to the United States, that asserted that a

UAE company, Al-Mutlaq Technologies, had bought $100 million worth of weapons from North Korea for use in the Saudi-led military campaign in Yemen. Qatar, plagued by allegations that its successful bid for the 2022 World Cup hosting rights lacked integrity and that its migrant labour regime amounted to slavery, has scored reputational gains in the Gulf crisis despite the recent revelations related to North Korea. While the revelations reinforced concerns about Qatarâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s policies and labour regime, they also suggested that issues at stake in the Gulf crisis constituted regional problems rather than exclusive concern about just one of the Gulf states.

The UAE, a driving force in the anti-Qatar campaign that uses the hosting of international sporting events to boost its image, has suﬀered because of its failure and that of its alliance partners to garner widespread international support for its tactics and demands that were perceived as unreasonable, unactionable, and designed to undermine Qatari sovereignty and independence. The UAE’s North Korea link as well as allegations by human rights groups, denied by the government in Abu Dhabi, that the UAE was backi ng the abuse of prisoners in Yemen has done little to enhance the Gulf state’s reputation. Qatar and the UAE’s North Korean links could put the two Gulf states in the Trump administration’s firing line as it considers how to respond the Pyongyang’s most recent ballistic missile test that the pariah state claims would allow it to target any US city. Pressuring countries to back away from economic relations with North Korea, the Trump administration recently extended sanctioning of Sudan for among other things not being fully committed to implementing United Nations sanctions on the country. Saudi Arabia promised Sudanese President Omar al-Bashir, during a visit earlier this month to the kingdom as well as the UAE, that it would continue to see improvement of relations between Sudan and the United States despite the African country’s refusal to join the Saudi-UAE-led boycott of Qatar.

Neither the Gulf crisis nor sports has done much for Bahrain, its image tarnished by its brutal suppression in 2011 of a popular revolt with the help of Saudi and UAE forces, and its subsequent repression of opposition forces and continuous violations of basic human rights. Worse even, the Gulf crisis has focussed attention on Bahrain’s failed eﬀort to use sports to polish its tarnished image and put it in the spotlight as an example of the degree to which smaller Gulf states risk losing their ability to chart an independent course. As the quarrelling Gulf states pour millions of dollars into hiring public relations and lobbying firms in Washington and elsewhere with the UAE as the largest spender, Qatar can shrug oﬀ in both reputational and financial terms a $51,000 fine by world soccer body FIFA. Qatar was fined because its national team wore jerseys in a World Cup qualifier against South Korea that featured a drawing of Qatari emir Sheikh Tamim bin Hamad Al Thani. The drawing has come to symbolize a wave of Qatari nationalism sparked by the Gulf crisis. The public diplomacy war has expanded beyond a constant diet of allegations against one another in state-controlled media of the Gulf protagonists into Saudi-sponsored tv spots on US television and rival advertisements on London’s famous black cabs, alternatively featuring a pro-Qatari message, a Saudi soccer match, and the UAE’s Emirates and Ettihad airlines. Qatar, in the latest move in the public diplomacy war, hired a Washington lobby firm originally established by former Trump election campaign manager Corey Lewandowski.

Mr. Lewandowski has since left the firm over a dispute with his partners, who include Barry Bennett, a Trump campaign adviser and others with ties to the president as well as George Birnbaum, an American-born former chief of staﬀ to Israeli Prime Minister Benyamin Netanyahu who has close relations with the Republican Party establishment. Qatar separately contracted the services of a company, Information Management Services, that specializes in digging up dirt on U.S. politicians. For its part, the UAE in the years running up to the Gulf crisis hired a US firm established by former Treasury Department oﬃcials to influence US media reporting on Qatar. The media war potentially could enter a new phase with the acquisition by a relatively unknown Saudi businessman, Sultan Muhammad Abuljadayel, of an up to 50 percent stake in Independent Digital News and Media, the holding company that publishes Britain’s left-wing The Independent daily.

The Independent has consistently been critical of the kingdom. Evgeny Lebedev, the Russian owner of the Independent’s parent company, ESI Media, recently saw his shareholding fall below 50 percent. At the bottom line, the escalating media and public diplomacy war between Qatar and its Gulf detractors is as likely, as is evident with the revelations about North Korea, to put on public display the protagonists’ hidden skeletons, as it is likely to contribute to attempts to polish tarnished reputations and influence attitudes and policies in Western capitals. A key tool in the protagonists’ quivers, sports is proving to be a double-edged sword as it too has the potential of shining the light on practices and policies Gulf states would prefer to keep out of the public domain.

Ensuring a Long-term Win Against ISIS In Mosul A n n e S p ec k h A r d, p h . d. , G r Ac e WA k i m & A r d i A n S h A j kovc i , p h . d.

Allah Akbar (meaning God is Greatest) is a colloquial expression commonly used by Muslims, especially in the Arab world, to praise God and express commitment to the religion of Islam. Muslims often use the term to express emotions, such as gratitude, fear, and joy. Sometimes, it is overused and clichéd—to the point of losing its intended meaning—such as when chanted during soccer matches. [1] To many in the West, Allah Akbar represents a petrifying expression, especially when used in relation to al-Qaeda’s, and now ISIS’, version of their so-called “martyrdom” operations.

However, for the people of Mosul, it should now serve as one of the most meaningful phrases. Indeed, as the recapture of Mosul from the Islamic State is drawing to an end, the citizens of Mosul can joyfully repeat this familiar term—and without any terrorism connotations or undertones. The military assault to recapture Mosul from ISIS started in October 2016. At the time, ICSVE researchers wrote, Competing Interests, Civilian Confusion, Conspiracy Theories and Chaos in the Assault on Mosul. Now, facing liberation, we wonder whether the same observations apply post-liberation? Will the sectarian conflicts that already existed well before ISIS took over territories in Iraq be more accentuated following the fall of ISIS? Can those who lived under ISIS, particularly impressionable youth who have become entrenched in ISIS’ doctrines and their malevolent beliefs, be able to recover? Can they be rehabilitated in detention? If so, can they safely be reintegrated into communities ravaged by the brutalities of ISIS? Many would argue that by losing Mosul, ISIS lost an important battle. There are still many unknown challenges, however, and celebrations for some have been cut short by worrying signals of potential strife to come. Despite losing their territory, ISIS is still recruiting online while its homegrown and directed “lone wolf” extremists have, and continue to be, deployed around the world.

Their threat remains global. Locally speaking, in Iraq, ISIS still has many of their members and supporters hiding out in urban environments and refugee camps, among others. Peshmerga leadership shared with ICSVE researchers that they have pieced together a list of approximately 20,000 ISIS cadres and ISIS affiliates and supporters. This crucial intelligence is being used to target and hunt down such individuals in the region. ISIS militants are also known to pursue defectors who flee the group, as revealed in our interviews with ISIS prisoners. One Iraqi boy who escaped ISIS in the past year and made it into a refugee camp told ICSVE researchers how his ISIS emir repeatedly contacted him, stalking and telling him that he could not leave and that he needed to act as a sleeper agent. His safety and true separation from the group actually came with arrest. Yet, Iraqi officials, both in Kurdistan and Baghdad, shared that when youth or family members of ISIS cadres are arrested and detained, authorities often face legal, process-related, and ethical barriers in assessing how to deal with them. While at the same time, we heard repeatedly a genuine desire by prison and government officials to rehabilitate and reintegrate youth.[2] In addition to challenges associated with rebuilding and reconstructing the physical Mosul, the challenge of rewiring the psychological state—at a minimum, to its pre-ISIS capture state—of its residents will remain a daunting task, particularly in the context of children who were molded under ISIS’ tutelage and the wider traumatized population. The citizens of Mosul have witnessed beheadings, hand-cuttings, torture, murders, and other forms of violence.

In some cases, some even had to reluctantly participate and engage in these activities. ISIS defectors told ICSVE interviewers how men and women, and even children, were forcibly gathered to watch the beheadings of people on the streets, which represented ISIS’ way of making clear that any resistance was futile and would lead to brutal punishment. The group put big screens up in the streets to inundate residents, including children, with their propaganda videos and atrocities—all framed in terms of glorious actions and with the purpose of desensitizing its residents to violence. Defectors spoke about the normalization of brutality, among both children and adults.

One ICSVE interviewed defector expressed concerns about the dangerous eﬀects of violence on children in particular—that is, how they will ever be recovered after having grown up under extreme brutality.[3] Populations in conflict zones almost always have high rates of traumatization and usually display serious symptoms of Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD). Saddam’s Baathist regime, the 2003 U.S.-led coalition invasion, and the post-2003 events that further widened the Sunni-Shia divide and violence are deeply entrenched in Iraq’s collective consciousness, creating a normalcy in repeated traumatization and post-traumatic arousal states among the general population.

One woman who escaped to Baghdad after being subjected to the brutal rule of ISIS relayed her inability to stop compulsively washing her hands, and even her hair, sometimes using harsh bleach to attempt to, as she described, “remove from her body, and her mind, the dirty realities of life under ISIS.” Trauma is rife throughout the population, and mental health issues can be expected to be as well. Recent research by the organization Save the Children revealed that Mosul’s children have shown “dangerous levels of psychological damage,” and even exhibited “toxic stress” signs, all conditions that affect children’s “mental and physical health.”[4] The organization is trying to raise awareness about the issue as well as asking for funding and support from the government of Iraq to provide trained psychologists for the affected populations. Many other organizations are also providing mental health support for internally displaced people, but there still exists a huge need for long-term help, especially in the case of those who are not easy to identify and reach. According to government officials in Iraq, an estimated half a million youth lived and served under ISIS-dominated territory in Iraq.[5] Some became Cubs of the Caliphate. Others attended ISIS schools where beheadings and brutality served as the norm. Even those kept at home still witnessed atrocities out on the streets. Having the appropriate treatment and care is crucial to prevent those kids who did not get sucked into violence, including those who did, from continuing a path set out by ISIS to continue the cycle of violence and become perpetrators of violence themselves.

