Piece for ‘Peace News’ written with Jenny Pickerill.

This is a super-short summary of some of the research we carried out for Anti-War Activism and is available from the Peace News website.

Chapter to be published in the forthcoming book, Net Working/Networking: Politics on the Internet, edited by Tapio Häyhtiö & Jarmo Rinne (2008, Tampere University Press).

This chapter works with the categories of ‘hackers’ and ‘users’ that have developed out of sociological analyses of the adoption of new technologies. These terms have sometimes been used to describe particular technological subcultures such as Sherry Turkle’s work on the mainframe hackers around MIT in the seventies. More generally useful, however, is the indications of particular attitude – what Graham Kirkpatrick describes ‘computational temperaments’ – that structure the ways in which people engage with technologies. In this sense, the notion of the ‘hacker’ may be of much wider relevance than those who carry out highly esoteric modifications in computers’ hardware or software.

This chapter explores these notions in relation to data gathered for a book on Anti-War Activism, asking to what extent user and hacker attitudes to technology were witnessed among activists opposing the invasions and occupations of Afghanistan and Iraq. As the book argues, many movement groups were steeped in a highly mediated information environment, making use various technologies to gather information, organise activity and represent their views. Mostly, as this chapter shows, activists engaged with the technology with a user attitude. That is to say, technologies were adopted in order to make use of their most obvious, advertised benefits. The chapter also details a number of cases in which activists have applied a recognisable ‘hacker’ attitude to the technologies they work with. In activist circles we see this attitude applied at the level of the communication system, rather than a particular device, and often with an explicit aim of creating a horizontal communication structure that transcends the intended uses of the system. It is those areas where activist groups differ most significantly from the intended market of technologies (usually businesses or public sector bureaucracies) where the hacker attitude seems to hold most promise.

You can download a preprint of the chapter here: Attitudes to Technology and Innovation, preprint.

You can find out more about the book from the E-democracy webpage: Net Working / Networking.

Article to be published in Information, Communication and Society.

Abstract:This article uses interviews with committed anti-war and peace activists to offer an overview of both the benefits and challenges that social movements derive from new communication technologies. It shows contemporary political activism to be intensely informational; dependent on the sensitive adoption of a wide range of communication technologies. A hyperlink analysis is then employed to map the UK anti-war movement as it appears online. Through comparing these two sets of data it becomes possible to contrast the online practices of the UK anti-war movement with its offline ‘reality’. When encountered away from the Web recent anti-war contention is grounded in national-level political realities and internally divided by its political diversity but to the extent that experience of the movement is mediated online, it routinely transcends national and political boundaries.

An electronic preprint of this article is available here: Anti-War Movement Online, Preprint. The authoritative final version will be available online at: Taylor and Francis, ICS.

With Jenny Pickerill, published in Australian Journal of Political Science 43:1, pp. 59-78.

Abstract: The upsurge in activism opposing wars and occupations in Afghanistan and Iraq appears to represent a significant process of transnational collective action. Using data collected through participant observation, interviews and website analysis this paper explores the role of the Internet in facilitating transnational activism between Australia, Britain and the United States. This research confirms Tarrow’s (2005a) assertion of ‘rooted cosmopolitanism’ – a primary commitment to locally contextualised action combined with a desire for transnational support. The Internet is used primarily for gathering news and for sharing symbolic expressions of solidarity. In Australia in particular, with fewer domestic anti-war resources online, international networking proves particularly useful. To an extent, online networks reach across both political diversity and geographical boundaries. However, online resources do not appear to enable the more personal connections required to build stable, working coalitions across borders.

An electronic preprint of the article is available for download here: Transnational Anti-war Activism Preprint. The published version is available from the Australian Journal of Political Science 43(1).

Paper presented to the 8th Conference of the European Sociological Association, Glasgow, September 2007.

Abstract: Significant activist groups see information and communication technologies (ICTs) as offering substantial potential in empowering social movements in organisation, mobilisation, and communication of their critiques and demands. Academic studies have begun to demonstrate some of the creative and technologically sophisticated uses to which activists have put new media. However, emphasis on the novel tends to overshadow the degree to which activists’ everyday lives are structured by interaction with new communications media. This paper analyses informational practices among UK anti-war and peace activists, demonstrating a far more complex picture of the value of new media to campaigning organisations. On the one hand, we see informational practices that utilise the manifest functionalities of new technologies as absolutely pervasive in contemporary activism. On the other hand, we see some activist groups discovering the latent functionalities of ICTs through stringing together multiple modes of communication or combining technologies with the social and political networks in which they interact. Through such practices activists produce relatively novel communication structures that potentially offer new ways of exerting the power of collective action.

This paper may be downloaded in pdf format from this link: Anti-War Activism and New Media.

During my last job as a research assistant on the project Internet Activism: Anti-War Movements in the Information Age I have worked with a colleague to revamp the project website. One of the key aims of this project is to produce work that is accessible beyond the academic realm of social science. The website gives us one way of trying to achieve that aim. As the project continues over the next year we will be using the site as a place to explain our findings. We hope that the site also gives a certain amount of accountability, since those who we come into contact with during the research have a place to find out more, and an easy route to get in touch.

