Some Play-doh at TEDxDesMoines. Photo: Holly Baumgartel

The paradox of finding peace in a war zone, and a way to make aid more effective — by decentralizing it and thus speeding it up. Each week, TEDx chooses four of our favorite talks, highlighting just a few of the enlightening speakers from the TEDx community and its diverse constellation of ideas worth spreading. Below, this week’s talks, which reflect on the complicated dynamics of our always changing world.

Aid doesn’t work when it’s too slow: Rob Williams at TEDxWarwick
Rob Williams wants us to decentralize aid management. Despite improvements in recent years, a United Nations’ controlled foreign aid system is still too slow to help many, he says. Citing harrowing experiences of needy children in conflict and disaster zones, he proposes a plan for decentralizing aid to meet a two-day response goal for disaster relief. (Filmed at TEDxWarwick.)

Finding peace in a war zone: Hesna Al Ghaoui at TEDxDanubia
As a war correspondent, Hesna Al Ghaoui is always asked: “How are you not afraid?” In this talk from TEDxDanubia, she shares harrowing stories from war zones all over the world and what her experiences tell us about the nature of fear itself. (Filmed at TEDxDanubia.)

The moral questions of new warfare: Yves Daccord at TEDxHelvetia
We know what cybercrime looks like, but what about cyber war? At TEDxHelvetia, Yves Daccord gives us a glimpse into a future where citizens are unaware of the actions of governments, where war is possible without soldiers, and where humanity has an entirely different set of moral questions to ponder. (Filmed at TEDxHelvetia.)

When should we negotiate with terrorists?: Mitchell Reiss at TEDxColumbiaSIPA
It’s an old movie cliché: “Don’t negotiate with terrorists.” But in the real world, are there times when negotiation might actually be the best course of action? If you do it right, says Mitchell Reiss, it might be possible to save lives by sitting down to talk with terrorist leaders. (Filmed at TEDxColumbiaSIPA.)

And here, some of the week’s highlights from the TEDx Blog this week:

• Can preschool save the US economy?
• Photographing whales from 10 feet away
• Getting kids to read — one video at a time
• The super-cool trailer for TEDxThessaloniki
• New treatments for epilepsy from TEDxUWollongong

“This is how war starts—one day you’re living your ordinary life. You’re planning to go to a party, you’re taking your children to school, you’re making a dentist appointment,” says di Giovanni in today’s talk, given at TEDxWomen. “The next thing, the telephones go out. The TVs go out. There are armed men on the streets. Your life as you know it goes into suspended animation.”

In today’s gut-wrenching talk, di Giovanni describes some of the moments that have stuck with her over her years as a war correspondent, and shares what she has learned from covering many of the bloodiest conflicts of the last two decades. She says that her mind often wanders back to Sarajevo.

“I had the honor of being one of those reporters who lived through that [three-year] siege. And I say I had the honor and privilege of being there because it taught me everything — not just about being a reporter, but about being a human being,” says di Giovanni. “Even in the midst of terrible destruction and death and chaos, I learned how ordinary people could share food with their neighbors, raise their children, drag someone who’s being sniped at from the middle of the road, even though you yourself were endangering your life.”

In 2004, di Giovanni had a son. And in this talk, she explains why she opted to cover the war in Iraq despite having a baby at home. She also shares why, less than a week after speaking at TEDxWomen, she headed back to Damascus to continue covering the conflict in Syria.

“I believe it needs to be done. I believe a story there has to be told,” she says. “What I see is incredibly heroic people fighting for things — like democracy — that we take for granted every single day … All I am is a witness. My role is to bring a voice to people who are voiceless … To shine a light in the darkest corners of the world.’”

To hear what an important and heart-breaking job this can be, watch di Giovanni’s talk. And below, read some of the incredible stories that she has written about wars over the years.

The Balkans:

“Christmas in Sarajevo,” The Sunday Times, Dec. 1992

On Christmas eve, the city of Sarajevo was pitched into darkness except for the occasional flare from the tracer rounds and the sound of the sporadic shells. On this day, like so many others before, The Susko family went to bed at about 9pm their only escape from the unlit cold.

On Christmas day light snow began to fall again and the temperature dropped to -5C. Mario Susko awoke to the sound of shelling in the borrowed unheated room where he lives with his wife, Maria, and his daughter Alexandra, 17. Wrapped in blankets on the floor where he sleeps, he could feel the detonations, but for some time now the 52-year-old Catholic Croat has not felt frightened.

“After three weeks without water, one month without electricity and eight months of total siege, I no longer feel fear,” he says. Keep reading » 

“From the Kosovo Frontline,” March to June 1999

It was the heaviest night of the Nato bombing here in Kosovo. The commander with the kind face, a former hero of the war in Bosnia, told me and the soldiers in my tent to sleep with our boots on.

He was right. At 3am, the blackness of night was shattered by the terrifying crack of a Serb MiG dropping cluster bombs on us. “Go. Go. Go,” ordered the Swede, a former UN soldier. We tumbled in the darkness to a nearby muddy ravine and threw ourselves on to the ground. It was not easy, the trench is used by soldiers as a latrine. Keep reading » 

“Goodbye to All That,” The Times Magazine, December 2004

I am not a big television fan, but recently a friend rang and told me to watch Prime Suspect. It was a two-parter in which Helen Mirren was investigating the murder in London of a Bosnian refugee who had witnessed a brutal massacre during the Balkan conflict. I watched it. The next night I stayed home to watch the second part. There was an actor I knew from Sarajevo playing the bad guy, and there was Helen Mirren, slowly going mad as she became more and more embroiled in the case. Eventually, she became obsessed. She disobeyed her boss, sacrificed her job and flew to Bosnia at her own expense to investigate the massacre. Strange behaviour. But I recognised that look in her eyes.

My friend rang me after the second part ended. “What was it with Bosnia,” he asked, “that made people so obsessive?” I could not answer, but I have been thinking. I began reporting the Bosnian war in 1992, and while I am fortunate enough not to have been injured or to suffer from post-traumatic stress disorder, not a day goes by in which the conflict does not enter my mind. I met my husband in Sarajevo. I forged some of my closest friendships in Bosnia. And, in a horrible way, my most powerful memories come from those years. Keep reading » 

Africa:

“Dark Days in Sierra Leone,” The Times of London, May 2000

West of Petitfu Junction, where the road turns to red dust and the bush grows darker, the villagers fly white neutrality flags over their mud shacks. It is their way of saying that they are peaceful civilians, a feeble protection from the Revolutionary United Front rebels, who are quickly advancing into this territory.

Further up the road that leads to Port Loko, there is real panic. The people who live in this bush are simple people who farm potatoes, grow rice and tap the palm trees for oil. This area was once held by the RUF, and the rebels know what the rebels will do if they come back. So the people are fleeing, walking quickly in the heat of the day, or pedaling on rusty old bicycles, their children walking alongside them. Keep reading » 

“Nobody’s Children,” The New York Times Magazine, February 2002 

Early morning, Mogadishu. The wet equatorial heat is rising from the chewed up streets, and the gunmen are already working. Truckloads of militiamen, hanging off the back of pickup trucks cruise the neigbourhoods of South Mogadishu. They chew quat, the bitter narcotic leaf imported from Kenya; wave Kalashnikovs above their heads, and stand defiantly in position behind anti-aircraft guns chained to the back of the trucks.

The American marines used to call them Skinnies, and it still makes the gunmen laugh, because it makes them seem innocent and sweet, like a cappuccino at Starbucks, which they are not. They are young men, some of them boys. They wear dark Gucci-style sunglasses, bandannas around their heads and Homeboy gear – jeans slung low, t-shirts, flip-flops. Some of them are barely into their teens, their weapons bigger than their tiny frames, but they know how to shoot and kill and ambush and raid. Keep reading » 

“A Civil Tongue: South Sudan Tries to Learn English,” Harper’s, March 2012

When South Sudan, the world’s newest country, was born in July 2011, after nearly half a century of on-and-off civil war that left as many as 2.5 million dead, it was greeted with enormous expectations. A contest for a new national anthem was sponsored. Beauty pageants for Miss South Sudan were held. Carpetbaggers and scalawags from all over East Africa and as far as China, India, and even the United States descended on the capital, Juba.