ICSVE interviews with government officials and mental healthcare practitioners in Iraq revealed that, generally speaking, Iraqis, and Syrians for that matter, often have strong stigmas against addressing mental illness or pursuing psychological therapy altogether. Equally important, Iraq is bereft of many of the well-trained psychologists and psychiatrists they once had, with many having moved to the Gulf States and Jordan during the 2003 U.S.- led coalition invasion of Iraq. In 2006, when we introduced the Detainee Rehabilitation Program for the U.S. Department of Defense to address the 23,000 detainees and 800 juveniles held at the time in Iraq, we found it difficult to find qualified Iraqi psychologists and social workers.[6] The situation has only worsened since then. How will the psychological problems be dealt with remains yet to be discovered. Laudably, the Prime Minister’s office in Iraq has already introduced a number of measures focused on education and deploying psychologists to survey teachers and youth in the affected areas to learn how to identify and serve their needs. Similarly, prison officials in Iraq are also looking at how to develop rehabilitation and reintegration programs for youth currently imprisoned who served under ISIS.[7] There appears to be hope on the part of the government of Iraq to release youth who served under ISIS while their elder cadres who organized and took part in systematic rapes, beheadings, and killings will generally face death sentences. The will of Iraqi officials, both in Kurdistan and Baghdad, to rehabilitate and reintegrate detained youth and the spouses of ISIS cadres and their children who have been detained in camps—with their movements restricted—is laudable.

More importantly, such efforts are necessary as this is not a problem that interested parties can overlook or kill their way through—there simply are too many youth and families who have been affected. These are complex issues that require effective rehabilitation and careful release programs that work not only with the youth held in prison but also with their family members and communities to whom they are being released. A senior police officer in the Mosul region whose brother was abducted by Islamic State militants told journalists, “I am affected — and there are a lot of people who are affected like me…[I] don’t believe that anyone who lost a family member will forget this.” [8] Indeed, the fact of having served under ISIS is not easily forgivable, even for youth who did not rape, torture, or kill, as well as ISIS family members—including the wives of ISIS members—who did engage in or carried out such atrocities. The fact of having served or having been a family member of cadres in such a heinous organization can make it difficult to be welcomed back or to live safely in one’s community without social stigma or actual revenge occurring. Arguably, one of the thorny problems is that Iraqi culture assumes a culture of revenge, enacted in the years of absence of adequate safety and security in many areas of Iraq. With the 2003 U.S.-led coalition invasion of Iraq, Iraqi society has witnessed tribes, militias, and individuals often taking matters of justice into their own hands. Sectarian violence unleashed by Zarqawi’s al Qaeda in Iraq slashed open societal rifts that have not yet healed. This was followed by revenge narratives that became especially pronounced during the period of Maliki’s sec-

ond term in power—often seen as largely responsible for sidelining the Sunni population in Iraq and eventually leading to the rise of ISIS in Iraq. To this this day, such narratives still permeate popular culture on both sides of the sectarian divide. Revenge attacks and killings continue to occur in post-ISIS Mosul as well. In an area near Mosul, fifteen family members of ISIS cadres were reportedly beaten to death while spouses of ISIS cadres report being terrified.[9] ISIS youth we interviewed in prison in Kurdistan also expressed fears that if released Shia death squads would hunt them down and kill them. Indeed, stories abound of Shia militias who have taken justice into their own hands, throwing ISIS cadres off cliffs and conducting systematic summary executions—to just name a few.[10] There are also reports of young people being detained and brutally attacked while fleeing Mosul without any proof of them being ISIS members. The Associated Press (AP) reported the Iraqi government forces at checkpoints treated those fleeing from Mosul as ISIS’ family members versus as innocent civilians fleeing a terrorist group.[11] Unless addressed, such stereotypes will further widen the gap between the people of Mosul and the rest of the population of Iraq. One interesting effort at reconciliation and healing has been made to break through the ideological indoctrination and terror techniques that ISIS engaged in and break stereotypes they instilled in the youth of Mosul and the rest of Iraq. This effort brings together hundreds of Sunni young men from Mosul who lived under ISIS rules to meet with Shia’ people from Iraq’s southern provinces.

It was made to break the misconception that both groups harbor about each other. The initiative was filmed and is called Hala Bikkon, or You’re Welcome. The short documentary showcases young men of Mosul who were taught by ISIS that the southerners [Shia’] were their enemy and told to wipe them from the face of the earth, now meeting these Shia in person. One of the young men states, “When Daesh came, we were told that people of the south hated Sunnis, southerners were going to kill us.” While the sectarian strife in Iraq is longstanding, and although many of the young men knew that such characterizations were only partially true, if true at all, they did not feel equipped or courageous enough to argue with Daesh. That Sunni and Shia citizens alike call today for unity in Iraq and to denounce the ethnic and sectarian division that Zarqawi’s al-Qaeda in Iraq unleashed after the U.S.-led coalition invasion of Iraq and that Daesh has been capitalizing on—and trying once again to magnify—is commendable. One of the bus riders optimistically asserted that despite ISIS’ evil indoctrination, “the youth of Mosul have not been influenced by Daesh’s ideology,” instilling hope in the viewer. The filmed visit between the two groups of young men went well, and trips to other places in Iraq are being planned in the future. This and similar initiatives are important and necessary to rebuild unity across sectarian divides that terrorist groups have exploited, but they also have to happen on the higher policy and grassroots levels as well as be reflected in actual governance and security measures.

The simple breaking of stereotypes is unlikely to be enough to rebuild confidence and trust between the diﬀerent ethnic groups who have experienced all the brutality that has transpired. Any eﬀorts at rehabilitation of ISIS youth, spouses and wider family members must seriously take into account the issue of deep traumatization and family and community reintegration. In a context in which collective punishment is occurring and revenge is at times generalized to anyone connected to ISIS, the government of Iraq will have to find a way to carefully work not only with former cadres and family members they wish to release back into society, but also with their communities, tribes, and wider family members who must be ready and willing to take them back. Our ICSVE research already revealed setbacks with Yazidi boys, who after being forced into the Cubs of the Caliphate, were released back to their traumatized mothers (who had also witnessed the killings of their family members and who may also have been rape victims). These boys had been ideologically indoctrinated into ISIS, witnessed extreme brutality, were taught to be brutal themselves, and were then released back to their equally traumatized mothers without any good treatment. They are reported to be confused and aggressive while their mothers are unable to cope in the face of these young boys predictably acting out their overwhelming trauma in extreme conduct disorders. In Erbil, the Kurdistan Region of Iraq, ICSVE researchers were also informed about a young boy who had been part of ISIS and was released without any adequate planning and preparation while his parents had gone missing.

Having nowhere secure to return to, the boy went back to his ISIS connections. Meanwhile, human rights workers, as well as family members of ISIS cadres, report being on the receiving end of threats. They are told to leave, face collective punishments, round-ups, and detention of entire families.[12] Conclusion Reconciliation and peacebuilding in post-ISIS Mosul, including post-ISIS Iraq, requires strong political will and determination. Strictly speaking in the context of liberated Mosul, sentiments and attitudes of projecting collective guilt upon those who lived under ISIS must be countered. The manner in which justice and reconciliation is carried out in post-ISIS Mosul will have a huge bearing on the future ShiaSunni relationship in Iraq. Equally important, while crimes against all communities must be investigated, acts of arbitrary revenge towards select communities must be avoided at all costs. Such crimes must beinvestigated and properly dealt with when they do occur. Security and justice for all is paramount to successful rebuilding. Such an approach is necessary to safeguarding the long-term success of Iraqi forces in defeating ISIS in Mosul, and in the wider Iraq, and to minimize the prospect for the reemergence of conditions that led to the rise of ISIS in the first place. By the same token, those who once lived in the ISIS-held territory in Iraq must begin to trust their government and have confidence in their ability to provide for their security and ensure justice. Given that in reality it is impossible to eliminate everyone who fell prey to ISIS and who oﬀered support to them, a transparent legal mechanism must be put in place to sort out those

who are truly guilty and separate them from those able to be rehabilitated and reintegrated. Robust deradicalization and post-traumatic stress disorder programs then must be introduced to address and heal the wounds that exist in the psyche of young children, families, and wider communities. Failure to rehabilitate and reintegrate the youth, particularly those who lived under ISIS, could jeopardize the long-term success of the successful operation against ISIS in Mosul and potentially result in the return of ISIS or other radical violent elements representing the Sunni struggle in Iraq through violence. Arguably, these rehabilitation eﬀorts are costly and will not be easy to achieve, but the costs of failing are even higher in terms of seeing a resurgence of ISIS or similar to ISIS ideology and violence.

References: [1] See for example Daniel Engber. Available at http://www.slate.com/articles/news_and_politics/explainer/2006/09/god_is_still_great.html [2] ICSVE Interviews with officials at the Ministry of Peshmerga, Sulaymaniyah, Iraq (June 2017). [3] Anne Speckhard and Ahmet S. Yayla. “ISIS Defectors: Inside stories of the terrorist caliphate. Advances Press, LLC, 2016. [4] Save the Children (July 5, 2017). “Mosul’s children mentally scared by brutal conflicts,” available at http://www.savethechildren.org.uk/201707/mosul%E2%80%99s-children-mentally-scarred-brutal-conflict [5] ICSVE interviews with officials in Baghdad, Iraq. “Education in Iraq Post Daesh-ISIL Terror,” Conference (March 29-30, 2017). [6] First author personal accounts in Iraq while tasked with the program. [7] In both cases ICSVE researchers have been giving their time and expertise to aid in such efforts; Charles Stafford. (July 2017). “Iraqi prison hopes to reform ISIL recruits. “Al-Jazeera. Available at http://www.aljazeera.com/video/news/2017/07/iraqi-

prison-hopes-reform-isil-recruits170721114348232.html [8] Anna Lekas Miller. (July 19, 2017). “Revenge attacks on families of ISIS could start a new cycle of violence in Iraq,” The Intercept. Available at https://theintercept.com/2017/07/19/revenge-attackson-families-of-isis-members-could-start-a-new-cycleof-violence-in-iraq/. [9] Anna Lekas Miller. “Revenge attacks on families of ISIS could start a new cycle of violence in Iraq.” [10] Patrick Cockburn. (July 18, 2017). “More than just revenge: Why ISIS fighters are being thrown oﬀ buildings in Mosul.” Independent. Available at http://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/middle-east/isis-mosul-ir aq-fighters-killed-thrown-oﬀ-buildings-reasons-corruption-revenge-patrick-cockburn-a7845846.html; Zubeda, Personal communication (July 2017). [11] Associated Press. (July 2017). “Tensions rise in waning days of Mosul battle.” Available at http://www.detroitnews.com/story/news/world/2017/07/05/iraq-mos ul/103456696/ [12] Human Rights Watch. (July 13, 2017).”Iraq: Alleged ISIS families sent to ‘rehabilitation camp:’ Evictions, detentions amount to collective punishment.” The Intercept. Available at https://www.hrw.org/news/2017/07/13/iraq-allegedisis-families-sent-rehabilitation-camp; ICSVE researcher personal communication with human rights advocates. Sulaymaniyah, Iraq (June 2017).

