Facebook Groups, Spin & The NGO Sector

One of the benefits of the relatively new approach of Facebook to its Groups is that they can be used for quite finely tuned and flexible qualitative shared intelligence gathering.

Facebook Groups

You can set a Group at secret, closed or open levels of engagement, gather in like minds or 'sources' and share information from the rest of the internet that would otherwise take a great deal of time to put together on your own.

The point of it all is 'sharing' but the Group's Founder(s) must be prepared to put up more material than others and manage the Group - allowing them to die if they are not doing their job, moderating lightly to keep things on track or keep out 'trolls' and perhaps letting them go to float free in the market.

The Group tool is qualitative not quantitative, focused not broad, and biased towards its own members (which has to be taken into account as group-think develops). It is just that - a tool. Groups come and they go with their practical value to their Members.

It is not a replacement for a 'newswire' approach to information (Google News is better at that) nor for in-depth and focused research or investigation but it is a useful tool nevertheless - if only to counter the general group-think of the mainstream media or political process.

The Value of Groups

Currently (meaning the last three months), such Groups have given us exceptional insights into the recent riots in the UK, the Occupy Movement in the US, the diffuse nature of the radical right and the perhaps insidious rise of faith-based politics within the West.

They have supplied insights into odd corners of international affairs, the tensions between libertarianism and the increasing cultural authoritarianism of what likes to be called the Left and the theories and movements surrounding up-coming trends like trans-humanism and the rediscovery of mythic narrative.

Nor do we own these insights - all Members of a particular Group share in the benefits, disproportionately in the case of the free riders who just watch and read for their own benefit. Anyone can draw their own conclusions from the flow of data.

Understandably enough, the Groups are particularly useful on mediating between street experts on privacy, hacking and the free internet and less technically advanced users. The best users, of course, do not speak at other Members but with them and you may have to put up with provocative tub-thumping.

Some Trends

Three trends stand out - the flow of 'institute of the bleeding obvious' research from universities trying to justify their funding, the effect of social media in countering rather than endorsing propaganda from special interest NGOs and campaigns and the ability to cut out official discourse as 'distrusted'.

It is this last that has most commentators excited but we suspect they are exaggerating the effect. In fact, conspiracy theory is usually alluded to humorously. What is shared critically are examples of 'spin' and half-truths' and a new realism about the 'interest' that dictates a news release or statement.

It is not that authority is seen now as actively lying so much as that it is clearly far less competent than it has claimed to be and is often trying to buy time or cover up the inconsistencies and internal contradictions in its own behaviour. It is this latter effect that social media is wryly exposing.

'Good' and 'Bad' Authority

But what is more interesting is that no authority is now immune from analysis. The world is no longer being divided up so clearly into bad and good authority by which progressive authoritarians, NGOs and academics are somehow more virtuous than states, the military and business.

Things have become vastly more complex as it becomes clearer that progressive campaigns, NGOS and the universities are also using spin and manipulation to try to win over our minds and so our time and money. And that these 'good' organisations tergiversate and make excessive claims too.

One case we have taken an interest in is the quickening and intelligent critique of the celebrity-driven sex trafficking campaign by Laura Agustin, an academic with a much deeper and more humane analysis of what is going on under globalisation than many in the 'rescue industry'.

Another case has been the conflict between NGOs over the aid given to Ethiopia with 'political' and 'rights' NGOs spinning like mad while aid-based humanitarian NGOs struggle (it would seem, successfully) to protect their charges. The blogger Daniel Berhane is a good source on this story.

The New Complexity

The social media and the blogosphere now enable the received ideas of alleged progressives (often in odd alliance with moralising conservatives) to be challenged from the ground up instead of having the wider population simply accept passive receipt of simple 'broadcast messages'.

The Ethiopian case is particularly interesting because one suspects that the 'outraged' progressives and the BBC were quite surprised that the establishment did not cave in to their 'evidence' but questioned it and clearly assisted in that questioning being made public.

However, this message that truth and analytical argument may be returning after the era of spin and manipulation may be premature because it depends on a greater struggle for control of technology analogous to that over the free print press and censorship over the last 500 years.

The truth is (and we do not take sides on the Ethiopian case) that the critique of Ethiopia got the broadcast coverage and the critique of the critique was only read amongst the knowledgeable but this imbalance between news 'grazing' and the actual conversion of news into power may be changing.

The Primer (Again!) on Spin

'Spin' arises from centralised media that broadcast information through intermediaries. The journalists who control information are subject to severe time and resource constraints and so are susceptible to special interest manipulation through dossiers. This is no more than Nick Davies' 'churnalism'.

Politicians (Ed Miliband's sound bite performances are now merely embarrassing), business (with more natural ease), NGOs and universities are forced into this model of simplification of language and narrative. This has dominated politics and culture for the last two decades.