With these aims the site design is aims at ease of navigation and simple presentation. Unlike much of my other web design work, this site doesn’t depend on any content management, which, in the main, keeps the technological ingredients down to HTML and CSS. The only complex feature is the photo galleries, written in PHP to enable easy resizing of images.

My involvement has included:

• Giving the site a new design;
• Creating a simple navigation system;
• Editing and authoring content;
• Re-working and installing my own photo gallery software.

Visit the Anti War Research website at: www.antiwarresearch.info

From the moment that George W Bush announced the beginning of a ‘War on Terror’, activists from across the world decided to oppose it. They did so on many different grounds, but came together in coalitions struggling against, first, the invasion of Afghanistan, and second, the invasion of Iraq. By 15th February 2003 these movements had created the largest popular opposition to war ever seen.

Within the UK anti-war movement of the time, all three of the frames described above can be seen to be influential as providing activists with particular critical understandings, motivations for action, and methods for acting. Of overriding importance, I argue, was the way that the different frames brought people with different political worldviews, into a broad agreement on an analysis of the war on terror. Commentry on the anti-war movement tends to brush away the any internal conflict, and while this chapter does emphasise a significant degree of unity, it is also sensitive to more difficult internal dynamics. Respondents characterise some anti-war movement activities as lacking space for debate and this proved problematic for two reasons. First, we see that conflict over appropriate methods to oppose the war was rife, creating significant tensions between adherents to different frames that has clearly also been transposed into the social forum movement. Second, since the movement as a whole lacked a broadly shared, detailed analysis of the reasons for war, it had difficulty coping with the moment of the invasion of Iraq. The fact that the three frames had only come into agreement on quite superficial critiques without dealing with more fundamental disagreements contributed to the strategic difficulty of questions such as whether to support the armed resistance inside Iraq once invasion became occupation.

Download C7: A Given Unity

Paper presented to the international research seminar ‘Politics on the Internet’ at the University of Tampere, Finland, 23-24 November 2006.

This article uses interviews with core anti-war and peace activists to offer an overview of both the benefits and challenges that social movement actors derive from new communication technologies. It shows contemporary political activism as intensely informational; dependent on rapid communication by a wide variety of means. A hyperlink analysis is then employed to map the UK anti-war movement as it appears online. Through comparing these two sets of data it becomes possible to contrast the online representation of the UK anti-war movement with its offline ‘reality’. We find that, to the extent that one’s experience of the anti-war movement is mediated online, it appears as a continuous network across national and political boundaries. This is in sharp contrast to activists’ experience ‘on the ground’ which is both politically divided and demonstrably tied to a national-level focus for action.

Please download the paper in .pdf format from this link: The UK Anti-War Movement Online.

(From September 2002)

Amidst the propaganda build up to another seemingly inevitable Gulf War a peace protester finds moral certainty in the facts of modern warfare.

There many good reasons not to re-invade Iraq. Given that Saddam Hussain is an intelligent self-preservationist (albeit a vicious murdering one) why would he use weapons of mass destruction against anyone unless his own survival was already threatened, as it is now being? War on Iraq simply makes the current regime more popular, destroying chances of internal regime change. A regime toppling war in Iraq would – unlike in Afganistan – leave a power vacuum with no viable opposition party ready to step in the breach. We should be suspicious of the motivations of US aggression given that an interim (US-puppet) government would have a major share in the price-fixing cartel OPEC [link]. I find these arguments, and many others, convincing. However, all are capable of being spun in different directions by skilled politicians.

What we can say with certainty is that the Iraqi people have suffered enough on behalf of their brainwashing dictator and at the behest of hawkish states inside the UN. We must dispel the myth that war has somehow become a precise, smart affair due to new weapons and new strategies.

An estimated 4-500,000 infant mortalities have been blamed on the continuing economic sanctions, in keeping with the ‘total war’ doctrine. [link]

The myth of ‘smart war’

A new war would combine the worst of strategic operations and conventional ‘total war’. Industrialisation lead to the notion of total war, in which the political order was subordinated to the military, and war would be waged through mass conscription, politics, economics, and propaganda [link]. Later, faced with the superiority of the USSR in conventional weapons, theorists proposed ‘Air-Land Operations’ – strategic strikes that would aim at stopping the supporting echelons of enemy troops ever making it to the fray, targeting supply lines and communications.

This kind of discussion led to the portrayal of the Gulf War as a smart war. [link] By giving the media exciting bombcam images, and rumours of missiles that could follow the streets and enter a building through a pre-selected window, warmongers could impress upon the general public the ideas of ‘precision bombing’ and ‘surgical strikes’ aimed at purely military targets. Even if the majority of attack missions in Iraq were of this kind we should not let this under-emotive language take away the reality of the bloody burning death inflicted on Iraqi conscripts, whatever the accuracy.