New Sanctions on Iran and Options for Regional Cooperation in Middle East AmnAh AmjAd

United States has imposed new economic sanctions on Iran over its ballistic missile program. United States accuses Iran of providing support and funds to terrorist's organizations in the Middle East, destabilizing the Middle East region and supporting the regime of Assad in Syria. These new sanctions will target the Iranian individuals and companies that are considered to be involved in supporting Iran' Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC) or supporting Iranian ballistic missile program. The important thing to notice is that the sanctions have been imposed one day after USA certifies Iran's compliance with the nuclear deal.

The news of economic sanctions depicts the contradictory behavior of the United States towards Iran that is unhappy with the activities of Iran of destabilizing the region. By imposing economic sanctions while at the same time recertifying Iran's compliance with the nuclear deal depicts that USA wants to put more pressure on Iran while keeping in place nuclear deal. The Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action (JCPOA) or Iran nuclear deal was an agreement reached in 2015 between Iran, the permanent member of the United Nations Security Council (USA, UK, Russia, France, China), Germany and European Union to curb nuclear program of Iran in return for lifting economic sanctions on Iran. Although this is the second certification by the State Department since Trump took office, the certification came at the last minute that shows reluctance and the bitterness of Trump towards the deal that was negotiated by his predecessor, Barack Obama. However, the United States cannot pull out of the nuclear deal as it will be the violation of the United Nations Security Council resolution and would oﬀer a platform to Iran to continue with its nuclear program. Is Iran violating the nuclear deal? And what is the ultimate purpose of the sanctions? The International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA), which holds a key part in monitoring Iran’s commitments towards the implementation of Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action (JCPOA), stated positively in May 2017 that Iran is working towards implementing every provision of the deal.

However, the JCPOA deals with Iran's nuclear related measures and not with the Iran’s support of rebels and terrorist organizations in Middle East. This depicts that although Iran is complying with the nuclear deal, but in absence of any deal with respect to Iran’s role in destabilizing Middle East, the country may hold up any activity that does not come under the nuclear deal. This has resulted in mistrust between Iran, United States and Gulf countries and that is why it has to face sanctions from USA and its diplomats in Kuwait have been asked to leave the country within 45 days over the court case that accused Iranian diplomats to have been working for spying and terrorism in Kuwait. The new sanctions by United States on Iran are aimed to target groups and individuals who have supported Iran's Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC), would freeze their assets in USA, and would prohibit USA citizens from doing business with them. Hence, the ultimate aim of these sanctions is to curb procurement of military equipment by Iran that may be used for terrorist activities in the region. What have been the repercussions of sanctions imposed on Iran? In the words of Iranian Foreign Minister, Mohammad Zarif, sanctions have become ‘a bad habit’ with the United States. The sanctions have affected Iranian economy and they have been imposed in order to curb Iran’s power to wage war in the region. They have affected oil exports of the country. However, the effects of sanctions on Iranian economy have not been transferred to its political movements. Although the sanctions have been imposed with the aim to change Iran’s regional politics but these sanctions could create hostility among the Iranians who could blame the West for their hardships in the form of inflation and poor economy.

Moreover, due to the sanctions imposed on Iran, China and Russia are both vary of including Iran as a full member to Shanghai Cooperation Organization. Iran has long exhibited a substantial interest to join as a full member in order to withstand pressure from the United States but this may take some years till it can prove that it is not involved in any armed conflict or facing any UN sanctions. With recent developments, what are the options to deal with the increasing tensions with the Iran, Gulf States and United States? Iran is in dire need to build up a trustworthy relationship with the world, at least with its neighbors.

For that, it needs to change its approach towards Houthi rebels in Yemen, Assad regime in Syria and Bahrain. There is conflict of interests between Iran and Gulf States in the wars and unrest in the Middle East that demands both sides to sit together and discuss the core of conflict. Since all fingers are pointing towards Iran at this time, Iran needs to take initiative and show to the world that it is willing to come to the table to discuss the concerns and is willing to change its approach towards region. The gas pipelines projects between Iran and Oman and Iran and Pakistan are examples of projects that could create incentives for regional cooperation and trust building.

But this does not spare Saudi Arabia from playing its role; Saudi Arabia needs to create a welcoming atmosphere towards Iran and needs to focus more on the repercussions that the disputed in the region will have rather concerning about the export of Iranian revolution. Issuing visas for Iranian Hajj pilgrims and allowing Iran to cap its oil production at a higher level than other OPEC members in a negotiation over OPEC production are some of the good moves taken by the Saudi Arabia towards Iran but the attitude such as laying an anti-Iran platform by inviting Muslim leaders during Trump visit to Saudi Arabia, exacerbated the tensions.

On the other hand, Trump needs to show more maturity while dealing with Iran unlike when he harshly criticized and accused Iran for sectarian conflicts and terrorism in front of leaders of Muslim nations during his visit to Saudi Arabia in May 2017. Such apparent alliance policy towards Arab autocrats also questions the United States stand for democracy and human rights. Moreover, the Gulf Cooperation Council (GCC) needs to mend fences with Iran so that the region could focus on its economic development rather sectarian divides.

Rebranding UNESCO

An interview with H.E. Dr. Hamad Al Kawari UNESCO Director General candidate

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Since his nomination for the position by Qatar in March 2016, Dr Al Kawari has also won support of a number of countries representing various continents Africa, Europe, Asia and Americas. UNESCO needs rebranding and he believes that under his leadership, the Organization will make a fresh start so that it can achieve the goal of the founding fathers. Will Dr Al Kawari be the first Arab leader in UNESCO? In an exclusive interview to Modern Diplomacy and Dimitris Giannakopoulos, he shares his vision about the prestigious Organization, towards the November election.

Let there be no doubt that the presence of one of its nationals at the head of the Organization will make Qatar and its sister countries even more keen to provide him with all the support that he would need to succeed in his mission and to help the Organization overcome its crisis and move forward.

How important is UNESCO leadership for Qatar? UNESCO incarnates the conscience of the world, through the deep interest it has given to the human issues which, through education, culture, science as well as heritage, have shaped up the past, current and future intellectual, social and cultural development of human beings. Of equal importance are UNESCO’s other areas of interest including gender equality, the promotion of dialogue between civilizations, the development of youth programs, sustained focus to the environment in all its dimensions and safeguarding human memory, all of which are structured around human development. It is against this background that the State of Qatar is seeking to serve these humanitarian goals. Since it became a UNESCO member, the State of Qatar has been very supportive towards this Organization in terms of the implementation of educational programs (Educate a Child), heritage protection programs as well as other programs, not to mention the financial support it has been providing throughout the Organization’s many various critical stages of its existence, its unshakable aim being to better serve the Organization and its humanitarian goals.

Once elected, which initiatives will you first start working on? There are several aligned and interrelated initiatives that need to be taken by the Organization. The ultimate purpose of such initiatives should be to address the crisis facing the Organization and help it make a fresh start so that it can achieve the goal of the founding fathers. However, UNESCO needs rebranding, as it no longer enjoys the image it used to have. As I was making my visits to the various continents, I have come to realize that some people do not know the location of UNESCO, nor are they familiar with its fields of competence. Some even confuse it with other organizations. Refocusing the image of UNESCO and ensuring a more effective dissemination of its noble objectives will definitely help secure more support from everyone. Among other feasible initiatives that could be conjured up is the setting up of a Small Projects Fund which would cater for the needs of countries for such projects. With respect to the financial aspect, the situation was examined and possible actions are envisaged in cooperation with senior oﬃcials, the President of the Executive Board and the President of the General Conference.

Which other issues do you think are of paramount importance? One of the most critically important issues to urgently deal with is the political dimension of the UNESCO crisis. During the Candidates general discussion held at the end of April in Paris, I happened to be the only one who dared to speak openly about the role of the United States which has frozen the payment of its share to UNESCOâ&#x20AC;&#x2122; budget since 2011 following the admission of Palestine to UNESCO. Since then, the crisis has become increasingly critical. The growing concern about issues related to the Memory of the World and the positive observations made on transparency and arbitration during the Organization's journey are but a few issues that need to be addressed bravely in order to solve them.

The Director-General plays a vital and eďŹ&#x20AC;ective role in raising these issues whenever and wherever appropriate, and in initiating dialogue with the concerned parties in order to overcome the problems. Turning a blind eye on the political aspect or shying from it will prove a not so constructive approach at all. Cultural Heritage has become some kind of hostage to terrorist groups such as ISIS. Can this threat be averted? Extremists and terrorists aim at destroying not only human lives but also the conscience of the world, its past, civilization and history, and in a nutshell its heritage. The world should be made aware of this. There are urgent measures to be taken akin to the Heritage Support Fund established in Abu Dhabi and the Security Council

Resolution condemning the destruction of cultural heritage, and stressing the importance of preserving and restoring it. In the discussions held at the end of April, I raised the slogan "Let UNESCO be the best means to combat terrorism through education and culture". During the discussions and the campaign, I put forward specific proposals regarding this matter, in particular emphasizing the upstream role to be played by education in addressing the root causes of terrorism. The eradication of its financial roots alone is not sufficient To wage an eﬃcient war against terrorism, emphasis should also be placed on qualitative education through shared human values such as tolerance, mutual respect between cultures and the fight against poverty. In line with this, I called for a world cultural day to be devoted to the promotion of the role of culture and the culture of peace in the fight against terrorism and extremism. In fact, UNESCO and its programs are as most eﬀective in combatting terrorism as the use of military means. Is the current Budget enough to carry out the tasks of the organization? Needless to say that, for optimum performance of the task, more financial resources is needed. Abu Dhabi Conference and the Heritage Support Fund are important, but the task is huge, especially after the sabotage acts perpetrated by the terrorists. Having been named the ‘Man of the Arab Heritage’ for 2016, and considering my immutable interest in heritage, human heritage and its preservation is bound to be a cornerstone in my work as Director-General, once elected.

Should governments be more cooperative in other ways? During my trips to the countries of the world, namely, the Caribbean, Asia, Africa and Eastern Europe, I have come to realize that the world has faith in the importance of UNESCO and is aware of the dangers facing us. This is a good sign indicating that there exists a genuine political will to overcome such dangers and to steer UNESCO back to the successful path it used to follow. UNESCO is a just cause, but one which needs an advocate who believes in it, who is fully aware of the intricate implications of its goals and who has the required competence, experience, vision, public relations, international network and friends to enable him to undertake the needed rescue operation. Only then will the cause achieve the desired success. Hamad Bin Abdulaziz Al-Kawari is a Qatari diplomat and statesman. Dr. Al-Kawari serves as an Adviser at the Amiri Diwan (Royal Palace of Qatar), and was formerly the Minister of Culture, Arts and Heritage of Qatar (2008-2016). He was previously the Ambassador of Qatar to France, the United States, United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization and the UN. Dr. Al-Kawari is a candidate in next election of the Director-General of UNESCO, to take place in autumn 2017. He is married and the father of three children.

