Exit Strategy

Stephen Mutinda Mutuku is a teacher, youth leader, and activist who lives and works in Northern Kenya. This area is vast and rural, with poor roads and infrastructure, leaving a very small footprint for the Kenyan state and local police to address crime and other forms of violence that regularly occurs in these northern communities.

Though these crimes are not large enough to be understood as an intra-state "conflict" by most conflict analysts, it is certainly coordinated and widespread, representing to some degree a challenge to state authority that is headquartered in Nairobi, over 500 miles away. 

Cattle rustling has been cited as the main cause of insecurity in places like Marsabit, where I spoke to Mr. Mutuku by phone. This practice undermines the security protocols that are aimed at ending killings and banditry in Kenya’s largest county by land mass. Civilians have died in the north as a result of this violence, and, according to the Marsabit County Commissioner, is its primary security concern.

From the state's perspective, cattle rustling isn't isn’t only a crime but a deeply entrenched retrogressive tradition among the pastoralist communities. In a single operation last year, police uncovered and seized over 300 guns and 3,000 rounds of ammunition from tibes engaging in the practice.

I visited South Ethiopia and North Kenya last year and saw first hand the cattle in question. Tribes like The Samburu, Rendille, Turkana, Daasanach and other warriors usually raid neighbouring communities and return with hundreds of cattle. While others may think this is a barbaric practice, these tribes consider it an act of bravery that earns them accolades from young women and elders. Cattle rustling was also a way of replenishing the communities’ stocks after their herds perished during droughts, getting livestock stolen by bandits from other communities or getting animals to pay as dowry.

It has now resulted in a continuous upheaval of violence that gets very little attention because it doesn't readily meet the conventional stereotypes we hold around African conflicts. I spoke with Mr. Mutuku about this, how he is helping to reshape his community through re-education and positive interference among the youth to disengage from these practices, and how this conflict is shaping the security norms in the north of the country. 

Kathryn Stoner (@kath_stoner) is the Mosbacher Director of the Center on Democracy, Development, and the Rule of Law (CDDRL), and a Senior Fellow at CDDRL and the Center on International Security and Cooperation at FSI. From 2017 to 2021, she served as FSI's Deputy Director.

She is Professor of Political Science (by courtesy) at Stanford and she teaches in the Department of Political Science, and in the Program on International Relations, as well as in the Ford Dorsey Master's in International Policy Program. She is also a Senior Fellow (by courtesy) at the Hoover Institution.

We talk all things Russia-Ukraine War, how the West (particularly the United States) underestimated its power in the world, the current disinformation campaign, and how China, India, and other States fit into all of this.

Benjamin Cunningham is a correspondent for The Economist. He covered Central and Eastern Europe for six years, and now writes about the wider Mediterranean region from Barcelona. In addition he contributes to The Guardian, The Los Angeles Review of Books, Aspen Review, Le Monde Diplomatique and is an opinion columnist for Sme, Slovakia’s main daily newspaper. 

His first book is called The Liar: How a Double Agent in the CIA Became the Cold War's Last Honest Man. In the mid-1970s, the CIA and KGB watched Karel Koecher closely—they were both convinced he was working for the enemy. And they were both right. Traveling with his wife, Hana, Koecher posed as a Czechoslovak asylum seeker and arrived in the US as a Communist sleeper agent. After parlaying a doctorate from Columbia into a job at the CIA, Koecher proceeded to operate as a double agent at the height of the Cold War.
 
Shunning a low profile, the Koechers embraced Manhattan’s high life—with cocaine, swinging, and parties emblematic of the times and their penchant for risk. Hana, who was no more than a shy teenager when she arrived, grew into a sophisticated international diamond dealer who relayed messages to Karel’s handlers. Riding a wave of euphoria, the Koechers felt unstoppable. But it was too good to last.
 
Using newly declassified documents, interrogation tapes, and extraordinary firsthand accounts from the Koechers themselves, Cunningham reconstructs their double lives and the fading Cold War, where a strange moral fog made it hard to know what truth was being fought for, and to what end.

I speak to Crisis Group analyst, William Davison, about what is going on in the North of Ethiopia, and what needs to happen to end the war in Tigray. We also talk about the Tigray War disinformation campaign, and how he was a target of it.

Chris Blattman is an economist and political scientist who studies global conflict, crime, and poverty. His life's work centers around the following questions: Why are some people and societies violent, oppressive, and poor? And what can we do about it? He works in sub-Saharan Africa, Latin America, and the United States. His new book, Why We Fight, explains the five reasons why conflict (rarely) blooms into war, and how to interrupt that deadly process.

I spoke to Dr. Dr Joseph Fitsanakis of Coastal Carolina University about the study of Intelligence and Intelligence Gathering, how the practice differs across states, and whether or not the practice is at odds with free and open societies. 

We talked about his latest #book, #Davos Man: How the Billionaires Devoured the World.

#DavosMan #Davos #Author #GlobalEconomy #Economy #PeterGoodman #worldview #worldviews #Corporations #CorporateGreed