That is why I think your focus is wrong. By focusing on all the evil in the universe, you are not focusing on what you *can* change, and you are thereby missing opportunities to limit or decrease the suffering of individuals put in your path. Do you think that the situation in Africa has been improved by this blog post? Have any of the sex slaves or child mercenaries been set free? I mean, scoff if you want to, but the fact is that the only way for anyone to make a difference in the world is by focusing on one thing that they can change, and then not resting until they make that change.

So, to hear you imply that your inaction is in some way mitigated by the existence of more evil in the world than you can shake a stick at makes me very sad, because if you are still not willing to take any action to help the oppressed in Africa, even after seeing a video that moved you, that means that the situation in our world is truly hopeless: if even intelligent people with good, compassionate hearts like yourself are not willing to do one thing to help the oppressed because the problem is “just too big,” then evil will spread unchecked, and there is no hope of improving anyone’s situation in any way. So, I have to admire at least the passion that it takes to make a video like the Kony 2012 video, and I also think it’s hard to deny that many more people are now more aware of the plight of children kidnapped by warlords than at any time prior to this month. At least they tried to do something, which is more than some of us can say.

“A young girl walks along a beach collecting sand dollars that have washed up on shore. Still alive, they are destined to dry out and die in the heat of the sun. She picks one up and throws it back into the ocean. She continues doing this, one by one. An older man walks up to her and asks, “Why are you doing this? There are thousands of sand dollars on this beach that are going to die. What you’re doing doesn’t really matter.”
The girl picks up another sand dollar and hurls it into the sea: “It matters to this one.””

You’re talking, first off, a lot of drones just in this region alone

I suspect that wouldn’t be a problem, as long as we didn’t used Pentagon style procurement. They should be cheap to manufacture. And all the “smarts” are on the exponential curve; if they aren’t cheap now, they will be in a couple of years.

“This is assuming that you decide not to target officers in what are supposedly national military organizations that also engage in said atrocities, or national politicians who order or condone such atrocities.”

This is an interesting point. I think the convention of not charging sitting rulers, no matter how illegitimate, with war crimes is unfortunate. Since this is all hypothetical I’d just as soon target them too (after appropriate trial and conviction, of course).

Second, to do the targeting, you’d need human intelligence that I strongly suspect the US and NATO do not have and could not easily acquire. How are you going to find out who is in command of various small (two or three hundred at best) militias in the region in any given week? Moreover, much of this terrain is more difficult when it comes to spotting targets from aerial positions than Afghanistan and the US/NATO/UN would need to build the infrastructure to support drone strikes in the region. Try a Google Earth flyby of Bururu in Ituri Province, DRC and you’ll see what I mean.

Here we are on very different pages. I was thinking about an African war crimes tribunal, so the human intelligence etc. would come from locals.

The issue about small militia is more fundamental. Heavyweight judicial processes couldn’t handle a large number of small cases. Plus if the problem is many small war crimes then this sort of approach is useless — which is the question I was really trying to get to. See more on this below.

Which points to the third problem: these are mostly decentralized organizations that exist in part because there are plenty of guns, few jobs and little meaningful state authority in low-population density rural areas. Drone-kill a leader and all you’ve probably done is promote one of his chief aides or rivals into that role. …. the men in these militias do not need specific orders to commit atrocities, and might be able to function perfectly well without a specific leader.

I take this as a strong “Yes!” answer to my question “[D]oes the institutional context produce this behavior in such an overdetermined way that the results would be just as bad [if we got rid of the leaders], but perhaps less coherent and comprehensible?” In fact I guess it is worse than that, the social environment spontaneously generates institutions that produce this behavior.

This also seems to me to largely answer my question “are there any relatively simple models of how this environment is stuck in such a messy state?” To try to summarize your point, there are a lot of weapons and very few economic opportunities. So a lot of economically surplus young men become predators and clump into predatory bands because that’s the path that works for them. At the same time there are no anti-predator institutions nearly strong enough to counter these bands.

It seems like part of this story may be that the population has outstripped economic opportunity (i.e. too many people for the good jobs) but this deep enough in the background that I’m not sure you were implying that.

I don’t know what proportion of the (young male) population will turn predator in this kind of situation, or conversely what proportion of the population won’t, even when the incentives are strong. I wonder if there’s any good data on that. I also wonder how much this sort of conversion is situational and how much it has permanent effects.

I do not see much evidence for thinking that future authoritarians will be soundly discouraged by the fate of Mussolini and Qadafi, because I don’t think becoming an authoritarian–or the head of a murderous prophetic movement–is a simple career choice that you can nudge easily in the other direction.