But the combination of the blogosphere and of specialist online feature journalism with the sharing function of Facebook and other tools (Linked-In, Twitter and Google+) means that the 'official version' delivered through the mainstream media can be challenged and used to mobilise action.

This can lead to a reversal of the classic position of the mainstream media. They are now just 'them' (alongside the state and business), whereas once they were, literally, intermediary between the forces of order and the forces of change, brokers between the State and the people.

The Occupy Movement

For example, it became clear that one of the early drivers of the Occupy Movement was outrage at the failure to report events by the media. It was assumed that this was deliberate (when it was probably simply disinterest in small protests as poor copy) and class-based, media as tool of bankers.

One trigger for that outrage was a scan of the New York Times showing an anti-protester change timed (allegedly) to a call from a spin doctor.

Similarly, the 'investment' of sponsorship by JP Morgan in the NYPD (coincidental or not) was exposed by bloggers not the mainstream media. Yes, as one blogger suggests, the funding could be innocent and just crassly timed, but it should have been discussed at a 'higher media level' as relevant news.

The point is that the mainstream media allowed this story to be appropriated by the margins and conspiracy theorists. But let us close with an example of a communication from one of our 'Institutes of the Bleeding Obvious', one that pinpoints the root of the problem in the attitudes of authority.

What Exactly Do Charities Do?

Back in June, the UK Charity Commission published research it had commissioned from Sheffield Hallam University that said that charities were not spelling out how they benefit the public.

Trustees could, it would seem, rabbit on about aims and targets but not about practical benefits and yet that is what most people who give to charity really want to hear. Instead (our opinion, not Sheffield Hallam's), they get a lot of passive-aggressive normative language and chuggers down the Strand.

Here is Plan UK Director of Communications. Leigh Daynes, in the July 8th Edition of PR Week: "Often charities bamboozle the public with jargon and faux management speak when they're sitting on a gold mine of human interest stories." The PR industry always wants case studies.

In fact, I worry about this statement because it implies that the alternative is invasions of client privacy and 'Little Nell' stories to tug at our hearts. This is not what we need. We need the provision of clear data about something that might embarrass some NGOs - actual delivery and efficient administration.

And this brings us back to the social media which are in a constant state of flux. NGOs and the media itself are no longer going to be taken at their face value. No longer is the assumption that righteous 'good' people cannot be critiqued. No one is now not subject to analysis from their peers.

Africa in 2010

We are not African specialists. If we want information about political risk South of the Sahara or in the Horn of Africa, we will turn to one of our clients, Pasco Risk Management, based in South Africa, or perhaps to a political contact or two of our own here in London or in East or West Africa.

But what we do understand is how the West has viewed and is viewing its position in Africa and the effect that recent economic problems in both the US (where instability persists) and Europe (which is deeply troubled) are having on the public acceptability of its forward engagement on the Continent.

There is a push and there is a pull in this. Both push and pull are driven by economic considerations that are beginning to overwhelm the 'idealism' that often gave cover to 'realpolitik' in the wake of the internal liberation of South Africa and derived from rage at examples of genocide and famine elsewhere.

The issues are complex and this is a note and not a paper. You could do worse than read Pasco's own on-the-ground assessments of the situation from an African perspective.

We have two sets of comment to make - first, about the very limited weight that progressive values now have for a Western policy that is definitely on the defensive because of resource constraints and, second, the limited ability of the West to effect its aims through its pivotal states strategy.

Pressures on the Humanitarian Impulse

Progressive and humanitarian drivers for Western intervention should not be regarded overly cynically. They were based on an ideological commitment within New Labour and this derived from the personal position of individuals whose political teeth had been cut on the anti-apartheid movement.

This British perspective would not have mattered in itself except that this progressivism 'worked' well with other drivers - Southern Baptist solidarity with Africa in Black America and a more general liberal determination in Europe that a colonial mentality must be replaced with a humanitarian one.

The high point of this general attitude was represented by liberals like Blair and Kouchner in France and to a lesser extent by Fischer in Germany and the Clinton administration. Adaptation to the opportunity presented for intervention by the Al-Qaeda strike on America was a natural one.

Unfortunately, after the initial success in Sierra Leone, liberal interventionism has undoubtedly been an expensive failure in the Middle East and West Asia while African states have increasingly resented the neo-colonial implications of what is essentially a centre-left imposition of values from the North Atlantic.

It is probable, though, that the policy could have struggled on so long as the electorates of the West were sentimentally directed to giving aid and assistance to their 'little brown brothers' - but that all changed with the near collapse of the complex economic system that underpinned Western largesse.