Last autumn, I visited the country during a brief respite before another flare-up of looting and massacres that killed, as of this writing, an estimated 3,000 people. Driving past a quarry every morning, I saw exhausted-looking women wearing ripped nightgowns and rubber shower caps over their heads crouched roadside, pounding large rocks into smaller rocks, inhaling noxious dust. Keep reading » 

The Middle East:

“The Last Days of Iraq,” Vanity Fair, April 2003

On Ash Wednesday, a few weeks before war was declared on Iraq, I went to mass in St. Mary’s Church on Palestine Street in Baghdad. The mass was in Armaic, the ancient language of Jesus, and around me the Iraqi Christians knelt and prayed for peace. On their faces was etched all the fear and anxiety of the past few weeks as the diplomatic process unravelled and the world fought over whether or not their country would be bombed. A few of the women, wearing lacy white mantillas on their heads, were crying.

Towards the end of the mass, three American peace activists, stood and addressed the congregation. Over the past few months that I had been in Baghdad, there had been a flurry of pointless peace activities, beginning with the arrival of the actor Sean Penn in December, to a host of human shields from Seattle and Michigan, to men of the cloth spreading words of faith. One of the priests, from Washington D.C. said slowly, “We hope we carry the hopes and fears of the people of the world in the quest for peace.” It was meant to be reassuring, but the congregation looked wary. Keep reading » 

“Gateway to Jihad: Pakistan’s Phantom Border,” Vanity Fair, June 2008

It has been more than 60 years since Pakistan was carved out of India by the British as a moderate, Muslim nation, a refuge rather than an Islamic state. For most of those six decades, Pakistan has been a friend of America’s. Since 9/11, it has been a so-called partner in the war on terror.

Up to a point. Newsweek recently called Pakistan arguably the most dangerous country on earth, harboring as it does a lethal combination of mostly foreign-born al-Qaeda terrorists and a native-born Taliban movement that is supported by its Taliban brethren across the border in Afghanistan. (American intelligence calls them “Big T” and “Little T.”) Given that the border is ridiculously porous and difficult to patrol, Pakistan has become a kind of haven for potential terrorists eager to be set loose into the wider world. Keep reading » 

“On Reporting from Syria,” The New York Times, October 2012

I took the first of several visits to Syria in June 2012, legally, with a rare journalist’s visa, to report from the government side.

I flew from my home in Paris to Beirut, then got a driver and traveled to Syria. Damascus, the world’s oldest inhabited city, seemed to carry on business as usual — though there were already the car bombs, and the wounded soldiers in the hospital. I could look out the window of my hotel, the Dama Rose, and see women in bikinis drinking beer to hip-hop music at pool parties, then see the smoke of bombings in the background. I had worked in the Middle East for two decades since I was a cub reporter, but this was my first time in Syria. Keep reading » 

“Denial is Slipping Away as War Arrives in Damascus,” The New York Times, October 2012

Rifa was growing frantic. Her husband had called to say that he and her brother were stuck on their way home from work outside the Syrian capital, normally a 25-minute drive. There was fighting in a northern suburb, he said, and traffic was frozen.

Tensions rose as the hours passed. It is never good to be out after dark in Damascus now, especially trapped in a traffic jam, unable to flee. Finally, Rifa’s husband called again. They had escaped and returned to their workplace to pass the night, another concession to their changing world. Keep reading » 

And read much more from di Giovannie at her website, JanineDiGiovanni.com.

TIME Editor-at-Large Bobby Ghosh covers global affairs and the Middle East. For five years he served as the magazine’s Baghdad bureau chief and, by the end of his tenure, was the longest serving print journalist in Iraq. Most recently Ghosh wrote a cover story on Egyptian president Mohamed Morsi, arguably the most important man in the Middle East at this moment.

In his informative TED Talk on why global jihad is losing, Ghosh discusses how Osama bin Laden misappropriated the word “jihad” — not just for the West but also for Arabs in the Middle East. While he painted it as a violent global holy war, in Islam the term has long referred to the internal, personal struggle to be a better person. Ghosh asserts that with the end of bin Laden came the end of this brand of bin Ladenism. And along with it, the concept of the global jihad.

Ghosh’s ideas are fascinating, but also raise a lot of questions. I caught up with him recently by email to hear more.

Do the Western media and/or government have a vested interest in perpetuating fear mongering in the form of jihadi rhetoric? What does the Western media get wrong about bin Ladenism and jihad?

No, I don’t believe Western media or governments have an interest in perpetuating fear about jihad. They misunderstand the word, but that’s not deliberate. They come by their misunderstanding honestly! The problem, as I say in my talk, is that extremists in the Muslim world have appropriated the word and twisted its meaning — so much so that many Muslims are now unsure what jihad stands for. So it would be unfair to blame Westerners for having the same uncertainty. There are some individuals in the West, just as there are in the East, who play up the worst interpretations, but they are a micro-minority.

How close do you think bin Ladenism is to being over? To what extent is jihad totally local?

I feel that the cult of bin Laden is on its last legs. Much of what passes for violent “jihad” today — whether it’s in Afghanistan, or Mali, or Somalia or Iraq — is, when you look closely, a contest for power and resources in those countries. The people behind the violence sometimes use the rhetoric of global jihad, and claim to be following in bin Laden’s footsteps, but in reality their interests are much narrower than his.

You say at the end of your talk that the original meaning of “jihad” can be reclaimed by Muslims who want peace. Can you elaborate on how this can be done? What does that mean on the ground-level? How do you wage a war on a word?

You don’t wage war on a word, you stand up to those who have hijacked it. Across the Muslim world, governments, civil-society organizations and religious groups are doing exactly that. Governments use policing and counterterror strategies to target extremist groups, but the challenge for civil-society and religious groups is to remind the faithful of the word’s original meaning. This is being done through education, through activism and through preaching in mosques and on TV. It’s an uphill struggle: corrupting a concept is easier than redeeming it.

One thing to note: extremists are actually helping to undermine their argument. By killing innocents (many of them Muslims), they are exposing the hollowness of their claims to be protecting the faith. Muslims can see through this.

It helps, too, that in the Arab world there is now demonstrable proof that change can happen without resorting to suicide bombs and IEDs. The Arab Spring may look messy to us in the West, but young people in that region are galvanized by the possibility of changing their lot. They’ve seen that dictators can be toppled by street protest. Bin Laden could never have imagined that.

It’s commonly believed that in the Koran there’s more than one original meaning of jihad, not just the internal struggle you speak of in your talk, but also the physical struggle to defend Islam. How would you respond to those who wish to perpetuate this meaning?

Yes, depending on how you choose to interpret it, jihad has more than one meaning, but nowhere in the Koran does it say it’s okay to kill innocent people. On the contrary, there are many passages that explicitly prohibit such killing.

In your article “The Agents of Outrage,” you mention Internet war-mongering by people like Sam Bacile, Terry Jones and Sheik Khaled Abdallah. What makes this specific kind of drudgery attractive to web users? Could this kind of outrage-machinery mobilization have been possible before the Internet?

The Internet makes it easier for these people to spread their poison, but equally, it allows the antidote to spread quickly. For every website that espouses hateful interpretations of the Koran, there are a dozen that seek to explain Islam in a reasoned manner. The trouble is not with the web, it’s with what happens in the “real” world, where agents provocateur sow discord, militants thrive in it, politicians stoke up the fear, and some people get carried away by it all.

I can’t understand the motivation of people who spread hate and fear in the name of faith, whatever their faith.

Finally: Yahoo! I’m glad you’re alive.

Thanks. … I think!

With just over a month to go before the 2012 presidential election, eyes around the world are on the United States. Will Americans vote to give Barack Obama another four years in the White House, or will the country opt for a turnabout and vote Mitt Romney into office? The election may well come down to a few select issues. So what matters most to Americans? The TED Blog was very surprised to read this Gallup poll from late July highlighting the issues that citizens most want the next president to prioritize. Since these are topics that speakers often address on the TED stage, every week until the election we’ll be bringing you a new playlist focusing on one of the top-rated issues.

