Center for International and Security Studies at Maryland

Permanent URI for this communityhttp://hdl.handle.net/1903/7565

Browse

Subject: search.filters.subject.governance

Search Results

Now showing 1 - 2 of 2
  • Thumbnail Image
    Item
    The Desirability and Feasibility of Strategic Trade Controls on Emerging Technologies
    (Center for International and Security Studies at Maryland (CISSM), 2023-06-22) Nancy W. Gallagher; Lindsay Rand; Devin Entrikin; Naoko Aoki
    Policy problem: Policymakers must decide whether and how to regulate the development, sale, and use of emerging technologies so the security benefits outweigh the economic, technological, and political costs. They have faced that question before, so lessons can be learned from historical experience. It has never been easy to get agreement about what types of governance mechanisms are most desirable, or to implement those controls effectively enough to achieve the security objectives. Many different approaches have been tried but only some legacy arrangements could be applied to emerging technologies, while others would do more harm than good. Four features make the current iteration of the dual-use problem particularly challenging. (1) Emerging technologies are largely intangible rather than physical. (2) The private sector is now the main engine for innovation, often independent from and resistant to government control. (3) Concerns about dual-use emerging technologies expand beyond their relevance to weapons of mass destruction (WMD) to their much broader utility for conventional warfighting. (4) Political and economic relations among the countries at the forefront of technology innovation are also very complex and uncertain, further complicating efforts to get agreement about what greatest security risks are, and what mix of competition and cooperation offers the most cost-effective way to reduce them. Methodology: This report employed a historical review of efforts to control dangerous dual-use technologies during and after the Cold War to identify key governance approaches and assess their effectiveness. This was followed by a socio-technical evaluation of five key emerging technologies including PNT, quantum computing, computer vision, hypersonics, and quantum sensing. The technical assessment focused on seven considerations that vary widely across different sectors to determine which strategic trade controls would be both feasible and desirable for a specific category or sub-category of emerging technology: technology makeup, fabrication process, stage of development and dispersion, dual-use applications, disruption mechanisms, stakeholder community and power distribution, and scientific promise. Key lessons for policymakers: The findings of the historical and technical survey contain important lessons for policymakers tasked with trying to manage the spread and use of emerging technologies: (1) Policymakers need to decide what the primary objective of strategic trade controls is. (2) The historical analysis shows that, even under relatively favorable geopolitical, economic, and technological conditions, any type of denial-based control effort will be a stopgap solution at best and is likely to have unintended negative consequences. (3) Using cooperative management as the primary governance approach for WMD relevant aspects of nuclear, chemical, and biological technologies has had strengths and weaknesses, too. (4) The socio-technological characteristics of critical emerging technology fields indicate that getting multi-stakeholder agreement on denial-based controls will be harder, implementation will be more challenging, and the outcomes will be less stable than they were in the past
  • Thumbnail Image
    Item
    Microdynamics of Illegitimacy and Complex Urban Violence in Medellin, Colombia
    (2010) Lamb, Robert Dale; Steinbruner, John D; Public Policy; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)
    For most of the past 25 years, Medellin, Colombia, has been an extreme case of complex, urban violence, involving not just drug cartels and state security forces, but also street gangs, urban guerrillas, community militias, paramilitaries, and other nonstate armed actors who have controlled micro-territories in the city's densely populated slums in ever-shifting alliances. Before 2002, Medellin's homicide rate was among the highest in the world, but after the guerrillas and militias were defeated in 2003, a major paramilitary alliance disarmed and a period of peace known as the "Medellin Miracle" began. Policy makers facing complex violence elsewhere were interested in finding out how that had happened so quickly. The research presented here is a case study of violence in Medellin over five periods since 1984 and at two levels of analysis: the city as a whole, and a sector called Caicedo La Sierra. The objectives were to describe and explain the patterns of violence, and determine whether legitimacy played any role, as the literature on social stability suggested it might. Multilevel, multidimensional frameworks for violence and legitimacy were developed to organize data collection and analysis. The study found that most decreases in violence at all levels of analysis were explained by increases in territorial control. Increases in collective (organized) violence resulted from a process of "illegitimation," in which an intolerably unpredictable living environment sparked internal opposition to local rulers and raised the costs of territorial control, increasing their vulnerability to rivals. As this violence weakened social order and the rule of law, interpersonal-communal (unorganized) violence increased. Over time, the "true believers" in armed political and social movements became marginalized or corrupted; most organized violence today is motivated by money. These findings imply that state actors, facing resurgent violence, can keep their tenuous control over the hillside slums (and other "ungoverned" areas) if they can avoid illegitimizing themselves. Their priority, therefore, should be to establish a tolerable, predictable daily living environment for local residents and businesses: other anti-violence programs will fail without strong, permanent, and respectful governance structures.