Three Realities

Three factors have now pushed their way to the head of the queue for Western policymakers: migration; growing disillusionment with the effects on the ground of intervention and of NGO engagement; and simple lack of hard cash and credit to disburse.

In each of these cases, the economic crisis in the West has played its role, taking the moral high ground away from the liberal progressives and returning it to those who question why scarce resources should be redirected to regimes that are now perceived to be capable of looking after themselves.

Migration is the most interesting because, although threats to the system from the nationalist Right have not emerged as serious electoral challenges except in particular conditions, the racist and nationalist underground is undoubtedly growing in strength and self-confidence.

Most migration and most terrorism is actually internally generated from within the West but, just as frightened Americans fear the flow of impoverished Mexicans from the South, so Europeans are unnerved by the flow of Africans into their cities.

The original progressive theory about this was that investment by Europe in Africa would create opportunities for Africans and the migrants would no longer need to flow North. To this was added the theory that Africans merely joined Asians, Arabs and Jews as the latest positive contributors to culture.

This was optimistic because, for many Africans, the poorest conditions in a European city were always going to be potentially more secure than conditions at home and the migrants were often 'post-modern': deracinated individuals rather than entrepreneurial pioneers for village communities.

The paradox of tighter border controls is that the criminal and a-social or desperate and trafficked elements are more likely to get through than families on the move and there has been a determined attempt by liberals to avoid an analysis of this lest it come up with 'racist' results.

But a great deal of the responsibility for migration into Europe lies with the greed and rapacity of Europeans themselves and Africans, with access to the internet as much as anyone else, have been educating themselves about radical interpretations of their own history.

Notoriously, Spanish industrialised fishing fleets have been raping the traditional fishing grounds of West Africa while the scale of oil pollution in some areas of the Nigerian Delta (greater than in the Gulf of Louisiana as we write) has been having similar effects on populations there for half a decade.

The Effects of the Crunch

There was always a faction of the liberal intelligentsiya that was relaxed about migration, seeing it as creating constant economic growth under globalisation. Another faction was ideologically perfectly happy to see Africans drive down Western wage rates as a form of global redistributionism.

The credit crunch of 2008 has pulled the rug out from both of these very influential factions (trickle down and redistributionist both) while the consequences of the crisis have affected the West and Africa equally in their relations with each other.

Inward migration from Africa was now a potential political threat (especially when overlaid with cultural and identity fears). The European electorate was not going to tolerate increases in expenditure overseas, to deal with the effects of recession in Africa, at a time of major public sector job losses.

Interestingly, and to widespread approval, Prime Minister Cameron in the UK has ring-fenced international development funds alongside health and education (helping to force even more draconian cuts elsewhere) but very much on the basis of more effective targeting and accountability.

What he was doing, as a 'soft' conservative himself, was taking aid off the political agenda for cuts until it needed to go back on again but also removing international development from its Blairite position as an integrated part of foreign policy and defence.

The days of doling out cash for political or strategic purposes are now over for the British and its humanitarian focus has been detached from grand policy in order to be treated as a moral imperative in its own right. If things get really bad in the UK, it will be cut because it will now be easier to cut.

Ressentiment

Quite separate from all this, there has been a growing distrust of NGOs and Governments as suppliers of aid. This is not coming from within the West (where critics have easily been pigeon-holed as right-wing miserabilists) but is the leaching back into the developed world of emerging world resentment.

Irritation with aid being used to patronise Africans alongside stories of waste, failure and of the 'fat cats' who appear as salaried do-gooders (from the perspective of some observers) merges with concerns about the tendency to use NGOs as soft power fodder in Iraq, Afghanistan and Somalia.

The criticisms may not be wholly fair (but nor are they wholly unfair either) yet the suspicion grows that aid is a job creation scheme for otherwise unemployable Western graduates and for scions of the traditional middle class. Many Africans see this as District Commissioners by the back door.

Western policy towards Africa at this level is thus a confused mess, reminiscent of the patronising involvement of young EU officials as inefficient satraps in Eastern Europe as the communist bloc fell apart. Disillusionment spreads, then as now, back from field workers into the heartland.

Of course, the issues are not cut and dried. Despite the values agenda, the US in particular, including private sector philanthropists, have all undertaken major programmes affecting healthcare and life chances (especially for women) in a highly positive way.

But the impression remains for many in the West that, just as they are fearing for their jobs and homes, substantial resources should not be directed to supporting the middle classes of other countries when it is quite clear the help is not always welcomed.

However, it is important to note that there is no movement to end aid but only a growing indifference to claims of the need for aid and intervention that makes it much more difficult for political interests to direct public funds towards foreign policy or security ends.

Strains

So, if we see a drift of public interest (World Cup notwithstanding) away from Africa and African affairs towards a stance of relative unconcern (there is no animus in this towards Africa at all), economic pressures also limit what the West can do in terms of hard power.