One of the most pressing issue for our next president to think about, according to those polled, is “dealing with terrorism and other international threats.” A whopping 86% of those surveyed rated job creation as either “very important” or “extremely important.” Which makes sense because, as Obama and Romney spar over unemployment and government benefits, always present in the conversation is an elusive search for peace in an increasingly complex global community.

The 12 talks below approach the themes of terrorism and security from a number of diverse backgrounds, reflecting the multidimensional nature of 21st century military and security policy. These talks range from personal stories about how the 9/11 attacks affected the speakers’ lives to analytic explorations of the inner-workings of the Pentagon to the economics and logistics of terror operations — and everything in between. And, of course, no discussion of violence and war is complete without a discussion of its inverse, peace.

Jason McCue: Terrorism is a failed brand
In today’s powerful talk, given at TEDGlobal 2012, reputation management expert Jason McCue outlines a new way to fight terrorism—by looking at it as a brand, like Coca-Cola. “If you look at terrorism as a brand, you’ll come to realize that it’s a pretty flawed product,” says McCue. “It’s bad for your health. It’s bad for who it effects, and it’s no better if you’re a suicide bomber. It doesn’t do what it says on the tin — you’re not really going to get 72 virgins in heaven and you’re not really going to end capitalism.” Because the brand of terrorism  has “an Achilles heel,” says McCue, we should be looking to attack the brand’s myths and, at the same time, demonstrate that we have a truly better product.

9/11 healing: The mothers who found forgiveness, friendship
An unlikely friendship between two mothers caught in the throes of geopolitical terrorism share their son’s stories — one a victim of the Twin Towers collapse, another on trial as a terror suspect — in this deeply moving talk from TEDWomen. Hoping to derive positivity from their suffering for other mothers, these two women bridged cultural gaps, looking to find forgiveness and learn from each other.

Loretta Napoleoni: The intricate economics of terrorism
Economist Loretta Napoleoni tracks the rise of transnational terror organizations and the under-the-table transactions that fund and enable terror activity. In this enlightening talk from TEDGlobal 2009, Napoleoni shares surprising revelations about the origins of the cash that funds the terror economy and highlights the surprisingly close proximity of western nations.

Thomas Barnett: Rethinking America’s military strategy
International security strategist Thomas Barnett’s job is to bridge the gap between war and everything else. In this candid talk from TED2005, Barnett looks at US security with a wide-angle, glancing into the past to project what is needed for the future. Honing in on specific flaws and successes, Barnett gives a realistic and intimate look at the inner goings-on of the US military.

James Stavridis: A Navy Admiral’s thoughts on global security
Navy Admiral James Stavridis advocates an open-source system of global security in this inspired talk from TEDGlobal 2012. To make ourselves safer, he argues, we need to collaborate and break down our barriers.

Hasan Elahi: FBI, here I am!
After being questioned for six months by the FBI following the attacks of September 11, artist and professor Hasah Elahi decided to cut out the FBI as the middleman in the information gathering process. He realized, having had to justify seemingly meaningless moments of his existence to the FBI, that by sharing mundane moments of his life — a precursor to Twitter, Facebook and Instagram — that he could beat the FBI to the punch and take control of the barrage of information available about him on the internet. As he explained at TEDGlobal 2011, to secure a private life, he decided to share everything.

Sharmeen Obaid-Chinoy: Inside a school for suicide bombers
Documentary maker Sharmeen Obaid-Chinoy walks through the Taliban’s five-step process of recruiting children suicide bombers in this astonishing talk with startling video clips from TED2010. Providing a perspective deeply contextualized in poverty and religion, Obaid-Chinoy explores the living conditions of the Taliban’s “sacrificial lambs.”

Joseph Nye on global power shifts
We need to redefine and realign national interests for positive-sum multi-national gain, said former assistant secretary of defense Joseph Nye at TEDGlobal 2010. As power dynamics shift and forceful power is mixed with what Nye calls soft power — the power of influence — Nye highlights the potential for the 21st century to be a period of cooperation and mutual benefit.

Marc Goodman: A vision of crimes in the future
Security expert Marc Goodman has spent his career studying criminals and terrorists, examining how groups co-opt technology for nefarious purposes. In this chilling talk from TEDGlobal 2012, Goodman outlines how burgeoning advances — like 3D printing and personalized medicine — could be exploited by terrorists. But there is a solution, he says. By making citizens a part of the security process, Goodman says that we can better anticipate threats and be prepared to counter them.

Jody Williams: A realistic vision for world peace
“We can change this world,” said Nobel Peace laureate Jody Williams at TEDWomen. Outlining women’s roles in bringing peace to violent and sometimes terror-ridden countries, she highlights the power of individuals to attain peace.

Peter van Uhm: Why I chose a gun
“Sometimes only the gun can stand between good and evil.” In this thought-provoking talk from TEDxAmsterdam, Netherlands Chief of Defense Peter van Uhm shares the experiences that lead him to go into the military to help keep the peace, and why he thinks that guns in the hands of good people are so important.

Rory Stewart: Time to end the war in Afghanistan
Rory Stewart isn’t your typical Member of Parliament. An author and adventurer, he walked across Afghanistan after the 9/11 attacks and later founded a charity in Kabul. In this extraordinary talk from TEDGlobal 2011, he powerfully argues for bringing home the troops in Afghanistan, not only because deployment has lead to more violence but because the perpetual optimism of Western military leaders is making failure “invisible, inconceivable and inevitable.”

Bandi Mbubi has conflicting feelings about his cell phone.

On the one hand, Mbubi — who fled his native country, the Democratic Republic of the Congo, as a student activist fearing for his safety — has seen firsthand the ability of cell phones to connect people in the formerly cut-off part of the world. In this moving talk from TEDxExeter, Mbubi reveals that cell phones have allowed for himself and his children to have a relationship with his parents, who are still living in the Congo.

But at the same time, Mbubi sees cell phones as intrinsically linked to the war in the Congo. It all comes down to one mineral, tantalum, which is used in cell phones, computers, video game consoles and other electronics. The mining of this mineral funds armed conflict in the war-torn country.

“What you hold in your hand has contributed to unimaginable human suffering. Over 5 million people have died in the Democratic Republic of the Congo, countless women, men and children have been raped, tortured or enslaved. The quest for extracting this mineral has not only aided but fueled the ongoing war in the Congo,” says Mbubi in this impassioned talk. “Why should we allow such a wonderful, brilliant and necessary product to be the cause of unnecessary suffering for human beings?”

As Mbubi points out, “We demand fair trade food and fair trade clothes. It’s time to demand fair trade phones.”

To help inform consumers about the human cost of their cell phones and other electronics, and to apply pressure to companies to comb their supply chains and carefully chart the sourcing of their tantalum, Mbubi has created the non-profit CongoCalling.org. And if you waited in line for an iPhone 5 last night, know that Apple is one of the companies Mbubi is hoping to affect with the campaign. While Apple does have a policy on sourcing conflict-free minerals, and is currently conducting audits of its supply chain, Congo Calling hopes that consumer awareness will bring about swifter change.

Below, a few ways that you can help the push for fair trade phones.