The Road to 2018: Mexico lisdey espinozA pedrAzA

The past Sunday's election in 4 states of Mexico City is a pre-cursor of what's to come in 2018. The statesâ&#x20AC;&#x2122; gubernatorial race is an important barometer of Mexican politics and they are a major opportunity to test the popularity of Andres Manuel Lopez Obrador (AMLO) from the leftist party MORENA.

The results are still being contested in almost all states and most importantly in the State of Mexico, what has been called by many the Jewel of the Crown of the PRI regime, the party that successfully ruled Mexico for over 70 years.

A PRI victory in this state would give the party a much-needed boost as the president's approval ratings have dipped near single digits ahead of the 2018 race for the nation's top office. But losing a state it has governed without interruption for 88 years would be a devastating blow a year after the PRI lost in several other states it had also always dominated. The loss of the 16-million-strong State of Mexico and its financial resources would be a major blow to the PRI in its bid to stop Lopez Obrador from winning the presidency next year. The State of Mexico is home to one in eight Mexican voters and victory there would have provided AMLO with a springboard to the top job. For the PRI, the state also holds profound symbolic significance, having been at the core of its power since the party was founded in 1929 after the tumult of the revolutionary era. The party has never lost a gubernatorial election here. President PeĂąa Nieto, himself a former governor of Mexico state, was elected in 2012 in a rousing comeback and reset for the ruling party. The PRI had lost consecutive presidential elections in 2000 and 2006 to the conservative National Action Party. If the PRI loses the state of Mexico that would practically cancel its chances to win the presidency next year

What became evident last Sunday was that not only mistrust is still commonplace in Mexican elections but also that mainstream political parties still lack democratic spirit to participate in competitive elections. Whoever claims victory, reality is that the current electoral system in Mexico does not guarantee governance, does not reflect the majority of the population and does not produce legitimate rulers. Neither MORENA nor PRI, the parties who obtained most of the votes in the State of Mexico, can be called legitimate when they will only represent 10 to 15% of the electorate. While it is true that society has become increasingly participative, this is still not reflected in the number of people that cast their votes: Only 54% of the population voted in the State of Mexico. This should be a wake-up call for the political parties as they have been unable to attract a large segment of the population. The current structure of the Mexican electoral system since the transition to democracy in 2000 creates minority governments that have been caught up in a legislative paralysis as opposition parties see opposing rather than cogoverning as more electorally fruitful. Mexico has an electoral system that favours political fragmentation and the dispersion of useful votes among too many political alternatives with no real chances of ever attaining power. Ever since the PRI lost presidential power in the 2000, a chant has been repeatedly heard across Mexico: The return of PRI to the power is a step back in democracy: Get PRI out of power to give democracy a chance. After 2 failed administrations of the opposing party PAN and almost no real progress towards a real and consolidated democracy in Mexico, people

need to understand that democracy needs more than a change of the party in power to survive and thrive. Current political parties in Mexico, including the newly created MORENA, have been unable to represent and attract a significant number of citizens. AMLO lost the elections in the state of Mexico not because of an electoral fraud but rather because of his need to be the only and most prominent figure of this party. He was unable to forge alliances with the parties that could have catapulted his candidate to power in this state. The need to become the star of the show has blinded AMLO’s ability to analise and understand the political reality Mexico is currently facing. It has been said that one of the many problems Mexico has is the lack of historical memory of its people. This is also evident in those supporters of mainstream political parties, there are very few people who take the time to analyse the political career of candidates, their political platforms and viability of their proposals; the checks and balances of their past administrations as well as the people they decide to associate and forge alliances with. It is very hard to believe AMLO is indeed looking to create an alternative project for the country when he is surrounded by people who are the living image of corruption and embezzlement in Mexican politics: Elba Esther Gordillo, Ricardo Monreal, Fernado Espino and Napoléon Gómez Urritua to name a few. These should be the last people a candidate that claims to be anti-establishment should be seen around. PRD held the keys to the administration of the State of Mexico for MORENA and it may as well be the party who could finally take AMLO to the presidency in 2018. The danger here is that

AMLO has demonstrated to be a leader unable to negotiate and unable to see others at the same level. Far from working out the possibility of an alliance with PRD in these elections, he demanded absolute obedience. In 2006 AMLO frowned upon the possibility of an alliance with Patricia Mercado, the then candidate of the Social Democrats, and whose 2.7% of votes would have been enough to beat PAN’s candidate Felipe Calderon, AMLO repeated the same mistake in 2017: Lopez Obrador eschewed a political coalition in Mexico state with the Democratic Revolution Party, to which he belonged before breaking ranks in 2012 — after his second presidential defeat, which he also attributed to fraud — to form MORENA. An alliance between the two parties would have united the left behind a single oﬃce seeker. By doing so, he let the 19% of PRD votes slip right through his hands and helped PRI maintain their jewel of the crown: the State of Mexico. Since President Enrique Peña Nieto won in 2012, the Mexican presidential elections of 2018 have had one clear contender: Andrés Manuel López Obrador. If AMLO wants to stop being the runner-up and to finally attain power in 2018, he needs to start showing a much more tolerant attitude and open mind. He needs to learn to negotiate rather than to impose.

Brazil in the short Strikes The ultimate price of welfare

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April 28th will be a date to remember. Even though some of the great media claim that there were only demonstrations around the country, it is to assume that, by a consensus or not, what happened here was a strike. A general strike, the first in 20 years, one of the biggest in the History of the country, highly cited in the social media (figuring the trending topics in the whole world for hours), spread over the 26 states and the Federal District. Barely any buses or trains in the city of São Paulo. Diverse unions like the teachers’ and the bankers’ and the two main popular fronts were not only present, but also organised the event.

The reason for that? Not Mr. Temer’s government, specifically; not this time. But the new measures and reforms he has emphatically worked on since the end of last year, that happen to surprise and worry – to say the least – the average Brazilian worker. The outraged atmosphere, however, comes way before today and takes a brief economic explanation to understand. Old, but not gold The last general strike happened in 1996, during Mr. Fernando Henrique Cardoso’s government, another neoliberalist. One of the points in common is the fight against turning the workers’ rights more flexible. At the time, Mr. Cardoso even claimed that ‘strikes don’t create jobs’, as the protesters also manifested against the high unemployment rates.

It is natural that a moment of economic instability creates some sort of friction amongst the workers and the government. The late conjunction of that with a huge political crisis under the stigma of corruption is perfectly combined with strict measures from Mr. Temer and creates a dangerous mixture. One of the most controversial acts proposed by the new president concerns the pension reforms. The initial project aimed to stablish a common age for retirement, being that valid for men, women, being them urban or rural workers – 65 years old, against the current 55 for women and 60 for men. Also, the minimum working time for retirements with a full pension (starting with 70% of its value and progressively evolving to 100%, according to the years of extra contribution) would be of 49 years, against the current 25 years for urban workers

and 15 for the rural ones. It is needless to say that it was not accepted nor tolerated and some changes were made to be voted again in the Parliament – yet, the amount of people impacted by the reform will be enormous, and so will the time they need to work until they retire. The country, Mr. Temer says, cannot aﬀord for the current system and some austerity must be shown, even in such a delicate matter. It is clear as Malthus could foresee that times of prosperity and abundance do not last forever, but one must make no mistake and believe that any reform should be accepted. Indeed, the Brazilian pension system works as a pyramid – the ones who start working pay for those who have already stopped. This pyramid, following the global tendency, is becoming inverted and finding solutions for that is more than an obligation. Mr. Cardoso, and also Mrs. Rousseﬀ created some formulas for calculating the ideal age for retiring and, until now, workers were to choose which one would fit them best. The clash came with a proposition of a questionable redistribution – which might have come as a demand from the president’s supporters – that would ultimately harm the Brazilian workers’ rights. Work, work, work Those, however, were not the only plans of the PMDB, Mr. Temer’s party, government. On Wednesday (27), a late voting session at the Lower House showed an articulation of a worried Mr. Temer for the approval of a reform of working laws before the pickets that would happen the next day. This reform would change some important aspects for workers, like the possibility to work as third parts, causing more instability; the prevalence of em-

ployer-employee agreements over the law, which may bring poorer working conditions, and the end of the obligation of yearly paying the union. The latter is clearly one of the reasons why the unionists were so heated: a union without its members is nothing at all, nor does it have the strength to fight for the working class. The general strike was organised by the leftists, the same ones that call Mr. Temer’s rise to power a coup d’état, as we may see here. There were occupations, a typical manner in which the Brazilian left-wing acts. And, this time, there was hopefully some food for thought for all the citizens: those who do not work anymore, those who are to suﬀer the tough times to come and, especially, the most imminent political figure we have – who has kept almost silent during the protests, but has been watching it all very closely and already counts with a historic of ‘forced flexibility’, once he notices the people more dissatisfied than the usual rejection polls normally show.

China, Russia and the shifting landscape of arms sales s i e m o n t. W e z e m A n

Following the end of the cold war and the break-up of the Soviet Union, there were rapid decreases in Russian military budgets. Soviet military expenditure had stood at almost USD $350 billion in 1988. However, by 1992 it had fallen to USD $60 billion and in 1998 was only USD $19 billion. The more flexible parts of the budget suďŹ&#x20AC;ered the most, such as those for procurement and operations. At the same time, the Russian arms industry saw several major clients for its weapons disappear, chief among them the former Warsaw Pact members and Iraq.

In the 1970s and 1980s, these specialists came primarily from Europe and the USA. However, these Western sources were largely closed oﬀ in 1989, primarily due to events in Tiananmen Square. Under these constraints, China began a search for alternatives.

By 1992, the arms industry Russia had inherited from the Soviet Union was in serious trouble. Most of its internal market and part of its export market was gone. In parallel with this development, China was embarking on a serious military modernization. Boosted by its rapidly growing economy, it began to implement a long-planned reorganization of its armed forces and the acquisition of advanced weaponry. (This modernization had been planned since the 1970s and was given extra impetus by the poor performance of China’s armed forces against Viet Nam in 1979.) Chinese military spending has increased almost every year since 1989, the first year of Stockholm International Peace Research Institute (SIPRI) data for China, from USD $21 billion in 1988 to USD $215 billion in 2015. With this surge, China overtook Russia’s spending in 1998 and within five years had become the second largest spender globally behind the United States. Mutual export and import dependencies Because Chinese arms design capabilities had been relatively stagnant since the late 1960s, based on outdated Soviet designs and technologies, its industries sought the help of foreign suppliers and designers of equipment and components.

