Virtual Diplomacy
Homepage >> Virtual
Diplomacy Publications >> Creating a
Common Communications Culture
Creating a
Common Communications Culture
Interoperability in Crisis
Management
Richard Solomon, President, United
States Institute of Peace, and
Sheryl J. Brown, Director,
Virtual Diplomacy Initiative, United States Institute of Peace
Delivered to the Conference on Crisis Management and
Information Technology, Helsinki, Finland, September 12, 2003
The views expressed in this report are those of the
authors and not necessarily those of the Institute, which does not
advocate specific policies.
No technologies have been more powerful in reshaping the
post-Cold War international system than those of the information
revolution. Over the past two decades, nation-states and subnational
groups, international businesses, and multinational organizations have
struggled to incorporate the dramatic possibilities for their work of
satellite communications, the Internet, inexpensive telephone and cell
phone services, fax machines, and global computer networks. The
innovations have occurred largely without central direction or a clear
game plan, and the effects of the ongoing revolution in the way we
communicate on international affairs will continue. We are only beginning
to see purposeful efforts to channel all the power in these technologies
in support of good governance or effective and expedient management of
international conflicts and crises.
A World Pushed and Pulled by
Information Technology
One of the most dramatic and paradoxical effects of advanced
communications technologies has been to reconfigure the international
order. Most notably, they have quietly co-opted the nation-states'
manifestation of sovereignty and power-by integrating them into an
interdependent global economic and political system while at the same time
empowering local communities and subnational groups within their borders
with voice and outreach beyond those borders. The Internet has created
worldwide virtual communities of shared interest that in many instances
and ways override citizenry as well as governance in this post-Westphalian
era.
These technologies offer an expanded role for conventional
foreign affairs agencies in the international arena through their power to
reach vast publics, maintain 24/7 contact with their counterparts in every
country, and elicit immediate responses from their own national
governments. Yet these agencies have tended to resist such changes. Many
reasons are offered for not dismantling organizational "stovepipes" that
inhibit reaching out to publics and counterparts across the globe. The
reasons, however, boil down to two: a defensive view that their power will
be diminished by sharing information with competitors; and fear of change
coupled with a lack of accountability for ineffective practices and
procedures. All of which leads to disjointed, erratic, piecemeal
policy-making and operational coordination. As the old structures struggle
to adapt, new collaborations are forming with remarkable speed. New
opportunities and threats, new priorities and national interests bring
people, societies, and states together in real or virtual
combinations.
There is, to be sure, something unsettling about the
dramatic rise onto the international scene of nonstate and stateless
actors who now press their demands for change onto the once-sacrosanct
diplomatic negotiating table. One need only mention Jody Williams of the
anti-land mine campaign or al Qaeda to dramatize the disquieting reality
that nation-states are now under challenge from individuals and small
groups who—thanks to the information revolution—have gained a global
electronic voice. Those who have the will to act increasingly have the
capacity to do so.
Without question, the information revolution has contributed
many invaluable tools to the international community's humanitarian and
human rights efforts: the use of remote sensing imagery to locate mass
graves, or databases to manage refugee repatriation, to name just two. Yet
there is a dark side to this new electronic force that must be recognized
as well. Terrorist groups and drug merchants can communicate globally, and
secretly, as they plot their destructive schemes or market their poisonous
wares. And we see how vulnerable we have become to computer viruses.
Hackers can cripple financial systems that support the work of millions
and impose enormous costs on the global economic order with a few strokes
on a keyboard.
These are heady and challenging issues. This presentation
explores some thinking derived from the work of the United States
Institute of Peace about the significance of the global information
revolution for humanitarian assistance operations.
The U.S. Congress created the Institute of Peace, an
independent federal organization, in 1984. Its congressional mandate is to
focus on the great, unresolved challenges involved in controlling
international violence in an interdependent world. Accordingly, the
Institute uses its resources and standing as a national entity to confront
issues traditionally outside the scope of interstate relations, such as
ethnic and religious conflict, humanitarian crises, and human rights
violations. Building on this mandate, the Institute—and especially its
Virtual Diplomacy Initiative1—has
for some years explored the relevance of the information revolution for
new approaches to international conflict management and has collaborated
with other organizations in its field of endeavor.