1. Alert your politicians to the situation. Congo Calling would like to see governments, especially those that are large international aid donors, pressure both phone companies and the Congolese government to take action on this issue. For residents of the UK, Congo Calling has a template for a letter you can send to members of Parliament, as well as a resource to find out the name and contact information for your member of Parliament. For residents of the United States, GovTrack.us is a great way to find information on your representatives in Congress.
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2. Recycle your old electronics and keep your current electronics longer. As consumers with spare income, it’s hard to resist getting out the credit card when a new shiny gadget appears on the market. But our constant updating of devices is part of the problem here, as each new phone and tablet requires minerals. While this article from IPS News notes that recycling alone won’t meet the worldwide demand for tantalum, we can make a difference by putting more space inbetween our electronics purchases. (Need further convincing to hold off on that iPhone 5? Read this article from Tech Insights which shows that producing the phone only costs $169. Read more at Apple Insider and Mashable.)
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3. Sign a petition for Tim Cook of Apple. The creator of this petition on Change.org, Delly Mawazo Sesete, writes, “I want an iPhone for the holidays this year, but having monitored mining sites in eastern Congo for several years documenting human rights abuses, I have seen firsthand the rape, violence, and devastation being fueled by the trade in minerals found in electronics products. Join me in asking Apple to create a conflict-free product that includes conflict-free minerals from eastern Congo that help Congolese communities by the 2013 holiday season.” Congo Calling hopes the petition could urge Apple to accelerate their research on mineral sourcing.
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4. Ask Samsung to change its policy. In order to avoid using minerals tied to conflict, Samsung has stopped trading with suppliers in the Congo altogether. Congo Calling suggests writing or calling the company to urge them towards informed trading rather than no trading.
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5. Write HTC and ask for a policy on conflict-free minerals. Congo Calling also has its eye on HTC, theTaiwanese manufacturer of smartphones and tablets, because they currently have no policy on sourcing conflict-free minerals. Again, the organization hopes that consumer pressure — through emails and placing complaint calls — will nudge the company to pay more attention to mineral sourcing.
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6. Ask your employer or university to start a campaign. Congo Calling applauds the efforts of the University of St. Andrews in Scotland. The University has asked Dell, Apple and HP to provide a “conflict free guarantee.” See a video students created explaining the guarantee below.

Shyam Sankar isn’t satisfied with the current state of data analysis. In his recent TEDTalk, “The rise of human-computer cooperation,” Sankar explained why we have a responsibility to create computer programs that drive human-centered decisions, rather than trying to supplant them with computer-centered data processing. In his talk, Sankar — the Director of Forward Deployed Engineering at Palantir Technologies, which is devoted to real-world data analysis — briefly touched on his company’s role in the case known as the Sinjar records.

In 2007, Palantir worked with the Combating Terrorism Center at West Point to sift through and analyze files uncovered in Sinjar, Iraq, a town near the Syrian border, containing records for 700 foreign fighters recruited to aid al Qaeda in Iraq.

Curious to know more about this project, the TED Blog caught up with Sankar and Brian Fishman — then the lead researcher at the CTC on the Sinjar records, now working at Palantir — to talk about the role of the increasingly visible foreign fighters in Syria.

What is the relationship between the Sinjar records and the current conflict in Syria?

Sankar: When the [Syrian] regime was essentially helping — from an anti-American perspective — transit foreign fighters through Syria into Iraq to fuel the insurgency that was happening there, they never really contemplated that the ideological insurgents would settle into Syria, make that home, and then at a later point in time — with the Arab Spring — essentially fuel the insurgency and the revolt against the regime itself. And that a lot of the data that was captured in a context related to the counterinsurgency in Iraq would become critical to understanding who the players are that are actually fighting the Syrian regime right now.

Do you think that foreign fighter groups like al Qaeda are going to play a big role in the conflict in Syria?

Fishman: I think there’s pretty clear evidence that there is a strong jihadi component within the “rebel alliance” opposed to the Assad regime. I’m skeptical that al Qaeda or jihadis — and those two terms, we often use them interchangeably but they’re really not — I think they’re likely to benefit from the rebellion in Syria, but they’re unlikely to come to dominate the Syrian rebellion. I mean, most people, when given a choice between al Qaeda and basically anybody else, choose anybody else. But I think what you see now is that the jihadis, including al Qaeda, that have experience fighting in Afghanistan and experience fighting in Iraq, can bring militarily relevant skills to the table in Syria, and fighters that used to be, you know, bakers and shopkeepers, six months ago, are going to look for that kind of assistance where they can get it. One of the places they can get it these days is from jihadis.

You’ve got a dynamic where there is no singular opposition. There’s this immensely variable collection of people and organizations that are all sort of roughly pointed in the same direction and, within that mess, a group like al Qaeda and, speaking a little bit more broadly, jihadis in general, are going to be able to find folks that they can latch onto. What the Sinjar records showed was that there were these networks, some of them ideologically minded, some of them criminally minded, that existed in Syria going back to at least 2007, or at least 2006, that were tolerated to some degree by the Syrian regime.

And in some ways that’s just an extension of the same dynamic, right? At that point there was this wide collection of people that were generally pointed in the same direction, vis-à-vis Iraq, in that they didn’t like the American presence there and they wanted to disrupt that. But what you’re seeing, I think, is that when you play with groups like al Qaeda, there’s blowback, and when you play with jihadis, there tends to be blowback. We learned that in the 1980s in Afghanistan. I think the Assad regime has learned that in this case. Certainly many of the Iraqi tribal folks that cooperated with al Qaeda early in the Iraq War learned that, and I think that rebel groups in Syria are going to learn that now.

Without the Sinjar records and the more nuanced human-centric analysis that Palantir does, what difficulties might you have faced in trying to parse out these nebulous groups?

Sankar: Essentially [Palantir] allows you to go beyond the first order effects. So, the first order of realization from Sinjar is: Okay, we now know where the foreign fighters are coming from. The second order might be: Oh, I can now characterize how they’re getting here. What does the network of coordinators look like? That in and of itself is really interesting and novel and was difficult to do without Palantir. The third order of effects are things like: if you look at the rise of Libyan foreign fighters, it correlates significantly with a speech and the activity of Abu Yahya al-Libi, who was a prominent Libyan cleric, but he rose to becoming the number two in al Qaeda. And so having this early warning in 2007 that there’s a new dominant and prominent figure, that’s not in the data itself. It’s when you bring that data and combine it with all the other data, and the knowledge you have of the world, that the insight emerges.

Fishman: When we were doing this back in late 2007, early 2008, we had the Sinjar records, and we did a lot of hard work without Palantir at first, to do some basic statistics and learn what we could. We could do all of those kinds of things, but what we couldn’t do, or what would have been very, very difficult for us to do, was some of the second order analysis on, for example, the funnelers, the folks that helped transit people through Syria into Iraq. We had personnel records that corresponded to each individual traveling fighter, and we were able to generate statistics about that fighter, but we weren’t able to easily understand the networks that were embedded within that data asking different kinds of questions, and Palantir helped us ask those kinds of questions.

We were able to identify all of the different fighters that had coordinated with specific smugglers, and we could also easily see the kinds of payments that those fighters were making to each smuggler, and from that we were able to make judgments about whether or not those smugglers were motivated just by, you know, criminality and financial resources, or whether or not they were interested and motivated by ideology. That gave us a sense of what this network actually looked like in Syria, because it was extremely variable. You couldn’t just say, “Every smuggler in Syria is a jihadi.” Some of them were criminals, and understanding that variation is really important.

When you get lots of information loaded into a sort of dynamic platform like Palantir, you can ask any sort of question that comes to your mind, and you don’t necessarily know ahead of time the kinds of questions that you want to ask. I think that that’s illustrated even more now, when we look back, and we had no idea five years ago that the Sinjar records would be useful for at least having a starting point, a baseline, for understanding and thinking about the role of jihadis in a rebellion in Syria today.

How has human-centric data mining changed wartime intelligence tactics in the past few decades, especially since the first Persian Gulf War, or the 1990 Gulf War?

Sankar: In a more conventional fight, you have a well-defined adversary. I don’t want to pick on any country — but you have some country, that’s the adversary who is trying to hurt you. You’re trying to assess their motives, you’re trying to understand how they think about the world. Why are they moving tanks here or there? But as a result, the analysis — I don’t want to say it becomes linear — but the problem is significantly more constrained and focused. But in today’s world, it’s unclear who is your adversary or if you have an adversary. It’s more about understanding. Understanding is a very nuanced thing. And so you can’t just focus on you and the counter-party. You don’t even have a counter-party. It’s you and the world, and contextualizing every piece of information. And in a sense, you know, the Assad regime … you can understand the marriage of convenience that’s happening between the rebels and the ideologues, but you’re also going to want to understand in a post-Assad world how does that unfold? And a lot of that is going to be informed by, who are the ideologues? How are they meshing? Who are the personalities? What motivates them? It’s no longer a constrained counter-party. It’s a fabric, and mapping that fabric becomes very, very hard. It’s intractable using conventional means.

For the Center for Combating Terrorism at West Point, why is it so hard to snuff out members of jihadist groups? Is it because their technology evades us? Or is it something more traditional, like really well kept secrets, or big guns, or — in this case — just confusing data?