By coincidence, rather than design, Russia and China found themselves in desperate need of a market and a source of military equipment respectively. During the 1990s and early 2000s, Russia’s arms industry survived largely because of its exports of newly produced combat aircraft, armoured vehicles and warships. China played a crucial role during this period. China was Russia’s largest client between 1999 and 2006, accounting annually for 34–60 per cent of the volume of Russia’s exports of major weapons. The decision to sell weapons to China, however, was not without opposition in Russia. There were warnings that Russia would be arming a potential adversary that many suspected had its eyes on the Russian Far Eastern Federal District. Moreover, concerns were expressed that China would copy, without permission and without paying royalties, whatever Russia delivered. In the longer term, worries grew that China might soon become a serious competitor in the global arms market, often in the same countries and regions as Russia. However, the fact that China needed significant numbers of a variety of weapons—and was willing and able to pay in cash—won the argument. At its peak in 2005, China accounted for 60 per cent of all Russian deliveries of major weapons. By 2006, however, the mutually beneficial export-import relationship between Russia and China had begun to shift.

Russian and Chinese military spending 1988–2015. Data and graphic: SIPRI

China’s share dropped to below 25 per cent between 2007 and 2009. Moreover, since 2010, the share has halved again to approximately 10 per cent. By that time, however, Russia had consolidated some of its other traditional markets in countries such as India and Algeria and received large orders from newer markets, such as Venezuela. Improvements in the Russian economy also meant that its military spending began to allow for larger orders for its domestic arms industry, reducing the need for exports. Reverse engineering and market shifts China’s shift away from Russian exports was in part linked to its own growing manufacturing capabilities. In line with Russia’s original concerns over the potential for reverse engineering by China, copies were made without permission of a variety of Russian weapon systems. Just a few years after Russia delivered the Sukhoi-27 (Su-27) combat aircraft, for example,

China released the Jian-11 (J-11). While this aircraft was labelled ‘indigenous’, it was a nearcopy of the Su-27. Similarly, new Chinese surface-to-air missiles (SAMs) looked very much like S-300 platforms from Russia. Moreover, Chinese submarines sported features of the Russian Project-877 and Project-636 Kilo class submarines supplied by Russia. China also started to field its own advanced weapons, such as the Jian-10 (J‑10) and J-11 combat aircraft, various air-to-air and air-toground missiles, and several types of warship. Thus, the emphasis of Chinese imports from Russia switched from complete weapon systems to components, such as engines. Only in the field of helicopters were Chinese eﬀorts to develop indigenous systems slow, mainly because China had not yet mastered the production of propulsion systems, such as engines, transmissions and rotors. In this one area, imports of helicopters from Russia have remained

Exports of major weapons by Russia to China 1987–2016. Data and graphic: SIPRI

significant (see table below; data from the SIPRI Arms Transfers Dataabse, received 2017).

New phase or last spasm?

Beyond the diminished need for Russian imports, China also rapidly transitioned into a major arms exporter. This resulted in Chinese forays into markets in which Russia was active, including Algeria, Nigeria, Venezuela, Indonesia and even the former Soviet state of Turkmenistan. (India and Viet Nam are the only important markets where Russia does not face Chinese competition.) Compounding initial Russian concerns over reverse engineering and loss of market potential, China’s L-15 supersonic training and light attack aircraft and the Hongqi-9 (HQ-9) SAM system have also shown signs of ‘borrowing’ from Russian weapons.

After almost five years of diﬃcult negotiations, Russia and China moved to a new level of arms trade in 2015. Russia finally agreed to sell China 24 Sukhoi‑35 (Su-35) combat aircraft and four S-400 SAM systems for approximately USD $7 billion. These are currently among the most advanced weapons Russia produces. This agreement marked a turning point. It was the first significant sale of Russian major weapons to China since the mid-2000s, representing a sizeable addition to Russia’s total annual value of arms exports, which has hovered between USD $13.5 billion and USD $15 billion in recent years.

The agreement could herald a new phase of large sales of Russia’s most sophisticated arms to China. However, it could also be viewed as a last chance for Russia to gain some income from arms sales to China before the latter becomes self-suﬃcient. The first scenario would fit the picture of warming Russian–Chinese relations, following the crisis in Ukraine. The second scenario is more tightly bound to Russian financial hardships and the diﬃculties in its arms industry since 2015. This sale could well be the last chance for Russia to engage in a major sale of military equipment to China. At the same time as the Su-35 and S-400 are due for delivery, China will be introducing its own more advanced Jian-20 (J-20) combat aircraft, as well as its own advanced jet engines, large transport aircraft, helicopters and long-range SAM systems—many of which are on a par with or even better than Russian systems.

When it comes to the arms trade, China has not only learned from Russia, but succeeded in challenging it. Given its financial and defence industrial base, China is likely to have more chances to develop new military technologies than Russia. China’s electronics, composites, advanced materials and shipbuilding industries are all more advanced than those in Russia. The size of the Chinese economy means that it has many more resources and much more manpower to invest in research and development. Thus, it is more than likely that China’s military technology will surpass that of Russia on all levels. This topical backgrounder is based on a chapter within the report ‘China–Russia relations and regional dynamics: From pivots to peripheral diplomacy’. The report contains case studies from 27 experts from 13 countries. Over two days in January 2017, these experts assembled at a workshop at SIPRI of over 70 participants to discuss their research and analyses on China and Russia in both non-traditional and traditional security domains. First published in SIPRI.org

Major Russian weapons delivered to China 1987–2016. Data: SIPRI

Cooperation or Connectivity: How will the SCO function from now?

W A n G l i & pA l A m d o r j B AyA r t s e t s e G

With the inclusion of India and Pakistan into the Shanghai Cooperation Organization (SCO) at the summit meeting on 9 June 2017, there is much uncertainty surrounding the future of the organization’s ability to maintain stability and cohesiveness. This is the first time the SCO has grown to include new nations since its establishment in 2001, and once the two countries are formally admitted the eight-member bloc will not only cover nearly half of the world’s population and 3/5 of the Eurasian continent bordering three oceans (the Indian, the Pacific and the Arctic Oceans), but also include four nuclear powers—Russia, China, India and Pakistan.

With their inclusion, it is one of the largest regional organizations in the world, however, it is unclear if India and Pakistan will complicate the organization’s efficiency and affect the SCO’s ability to promote regional stability and prosperity. Those who tend to believe in “the Thucydides Trap”, or recognize the differences among the “Big Three”—Russia, China and India, find it difficult to look at this merger optimistically, especially because of the long contentious history between India and Pakistan. According to some analysts, while the increase in SCO members will bring diversity to its voice, it also has the potential to affect the current equilibrium among the original six states. On June 9, Carnegie-Tsinghua Center for Global Policy held the forum “Shanghai Cooperation Organization at Crossroads”. The keynote speakers provided their insightful views from Russia, the United States, and India, but it seemed to omit the Chinese opinions on the summit meeting of the SCO in Astana.

Like any international or multilateral organization, it is essential for both new and old SCO member states to ensure the organization continues to maintain the necessary cohesion among them. Theoretically, the forces that bring states together and drive them apart will aﬀect the security of individual states by determining both how large a threat they face and how much help they can expect. Therefore, the factors that determine how states choose alliance or “strategic partners”, as China asserts, will shape the evolution of the SCO as an international organization. Therefore, the central issue that remains is how these states will respond to “threats” and the likelihood of working together to combat threatening ‘forces”. China aﬃrmed that since it was founded 16 years ago, the SCO has become a significant platform and reliable support for the member countries to enhance mutual trust, deepen public diplomacy, expand practical coopera-

tion, and jointly safeguard regional security and stability. Yet, with the increasing uncertainties and instabilities in the current international and regional situation, the member states agreed to be more cooperative within the SCO framework. As a rising power and the dual core founders of the SCO, it is highly expected China will assume its usual role. During one SCO summit, Chinese President Xi Jin-ping called for all member states to work jointly in safeguarding regional peace and building a community of shared future, which then resulted in an SCO convention on combating terrorism and extremism. China is considering hosting another similar convention and promised to take the primary share of the budget for the Secretariat of the SCO to facilitate its work as scheduled. In addition, given the recent deterioration of the security situation in Afghanistan, the SCO reached a consensus that “without security, there will be no development to speak of. And it called upon all parties to support the war-worn government in Kabul to reinforce the fight against all sorts of the acts of terrorism and religious extremism which remain a long and arduous task”. It deserves noting that China made the compromise to take the term of separatism out of the “three evil forces”—terrorism, separatism and extremism, which have been the key words of the Chinese discourse with international terrorism. Secondly, although China has quite a wide range of disagreements with member states such as India, it highlighted the year of 2017 as the SCO’s 15th anniversary and the 10th anniversary of the signing of the Treaty on LongTerm Good-neighborliness, Friendship and Cooperation.

In Astana, Xi lost no time to reiterate the "Shanghai Spirit" mainly embodied in the two documents, which have become more cohesive in the face of the vicissitudes of the region and the world as a whole. At the moment of the accession of India and Pakistan to the SCO on June 9, Chinese leader first congratulated India on being a full member of the SCO, adding that the two parties would work together for more high-level interaction, strategic dialogues and policy alignment within the SCO framework. As a regional bloc in which Sino—India cooperation can extend to other issues in the region, the SCO is also able to provide a new angle for bilateral ties between Beijing and New Delhi. As Indian scholar Raja Mohan put it, the deepening strategic partnership between Moscow and Beijing and a transformed India-United States relationship have fundamentally altered the context of India’s interest in the SCO. As China’s rise has begun to constrict India’s room for maneuver in the subcontinent of Asia and the Indian Ocean, unlike in the past, Moscow may not be willing to help New Delhi balance Beijing. However, being a full member of the SCO does provide India with much more strategic capacity. At the least, Prime Minister Modi has taken the utility of the SCO to deal with two of India’s immediate security issues: counterterrorism and connectivity. China certainly welcomes the fruitful outcomes gained at the Astana Summit, which includes the expansion of the SCO for the first time. The leaders in Beijing are also content with the deepening cooperation between old and new members in terms of the "Shanghai Spirit".