This conference focuses on ways of developing interoperable
communications systems that can facilitate information sharing during
crises. Underlying this very practical problem is a fundamental need. That
need is for better security, in the broadest sense, for people in peril
and for those managing the rescue or care of such people. The new
challenges of security in our time were made evident, of course, on
September 11, 2001; but the special problem of security for the
peacemakers was brought home to us by the horrific bombing of the UN
headquarters in Baghdad on August 19, 2003. Many of us lost colleagues in
that bombing—as did we in the case of the UN Secretary General's
representative in Baghdad, Sergio Viera del Mello, with whom we had worked
on the Cambodia settlement a decade ago. The vulnerability of such
humanitarian workers has been repeatedly and tragically demonstrated over
the past decade in Somalia, Rwanda, Bosnia, Kosovo, East Timor,
Afghanistan, and now Iraq and Liberia.
Civilian aid workers, as well as the vulnerable population
they seek to protect, are at risk in these circumstances largely because
of the ill intent of bad actors. Yet those of us who organize the work of
first responders bear some responsibility because we do not have our act
together, so we can collaborate more effectively among ourselves and with
those uniformed military and police who must provide security in
conflict-ridden societies.
Interoperability
How can we make our humanitarian assistance operations more
effective? The magic concept is "interoperability." Sometimes techies
refer to the mechanics of interoperability as an electronic "handshake"
that enables separate communication systems to "talk" to each other. Such
metaphors try to explain in common parlance the conditions that enable
nonhuman technologies to do "human" things, such as share information.
During this conference we are applying a technical term,
"interoperability," to a basically human endeavor of creating conditions
that enable separate organizations to share information toward a common
end.
Interoperability means not only technical and political
compatibility, but also the will and the means to communicate, to
cooperate, and to collaborate: in short, sharing a common culture of
communication. As we well know, when systems are not politically,
organizationally, or technically interoperable, information becomes
"stovepiped" within a single organization, and systems cannot easily
collaborate. The U.S. government was forced to recognize the costs of
stovepiping in the post-9/11 analysis of its intelligence failures, and,
indeed, of the inability of first responder organizations—the police,
firefighters, and the New York Port Authority—to readily communicate. The
problems created by a lack of information sharing in crisis conditions
cannot be overstated.
Consider the post-Iraq war challenges: In assessments of the
American operations six months after the end of major combat, we see a
picture of how reconstruction-phase planning was undermined by a lack of
information sharing among various government agencies. And, what is more
disturbing, the valuable information in the "lessons learned" from the
past decade's many humanitarian and political crises was either ignored or
dismissed.2
As far back as Somalia and as recently as Afghanistan, the
Institute of Peace's Virtual Diplomacy Initiative has convened workshops
of military and civilian practitioners to identify the salient lessons to
be learned from these interventions. Out of these assessments, we have
extracted four key lessons, all related to the need to create a common
culture of communication between civilian and military organizations and
between civilian nongovernmental organizations (NGOs) during humanitarian
or peace operations:
- Communications must flow in all directions, all the time.
- An organization's mission matters.
- Information structures need to be flexible (but not ad hoc).
- "Lessons learned" need to be learned and trained toward.
Communications Must Flow in All
Directions, All the Time
The Institute's 1996 conference "Managing Communications:
Lessons from Interventions in Africa" examined the effectiveness of
communications and information-sharing practices between and within
humanitarian and peacekeeping organizations operating in complex
emergencies in Somalia, Rwanda, and Liberia. From that conference and
every subsequent study, the Institute has undertaken on this and related
subjects, we have learned that at least seven dimensions of communication
must be in place and working during a crisis3:
- Communication within organizations
- Communication between organizations (bilaterally)
- Communications among organizations (multilaterally, as in a
networked community)
- Communication with local leaders
- Communication with and between decision makers
- Communications with the media
- Communication among the parties in the conflict
Perhaps most central to these assessments, we came to
realize that communications interoperability is less a technical problem
than a matter of organizational politics. Commitment at the very highest
policy levels to implement and enforce omni-directional information
sharing is required before there can be meaningful information exchange
from headquarters all the way down into the field.
Organizational Mission
Matters
All of us involved in crisis management and humanitarian
assistance work want to achieve the same goal: conditions that will permit
the emergence of a safe, just, and self-sustaining society out of the
chaos of a crisis. Each organization's mission prescribes its own unique
role in contributing to the attainment of that goal. Operating according
to one's mission and special capabilities is the sine qua non of
organizational effectiveness. Understanding and respecting one another's
missions and the special means by which those missions are fulfilled are
necessary conditions for effective collaboration in the complex
environment of a crisis or battlefield and in the post-conflict
reconstruction phase.