In any case the definition of military targets in the first Gulf War was dubious. Iraq was one of the wealthiest countries in the region. The country had spent $160 million on infrastructure in the 1980s and was thus a highly urbanised and mechanised society. Within two days of the beginning of the Gulf War, every electricity generation plant in Iraq had been destroyed or damaged it thus became impossible to pump or process clean water, refrigerate food, or run hospitals. A similarly thorough operation was carried out on communications and transport infrastructures, knocking out at least 50 bridges around Iraq. When people were injured in the bombing it was not possible to alert the emergency services, and they would not be able to get to the victims anyway. Human Rights Watch also note the bombings of water-treatment facilities, food-processing plants, food- and seed-storage warehouses, flour mills and a dairy-products plant, a sugar refinery, a textile factory and domestic heating-gas plant were bombed. Furthermore, due to a complete lack of intelligence on the ground in Iraq, verification of the list of at least 700 approved targets was questionable, as shown by the notorious attack on a civilian air raid shelter in Baghdad on 17th February 1991.[link]

Not so smart

In reality smart weapons were rarely used during air operations in Iraq. Less than 8% of the 88,500 tones of bombs dropped during the Gulf War were guided weapons. [link] As a result 35,000 civilians and more than 100,000 soldiers were killed. [link] The campaign against Iraq made use of both the smart Land-Air strategies and an older doctrine of total war. When it came to the front line, and even retreat of Iraqi soldiers from Kuwait, the military coalition were ruthless in destruction.

The main route out of Kuwait after bombers intercepted fleeing soldiers.

Weapons of mass destruction

More war can only bring more suffering. Let me offer some brief idea of the effects of a few of the more damaging conventional weapons with which Iraq would be attacked: cluster bombs, fuel-air explosives, daisy-cutters and depleted uranium (DU) shells.

Depleted Uranium is a component in many of the more conventionally recognisable weapons: shells from tanks and artillery, and rounds from machine guns. It is used because it is a particularly dense metal and because it is cheap: it is a by-product of the nuclear power industry and thus firing it at your enemies is considerably cheaper than disposing of it at home. It straddles the line between conventional and nuclear weaponry because of its long term effects: radiation sickness, increased incidence of cancer, and genetic mutations in new born children and livestock. While DU in fact produces less radiation than uranium commonly found in topsoil the sheer quantities left behind are staggering. After the 1990 Gulf War 290,000 kg of the substance were left behind – this is a substance whose presence is usually counted by the number of molecules. Furthermore, the costs of clean-up are prohibitively expensive: the estimate for a two square kilometre area of testing ground in the US was estimated at $4-5 billion. [link]. Of course, DU weapons not only kill enemy soldiers and civilians, have massive long-term health consequences and wreck the environment, they also damage the health of those who wield them; hence Gulf War Syndrome[link].

The result of a Russian dropped FAE in a Grozny cemetery.

Daisy cutters, less memorably, the BLU-82 [link] are massive explosives, originally designed to clear helicopter landing areas in Vietnam. They even create a mushroom cloud like nukes. Fuel-air explosives (FAEs) are similar to daisy cutters but instead of carrying their own combustion medium the explosives spread over a wide area before burning all the available air. Thus, it is not overpressures (i.e. the blast itself) that destroys but the creation of a vacuum. Victims die of suffocation and those outside of the lethal range of the weapons are likely to suffer damaged internal organs including brain tissue, and injuries sustained by smaller objects being sucked into the vacuum at high velocity. These weapons were used on troops in trenches during the Gulf War. [link1, link2]

Cluster-bombs have been the work-horse anti-personnel weapon in Iraq, Kosovo and Afganistan, about 25% of bombs dropped in the Gulf War were of these type. [link] A drop of several cluster bombs can easily produce a lethal zone of one square kilometre. [link] The biggest danger from cluster bombs is after the event however. Many sub-munitions lie unexploded and unstable on the battlefield. An ‘acceptable’ level of duds has been set at 3% by the UN; however, due to poor quality control US pilots report approximately 20% as duds. During negotiations over the international Anti-Personnel Landmines Ban the US had the definition of landmine altered so that it would not include the cluster bomb [link] Escaping on a technicality, the continued use of cluster-bombs therefore represents a conscious acceptance of the fact of injury and death for unsuspecting civilians long years after the end of the war. As with DU, cleanup is dangerous and prohibitively expensive.

All of these weapons will undoubtedly be used in a new Gulf War. Perhaps the only advantage to their destructive might is that it may make reduce the possibility of the US field-testing their tactical or battlefield nukes.

When dealing with a dictatorship it is unacceptable to hold the general population responsible for the actions of their leaders; this applies both to civilians and conscripts. The tactics of the first war hit the innocent hard. They did so predictably, not merely as accidental collateral damage. Imposition of sanctions have deliberately extended the human suffering resulting from the first Persian Gulf War. A second would be merciless and immoral.