Fishman: A lot of the folks that have been involved in terrorist organizations over time seem to have gone offline. They’re not exposing themselves to technological data collection, and, you know, at the end of the day — garbage in, garbage out, right? If you don’t have that much data to analyze, then you don’t have that much to analyze.

Sankar: From my technologist’s perspective, if you think about the fundamental cycle of understanding, usually what happens is that a human is sitting down, thinking. They develop a hypothesis. They explore that hypothesis. That hypothesis leads to some amount of insight. But more interesting than the insight is actually the subsequent hypotheses that are generated from that exploration. So I think of something, I have an idea, I explore it, I come up with three new ideas that I need to explore. So deep understanding comes from maybe going around that cycle 20 times, so the velocity through which you can go through that cycle becomes really important. If you’re drowning in data on one hand and you don’t know where to start on the other, the most important thing is being able to get started and iterate on those cycles very quickly. So how quickly can I ask questions of the data and get answers so I can generate the next set of meaningful questions? Because it’s going to take me a while before the questions I’m actually asking are truly insightful and change the course of how we’re thinking about the world.

I think that’s the difficulty with the computer-only approach. The questions you can ask are highly constrained, and you never get to the interesting questions. In this context, what’s very difficult about analyzing the jihadists is it’s a very recent phenomenon, it’s changing very quickly — on a world history scale, it’s recent — and so we don’t necessarily always know where to begin or have the the depth of understanding that we do about, say, Russia, or just adversaries on a nation-state level.

In an article from Bloomberg Businessweek, the author cites a hypothetical example given by Palantir, in which we could use security video footage from an ATM machine or phone records or geolocation information to find out if a person is a potential terrorist. Shyam, as you mentioned in your talk, this kind of data mining obviously has dangerous implications for privacy and for people’s civil liberties. Could you speak to the gray areas in preemptive counterterrorism?

Sankar: Yes. … The paradox here is essentially in how you decide what data you’re going to share and what data you can use under what circumstances. We kind of bristle — I know it’s going to seem like a subtle technical distinction — but we bristle at the idea of being a data mining platform … [Here's] the data mining approach at the core level: Essentially, you develop an algorithm that looks at all the data to come up with things that the algorithm suspects are suspicious. Our approach is to have humans, who have to have predicates … where the data is actually protected. So, as a hypothetical example, if you’re in the Department of Defense, you can’t see any information on U.S. persons. Even though you’re seeing large amounts of data, the data you can see is constrained by constitutional and legal mandates, and having a way that is verifiable by a third party or an Inspector General that those mandates are enforced is part of the platform. So it’s a big deal. I think privacy and civil liberties are always a discussion around what, as a society, do we believe are the right rules and mandates, but our goal as a company is for democratic societies to be able to decide those rules and then guarantee that they’re enforced.

In Marc Goodman’s ominous talk on crime in the future, he gave an example of the terrorists’ ops center in the 2008 Mumbai attacks, which was monitoring BBC, al Jazeera, CNN, and local stations in real time. What if the terrorists had access to Palantir? Are you ever worried that your work will fail to “protect the Shire,” as it were?

Sankar: Obviously it would be devastating, and we do everything we can to keep [Palantir] out of the wrong hands. In terms of failing to protect the Shire, we aspire to make the world a better place. We obviously can’t prevent every bad thing from happening, but I think it’s a noble thing for computer scientists — especially people who would otherwise kind of jokingly be in a cubicle unable to affect the world — to do what they can to make the world a better place.

You said earlier that you and Marc caught up in Palo Alto. Are your views in conflict with one another? While you are very idealistic about technology, he seems to have the cynic’s view.

Sankar: I don’t know if I’d call him a cynic. I know it can seem that way, but the question is — are we thinking critically about [technology’s implications]? Because the cynic, in my mind, and maybe this is because I’m a technologist, would be the Luddite who says, “Wow, look at how all this can be used for evil. We should just give up.” I think in Marc’s mind, by thinking critically about how it could be perverted and building defenses on it, we ensure the future, and that’s a perspective I agree with. When we were fighting the Russian mob, at Paypal — I called it organized crime in my talk, so as not to call it the Russians — I don’t need any more scrutiny from them. Their fundamental thing is they’re highly adaptive. They kept adapting to everything you learned how to block. And so I think that’s structurally similar to what’s Marc saying. It’s just the rate of adaptation and the level of damage the adversary can inflict have increased tremendously. So to not think about how someone could synthesize your DNA and put it at a crime scene, it calls the entire justice system that we’ve built into question since DNA testing came around, and I think that has some really interesting and fundamental implications. And I’m positive, as a technologist, as a society, we can figure out how to defeat that sort of gaming of our system — but not if we’re burying our head in the sand.

What on the frontier of human and computer interaction excites you?

Sankar: I think there’s a lot more to come with the integration of non-computer data. It could be video, images. It could be the way that people think about and categorize this sort of information, but essentially applied to really important problems. We’ve been doing some of this stuff with child pornography. The image itself has a lot of context — [for example,] where are they located? What’s going on? The platform was used to take down the largest child pornography ring in the world. At Google Ideas, we did a presentation — Brian’s actually pretty closely involved in it — on organ trafficking. Every one of these domains that we’re pushing into influences how we want to think about human-computer symbiosis. The question we tend to ask is: what is the problem in the world we want to solve? How can the technology support it? Which is exactly the same position that Licklider was coming from when he was thinking about human-computer symbiosis. And yes, artificial intelligence would be great, but today, what can I do today? Today I can use the computer to solve the problems in this way.

Fishman: Shyam’s the technologist here, but the idea that really fascinates me is the notion that one of the things that we’re doing at Palantir is redefining how information is stored and how people interact with it fundamentally. In the future, you could have libraries that were accessible through a platform like Palantir, where you are essentially exploring information via relationships, and books are modeled in Palantir. And that’s the kind of thing that I would like to see in the future, is ways to break down existing corpuses of data so that it’s more searchable, more accessible, easier for people to access globally. Because at the end of the day, the whole purpose here is to make this information accessible to people, so that they can do things with it, and I think that there is a lot we can do about bringing different incarnation sources into this platform in order to do that.

Sankar: We used to call it emancipatory intelligence. Most systems you need to be a technologist to use. Google made every person a researcher. Palantir makes every person an analyst.

When Giles Duley left behind life as a music and fashion photographer and began criss-crossing the globe, photographing forgotten people — those with mental illness, living on the streets, residing in refugee camps and surviving in the crossfire of war — he felt a certain level of separation from his subjects. But then something happened that brought him into the story he was telling about suffering and survival. While in Afghanistan, Duley stepped on an improvised explosive device (IED). He lost both his legs and an arm.

“At first, I was devastated by what had happened. I thought my work was over. [Nothing made] sense to me,” says Duley in a powerful, must-watch talk from TEDxObserver. “It was the stories I’ve documented that inspired me to get through the last year. To survive. To get back up on my new legs and to come tell their stories but also my own … To show that losing your limbs doesn’t end your life.”

Above, see a self-portrait Duley snapped in 2011. And below, see just a few of the people who inspired Duley to keep going.

“Nick, living with Autism, 2008.”
Nick described his daily life as “living downstairs as a party.” He and Duley struck up a friendship while Duley served as his caregiver. In this photograph, Duley photographs Nick hitting himself.

“The family of Prymorska Street, Odessa, Ukraine, 2010.”
Odessa guidebooks suggest “do not talk to the street kids,” but Duley lived with these homeless teens in a squat while photographing them and describes them as “great kids.”

“Rohingya Refugee Portraits, Bangladesh, 2009.”
Forgotten in a refugee camp for the past 20 years, the Rohingya people lined up to have their portraits taken, amazed that their story was being told. This is Fatima, then age 10, with her younger brother Noru.

“IOM/UNHCR, Angola, 2008.”
Born in the refugee camps of Zambia, these children now find themselves outsiders within their own country.

“MSF in South Sudan, 2009.”
This young Nuer boy is one of the 110,000 Sudanese refugees being treated by MSF, otherwise known as Doctors Without Borders, who Duley encountered on a trip with the nonprofit.

