A small highlight reel of a good friend's illuminating TED Talk on strategies to counter violent extremism. In particular, Dr Southers' nuanced view of how to approach communities irrespective of religious or ethnic background is insightful and thought provoking. Have a look:
Digital Hope: How Adam Motiwala is helping homeless writers make the transition to the web
Adam has always been an innovator and an entrepreneur and his new venture, Digital Hope, a partnership with Washington DC's Streetsense Newspaper, is helping the city's homeless develop a career writing for blogs and media outlets online. A short excerpt from a writeup in Technical.ly about his work below, and check out a great podcast on entrepreneurship where Adam's work was featured recently. Contact him if you are interested in collaborating.
“Adam Motiwala met his business partner Ibn Hipps at the McPherson Square metro stop. That’s where Hipps was selling copies of Street Sense, a D.C. newspaper that publishes writers experiencing homelessness, for $2 a piece. “I used to see him every day,” said Motiwala. At first, he thought Hipps’s business was bogus. But over time, he got to know him and “started reading his stories. Then in early 2014 Motiwala, 30, a VP account manager at local marketing firm Fifth Tribe, was commissioned to produce a blog post for a real estate firm.”
Securing the Homeland (Part 1): An Interview with Former Governor and Homeland Security Secretary Tom Ridge
I am currently writing a textbook on homeland security (due out from Routledge 2015). Unique to this text are interviews with renowned experts in the fields of homeland security and national security. Former Gov. Tom Ridge is one such expert. Mr. Ridge has had a remarkable and distinguished career in public service and served as a member of the United States House of Representatives (1983–1995), the 43rd Governor of Pennsylvania (1995–2001), Assistant to the President for Homeland Security (2001–2003), and was the first United States Secretary of Homeland Security (2003–2005). An excerpt of his interview appears below. Read the rest when it publishes later this year.
What challenges did you have standing up the Department of Homeland Security?
TR: The seminal challenge, in my mind, was convincing Congress and ultimately Americans in the 21st century, particularly after 9/11, that it was absolutely essential for the United States to build a border-centric agency that effectively monitored people and goods coming in and out of the country. The inter-connectedness and inter-dependency of the global community and the forces of globalization necessitated the creation of the Department of Homeland Security. In fact, I would have argued for its creation even before 9/11.
The second most significant challenge was creating a collective sense of mission among the disparate entities that form DHS so that every agency appreciated the necessity of newfound internal collaboration among government agencies entities that had previously existed in silo’ed and closed-off entities.
A third challenge was to integrate the capabilities of each component agency of DHS in a way that was both efficient in terms of the resources committed, while being effective in terms of the outcome desired. If one thinks of DHS initially as a holding company, those who were involved at the outset of DHS would remind you that underneath the holding company umbrella we had mergers, acquisitions, start-ups, and a few other things going on all under one entity called DHS. Thus, the mechanics of starting up DHS were very complicated, but the first two challenges were the most important substantively and intellectually.
Do you believe that a government entity such as DHS was the best way to solve the lack of coordination among government agencies that existed prior to 9/11?
TR: One of the observations I made when standing up DHS, predicated both on my experience previously as a Congressman and then as Governor of Pennsylvania and then certainly as Assistant to the President for Homeland Security, is that not too much moves in Washington D.C. as far as integrating capabilities unless you control budgets.
DHS was a new department in name, but it was created through the assimilation of multiple agencies for whom border responsibilities were very essential. To the extent that agencies with authority over and around the border were included in a border-centric agency, DHS’s initial structure was appropriately framed - the agencies and units of government that were integrated into DHS were clearly appropriate. At the outset of DHS, there were multiple human resource systems, multiple procurement systems, and different approaches toward the budget as well as the creation of different digital and cyber divisions. The organizational tasks were astounding. Had DHS been a series of merging businesses, by the time they received regulatory approval, they would have had more than a year to sort out all the issues associated with merging a large organization. Unfortunately DHS had less than 90 days to sort those same issues out with a staff of over 180,000 personnel and at the same time we had to fill vacancies and build out policies. I think that business line integration of the Department continues to this day. Given these challenges, the defensive role that DHS plays in combating terrorist threats is a vital one, despite the challenges that remain in making the Department a more complete entity.
One of the roles of the Department was to focus on the private sector, because the private sector bears the brunt of both man-made and natural hazards. Do you think that the Department’s current initiatives have been sufficient in increasing the resiliency of the private sector to all these hazards or is there more work to do? And if there is more work to be done, is there a structure that should be put in place that is different than the public/private partnerships that are currently in place?
TR: The term “public/private partnership” is very much a refrain that political figures use on a fairly regular basis and I happen to believe that public/private partnerships, if structured around mutual goals and mutual responsibility are far more effective than either the government or the private sector working independently. Let me give an example: we wanted to expedite through-put across the Detroit/Ontario border region and there were many complaints about infrastructure. Alfonso Martinez-Fonts, he’s from the Department in charge of private sector collaboration, sat down with the private sector and facilitated a change in delivery schedules, customs and border protections in the toll booths, in order to make change work.
However, if you are trying to combat terrorism, one of your largest most significant concerns is sharing information. Information sharing is still a challenge, although not so much DHS’ challenge because DHS is really a consumer of intelligence. DHS doesn’t generate intelligence, so DHS can’t be blamed for not dispersing information they don’t know. DHS needs to receive information about potential attacks from other government agencies, alphabet agencies, and other resources. There are still too many occasions when federal government agencies do not share information about a potential physical attack such as the Boston marathon attack with the private sector.