Perhaps more significant is that because of wide support of the “Belt and Road Initiative” and SCO development strategies during the summit, China seems to be more confident than ever to seek the glory it claims on the world stage. In the meantime, China appeals to all members to adhere to inclusiveness and openness in order to have dialogues with other countries or international and regional organizations. For the SCO overlaps with many key areas of the Belt and Road Initiative, it also serves as a security complement to the ambitious economic-focused BRI. But just as the BRI is leading China to become more entangled in regional geopolitical security challenges, the SCO’s two new members, India and Pakistan, will likely complicate the organization’s normal function. In closing, China has perceived the SCO as a first testing ground for promoting common interests through a multilateral platform in which China is the strongest, but not the only strong player. It was also viewed as a first step toward a Sino-Russian condominium in Central Asia, in which Beijing and Moscow could create a regional order to benefit both powers and could be accepted by the countries of the region. In order to get there, China was promoting the creation of the SCO’s free trade area (FTA) and a joint development bank. Yet, Beijing soon discovered that Moscow was worried that China would use the SCO FTA and the development bank to promote its own agenda and to buy influence in Central Asia at Russia’s expense. Because the SCO headquarters are located in Beijing - and the organiza

tion has Shanghai in its name - it is seen as a big enough symbolic trophy to keep China pleased. As a matter of fact, in Henry Kissinger’s opinion, the contemporary Asian order includes outside powers as an integral feature: the United States whose role as an Asia-pacific power was explicitly aﬃrmed in joint statements by the two governments in 2013; and Russia, geographically an Asian power and one co-founder of Asian groupings such as the SCO, has forged the highest-level strategic partnership with China of the day. Therefore, the leaders of China are well aware that given the rivalry between India and China and the continuing enmity between India and Pakistan, they do represent major challenges to the future function of the SCO. The key to the challenge is that if Moscow rises to the occasion, it can create a useful platform for managing international order across Greater Eurasia. If it fails to do so, the SCO will be dysfunctional, with the rivalries and enmities on the continent running unchecked. The picture seems not so rosy, but it is the reality faced from now by all member states of the Shanghai Cooperation Organization.

The Challenge of the Indigenous Arms Industry: The Ascendant and Dependent Classes

D av i D D av i D i a n

Just as Niccolo Machiavelli noted the unreliability of mercenaries and interpretations of Sun Tzu claiming a mercenary's real value is not more than half a native soldier, one can extrapolate from these observations to deduce that the most eďŹ&#x20AC;ective arms industry is indigenous. While this may not be much of a revaluation, its implementation, especially in developing countries (and even developed countries), is becoming exponentially diďŹ&#x192;cult. The gap between the necessity for manufacturing indigenous arms and the ability to deliver them is widening and has been since the end of WWII. This gap is not between first- and third-world states.

To be more precise, if one looks at the history of weapons development since the end of WWII, one sees that countries that have had uninterrupted arms development are those that have been able to build upon and maintain military research and development programs and can deliver continuously advanced weaponry to the field. It is nearly impossible for a newly established state or an established state that wishes to enhance its defensive capabilities with serious indigenous development to do so at the same rate as established state industries, for the ever-increasing rate of change in technology is fostered by “ascendant-class states”. An exception to this may be Israel, but this is due to its extensive ties with the US military industrial complex. The widening of the technology barrier is in the interest of ascendant-class states such as the US, Russia, and China as they are the leading arms exporters to the “dependent-class states”.

Where has this left the dependent-class states, specifically those that have budgets, technology, development and management capabilities, and inevitably the political necessity for weapons? Given a fortuitous combination of items from the preceding list the best bang-forthe-buck is to develop nuclear weapons. Israel's nuclear program began as far back as the 1950s, accelerating after the 1967 Six Day War. Some states move from dependent-class to the nuclear club sometimes at the expense of feeding their own people. North Korea is an example. If Iran were not eﬀective in its indigenous weapons program and uranium enrichment capabilities, it might be relegated a Middle East backwater subject to a Persian Spring. We have seen this spelled out clearly with India and Pakistan. Both have nuclear weapons. India claims to have hydrogen bombs of varying yields, yet it must import its best fighter jets as does Pakistan.

In some cases, it makes little sense in both time and eﬀort to match technology-for-technology with a state's perceived enemies. For example, if state A has advanced tanks or other heavy weaponry, rather than to match or exceed it in quantity and/or quality, state B could use ultrasensitive vibration and triangulation processing to locate tanks in motion from many kilometers away and target them with standard artillery. When the enemy's advanced tank is disabled and captured, further inspection and investigation could provide methods for more eﬀective destruction.

While joint development or licensing of technology seems a reasonable compromise in some scenarios, ascendant-class states limit the amount of technology that is exposed. Many examples can be cited, but earlier this month joint development of an Indian-Russian fifth generation fighter jet stalled over Russian concerns that its stealth technology would be compromised. [5] Pakistan was hoping it would acquire the capability to build a state-of-theart fighter jet from scratch in their joint JF-17 Thunder program with China. This didn't happen. “...PAF [Pakistani Air Force] understood that it cannot build a backbone fighter via imports.” [6] A licensing agreement between Azerbaijan's Defense Ministry and Aeronautics Defense Systems of Israel for the local assembly of Aerostar and Orbiter UAVs (Unmanned Aerial Vehicles) in Baku still has 70% of the components produced in Israel. [7] These are strong reminders of what Machiavelli and Sun Tzu observed hundreds and thousands of years ago, respectively. The dependence resulting from not reinventing one's own wheel can be a gating factor as the ascendant-class can modulate the game.

Most oﬀensive military UAVs have anti-radiation protection. However, a UAV must either be directed or self-identify a target. Considering that the methods available for targeting are based on technologies associated with radar, ladar, electro-optical sensors, GPS, etc., rather than to match the enemy’s advanced UAV systems, creating ways of disabling or degrading their tracking and target acquisition may be the way to go in defending against such technologies. Inexpensive, yet eﬀective, (non-nuclear) directed EMP (Electro Magnetic Pulse) systems may be enough to temporarily degrade or at least cause directional errors large enough to divert the UAV. Wide field laser weapons [8] meant to blind soldiers (banned by the UN) could damage electro-optical sensors, adapted for use in combination with other defense mechanisms. Such techniques can be an alternative to developing a top of the line military UAV industry.

What of those states that have limited resources, and/or never had or lost their research and production capabilities to sustain a limited indigenous arms industry? These states would rank below dependent-class status.

Then, there is cyber warfare. Some call this the great equalizer because cyber attacks are anonymous, eﬀective, deniable, and entire state infrastructures can be taken down with a keyboard. The United States, China, Russia, and

Israel are on cyber warfare technology's leading edge. Some of this is very overt. Job postings for several years in the United States include a new position called an “ethical hacker”.

If collateral cyber damage from not having internet access to at least neutral information were actually planned, it alone could cause erroneous decisions to be made based on false or incomplete information.

Targeted cyber weapon eﬀorts such as Stuxnet [9] require the prowess of a sizable state. This is due to the combination of wide systems expertise, cyber hacking technology, and human intelligence required to stage such a debilitating weapon. Less challenging, yet devastating, attacks can be the work of a single cyber soldier. Cyber warfare attacks have been reported on infrastructures in Syria, Ukraine, Estonia, Burma, Iran, Japan, Israel, South Korea, US, Georgia, etc. If there is such a thing as collateral damage from cyber attacks, the following story should shed light on this. While I was on a visit to the Republic of Georgia in 2008, hostilities between Russia and Georgia commenced. The Russians began the equivalent of a denial-ofservice attack on the Georgian internet infrastructure.

Georgia did not need a classical army of soldiers, weapons and tanks to mitigate this denial-of-service attack. I am sure lessons learned will be implemented as the boundary between ascendant-class and dependent-class or below is not easily defined in cyber warfare.

This resulted in the inability of Georgians to access facilities such as email; but, most importantly, accurate information simply wasn't available. One might as well have been in the dark ages, for local TV reverted to showing black-and-white movies of Georgians defeating the Persians hundreds of years earlier. Russian cable channels were severed. Rumors became “reality”: flour imports were rumored halted, which caused a run on bakeries at 2pm one morning; word on the street was the country was low on beans, and within hours the price of beans in Tbilisi stores became astronomically high; Russian fighter jets were launched from air bases in Armenia (this was specifically announced as false on Georgian TV).

Finally, there are non-state actors. Non-state actors are either given weaponry or must secure them financially. As proxies for regional or international powers, non-state actors are subject to the vagaries of their patrons. However, as the line between state-of-the-art state-sponsored hackers and those of an astute individual is blurred, the capability of non-state actors to create infrastructure chaos is real. Six months ago, Syrian hackers claimed responsibility for hacking into Belgian news sites. Only last month, it was reported that ISIS-aﬃliated hackers attacked various governmental sites in the UK. [10] It could take only a few more keystrokes to hack into UK's power distribution grid even though it is actively protected against such attacks. Military and defense secrets are the most fleeting of all. The world is increasingly technologically complex. It would be remiss of established states not to maximize their indigenous defense capabilities – if – such states are determined to minimize their dependence on the ascendantclass. Minimum dependence enhances the ability to defend one's own interests.

Politicized Intelligence/ Wounded Democracy D r . M at t h e w C r o s s t o n

The current political climate in Washington DC towards the American Intelligence Community (AIC) is perhaps at an all-time low. Not only is there a special prosecutor taking over for a fired FBI Director to investigate the President of the United States, trying to determine if the Commander-in-Chief in fact colluded with a foreign nation to undermine the sanctity of the American electoral system, that same President seems to take every opportunity he can to denigrate, call into question, and heap insults upon the AIC in its entirety. While some may not consider such behavior from Trump to be surprising (if nonetheless disappointing), the reality is this atmosphere is the consequence of a trend that has existed for almost the entire 21st century and has crossed party lines and involved two other presidents.

This disturbing trend has remained somewhat hidden from mainstream eyes and ears. More importantly, the damaging consequences to democracy that can emerge from politicized intelligence have gone even more unnoticed and undiscussed. George W. Bush The obvious event that started the downward turn between the political and intelligence communities in America was the lead-up to the Iraq War under George W. Bush. Its ultimate expression came with Colin Powell’s speech to the United Nations where he ‘made the case’ for Weapons of Mass Destruction being present in Iraq. The information presented was from the AIC. However, the subtle nuance missed (and which to this day deeply irritates members of the AIC when discussing the issue) is that the Intelligence Community does not present policy suggestions to the government. Its job is to simply present its analysis based on the evidence that was sourced from various venues, both open and classified.

How leaders then interpret and present those analyses, that evidence, to the public is the sole and exclusive responsibility of the government. The problem, of course, was that WMDs were never discovered in Iraq and subsequently said intelligence analyses were deemed ‘inaccurate’ by many politicians in a fairly blatant attempt to avoid public blame. Secretary of Defense Rumsfeld was particularly vocal in this passing of the responsibility buck. This clearly left a sour taste in the collective mouth of the AIC, which felt it had simply done its analytical job to the best of its ability and, having never given a policy recommendation or even oﬀered a definitive conclusion about WMDs in Iraq, did not exactly appreciate being ‘thrown under the bus’ as the saying goes in the United States – used for political convenience and its prestige and purpose undermined and misunderstood. Most importantly, the AIC felt somewhat handcuﬀed in that it knew it would be inappropriate to air its grievances in public. As a result, public perception was being de facto misled.