No argument. I was trying a thought experiment to get more insight into the larger picture, and it worked pretty well.

But building on the model you’ve articulated, the question of motivation is pretty important — specifically the motivations of militia members, since the leaders aren’t that big a factor. (I guess if they had hardly any followers, the leaders would be easy to deal with.) If we sanction behavior or improve opportunities, but those changes don’t shift the motivations of the militia members, the effort is wasted. Conversely if we can identify cost-effective ways of shifting militia member motivations, maybe changes would not be so hard.

Is there research on what motivations determine militia participation — to the extent that people have a choice — and what changes them?

I wonder if giving militia members unlimited amounts of addictive drugs (e.g. heroin) would chill them out. That would be cheap.

I guess this leaves one question that you didn’t answer: Why are there “deep recurrent forms of militant prophetic leadership”? The incentives you describe to become a predator don’t address that. If militia members are driven by deep religious belief then shifting their choices may be pretty hard, short of deprogramming — though I wonder if that could be cost-effective using local resources.

Also, in general militant prophetic leaders don’t gravitate to war crimes as consistently as these seem to. Why aren’t more of these prophetic leaders organizing some equivalent of “meaningful state authority” instead of predatory militias?

You’re talking, first off, a lot of drones just in this region alone, if you were going to target every head of a militia that has engaged in Kony-type atrocities. This is assuming that you decide not to target officers in what are supposedly national military organizations that also engage in said atrocities, or national politicians who order or condone such atrocities.

Second, to do the targeting, you’d need human intelligence that I strongly suspect the US and NATO do not have and could not easily acquire. How are you going to find out who is in command of various small (two or three hundred at best) militias in the region in any given week? Moreover, much of this terrain is more difficult when it comes to spotting targets from aerial positions than Afghanistan and the US/NATO/UN would need to build the infrastructure to support drone strikes in the region. Try a Google Earth flyby of Bururu in Ituri Province, DRC and you’ll see what I mean.

Which points to the third problem: these are mostly decentralized organizations that exist in part because there are plenty of guns, few jobs and little meaningful state authority in low-population density rural areas. Drone-kill a leader and all you’ve probably done is promote one of his chief aides or rivals into that role. You’d have to kill and kill and kill to make it enough of a threat to discourage armed men from assuming leadership over these groups. Or you’d encourage militia heads to adopt the same position that heads of state throughout the world adopt, including our own: to stay in a secure base and profess ignorance of what your troops are doing. Which wouldn’t be that far from the truth: the men in these militias do not need specific orders to commit atrocities, and might be able to function perfectly well without a specific leader.

One of the problems here is the extent to which an organized project to kill Kony-type leaders operates from an assumption: that killing the leaders of groups or movements that commit atrocities is sufficient to discourage others from stepping into that role, or sufficient to discourage atrocity. The deterrent effect of capital punishment isn’t exactly well-established in ordinary criminality, let alone this sort of context. There’s plenty of evidence to suggest the contrary: I do not see much evidence for thinking that future authoritarians will be soundly discouraged by the fate of Mussolini and Qadafi, because I don’t think becoming an authoritarian–or the head of a murderous prophetic movement–is a simple career choice that you can nudge easily in the other direction.

OK, no suave British action heroes handy. But we do have lots of drones. What if we engaged in a campaign to kill everyone who runs an institution that engages in those practices you condemn? I guess whoever should be responsible for this sort of decision could set up a court that would try and sentence them in absentia. From your description the evidence isn’t hard to gather.

One question here is, given that “it’s complicated”: Would this make things worse on the whole? What would be the positive and negative effects?

I guess a more fundamental question is whether the individuals are even part of the problem, or whether it is all institutional. Are there few enough sufficiently talented psychopaths that killing a bunch of them, and tilting the incentives against the rest adopting that particular career path, would empower other dynamics? Or does the institutional context produce this behavior in such an overdetermined way that the results would be just as bad, but perhaps less coherent and comprehensible?

Of course the actual attempt to do this would run into all kinds of regional politics. But possibly that would clarify matters. Certainly it would provide a pressure point (“Bring the war criminals to justice!”) that would evade most of your objections.

Finally, are there any relatively simple models of how this environment is stuck in such a messy state? If it is just “complicated” then I guess most of us will just tune out until it simplifies itself. I hope there’s some way to step back from the complication and describe the situation in a way that makes it somehow more comprehensible. For example, why are there “deep recurrent forms of militant prophetic leadership”? Can we anticipate any long term changes in this? Do these directly empower psychopaths? Etc.