To hear more about the people here, watch Duley’s moving talk. And to see much more of Duley’s work, head to his website, GilesDuley.com. You can also follow him on Twitter @gilesduley.

do you ever have one of those mornings, when you just can't be bothered to put your legs on?

—
Giles Duley (@gilesduley) July 05, 2012

“Walls don’t work,” James Stavridis declared at TEDGlobal 2012. A highly accomplished Navy Admiral, Stavridis recalls 20th-century phenomena like trench warfare and the Berlin Wall. “Instead of building walls for security, we need to build bridges.”

James Stavridis: A Navy Admiral's thoughts on global securityIn his brass-tacks talk, Stavridis lays down a vision of “open-source security,” which he defines as “connecting the international, the inter-agency, the private/public, and lashing it together with strategic communication.” The basic point: that to combat 21st-century threats like cybercrime, terrorism, trafficking and piracy, the military cannot work alone. Stavridis invokes the example of Wikipedia to make his point.

“Wikipedia is not created by 12 brilliant people locked in a room writing articles. Wikipedia every day is tens of thousands of people inputting information,” Stavridis says. “It’s the perfect image for the fundamental point that no one of us is as smart as all of us thinking together.”

Stavridis’ thoughts on security are surprising. Below, listen to 8 other TEDTalks that challenge you to think of war, peace and military life in new ways.

PW Singer on military robots and the future of war
Does having robots and drones in the field change the parameters of war? Absolutely, says military analyst P.W. Singer in this powerful talk. Singer argues that robotic warfare lowers the bar for going to war, and points out that terrorists can easily harness the same technology. While Singer rung the warning bell on the perils of drone warfare back at TED2009, the topic is still being hotly debated, including in the piece “The Moral Hazard of Drones” on The New York Times’ Opinionator blog today.

Keith Nolan: Deaf in the military
Keith Nolan grew up fascinated by military history, but heard “no, no, no” every time he tried to enlist. Why? Because being deaf is an automatic disqualification. In this talk, given in sign language, Nolan recounts his long-term fight to fight for his country, making the case for why citizens with disabilities should be a part of the military.

Inge Missmahl brings peace to the minds of Afghanistan
In Afghanistan, a country of 30 million that has been through intense warfare and unrest, there are only two dozen psychiatrists. Jungian analyst Inge Missmahi explains her work in the country, helping to address their trauma and depression and promote national healing.

Stanley McChrystal: Listen, learn … then lead
Four-star general Stanley McChrystal shares the thoughts running through his head during a parachute jump, from “Why didn’t I go into banking?” to “What does it mean to be a leader?” The former commander of U.S. and International forces in Afghanistan explains at TED2011 that, over his decades in the military, he’s come to realize that good leaders let you fail, without letting you be a failure.

Thomas Barnett: Rethinking America’s military strategy
In a classic talk from TED2005, military strategist Thomas Barnett makes the bold statement that to win a war, we need to win the peace. He advocates splitting the US military into a two-tiered power capable not only of winning battles, but of preserving international calm.

Paul Collier’s new rules for rebuilding a broken nation
Economist Paul Collier explains that 40% of countries recovering from war fall back into conflict within 10 years. He lays out a three-part plan for post-conflict aid, which doesn’t focus on the political quick fix.

Samantha Power on a complicated hero
Journalist Samantha Power looks at why we as a culture do not pay attention to genocide. She tells the gripping story of Sergio Vieira de Mello, a UN diplomat who traveled to the world’s most broken countries and navigated the “lesser-evil terrain” of negotiating with dictators to help their people survive.

This week, Iran stated that they refuse to discuss their “nuclear rights” at the UN Security Council. What are the ramifications of making a statement like that? Politically, what does that mean for them and what does that mean for their interactions with the rest of the world?

Good question. Let me put their statement into a bit of context. Let me start with what I said at TED, back in February, which is that they will develop enough weapons-grade fuel so that the world will know that they know how to make a bomb, but they won’t go ahead and make a bomb, and relate that to the New York Times front page Iran story on September 9th — the lead international relations story in the Times that day — the first paragraph of which says that the intelligence community has informed the White House that Iran has made a spring towards the nuclear bomb but has deliberately stopped short of making one. And they explicitly used the word “deliberately.” That is, they didn’t run into a stumbling block or something; they chose to stop, which is exactly the outcome that was predicted at TED.

Let me push that forward to their current statement. I have not actually seen this statement in print, but I’m going to assume that you’ve stated it precisely, because what you said had very important meaning the way you said it. Their rights, under the non-proliferation treaty — and President Obama has acknowledged that this is their right — is to develop nuclear energy for civilian uses. This is a right for all signatories under the NPT. So, if what they said is that they will not be discussing their rights, that’s just the right to make civilian nuclear energy. It does not include, inherently, all discussion with regard to enrichment. Enrichment is beyond what is necessary for nuclear energy and beyond their rights under the treaty they have signed. So, I think they made a very carefully phrased statement. This does not rule out discussing other aspects of their nuclear program. However, there’s a great deal of evidence that they’ve gone beyond civilian nuclear energy. You don’t need to enrich uranium for civilian energy. There are other ways to make civilian nuclear energy — you can do it by enriching, but they seem to have gone beyond that. They do not seem, by this statement, to have precluded discussion of that.

I expect that this dance over how to resolve the issue is not going to be settled in one conversation. But, I’m hearing in that statement that they’ve left the door open and I imagine that the people at the State Department who have looked at this statement and understand exactly what their rights are under the non-proliferation treaty will see just the way I have expressed it. Not to say that they will say that publicly.

Now, I’ll address the terms of public standing within Iran. The civilian nuclear energy aspect of the program is very popular in Iran. But, the aspects of the program that seemingly go beyond civilian nuclear energy are very unpopular because the Iranian people see this as harming their economy and putting them at risk, neither of which they’re keen on. And the Iranian leaders surely understand that, because they went through the wrenching experience in June, when, for the first time since the revolution, the supreme leader was publicly challenged — not only by mass demonstrations, but also by the khoum clerics, and by very prominent politicians such as (Ayatollah Ali Akbar Hashemi) Rafsanjani and (Seyed Mohammad) Khatami and so forth.

I think it’ll take another year or two to play out, but in the next year or two we will see a shift away from a strict theocratic government to something much closer to what (Sayyid Ruhollah Musavi) Khomeini had in mind originally, which was a government where politics and theocrats — the religious leaders — were more separated — a government that basically evolves into a little bit of a petty military dictatorship that is heavily influenced by a group called the Bonyads, who control a lot of the money in Iran, and who, because they are concerned about making money and so forth, are likely to move Iran in a more pragmatic direction. That won’t be a nice government necessarily, but will be a government, at least, that people can live better in.

President Obama has also made reference to sanctions as a possible response to Iran developing their nuclear program further. How effective do you think US sanctions would be in this situation?

I’m going to try to answer this very precisely, because there’s a very important distinction to be made between the threat of sanctions and the enactment of sanctions. The threat of sanctions can be very effective if the Iranian leaders calculate that the cost of the concessions being asked for is smaller for them than the cost that sanctions will impose, and to avoid sanctions they will make concessions in negotiation. And so, threatening sanctions is a very good thing to do at this stage as negotiations get going. On the other hand, if the Iranian leaders calculate that the cost of the threatened sanctions when imposed is smaller than the benefits that they gain when maintaining the policy that we’re trying to change, then they’ll maintain the policy and the sanctions won’t work. And so, generally, except for calculation error, the threat of sanctions can be effective. Once sanctions are implemented, that’s a pretty good indicator that the target of the sanctions has made the calculation that they can bear the cost of the sanctions better than they can bear the consequences of making the concessions, and they won’t work. That’s a subtle distinction, but an important distinction.

It’s also important to distinguish between sanctions that are aimed at the general economy of Iran and sanctions that are leader-specific, that are aimed specifically, for example, at tying up the leadership’s access by the leadership to their money or their funds. Sanctions of the latter type, leader-specific, are more likely to get them to decide up front to make concessions, rather than pay that price. Sanctions of the other type, aimed at the general country, are more likely to either form an opposition to the regime which, if they anticipate, will produce concessions beforehand, or to consolidate support for the regime, sympathy for the regime internally, in which case they would backfire. I’ve not analyzed what the likely consequences are along those lines, but those are the questions from a strategic perspective that one would have to work out. The threat is, in any event, a good thing because the threat forces the Iranians to make these calculations and therefore to reveal, through the negotiations, whether they have concluded that the sanctions really would be costly to them or not.