Last year, at the behest of our Department of Defense and
the U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID), the Institute of
Peace and the RAND Corporation conducted a study of civilian-military
interactions in Afghanistan. The results of this assessment—the "lessons
learned"—were to be conveyed to those involved in planning the Iraq
operation. The study observed that U.S. military personnel saw
humanitarian assistance as one facet of their overall mission.4
They regarded the work of the NGOs as a means to a political end, and they
weighed the priorities of assistance efforts against other priorities in
the military's broader range of activities. For the NGOs and international
operations (IOs), in contrast, assistance was—and is—the sole mission.
"Hearts and minds" campaigns waged by the military are not
the same as humanitarian responses to victims in crisis. The first have an
overtly political end. The second assume no particular political end and
seek to conduct their activities as neutral actors in the field—operating
under the security umbrella accorded the International Red Cross by the
Geneva Convention, which we have come to term "humanitarian space."
Political neutrality is critical to justifying humanitarian responders'
access to victims behind combatant lines—just as force protection is
critical to the operations of all military organizations. In order to
effectively promote their respective missions, both the military and the
humanitarian assistance organizations must have their own spheres of
operation, or "spaces," and information integrity, even as they need to
collaborate in working toward the common goal of protecting the local
population. To cooperate when their needs and objectives overlap, they
must share suitable, protected mechanisms for exchanging information.
Instead of going around and around on this issue, which the two cultures
have done for a decade, policymakers from both sides should evaluate the
necessities and realities that face them in the field and manage their
respective needs for information integrity and the means to cooperate.
This is doable technically; whether sufficient political will exists to
meet the challenge is the critical question.
Information Structures Need to Be
Flexible (But Not Ad Hoc)
During a conference that Virtual Diplomacy cosponsored with
the U.S. Army's 353 Civil Affairs Command in 2000, humanitarian workers
and military participants alike stressed the need for a standardized
structure of humanitarian coordination and information sharing to meet
their respective and common needs.5
This call coincided with recommendations in the 2000 United
Nations' "Report of the Secretary-General on the Implementation of the
Report of the Panel on United Nations Peace Operations" (better known as
the Brahimi Report) for specific actions to improve information sharing
between civilian and military groups during complex emergencies. In
particular, the report recommended the design of new information
management and planning capabilities involving military, humanitarian,
human rights, and other entities engaged in complex emergencies.
Sad to say, however, our "lessons learned" assessments have
taught us that humanitarian assistance organizations do not routinely or
readily share information among themselves. They have yet to develop
reliable standards, structures, and practices for information sharing and
communication in field operations. Because they compete for funds and
visibility, they often risk forfeiting success in their broader mission
through collaborative efforts in the interest of enhancing their
individual public visibility or financial gain.
There have been a number of efforts to deal with these
problems, such as the humanitarian community information center (HIC) in
Kosovo, Afghanistan, and now in Iraq and Liberia. HICs and humanitarian
operational centers (HOCs) and NGO councils have played important and
variously successful roles in field information sharing. Yet, each
instance of cooperation has been worked out more or less on an ad hoc
basis. To date, there has been no agreement about funding for mechanisms,
procedures, responsibilities, or systems for information sharing, much
less data standards. Moreover, scanty documentation has prevented others
from learning from these useful and important experiences.
In response to the lack of institutionalized humanitarian
information management practices, the Institute's Virtual Diplomacy
Initiative has produced the Good Practices Database, which chronicles in
computer-searchable form an oral history of the past decade's humanitarian
communications and coordination structures and practices. Our objective
has been to document what has worked in what conditions, and to describe
the components of these various models to prospective practitioners for
possible use in future interventions.
Despite the utility of this effort, a single, fixed modality
of acquiring and circulating information would, in the long run,
needlessly inhibit the innovative use of extant or emerging technologies
that would enable humanitarians to acquire better ground truth in their
areas of operation. The following collaborations demonstrate paradigms of
public-private leading-edge partnerships:
- SPOT Image satellite imagery, among others, is now available through
UNOSAT to all UN humanitarian agencies.
- ESRI's geographic information system (GIS) has been applied to rapid
assessment forms, refugee flows, and the return of internally displaced
people (IDPs) in Kosovo.