Barack H. Obama While most assume there were no major missteps during the Obama administration when it comes to politicizing intelligence or isolating the AIC, they are forgetting the complex use of drones in the war on terror overseas. Obama’s foreign policy and counterterrorism initiatives were definitively marked by the fortuitous technological advancement and dominance of the United States over the drone market. Few realize that America employed a two-tier system of drone usage, one controlled by the Department of Defense (DoD) and one commanded by the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA). It is in breaking down these two tiers that some unnecessary slipperiness is exposed during the Obama tenure. The DoD-usage of drones was more closely monitored and rigidly hierarchical in terms of command structure. The process of analysis and approval was indeed labyrinthine. But the CIA-level of drone usage was tagged more to classified information and covert operations. As such, an impression was allowed to develop over time publicly that the CIA drone program was akin to ‘spies run amok’ or some other Hollywoodized-style ‘rogue system.’ In reality, this perception was exaggerated: the CIA did not feel there was anything about its usage of American drone technology that could be categorized as rogue or inappropriate

to the standard calculation of US national interests. Those interests are set and/or approved by the President of the United States. That Obama did not make any special eﬀort to make the public aware of this distinction and thereby stop the growing public perception of CIA rogue kill lists via drone was particularly disconcerting to the AIC. Once more, it felt it was being placed in the position of doing exactly what it was supposed to do while the Commander-in-Chief allowed falsehoods and misperception to sully the Intelligence Community’s image. Coming on the heels of the Bush-WMD fiasco, it made the AIC feel as if the White House was grinding on old scar tissue and that Obama had played a bit fast-andloose with public opinion to leverage his own personal image and Q-rating. The AIC took note but again did not do anything publicly. Donald J. Trump In the Trump Presidency, we perhaps have the nadir of this phenomenon. Not only is the Commander-in-Chief openly talking and tweeting about the relevance and allegiance of the Intelligence Community, he also accuses it of actively leaking information to the detriment of his oﬃce. For the IC’s part, it feels nervous about the current President’s understanding of classified information and the procedural norms tied to the releasing of such information. It is easy to glance over these statements without fully understanding the calamity they represent: to have the executive branch of the government and its intelligence community openly engaged in an adversarial rather than cooperative relationship is beyond shocking. That some of this takes place across social and regular media for full public view is doubly shameful.

Obviously, the Russian hacking scandal and its aftermath only pushes these conditions to even more extremes of non-communication. And while the AIC stayed largely quiet with their complaints during the previous two Presidential administrations, it seems apparent that it has now decided to take the gloves oďŹ&#x20AC; and let fly with a few haymakers of its own with the current administration. All to the detriment of democracy. The Consequences Politicizing intelligence is more than just the same old, same old, politics-as-usual cynicism that is so pervasive across global society today. It is also not just risky behavior that hinders the American national security scene as it produces poor communication and a lack of trust. It fundamentally weakens one of the great and undervalued structural aspects of American democracy. It is a lesser-known check-andbalance that we do not discuss very often but which represents a core aspect of our political stability and rationality. This is especially so when it comes to formulating and pursuing foreign policy and national security interests. Just go look at China, Russia, Iran, Saudi Arabia, Nigeria, or Venezuela if you want to understand how damaging it can be to society overall when intelligence is either compromised by the government or made to heel and obey the ever-changing policies of diďŹ&#x20AC;erent administrations, when intelligence is not allowed to remain above the fray of politics. This weakening has an added negative impact: it undermines public faith and trust in its security institutions and the leaders meant to run them, which has severe consequences on scholars and their academic institutions that

want Intelligence and National Security Studies to represent a viable, exciting, important, and HONORABLE career for public service. For the last fifteen years the United States Intelligence Community has become, despite its own preferences and professional standards, more and more politicized. It has been forced into this position by circumstance and is awaiting the administration that can right the ship and put Americaâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s governing institutions back into their true and proper places. Unfortunately, that administration is, at the moment, nowhere in sight, leaving us all to guess just how much long-term damage is being done to democracy in America.

Telegram: The Mighty Application that ISIS Loves a h M e t s . YaY l a , P h . D .

ISIS has been the most successful terrorist organization in history using social media and the Internet for distributing its propaganda, dissemination of its news and more importantly to communicate. There is no doubt that the frequency and quality of ISIS posts on the Internet, including their videos, memes and online journals are of a quality to make many professional editors and producers envious and they also receive much attention[1]. ISIS usually does not host its posts on dedicated servers but uses several free and open mediums including Google drive, Cloud.mail.ru, Yandesk, YouTube, Sendvid.com, Dailymotion.com, Drive.ms, Archive.org, Justpaste.it, Bitly.com and some other recent platforms.

Of course, hosting is not enough; hosted posts need to be distributed to followers, the target audience and the public. At this point, several social media platforms including Facebook, Twitter, Telegram, WhatsApp, Google+, Instagram, Pinterest, Tumblr, Viber, and WeChat are utilized by ISIS to circulate their posts so that the target audience and public are made aware and can watch or read them by clicking on the web addresses posted to those mediums.

A Belgian female defector recently recounted being recruited upon her arrival to ISIS to serve as an Internet seductress, a role she declined[3]. Indian police also told us that most of their ISIS recruitment occurs via the Internet and consists of female seducing males into the group[4]. Indeed, American Mohamad Khweis appears to have been seduced in this way, marrying his ISIS bride when he arrived to Istanbul and then traveling into ISIS territory with her[5].

Among these social media platforms Twitter, YouTube, Facebook, Tumblr and Instagram were previously heavily utilized by ISIS, but since takedowns on these sites, ISIS currently favors Telegram where ISIS users maintain a presence in several diﬀerent languages. ISIS has assigned administrators in several languages who are in charge of ISIS social media accounts including Telegram. When interviewing ISIS defectors[2], we also learned that female foreign fighters are specifically tasked for the administration of social media accounts, and they have special oﬃces in Raqqa to carry out their tasks under the control of their emirs.

At ICSVE, our researchers closely follow ISIS’s Telegram posts on a daily basis and download any relevant videos, journals, memes, pictures or anything else useful for our research. While the terrorist organization utilizes several diﬀerent platforms to distribute their posts, the most reliable medium of late for their purposes has been the Telegram social media application. This is because other platforms usually quickly take down posts or shut down the accounts posting the links to these hosts. Hosting mediums also delete posts as soon as they realize they are ISIS content. As a result, Telegram has become the main social media platform for ISIS

members and followers primarily because, so far, Telegram administrators do not usually shut down ISIS accounts, and when they do, the frequency is far less when compared to other social media accounts. For example, Twitter or Facebook take down ISIS accounts in a day or most two in many cases, and when the same account owners open new accounts, they block them even sooner. However, there are Telegram accounts opened or used by ISIS members that stay active for months or basically never get closed. Telegram was launched in 2013 by two brothers, Nikolai and Pavel Durov, who also founded Russia’s largest social network Russian VK. The Telegram Messenger LLP is registered as an independent nonprofit company in Berlin, Germany. The founders claim that Telegram is “faster and safer” than other apps and more importantly the “messages sent through Telegram cannot be bugged by third parties.” [6] Indeed, Telegram is an encrypted social media application that is very diﬃcult for law enforcement to penetrate or eavesdrop. Apart from accounts not being closed as often as other ISIS social media accounts, there are two other advantages to ISIS for using Telegram. The first is that while in most cases the links to hosts are distributed in Telegram groups where there are several members or directly sent to individual accounts, they become useless as soon as the hosting companies realize they are ISIS posts and take them down, making them dead links. However, Telegram’s large file-hosting feature becomes very handy in this case because almost all files pushed through Telegram with links are also uploaded to the Telegram channels, and those files remain as long as the channels are open or the

user who posts does not delete them. Therefore, even if a file is not available as a link, if it is uploaded to Telegram, it will exist there unless it is deleted or the channel is closed. Furthermore, Telegram allows uploading large files simultaneously consequently allowing the ISIS social media accounts to simultaneously upload videos with four or five diﬀerent resolutions and sizes beginning from the largest to the smallest, such as a video in full HD from which would be 1.5 gigabytes to smaller resolution versions such as 800 megabytes, 500 megabytes, 200 megabytes and 50 megabytes. The smallest size versions would be for mobile devices. The other advantage of Telegram is providing users a forum to be able to communicate in a secure way through a secure algorithm. While Telegram chat rooms are usually open to all members, one-to-one communications are secret and cannot be seen by others. There have been several attacks where it was later established that ISIS members communicated internationally about the attacks before they took place. For example, the Istanbul Reina club attacker got his orders from his Emir in Raqqa, Syria through Telegram and communicated over Telegram with his Emir both before and after the attack[7]. The same was true of the Paris attacks[8]. Telegram has thus become one of the main communication apparatus of ISIS, particularly with foreign fighters deployed outside of ISIS territories. In addition to all these advantages, like all other applications, Telegram is convenient and mobile as it can be installed on cell phones, Windows PCs, and IOS computers, therefore, making it available on many diﬀerent devices.

Joining Telegram is easy. The only requirement on the side of Telegram, to sign up, is having a cell phone number and verifying that number after the registration through a text message verification step. In some cases, some Internet proxy phones (phone accounts created over the Internet) work as well, omitting the requirement of a cell phone number as long as the Telegram system does not recognize the number provided as a proxy Internet number. Telegram, therefore, only requires a cell phone number to verify the user and once a user is verified, the user does not need to maintain the phone number, enabling users to use a number once to verify an account without the necessity to keep that number. In fact, the one of the cell phones ICSVE staﬀ use to track ISIS telegram accounts was registered through a cell phone number and that number has been inactive since 2015, but the account has still been in use without any problems. This feature becomes a great tool for ISIS terrorists as they do not need to reveal their real identities or provide anything to be traced other than a phone number which they don’t need to maintain. On the side of ISIS, in most cases, there is no vetting to join their public channels or groups, but private ones do vet potential members with a range of questions, sometimes having to do with the basics of Islam such as cleansing before prayer (wudu) etc. If ISIS members need to connect over the Telegram without physically being in touch, they either use other known members to reach and connect to the desired members or for their foreign fighters,

they pre-arrange known passwords and indicators to vet the people they are communicating with to ensure the authenticity of the parties. As a user interface, Telegram is no diﬀerent than many other similar mediums such as WhatsApp and Twitter. When it comes to peerto-peer communication, it is more like WhatsApp where users can message each other, share documents, links, videos and voice messages similar to the chat features of many social media platforms. There are even time stamps indicating when the messages were sent and if they were read or not. Telegram channels are a diﬀerent from common social media groups as followers are not allowed to interact with the others in the channel openly unless authorized by the administrator. Members are only able to read and download posts shared in the channel unless they have permission for greater access. Posts flow on the timeline chronologically and with time stamps and an indicator “eye” acting as a counter showing how many times a post was downloaded by the channel members. Telegram groups, as opposed to channels, are just like other social media groups where members can interact with each other and their individual posts, therefore, making it possible to communicate with sometimes thousands of people at once. Based on our experience at ICSVE, several channels and individual accounts in the same languages are usually run by the same administrators, or there are a handful of administrators who appear to share the same posts simultaneously.