Sanctions at our end are typically more or less cheap talk because they don’t really cost the United States a lot. It doesn’t cost us a lot not to buy oil from Iran since we currently don’t buy oil from Iran. So, we’re not really giving up much. And tying up their bank accounts doesn’t really cost us much. It costs a little credibility to our banks, but that’s about it. Sanctions are also more effective if they are politically costly to the people imposing the sanctions, because then it’s an announcement that they view the issues as so important that they are willing to pay a price. So far, we have not shown that.

There are also the negotiations around the three Americans who are being held by Iran at the moment …

They’re a bargaining piece on the Iranian side. They’re something that the Iranians can give up to make themselves look nice, thoughtful, considerate. And presumably they are going to try to extract something of value. It’s actually quite funny — Ann Curry of NBC interviewed (Mahmoud) Ahmadinejad, a week or so ago, and brought up these three alleged hikers, and he indicated that Iran was open to releasing them when the United States released several diplomats that we were holding in Iran and Iraq. She informed him that we had released those diplomats in July. He obviously didn’t know that, so he found himself in this awkward position. So now, he’s got to presumably look for something else to get.

That anecdote has an important element to it. The American media spend much too much time paying attention to Ahmadinejad. He is not a big power in Iran. Khomeini and the Supreme Council and the Guardian Council — these people are important. They’re the ones who run the show. He can’t wander very far form what they want and get away with it. Look at after he was installed, and attempted to appoint a cabinet that Khomeini didn’t like. Khomeini just said, “No.” So Ahmadinejad got a cabinet that he doesn’t like, instead. Ahmadinejad just doesn’t have that big a say.

Watch Bruce Bueno de Mesquita’s TEDTalk from February 2009, where he makes predictions about Iran’s nuclear future:

Read more TED Blog Q&As on current events:
+ Jonathan Haidt on the US healthcare debate
+ Clay Shirky on Twitter, social media and the Iran election protests
+ Laurie Garrett on H1N1 swine flu and our preparedness for pandemic
+ Nathan Wolfe on H1N1 swine flu and the “perfect storm” for viruses

Last week, Parag Khanna sat with the TED Blog to discuss no less than the political future of the world we live in. He works in the expansive field of geopolitics, and his TEDTalk discusses the history and future of some of the world’s most troubled states and the possibilities of a borderless world. In this interview, he expanded on his theories, delving into the causes of terrorism, the impact of the G20, a solution for Sudan and more.

Can you explain exactly what it is that you do? Your title is Director of the Global Governance Initiative of the American Strategy Program at the New America Foundation, and I’m not sure that we all know precisely what that means.

It’s essentially designed to be misleading so that no one will ever actually know what I truly do. (Laughter) And most of the ambiguity rests in the fact that what people struggle to grasp is that at think tanks a lot of people, like me, actually get paid to do whatever we want. So that explains it, partially.

But let me start at the top level — the New America Foundation is an independent, nonpartisan think tank based in Washington, and it’s one of the youngest and definitely the hottest think tank in Washington. And it has, as in other places, a mix of domestic and foreign policy experts, and it’s run by Steve Coll, the former Washington Post editor, and the chairman of the board is Eric Schmidt of Google, and it’s a very dynamic and lively place.

The American Strategy Program is the foreign-policy wing of the think tank, and it has people like Peter Bergen from CNN and myself and others. And the Global Governance Initiative is my particular program, in which I’m exploring the future of diplomacy, not just from the perspective of what happens to intergovernmental relations and the United Nations and standing institutions like the World Bank, but rather how do all of the important actors in the world today, like News Corp and Rupert Murdoch, Bill Gates and the Gates Foundation, Bill Clinton and the Clinton Initiative, the World Economic Forum, the United Nations, the US government — all of these players exist in a very complicated diplomatic knit. And my project is intended to clarify what the new patterns of diplomacy are among them: How are they cooperating? What issues are they cooperating on? What’s their purpose? Diplomacy is the future of understanding how we run the world, basically.

That’s a very interesting position to be in. Have you seen any of your work creating any influence or ripples in the world around you?

Should I speak for myself or New America Foundation as a whole?

Both, if you can.

Well, what I do is I tend to go to countries and interview the leaders, but I don’t interview them like a journalist. I talk to their leaders as someone who’s developed a certain knowledge or expertise on emerging markets or rising powers. And I don’t so much interview people as I debate with them, and I argue with them, and I get them to say what they really believe, not what they want to see in the newspaper tomorrow. And that’s how I gathered the material for my book, in addition to reading a hell of a lot and traveling around countries and talking to all sorts of people.

I can’t take responsibility for the policies that other countries develop, but I’ve built up a substantial network of young and current leaders in a lot of countries and I have regular interactions with them on important issues. With the US government, I’ve worked with the Department of Defense advising on the US forces in Iraq and Afghanistan. I can’t actually talk about the specific things that went on there. As with many people who’ve been involved in the conflicts over there, I’ve tried to assert a certain way in which things should go, but influence is a very complicated landscape. We keep on pushing and pushing on certain issues, in the hope of seeing some kind of change.

New America Foundation has had a lot of success in areas like education policy, tax policy, climate policy as well — it’s a very progressive place. But the question of influence is very interesting, and I think people should ask themselves more seriously — whether they’re journalists or think tank people or academics — “What’s the measure of my influence?” Is someone influential because millions of people read his column, or does anything actually ever change according to what he suggested or recommended? We tend to conflate the two measurements of visibility versus a change. I, for one, I like to set the bar very high and say, “Did something change?”

That’s very inspiring. I’d like to delve some more into application and talk about relatively current events. Obama’s been in office for a little over half a year, and when he was elected the global attitude toward him was much friendlier. Do you think that this friendlier global climate really will prove advantageous to the United States in diplomacy and foreign relations?

I think when people are struggling to understand public opinion toward the United States between the Bush administration and the Obama administration, there’s a very simple explanation that I never hear people give, which is that when Obama was running for President, he didn’t represent America, he represented the anti-Bush and a different America. But now that he’s President and represents America, he’s conflated again, so that Obama equals America. If American policy is still bad, now Obama takes the blame rather than Bush taking the blame. So if you want to explain the fall-off or drop-off in popularity or approval for Obama, that is how you’d explain it. Because people want or expect change instantaneously, and obviously they’re not going to get that because the power of inertia is so great.

Not only is the power of inertia great, in the case of the war in Iraq — where in fact he’s been very fast, he’s been pulling troops out — but it still takes time. In Afghanistan, his very controversial decision is that he’s trying to increase the number of troops there. In many people’s eyes that means deepening an occupation, digging in deeper, and that obviously also isn’t necessarily popular.

Now, I do believe he was quite revolutionary in his early diplomacy. He reached out within the first 100 days to the leaders of Cuba, Venezuela, Iran, North Korea, Russia, Syria and a whole host of countries that the Bush administration considered rogue states. And he said, “Look, it’s time to start anew, it’s time to work on pragmatic interests.” He canceled this whole missile defense plan that had no strategic defense whatsoever and that had been hampering American relations with Russia for years and years. And overnight, he just changed it. So I think he deserves a tremendous amount of credit for quickstarting a process in the first 100 days. And, of course, people will be disappointed if they don’t see reciprocal results right away. But they’re just not going to. That’s not the way it works. I still have a lot of faith in the process that he has initiated.

READ MORE: Parag Khanna discusses the G20, a solution for Sudan, terrorism and borders, explains who’s really going to address climate change and how we may yet come to live in a borderless world.We’re about to head into the G20, and there are many predictions about what’s to be discussed at the summit. I was wondering if you have any comment or insight into this?

Yeah, I spend a lot of time working on G20 issues. I’m part of a group of people who go to each host country of the G20 before they host it, and we spend time in the foreign ministry, with the sherpas and other diplomats to help them figure out what it is they hope to achieve in their one year as chair of the G8 or G20. So I’ve been doing this with Italy last year, Korea next year and so forth.