- Ericsson set up and maintained telecommunications systems for the UN
system during the humanitarian response in Afghanistan in 2001-2002.
- And, most recently, IBM Finland is an active partner with
Information Technology and Crisis Management (ITCM ) in building an
incident management system for civilian and military organizations in a
crisis zone.
These innovative projects highlight the opportunity to
create the public-private partnerships that this conference and its
sponsors seek to foster and implement as a regular feature of information
management during crises.
"Lessons Learned" Need to Be
Learned!
Even with these visionary applications of information
technologies to crisis management, we are far from fulfilling their
potential. We tie our hands with outdated institutions and practices. And
to paraphrase that oft-used phrase of George Santayana, those who are
ignorant or dismissive of history's mistakes are bound to repeat them. A
recently commissioned U.S. Department of Defense review of the
post-conflict effort in Iraq by the Center for Strategic and International
Studies (CSIS)— Iraq's Post Conflict Reconstruction: A Field Review and
Recommendations—concluded that the "lessons learned" from Afghanistan were
not merely not learned and applied in Iraq, but rather a wholly new and
untested model was tried.6
Besides lacking the relevant experience, the U.S. military,
in its efforts to prepare to win the peace, failed to focus on the
critical need to develop a robust culture of communication with its NGO
collaborators and the systems needed to support it. As the CSIS report
concluded, this lack of internal communication among the governing
elements of the Coalition Provisional Authority has contributed to the
mission's current physical insecurity. And the lack of external
communication with the Iraqi people has led to misunderstanding,
alienation, and violence7.
The consequences of a lack of communications in all directions at all
times in Iraq is tragically evident—such as the downsizing of staff or
outright departure from Iraq of several key IOs and NGOs: Oxfam; the
Norwegian Refugees Council; Save the Children; the UN, and even the
resilient ICRC.
Conclusion
Where does this leave us? How do we build a culture of
communication as the centerpiece of the post-Cold War world's efforts at
effective crisis management? How do we implement the recommendations from
this conference's work and "lessons learned" from a decade of humanitarian
interventions?
First, at a minimum, we must press our governments for
immediate ratification of the Tampere Convention, which would allow
emergency communication workers and systems to rapidly deploy across
national borders in response to a crisis.8
Second, building on this international convention—a first
step in recognizing the centrality and importance of information systems
in crisis management—we must establish other conventions that require
governmental and private organizations involved in crisis response to
commit to recognized information-sharing standards and practices in the
field.
Third, we must require, through force of treaty and
training, respect for the distinct humanitarian and military spheres of
operation in the field. We have to engender attitudes and practices of
cooperation with and support for each other's missions.
Fourth, we must encourage our national and international
agencies to routinely engage the private sector on international crisis
management issues. We have the Crisis Management Initiative to thank for
this mutually beneficial step. We must develop organizational policies and
practices to facilitate more flexible interactions and system development
processes between government agencies and private enterprises.
Fifth, we must improve forward planning, to ensure
sufficient resource allocation for longer-term partnerships as opposed to
fleeting and ad hoc arrangements. We must commit our governments and
international organizations to review, learn, implement, and then train
"lessons learned" to agencies and to rising diplomats, military personnel,
and civilian humanitarian and development responders. This means that we
must institutionalize internationally agreed-upon "lessons learned" into
national doctrines, policies, and operating procedures.
And finally, we must establish at the highest level a policy
framework that will embrace the efforts of government officials, the
military, and all civilian responders on the ground. Former Finnish
President Ahtisaari has personally advanced this conference's agenda with
the secretary-generals of the United Nations, the North Atlantic Treaty
Organization, and the Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe,
and the chairman of the European Union (EU) Military Committee and a
high-level civilian official from the EU, all of whom endorsed it. We must
all commit to follow his lead by calling for the political leadership
within our own governments and organizations to mandate, fund, and
implement a culture of communication through organizational information
sharing and interoperability. Crisis management interoperability must
become a routine agenda item for our individual and group advocacy.
Creating more effective communications practices in the
service of protecting people during a crisis need not be an impossible
dream. We have come very far in the past ten years. A common culture of
communication—and the policies and procedures that would give it
reality—is within our immediate grasp, a "handshake" away.
Advances along the road toward organizational
interoperability must be aggressively initiated from the top with the goal
of transforming organizations into portals rather than terminals in the
global network. Our challenge is to ensure that new generations of
international humanitarian responders have the institutions with which to
conduct twenty-first century crisis management.