Reaching out on to ISIS members via Telegram channels is a significant challenge for beginners. First of all, as the Telegram application is installed, the application copies all the contact numbers on one’s cell phone and connects the users with any of his contacts who are already registered with Telegram. However, to connect with ISIS members, channels, or groups, the key is knowing what channels are ISIS channels and what their names or addresses are. ISIS usually does not require verification for its public channels, therefore if one knows the name or address of an ISIS channel, joining those channels is simple—locate the channel and click the join button. As soon as one joins a channel all that channel’s posts are available to the new user. For peer-to-peer communication, however, the users must know each other’s registered phone numbers or user names. If a user is not originally recorded in one’s downloaded phone connections, in order to connect with that user over Telegram, one of the users has to provide the other his registered cell phone number. This process is useful for ISIS foreign fighters operating abroad as they often switch phones and need to reconnect with their emirs or middlemen and can easily do so even with a new burner phone, using their original login credentials. ISIS members may also open accounts before traveling and exchange those accounts beforehand so when they need to use them they can easily install Telegram on whatever device they are currently using and log into Telegram with their credentials to communicate with their ISIS peers. ISIS frequently posts on new and backup channels with diﬀerent names for diﬀerent purposes including: media and video sharing, book and journal sharing, news and daily updates, hisbah

(morality police) office, accounts of personal well-known ISIS members, pamphlets and meme accounts, ISIS Amaq News Agency and several other channels or groups with different names. These lists are frequently shared on different social media platforms alerting users to subscribe to new or backup accounts in the case an account is closed or expected to be closed. While being banned and dropped in other social media mediums occurs to ISIS endorsers, supporters and distributors quite often, Telegram, as mentioned previously, does not frequently close ISIS accounts. However, the backup or spare ISIS channels usually function as a mirror of the original channel or simply are ready to be facilitated if an original channel is closed. ISIS cross shares the lists of their Telegram channels as they appear and reappear via different social media accounts. For example, they post their new or existing Telegram channel addresses on Twitter or Facebook, and then in their Telegram channels, they provide their Twitter, Facebook or Instagram account names and encourage their members to follow those accounts as well to be updated of any changes when channels are taken down. In that manner, they efficiently migrate their followers from Telegram channel to channel. ISIS social media administrators also often share bulk ISIS Telegram account lists both in regular social media and also in their Telegram channels, by which users are alerted to join channels or follow individuals simply clicking the links of those accounts. If someone starts to follow an ISIS Telegram account, it is thus very easy to update and enrich their ISIS network of account collections and lists by simply subscribing to the post lists or by following the users who post to the groups and simply by looking at the for-

warded posts and reaching to the original post owners with a few clicks. Therefore, following or communicating with ISIS Telegram accounts is an easy task as long as one understands how they work and basically keeps following the posts to update their related contact lists. Even if one completely loses ISIS Telegram channels on Telegram, it is still easy to reach out to those channels again by simply following ISIS related Twitter and Facebook accounts. ISIS users or administrators are not shy about their posts, and they are usually aware of the fact that many of their followers in the channels are not ISIS members, but are intelligence members or researchers. In fact, it happened several times with our ICSVE Twitter posts sharing some important incidents or updates from the ISIS Telegram channels we follow, that they would then openly post into the same channels saying “We know you are here and you are sharing our posts on your Twitter account. You are an infidel, and we don’t care if you are following us.” Strangely enough, ISIS administrators have never banned or blocked us from their channels thus far, perhaps enjoying the attention and being a threatening presence. Of course, there are strategies behind that as well. Simply put, the terrorist organization is using its Telegram channels to disseminate its propaganda and the narratives they would like to share, and they are aware of the fact that outsiders may be the ones who also become conduits for their shares to the outer world. There are countless channels and groups on Telegram, not only related to ISIS but also to other Salafist-jihadi terrorist organizations as well. If one does not know the specifics of different terrorist organizations, one would very easily confuse other Salafist terrorist organiza-

tion’s channels with ISIS channels as they promote very similar thinking. While ISIS dominates the Telegram terrorism cyber-space, other groups use the same medium as well and just like ISIS, maintain groups and channels in different languages, probably more than twenty. One may witness a variety of things in ISIS channels. First of all, regular known ISIS channels or groups maintained by well-known recognized ISIS members such as Khilafah News, the Strangers, Mr. State, al-Firdaws English or Mr. Killer, share ISIS related breaking news, videos, memes, propaganda campaigns, brochures, new ISIS journals including Rumiyah and others, nasheeds, pictures or stories, or anything they would like to push. However, theme specific channels or groups only share related posts. For example, ISIS video channels would periodically post new or old ISIS videos in different resolutions or sizes, book channels would only post books or booklets mostly in pdf forms, news channels would only post news or news articles and so on. Therefore, based on the type of the channel or group, it is possible to reach and follow groups in different categories. Another important feature of Telegram is being able to search the channels posts, group messages, individual messages or any kind of communications or posts in one’s account. This feature is available for both cell phone applications and the Web-based Telegram interface making it possible to reach any content by simply searching. This basically makes Telegram one of the largest free ISIS databases available to the public especially considering the fact that many other mediums including Google, YouTube, Twitter and Facebook are continuously taking down ISIS posts.

Telegram has enabled ISIS to create, without much effort, its grand propaganda machine to further its reach beyond it’s so-called “Caliphate” to the whole world with only the click of a button, pushing its new media content constantly and reaching to its targets momentarily, and most importantly communicating with its fighters abroad to direct them for new attacks or facilitate their operations in different countries[9]. The nature of the Telegram application with a secure algorithm providing protection from the outside world and making it almost impossible, or very difficult, for law enforcement to trace back to the original users, also has become a magnificent advantage for the terrorist organization in terms of the anonymity of its users and for carrying out terrorist operations via secure communications. These two qualities are the most valuable qualifications, or gifts, for a terrorist organization like ISIS. Thanks to Telegram, ISIS has now been using their application very heavily almost without any interruptions with great success when compared to other social media applications. While other social media platforms have since 2014 taken strong stances to institute takedown policies when it comes to ISIS, the stand of the Telegram application when it comes to allowing ISIS to use its platform without interference is quite different and difficult to understand.

Recently, Rob Wainwright, the director of Europol, European Union’s policing body, condemned Telegram owners for failing to join the fight against terrorism. Wainwright said that Telegram’s reluctance to work with anti-terrorist authorities was causing major problems[10] considering the fact that the application is in widespread use among the target population of ISIS. Telegram has become the choice of the ISIS due to its specifications—providing secure encrypted communications and allowing users to share large files and act with their accounts operating with impunity. While Telegram administrators claim, they favor speech free of interference; it is time for the owners of Telegram to thoroughly consider the existence of ISIS presence and activities on their digital platform. Telegram has become the ultimate tool for the bloodiest terrorist organization in history, carrying and spreading its terrorist ideology around the world, recruiting and even directing cadres to carry out attacks globally. Recently, the families of the San Bernardino shooting sued Facebook, Google, and Twitter, claiming that these social media companies permitted ISIS to flourish on these social media platforms[11]. It may soon happen that Telegram will also have to deal with several legal actions as ISIS cadres continue to utilize their application for their terror operations and communications. Reference for this Article: Yayla, Ahmet S. & Speckhard, Anne (May 5, 2017) Telegram: the Mighty Application that ISIS Loves, ICSVE Research Reports, http://www.icsve.org/brief-reports/telegram-the-mighty-application-that-isi s-loves/

References [1] Speckhard, Ph.D., Anne; Shajkovci, Ph.D., Ardian; and Yayla, Ph.D., Ahmet S.. “Defeating ISIS on the Battle Ground as well as in the Online Battle Space: Considerations of the “New Normal” and Available Online Weapons in the Struggle Ahead.” Journal of Strategic Security 9, no. 4 (2016): 1-10. [2] Speckhard, A., & Yayla, A. S. (2016). ISIS Defectors: Inside Stories of the Terrorist Caliphate: Advances Press, LLC. [3] Speckhard, Anne research interview Brussels, Belgium January 2017 [4] Speckhard, Anne research interview New Delhi, India March 8th, 2017 [5] Speckhard, Anne & Yayla, Ahmet S. (March 20, 2016) American ISIS Defector – Mohamad Jamal Khweis & the Threat Posed by “CleanSkin” Terrorists: Unanswered Questions and Confirmations. ICSVE Brief Report http://www.icsve.org/american-isis-defector—mohamad-jamal-khweis-and-the-threatof-clean-skin-terrorists-.html [6] Editorial, “Russia’s Zuckerberg launches Telegram, a new instant messenger service,” Reuters, August 30, 2013, http://www.reuters.com/article/idUS7472256 9420130830 [7] Yayla, A.S., “The Reina Nightclub Attack and the Islamic State Threat to Turkey” CTC Sentinel, Combating Terrorism Center at West Point, Vol 10, Issue 3, pp. 9-16, March 2017. [8] Evan Perez & Shimon Prokupecz, “First on

CNN: Paris attackers likely used encrypted apps, officials say,” December 17, 2015, http://www.cnn.com/2015/12/17/politics/pari s-attacks-terrorists-encryption/ [9] Speckhard, A., & Yayla, A. S. (2017). The ISIS Emni: The Origins and Inner Workings of ISIS’s Intelligence Apparatus. Perspectives on Terrorism, 11(1). Retrieved from http://www.terrorismanalysts.com/pt/index.php/pot/article/ view/573 [10] Dominic Kennedy, “Message app used by Isis refuses to fight jihadists,” May 4, 2017, https://www.thetimes.co.uk/article/messageapp-used-by-isis-refuses-to-fight-jihadistsjrddv7c93?utm_content=buffer2b755&utm_ medium=social&utm_source=twitter.com&ut m_campaign=buffer [11] Dan Whitcomb, “Families of San Bernardino shooting sue Facebook, Google, Twitter,” May 4, 2017, http://www.reuters.com/article/us-sanbernardino-attack-lawsuit-idUSKBN1802SL