So public/private partnerships work, if they are managed effectively toward mutually beneficial outcomes and are far more effective than either organization working on its own. Ultimately, I think that DHS, and the rest of the government channeling information through DHS, still has a lot of work to do in building stronger partnerships with the private sector.
The False Tradeoff Between Rights and Liberty: Addressing the Violent Extremism Narrative
In an upcoming guest lecture at the Naval Defense Postgraduate School, I will discuss issues concerning countering violent extremism (CVE) in the context of potential homegrown radicalization threats. Threats posed by violent extremism are not constrained by borders, but they are also not limited to any single ideology, religion or ethnicity. In today’s technological age, violent extremists are growing increasingly sophisticated in their use of the Internet and social media.
My lecture will endeavor to establish how CVE is not limited to a single ideology or religion. Rather, violent extremism, including acts committed by “lone wolf” actors arise out of broader systemic areas of causation such as poor mental health, alienation, isolation, loneliness, aggravation and teenage angst and that ideology of any kind can be used to justify violent behavior. During my talk I will also compare violent extremists irrespective of their ideological background and discuss the legally relevant difference between “radical thought” and “violent action.”
Empowerment Through Education
As a board member for Developments in Literacy (DIL – an organization that promotes student learning in South Asia) I collaborated with New America to host DIL’s Founder and CEO, Fiza Shah, and Sheereen Sial, DIL’s Project Manager in Pakistan, for a discussion on “Empowerment through Education in Pakistan”. (click the link to the see the webcast)
DIL was created to educate and empower underprivileged students by operating student-centered schools and provide teachers with quality curriculum development training. The New America event, focused on DIL's student-centered work in teacher training and women's empowerment, as well as the role education can play in curbing corruption and violent radicalization.
Focusing on education in Pakistan is of particular importance given the December attack on a Peshawar school resulting in the death of over 130 individuals, mostly children. There is a lot of nuance associated with education in Pakistan, however, the type of work conducted by DIL is largely overlooked by the media. Rather, the media at large discusses South Asia, particularly Pakistan, under the lens of terrorism or poverty. Instead a shift in focus on the region could reduce, and possibly eliminate, the rampant poverty and terrorism issues. Ms. Shah discusses how meaningful education is effectively the only viable pathway to socio-economic empowerment in Pakistan, with each additional year of schooling increasing an individual’s earning by 10 percent. Yet, despite increases in access to education in Pakistan, the population largely remains uneducated and has a high dropout rate with some 25 million children not completing primary school. Even more disheartening is lowering female literacy rates, as girls drop out at a rate twice that for boys.
When DIL initially began opening its schools in Pakistan, the organization notices that almost 48% of schools in Pakistan are dilapidated having no walls, working bathrooms or even classrooms. Additionally, on any given day, 18-20% of teachers did not attend school and curriculum textbooks were outdated. DIL addressed these issues by providing a modern education by developing a student’s critical-thinking, problem-solving, and reasoning skills. This resulted in changing the way the students conducted their everyday lives and changed the community. In large part, DIL’s schools and education concepts succeeded in breaking down barriers concerning the perception of educated girls in Pakistan. In the rural communities that DIL penetrated, education of females was shunned and deemed un-Islamic. Initially, fathers would burn daughter’s books and girls would attend school only when their fathers had left the home. Now, the opposite is the case. DIL receives demand for more schools from neighboring villages after seeing how education has benefited students currently enrolled.
The communities impacted by DIL have realized how meaningful education is, largely due to parents realizing the benefits and potential of educating their daughters. In one of DIL’s schools, when faced with the realization that opportunities for educated girls was limited, the female students were undaunted and developed a concept of opening up a women’s store. In these communities all shops are owned by men, and a woman cannot go shopping on their own. They have to either go with their husband or have their husband or male relative go for them. A woman’s store changes that community perspective by allowing a woman the freedom to shop on her own. DIL students opened two more stores since the initial store. After that period, enrollment for that specific community increased resulting in DIL having to turn down students because they did not have the capacity for so many students.
These minute changes within the community, especially the development of the education system, play a key factor in reducing and ultimately eliminating the spread of extremism and radicalism in Pakistani society. Lack of education results in a lack of professional skill sets, and ultimately unemployment and poverty. Without sufficient opportunities for education, the young are vulnerable to radical rhetoric and tendencies. DIL has worked to change to that narrative by changing one community’s mindset at a time pertaining to education and what constitutes quality education for youth, male and female.
The costs of moving to the burbs
One of the lasting inequities of gentrification is the increasing unaffordability of urban centers.
The suburban enclaves that now ring many major American cities are creatures borne of the excess wealth and development of the post-WWII era. Suburban residents from the 1950's onwards consumed far more resources when commuting long hours to work or maintaining their lush lawns. Suburbia was space squandered, inefficiency welcomed.
And those who moved to the suburbs at that time - the largely affluent white community of the 50's and 60's - did so knowing full well that the price they paid for seclusion would be one they could bear.
Not so for the many thousands who are now being forced to abandon their homes in cities across the country and move to America's increasingly depressed suburbs. These former city dwellers, often renters, often from low-income households, previously lived in the city because they could not afford the plush life of the suburbs.
As gentrification has attracted younger, wealthier, more educated residents into the city, it has pushed out low wage earners to the suburbs. The same suburbs that today, as before, require the luxury of time and charge the penalty of convenience.
Except that these new suburban residents lack both the time (many work multiple low wage jobs to make ends meet) or the desire to live farther from the city.
In the transaction that gentrification represents, It seems only one party benefits: the wealthy who buy and rent the increasingly homogenous downtown lofts of the inner city.