The New Digital Age

by Jared Cohen

  As crowd-sourcing becomes a defining feature in the future of the rule of law—at least in the aftermath of conflict or disaster—a culture of accountability will slowly emerge. Fears of violence or looting will remain, but societies in the future will have all of their personal possessions and their historical artifacts documented online, so there won’t be a question of what’s missing when security returns. Citizens will be rewarded for sending in photos of thieves (even if they’re police) that show their faces and their loot. The risk of retaliation would be real, but evidence suggests that despite their fear there is almost always a critical mass of people willing to take that risk. And the more people there are willing to report crime, the more the risk to the individual is reduced. Imagine if the ransacking of Iraq’s celebrated Baghdad Museum in 2003 had occurred twenty years later: How long would those thieves have been able to hide their treasures (let alone try to sell them) if their theft had instantly been recorded and broadcast across the country, and other citizens were highly motivated to inform on them?

  Lost artifacts damage a society’s dignity and the preservation of its culture, but lost weapons constitute a far greater danger to a country’s stability. Weapons and small arms routinely disappear after conflicts and find their way onto the black market (an estimated $1 billion annual business), later appearing in the hands of militias, gangs and armies in other countries. Radio frequency identification (RFID) chips could represent a solution to this challenge. RFID chips or tags contain electronically stored information and can be as small as a grain of rice. They are ever present today, in everything from our phones and passports to the products we buy. (They’re even in our pets: RFID chips embedded under the skin or on an ear are used to help identify lost animals.) If major states signed treaties that required weapons manufacturers to implant unremovable RFID chips in all of their products, it would make the hunt for arms caches and the interdiction of arms shipments much easier. Given that today’s RFID chips can be easily fried in a microwave, the chips of the future will need a shield that protects them against tampering. (We assume there will be a technological cat-and-mouse game between governments who want to track the weapons with RFID chips and arms traffickers who want to deal the weapons off the grid.) When weapons with RFID chips were recovered, it would be possible to trace where they’d been if the chips themselves were designed to store location data. This wouldn’t stop the trafficking of arms but it would put pressure on the larger actors in the arms trade.

  States that donate weapons to rebel movements often want to know what happens to those arms. With RFID chips, such investments could be tracked. The Libyan revolutionaries were an unknown quantity to almost everyone, so in the absence of any tracking capability, governments that distributed arms to them had to weigh the benefit of a successful revolution with the possible consequences of those weapons going underground. (In the beginning of 2012, some of the weaponry that Libyan militias used wound up in Mali with disgruntled Tuareg fighters. This, combined with the return of the Tuareg contingent of Gadhafi’s army, led to a violent antigovernment campaign that created the conditions for a military coup.)

  Electronically traceable arms distribution will have to overcome hurdles. It will cost money to design weapons that include the RFID; arms manufacturers profit from a large illicit market for their products; and states and arms dealers alike rather enjoy the anonymity of weapons distribution today. It’s hard to imagine any superpower willingly sacrificing its ability to have plausible deniability regarding arms caches or covertly supplied arms for some long-term greater good. Moreover, states might claim that falsely planting another country’s weapons in a conflict zone would point to their involvement and lead to even more conflict. But international pressure might make a difference.

  Luckily, there are myriad other ways the RFID technology can be used in the short term in reconstruction efforts. RFID tags can be used to track aid deliveries and other essential supplies, to verify pharmaceuticals and other products as legitimate, and to generally limit waste or graft in large contracting projects. The World Food Program (WFP) has experimented with tracking food deliveries in Somalia, using bar codes and RFID chips to determine which suppliers are honest and deliver food to the target area. This type of tracking system—inexpensive, ubiquitous and reliable—could demonstrably help streamline the serpentine world of aid distribution by enhancing accountability and providing data that can be used to measure success and effectiveness, even in the least-connected places.

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  Another innovative use of mobile devices for a post-conflict government involves handling former combatants. Trading in weapons for handsets may become a key feature of any disarmament, demobilization and reintegration (DDR) program. Paul Kagame’s government, while controversial in human rights and governance communities, has overseen the demilitarization of tens of thousands of former fighters through the Rwanda Demobilization and Reintegration Project. “We believe that we need to put tools in the hands of ex-combatants to transform their lives,” he explained. In packages handed out to ex-combatants, “We gave them some money, but we also gave them phones so they could see what the possibilities are.” Most ex-combatants coming through the still ongoing program in Rwanda also receive some form of training that will prepare them for reintegration into society. Psychological treatment is an important component as well. We’ve seen these programs in action, and they resemble summer camps, with classrooms, dorms and activities—fitting, since so many of the ex-combatants in Rwanda are practically children. The key is to start them off with hundreds of others who have a shared experience, and then build their confidence that there is a good life on the other side of combat.

