I’ve put together a research brief summarizing my recent work looking at 3 examples of emerging non-state power. These models indicate that many of the technologies enabling rapid, ad hoc global communication & collaboration are being adapted by criminal & ideological groups to grow international supply chains and build sophisticated financial networks. While there are certainly many non-state challenges in the current geopolitical landscape, in this brief I focus on the Mexican narcoinsurgency, the MEND resistance in Nigeria, and the nexus of illicit drugs & terrorism in northern Africa.

From the intro:

Cartels, militias, insurgencies, and terrorist groups leverage mobile communications & rapid collaboration to grow & manage globally-distributed ad hoc networks that overlap in complex international shadow economies.

Traditional state governance is being challenged by the ubiquity of personal technology and the rise of multinational corporate powers, ideological factions, insurgencies, militaries, militias, and criminal groups. Laboring under inefficient bureaucratic structures, over-reaching foreign policy, legislative deadlocks, corruption and co-opted representation, traditional states are less capable of governing in ways that support social welfare. As a result, communities, collectives, and distributed ad hoc organizations are being forced to innovate strategies for resilience & prosperity in ways that increasingly lie outside the conventional models.

These networks have become sophisticated enough to rival many corporations in capital & influence. Yet, unlike most corporations, they are wholly opaque & unaccountable, relying on illicit goods, drugs, and violence to grow their markets and remove obstacles to business.

This report highlights some of the more disruptive methods that not only seek to re-establish socio-economic influence and control in the face of great disparity, but also directly challenge state authority at levels formerly impossible for non-state actors.

Full PDF here (8 pgs).

“In what ways will the concept and landscape of the city change over the next decade, and will this change bring about positive or negative impact in terms of global resilience, transformational development, and human evolution?”

My answer begins:

“All human systems and technologies are ultimately embedded within the larger natural ecosystem of the planet. As we’re now beginning to witness across all such domains, nature is applying more and more pressure on civilization to force it into better alignment with the principles of conservation and homeostasis critical to balanced living systems. As massive aggregations of society, technology, commerce, industry, resource consumption, and waste production, cities will feel tremendous impact from the corrections imposed by the natural world. Megacities in the developing world like Lagos, Jakarta, Delhi, and Mexico City already exhibit enormous stress due to rapid urbanization, rising populations, and the energetic consumption and waste production that attends their growth. With aging populations and over-burdened consumer economies, first world cities like London, Los Angeles, and Tokyo will find it more & more difficult to support their resource demands. Indeed, given projections for energy prices, food stocks, and clean water & sanitation, cities across the world are trending towards a lower common standard of living.

Continued at KedgeForward…

“Roughly speaking, we can think of the OECD as the oil users, and the Non-OECD as the coal users.”

This quote from energy investment analyst, Gregor MacDonald, should be deeply considered, particularly given the realities of world energy use and demographics. Simply put, the West is getting older and it’s growth has slowed considerably. Meanwhile, the developing world is seeing rapid population growth, now contributing almost 5 billion people to the global register. The ten largest cities in the world are mostly non-OECD* and as they further industrialize and pull more people out of the slums, they’ll need more power to drive their growth. With economic disparity choking access to petroleum, reinforced by much higher oil prices, the developing world is rising on coal-fired utilities and marching towards it’s own industrial revolution.

Source: Gregor MacDonald, 2010.

It’s my sense that these realities are not being deeply considered by many of the people involved in the debate about climate, energy, and sustainability who seem to be focusing primarily on China and the developed world. Yet population growth, industrial activity, and energy use has slowed to nearly flatline across Europe and the United States over the past 10 years, and their rate of population replacement is now negative. While coal use is a reality that may be declining in the West, it’s on the rise across the rest of the world. The other half of the planet is industrializing rapidly and it’s doing so by burning massive amounts of coal**. China, with a population of approx. 1.3 billion, gets a whopping 68% [adjusted to 2009] of it’s energy from coal. India, with aprrox. 1.1 billion people, derives about 60% of it’s energy from coal. While considerable efforts are being made to build out renewables the sheer size of these populations and the rate of their growth ensures many years of coal use before solar & wind will substantially offset their energy requirements. Likewise, countries heavily invested in coal exports, like Russia & Australia, are incentivised to promote it’s use for the foreseeable future. Indeed, the World Coal Institute would have us believe that there’s enough coal to last 130 years at current rates of production.

Given that coal use is so large and embedded as a global energy resource and financial commodity, it is imperative that the coal industry and it’s technologies are upgraded to reliable clean coal and carbon recapture solutions. These are, in my opinion, some of the most important developments that the climate discussion should be pressing for, amended as pre-requisites to World Bank and IMF funding. Western industrialism is cooling. Capitol is moving to the developing world and the second industrial revolution is beginning. We have the opportunity to try and intentionally design it to avoid the pitfalls of the western path. Whether or not we accept anthropogenic warming we know that burning coal is dirty and bad for living things.

Believe me, I don’t want to say this. And I know the proclivity of the coal industry to promote less-than-marginal solutions disguised as “clean coal”. But it’s critical that we accept the abundance of coal, it’s presently-irreplaceable energy intensity, and it’s ongoing use across the world so we can focus on real solutions to making it cleaner over the next 20 years while we build out the necessary renewable infrastructure.

* Tokyo – 35,676,000; New York-Newark – 19,040,000; Ciudad de Mexico – 19,028,000; Mumbai – 18,978,000; Sao Paulo – 18,845,000; Delhi – 15,926,000; Shanghai – 14,987,000; Kolkata – 14,787,000; Dhaka – 13,458,000; Buenos Aires – 12,795,000 (2007) [Note that non-OECD countries often have census numbers lower than actual population size, due to under-reporting across slums.]
** For more details & numbers on rising coal use in non-OECD, see: EIA International Energy Outlook 2009 for coal.