[Back
to Top]
Endnotes
1. For a description of the
initiative's history and activities, see
http://www.usip.org/virtualdiplomacy/index.html.
2. John Hamre, Frederick Barton,
Bathsheba Crocker, Johanna Mendelson-Forman, and Robert Orr, Iraq's
Post-Conflict Reconstruction: A Field Review and Recommendations, July
17, 2003, pp. 5-7.
3. "Managing Communications: Lessons
from Interventions in Africa," Virtual Diplomacy Series No. 2, January
2000, http://www.usip.org/pubs/specialreports/early/managingcomm.html.
4. OSD-USAID Civil Military Operations
in Afghanistan Project, United States Institute of Peace/RAND,
forthcoming.
5. "Taking It to the Next Level:
Civilian-Military cooperation in Complex Emergencies," Virtual Diplomacy
Series No. 10, August 2000.
http://www.usip.org/virtualdiplomacy/publications/reports/nextlevel.html.
6. Iraq's Post-Conflict
Reconstruction: A Field Review, p. 9.
7. Ibid., pp. 5-7.
8.
www.reliefweb.int/telecoms/tampere/index.html.
For More Information, go to:
The United States Institute of
Peace
http://www.usip.org
Virtual Diplomacy
Initiative
http://www.usip.org/virtualdiplomacy/index.htm
"Towards Interoperability in Crisis Managment"
conference
http://www.itcm.org/seminar/index.html
The Information Technology and Crisis Management, Crisis
Management Initiative, Crisis Response Executive Advisory TEam (CREATE)
groups
http://www.itcm.org/
Report of the Secretary-General on the implementation of the
Report of the Panel on United Nations Peace Operations (aka "Brahimi
Report")
http://www.un.org/peace/reports/peace_operations
Tampere
Convention
http://www.reliefweb.int/telecoms/tampere
"Iraq's Post-Conflict Reconstruction: A Field Review and
Recommendations"
http://www.csis.org
About the Report
This publication was presented as a speech at a conference,
"Towards Interoperability in Crisis Management," cosponsored by the United
States Institute of Peace's Virtual Diplomacy Initiative (USIP/VDI) and
the Crisis Management Initiative's Information Technology and Crisis
Management project (CMI/ITCM) in Helsinki, Finland, September 11-14, 2003.
Former Finnish president Martti Ahtisaari, president of CMI, provided the
opening framework for the conference; Richard Solomon, president of the
United States Institute of Peace, delivered this keynote speech at the
conference's culminating banquet.
The conference, the second in a series launched by CMI, was
organized to explore practical steps toward improving information sharing,
coordination, and cooperation from headquarters to the field and between
and among the various organizations responding to humanitarian crises, a
subject that VDI has pursued since 1995.
Conference participants included senior management from the
European Union (EU), the Organization for Security and Cooperation in
Europe (OSCE), the United Nations (UN), the North Atlantic Treaty
Organization (NATO), government agencies, practitioners from
international, regional and local nongovernmental organizations, the
military, information and communications technology companies and
standards-making organizations.
About the Authors
Richard H. Solomon has been president of the
Institute since 1993. As assistant secretary of state for East Asian and
Pacific affairs in 1989-92, he negotiated the Cambodia peace treaty, the
first United Nations "Permanent Five" peacemaking agreement; had a leading
role in the dialogue on nuclear issues among the United States and South
and North Korea; helped establish the Asia-Pacific Economic Cooperation
(APEC) initiative; and led United States negotiations with Japan,
Mongolia, and Vietnam on important bilateral matters. In 1992-93, Solomon
served as United States ambassador to the Philippines. He is the author of
several books.
Sheryl J. Brown is chief information officer,
director of the information and communications technologies office, and
director of the Virtual Diplomacy Initiative. Brown is editor of the
Virtual Diplomacy Series and coauthor of several articles on theoretical
perspectives and applications of information and communications
technologies in international conflict prevention, management, and
resolution.
[Back
to Top]
Virtual Diplomacy
Initiative Homepage | About the
Initiative | What's
New | Activities
| Grants
Publications | Electronic
Discussion Group | Contact
Virtual Diplomacy
Institute
Home | Education &
Training | Grants &
Fellowships | Policy
Research | Library &
Links
Publications
| News
& Media | About
Us | Events | Resources | Jobs | Contact
Us
Site
Map
 |