In one sense, the Western public has grown up and the shifts show maturity and generational shift. Younger politicians do not have anti-apartheid activism and resentment of imperialism to worry about and can escape guilt as Middle Europeans are now escaping from Holocaust guilt.

African music is now established in the world music repertoire, African writers sit comfortably alongside Latin American magical realists on the shelves, Ghana was supported by many white British in the World Cup and racism is psychologically inconceivable as a concept to middle class kids under 30.

But, self-evidently there are less resources to play with - in Europe, where the engine of European growth, Germany, has found itself bank of last resort to economically maladjusted smaller partners in the European Union, and in the UK which is running not to face its own crisis in the next year.

In the US, Obama will not be thanked if he spends a great deal on Africa rather than on the Gulf Coast, now hit by two successive disasters in Katrina and the BP oil spill, while US unemployment remains high and may even be rising again.

Finally, the costs of Iraq and Afghanistan are just not going to go away. Afghanistan is a true disaster, involving payments not only on military campaigns but to a corrupt and corrupting puppet regime and major subventions to Pakistan simply to keep its military on side and its economy from collapsing.

Pivotal States

US strategy in Africa (as pointed out by Pasco) was based on containing insurgency, controlling energy supplies (and we add the free access to mineral reserves vital for strategic purposes) and countering Chinese and Indian influence that might remove the continent from the Western to the Eastern sphere.

The methodology for control was based on 'pivotal states' theory - i.e. supporting strong stable states in each major sub-zone and encouraging them to go out and police the surrounding areas, presumably at their own expense but with Western aid and in alignment with Western values.

Placing the unusual Uganda/Rwanda complex to one side, the original postulated key states were Nigeria, Ethiopia and South Africa and all were expected, under Western guidance, to adopt liberal anti-corruption regimes and to manage their sub-region - later in an African Union context.

All three have been disappointments. The surrounding countries have gone their own way willy-nilly as either failed states or as independent countries following their own paths - they will go with the highest bidder, increasingly China. And, of course, Congo remains a great yawning gap in the system.

Nigeria has remained such an anxiety in terms of its long term stability that the US has now switched its attention to Ghana. At one point, before its recent troubles, Gazprom looked as if it would be taking a strategic position for Russia with the help of Libya and Italy by capturing control of Nigerian gas.

Ethiopia is the strongest state (perhaps) but at the cost of any programme of liberalisation, despite constant Western pressure, wheedling and largely idle threats.

However its intervention in Somalia was abortive - the African Union contingent sit in Mogadishu like rabbits in the streaming headlights of the insurgents.

South Africa seems to have been treated by Western liberals as if it owed them something for their support against apartheid. It didn't and it doesn't.

The peaceful transition to democracy was a remarkable achievement but its very tranquillity and compromise meant that serious issues of economic inequity have not been handled. Too many powerful interests had needed to be mollified. Now, as Pasco reports, the ANC is stirring again.

Capital accumulation by the new black elite was meant to result in trickle-down but the global credit crisis has put paid to that. An expectation of the West that South Africa would put scarce resources into a neo-colonial liberal intervention into Zimbabwe was thus disappointed and quite rightly so.

The Meaning of the US Presence

Africom, meanwhile, is now basically an anti-insurgency operation operating from enclaves which it controls because deals have been struck - Djibouti is effectively a grant from the rump of the old French Empire. It does dirty deeds in a war between the US and fanatics that passes most Africans by.

The US is now engaged in a process of constant and often very expensive negotiation that often comes down to little more than the containment of sworn enemies and the maintenance of the sea lanes that take oil and gas from the Gulf and West Africa to Western refineries and holding installations.

The lesson of all this is that there is no 'Africa' except in the imperial imagination of Westerners brought up on the carve-up at the Berlin Conference. There are many Africas - sovereign states with sovereign interests who still need to stabilise themselves before they start stabilising their neighbours.

A nightmare for the West might be a serious political collapse in a key state or a massive humanitarian crisis in a small state that the Chinese relieve faster and more efficiently than it can. The US and UK scuttled from dabbling in the recent Ethiopian elections for fear of precipitating such a problem.

This state of affairs - growing African intransigence at Western interference and Western economic retrenchment - will not last forever. Each of the pivotal states remain a potential partner of the West according to the original theory but the real aims of any African country must be a different from 'ours'.

South Africa can look across to Brazil and envy its inclusion alongside India, Russia and China as one of the BRICS. Nigeria and Ethiopia, too, would not want less status in the world than Australia. It might take thirty years but these three countries will want parity not patronage.

[These views are entirely those of TPPR and are not to be construed as those of Pasco Risk. For access to Pasco Risk featured articles now and in the future, go to their website]