  Kagame’s words indicate that we are not far away from more countries trying this. In the aftermath of every conflict, the disarmament of former combatants is a top priority. (Disarmament, sometimes referred to as demilitarization or weapons control, is the process of eliminating the military capacities of warring factions, whether they are insurgents, civil enemies or army factions left over from a previous regime.) In a typical DDR program, weapons are transferred from warring parties to peacekeeping forces over a prescribed period of time, often with some form of compensation involved. The longer the conflict, the longer it takes to complete the process. It took years of prolonged fighting between the northern and southern sides in Sudan to produce the state of South Sudan (which we had the opportunity to visit in January 2013), so the urgent need for a comprehensive DDR program was recognized immediately by the new South Sudanese government and the international community. With more than $380 million in aid from the United Nations, China, Japan, Norway and the United States, the Sudanese on both sides of the border agreed to disarm some two hundred thousand former soldiers by 2017. Two neighboring countries, Uganda and Kenya, concerned about the possible spread of combatants-turned-mercenaries and the illegal transport of arms across borders, also pledged their support in order to reinforce regional security—a critical element of the plan. However, there are few regions as unpredictable and conflict prone as the Great Lakes, so pledges must be taken with a grain of salt.

  Most post-conflict environments contain armed ex-combatants who find themselves without work, purpose, status or acceptance by society. Unaddressed, these problems can lead former fighters to return to violence—as criminals, militia members or guns for hire—especially if they still have their weapons. As governments seek to create incentives for ex-combatants to turn in their AK-47s, they will find that the prospect of a smart phone might be more than enough to get started. Former fighters need compensation, status and a next step. If they are made to understand that a smart phone represents not just a chance to communicate but also a way to receive benefits and payment, the phone becomes an investment that is worth trading a weapon for.

  Each society will offer slightly different packages in this initiative, depending on the culture and the level of technological sophistication, but the essentials of t
he process have a universal appeal: free top-of-the-line devices, cheap text and voice plans, credit to purchase apps, and data subsidization that allows people to use the Internet and e-mail inexpensively. These smart phones would be of a better quality than much of the population’s and cheaper to use, as well. They could be front-loaded with appealing vocational applications that would provide some momentum for upwardly mobile ex-combatants, like English-language instruction or even basic literacy education. A former child soldier in a South Sudanese refugee camp, who had been forced to leave his family at a young age, could have access to a device that connected him not only to local relatives, but also to potential mentors from the Sudanese diaspora abroad, perhaps young men who had successfully sought asylum in the United States and built wholly new lives for themselves.

  Donor nations would likely pay for a program like this in its initial stages, then transfer the cost and control to the state in question. That would allow the government to maintain some leverage over the ex-combatants in its society. There could be software preloaded on the phone that allowed the state to track ex-combatants or monitor their browsing history for some period of time; ex-combatants would risk losing the data plan or the phone if they didn’t follow the rules of the program. A state would be able to institute a three-strike policy tied to the geo-location data on these phones: The first time an ex-combatant failed to check in with his equivalent of a probation officer at a prescribed time, he would receive a short video warning; the second failure would result in the data plan being suspended for some length of time, and the third failure would lead to the cancellation of the data plan and the repossession of the device.

  Of course, enforcement would be a challenge, but the state would at least have more leverage than it would from a one-time cash payment. And there are ways to make this program desirable beyond useful apps and status-symbol phones. Ex-combatants will likely rely on pensions or benefits to provide for their families, so integrating those payments into a mobile money system is a smart way to keep the former fighters on the right path.

  In order for this arms-for-phones project to work, however, it would need to be tied to a comprehensive and successful program—mobile phones alone would not get thousands of former fighters reintegrated in any sustainable way. As part of the reintegration and accountability programs, some ex-combatants would receive cash or special features for their device in exchange for photographs of arms caches or mass graves. Ex-combatants would have to feel fairly treated and adequately compensated to surrender both their guns and their sense of authority; programs that included counseling and classes in job skills would be important for helping these individuals transition into civilian life.

  In Colombia, a largely successful DDR program to reintegrate former guerrilla fighters into society involved a wide network of support centers for ex-combatants, offering them educational, legal, psychosocial and health services. Unlike many other DDR programs, which are run far away from city centers, the government of Colombia made the bold move of placing many of the reintegration houses in the middle of the city. The government identified a need early on to build confidence in the program, both on the ex-combatant side and within society. Set up much like homes for runaway teens, these houses eventually became part of the community, with neighbors and other locals getting involved. The government used ex-combatants as spokespersons for why Colombians should not turn to violence. They spoke at universities, addressed former members of the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia (FARC)—a forty-eight-year-old Colombian terrorist organization—and conducted community roundtables.