I think that the G20 is remarkable in that it emerged sort of from nowhere. It did technically exist for more than 10 years, but no one really knew about it till last year. And all of a sudden, it’s become the new rock concert of diplomacy, where everyone is descending on Pittsburgh and making a big show out of it. There’s protesters and poetry and God knows what else. So, whereas the G20 initially was just focused on financial stability and monetary policy issues, now, all of a sudden, it’s expected to save the world, run the world and take care of the world at the same time. It simply can’t do that.

It needs to really focus on achieving certain things, one by one, or whatever it has capacity for, instead of taking on a hundred issues at the same time. Achieving progress on global multilateral opening of trade, poverty reduction in Africa, climate change policy, financial regulation, Iran and the nuclear issue — all of those things are being dumped on the agenda at the same time, as if they’re all going to be solved at once in two days in Pittsburgh. The problem with thinking of diplomacy in terms of these summits is that you wind up with people just having a big scrum and absolutely nothing comes out.

I worry about the G20’s fate, because its main advantages are that it’s flexible, it’s lean, it’s representative. It’s not even a legal entity. It’s just an informal coordinating mechanism. I think informal coordinating mechanisms are very important; I think they are the future of diplomacy, quite frankly. Not legal or treaty-based sorts of institutions, like the UN Security Council — which has a lot of legal authority, but no one trusts it anymore and it’s become basically useless. I would like to see the G20 focus on one or two things at a time and get those right, before it starts to bounce around to 100 different issues at once.

Conflict in Southern Sudan has been on the rise. Is there any way out of these types of conflicts in Africa that are essentially happening, as you pointed out, because of borders that were drawn through the continent in colonial eras?

Technically, there are multiple scenarios, both in the case of south Sudan and also in the generic question of African conflicts. One is independence and partition, but always with an eye toward survivability. To me, that’s always the question for a particular conflict. I talk about Pakistan’s problems with territorial integrity and people are like, “Hey, you didn’t mention Kashmir.” But one of the questions you always have to ask is about survivability. I talk about Kurdistan — it’s a land-locked entity, but I still think it can survive, because I think there are enough pipeline routes already flowing from it. Kashmir has no infrastructural links to oceans, to other bodies of water, and no major allies that would support its independence. So its independence as such is problematic, whereas Kurdistan is really way ahead.

With south Sudan, because they have oil and they’re relatively close to the sea, they can have sustainable exports and energy, and survive as an independent state of Africans — of Christian black Africans — independent of the Arab regime in the north. So I believe that they could have independence. The attacks that you heard about yesterday, quite frankly are happening every day and are really just emblematic of what happens when regimes agree to kick a decision down the road — all that does is lead to more death along the way, because they can’t agree on the ultimate outcome. In the TEDTalk, I said, “Look, whether it’s yesterday or 2011 the official referendum happens, south Sudan is going to be independent.” So the northern regime says, “Let’s just have a referendum three years later, and in the next three years we’ll just torture and kill a lot of people, we’ll fund another war, send a lot of militias in and try and break up your pipeline operation.” What’s the point of doing that? Why cause more harm?

There have been stupidly partitioned states in history, and the one of India and Pakistan, in term of its geography, obviously stands out as a shining example. But that doesn’t mean that right now we don’t have enough data, analysis, material, on-the-ground feedback and opinion. This isn’t 1947. We know now, today, exactly how and where to divide certain places. And the Balkans are no different, except that we would not repeat 1947 if we divided certain countries today.

There’s a great irony in people knowing that their colonial borders are absolutely illegitimate and imposed and forced on them by ignorance, by retreating colonial (now nonexistent) empires, and blaming those empires, but on the other hand today defending those borders as if they’re utterly sacred. And I think we have to break out of that irony if we’re going to have territorial peace in any of these places. That’s not an opinion. Quite frankly, it’s fact. If borders aren’t one of the reasons we have these conflicts, then please, give me another reason. We have this notion that resolving borders would not contribute to conflict resolution, and it’s obviously ludicrous. I think that we should tackle the problem of borders and territorial issues head-on. That was the purpose of my TED Talk.

How do you then deal with the problem of terrorist organizations, these stateless entities? How does that fit into your theory of how the world interacts?

It’s very important to point out that literally almost all terrorism is locally rooted, with local political agendas and often very territorial-rooted agendas. Yes, terrorists cross borders and can strike internationally and appear to be territory-free, but that’s a description of how they act, not an analysis of what they want. When you analyze what they want, and you look at the patterns of global terrorism in the last decade, you find that the countries that are most affected by terrorism — those are very concretely India, Pakistan and Iraq — you find that literally 100 percent of the terrorist activity is about a specific political, geographic, historic, territorial reason.

So just because terrorists fly around in planes and have bank accounts in many countries and operate in these loose networks and don’t have an office that you can attack, it doesn’t in the least bit mean that they’re not political actors in the way that others are. I think it’s really essential to understand that. Whether it’s Kashmir or Belugistan or Pashtunistan or Afghanistan or Iraq or Kurdistan or Palestine — the list goes on and on — there is in fact a political, territorial grievance or basis that is at stake. I don’t deal with it any differently than I deal with anything else. I think that the mistake people make is to go too far in the opposite direction and argue that terrorism means that it’s a border-free world. That’s not true, because most terrorists are fighting for borders and about borders and occupations.

It’s been surmised that the central enemy of climate change could bring the world together to work against it. What do you think about that? Do you think that climate change could impact and improve diplomatic relations?

I think it’s a very vague assertion that the crisis of climate change is going to pull countries together to combat it. Quite frankly, the perception of the threat really varies based on the impact that people calculate for themselves. And even if they know it to be true that it will hurt them — like India or China — they are also calculating two things: First, whether their growth is more important than addressing the issue, and secondly, if the Western countries feel passionate enough about it, they’ll pay them to deal with the issue. So, in negotiations, you’re not really representing what you know to be true, you’re representing a position that is going to gain you the maximum amount of resources and leverage.

There’s a great sort of joke or analogy used to represent Iran that’s also at work here. You know, in Arab culture or Persian culture, it’s all about bargaining and the bazaar. You go, you want to buy a carpet and you look at every single carpet except the one you want and then you end up getting a good price because it seems like you don’t want the carpet that you wanted all along. So the US says, “No nuclear proliferation. No nuclear proliferation. No nuclear weapons.” And Iran maybe didn’t want nuclear weapons that badly, but when they realized just how much the US wants to prevent them from getting them, they focus on that. The same thing goes for climate change. The more the US begins to argue that climate change is by far its greatest priority, well, that means that it has to put its money where its mouth is, and China and India can sit back and wait for America to pay them to confront climate change. We all know that China is by some measures the richest country in the world. Certainly, it has two trillion dollars of foreign exchange reserves, and could certainly spend its way toward a more manageable approach to climate change.

I’m afraid that the notion of some kind of holistic, global, political unity on climate change falls apart if you observe the official diplomacy. Unofficially — and again I get back to this notion of informal, consultative networks — unofficially, I think there’s phenomenal things happening. To hell with Pittsburgh, Copenhagen and all these things — I’ve just come from a meeting where even climate experts were saying exactly that — to hell with those things. It’s all about companies innovating new solutions and selling them cheap to mayors and factory owners and governments around the world. The more you do that, the more you’ll be addressing a problem, while negotiators sit and argue about trivial rhetoric.

Really, truly, concretely, do you think that we will ever live in a borderless world?

The answer is, as I said at the very end of my talk, it’s about pushing toward equilibrium. Equilibrium doesn’t mean a borderless world, it means a world in which borders align in ways that are peaceful and sensible with respect to populations and resources. That’s the definition of equilibrium.

When you say a borderless world, I take it to mean a peaceful world of free movement and communities that feel secure. Communities feel secure when borders are shifted to align population with the resources. As far as I’m concerned, we can move closer and closer toward that world. Infrastructure is key because building infrastructure across those borders makes it easier to cross them. You don’t assume a borderless world, you build a borderless world by building lines across borders instead of borders across lines.