  It’s unclear whether communication technologies will help or hinder the reconciliation process for noncombatants. On one hand, the ubiquity of devices during a conflict will help empower citizens to capture evidence they can use to seek justice in the post-conflict environment. On the other hand, with so much violence and suffering caught on digital tape (stored in perpetuity, and shared widely), it’s possible that the social or ethnic divisions that engendered the conflict will solidify when the volume of data is brought to light. The healing process for societies torn apart by civil or ethnic conflict is painful enough, and it requires a certain collective memory loss. With much more evidence, there will be much more to forgive.

  In the future, technology will be used to document and record the implementation of various transitional justice processes, including reparations, vetting (like de-Baathification efforts), truth-and-reconciliation commissions, and even trials, making each of them more accessible and transparent. There are good and bad aspects to this shift. The televised trial of Saddam Hussein was cathartic for many Iraqis, but it also gave the late dictator and his supporters a stage on which to perform. Then again, as Nigel Snoad, a former senior U.N. aid worker now at Google, predicted, “Human-rights and justice groups can build a system for people to create memorials and to tell the story of those killed and who disappeared in the conflict.” Using these testimonials and memorials, he said, groups could “bring together stories from both sides, and despite conflicting accounts and occasional online flame wars (character bashing over the Internet through discussion lists and comments), create a space for apologies, truth-telling and an emerging reconciliation.”

  The slow, painful mechanics of reconciliation will not be eliminated by Internet technology, nor should they be. Public admissions of guilt, sentencing and punishment, and gestures of forgiveness, are all cathartic for a society recovering from conflict. Today’s models for criminal prosecution at the international level—for crimes against humanity—are slow, bureaucratic and prone to corruption. Dozens of criminals sit in the International Criminal Court (ICC)—more casually referred to as The Hague—for many months before their trials even start. In today’s post-conflict environments, local court systems and indigenous local bodies are frequently preferred over the international institutions that lag behind.

  The spread of technology is likely to exacerbate this trend. The sheer volume of digital evidence of crimes and violence will raise expectations that justice must be done, yet the glacial pace displayed by international judicial bodies like the ICC will limit how quickly such bodies adapt to these changes. For example, the ICC is unlikely to ever accept unverified videos captured on a mobile phone as evidence in its highly procedural trials (although organizations like Witness are trying to challenge this), but local judicial systems, with fewer legal constraints and a more flexible attitude, might be more open to developments in digital watermarking that will allow firsthand videos to be effectively authenticated. People will increasingly show their preference for these judicial avenues.

  A local setting means that adjudicators, whether they are formal judges, tribal chiefs or community leaders, must have an intimate and expansive knowledge of the society—internal dynamics, main actors, major villains and all the nuances that international or distant bodies struggle to understand. When presented with digital evidence, the need for verification is lower, because the people and places are already familiar. In a postcrisis setting, there is also a distinct pressure from the community to mete out justice quickly. Whether these courts would be more or less fair than their international counterparts is a matter of debate, but they’ll surely move faster.

  This trend could be manifested in future truth-and-reconciliation committees, or in temporary judicial structures after a major conflict. After the Rwandan genocide, the country’s new government rejected the South African truth-and-reconciliation model, arguing that reconciliation would take place only when the guilty were punished. But the formal judicial system took too long to process alleged genocidaires; more than a hundred thousand Rwandans sat in jail for several years waiting for their time in court. So a new system of local courts was built, taking inspiration from a grassroots, community-based conflict-resolution process known as “gacaca.” Under gacaca tribunals, the accused were confronted by the community and offered a commuted sentence if they confessed their crimes, shed light on what ha
ppened or identified the remains of those they killed. Despite being based in village justice, the gacaca tribunal system was a complex structure, involving different phases for judgment. The first phase was referred to as the cell level; in it the accused were brought before a tribunal of people in the community where the crime was committed. This tribunal determined the severity of the crime—whether the accused should be tried at the sector, district or province level, all three of which deal with appeals. The gacaca system was far from perfect. It came with the full panoply of traditional cultural prejudices, including the exclusion of women as judges and a failure to prosecute crimes committed against women with the same ferocity as those against men. These caveats aside, justice was fast, and the participating community generally felt satisfied with the process. Subsequent postcrisis governments elsewhere in the world have looked at adopting this model given how effective it was at advancing numerous reconciliation goals.