The Bush War to Save the Rhino: Improving Counter-poaching Through Intelligence

The rhino is going extinct due to poaching at a rate which far outstrips current law enforcement or conservation efforts to halt their decline. A critical aspect of counter-poaching failures to date is an inaccurate view of the nature of poaching as a crime. Rather than demand-side efforts, attacking elusive smuggling networks or expensive technical solutions like drones, this article notes how a quasi-military tactical approach of ‘combat tracking’ offers the best way to protect the species. Based on wide ranging interviews and fieldwork across dozens of parks in southern Africa, it demonstrates how the current restricted range of the rhino, and the rarity of skilled poachers, makes a tactical solution the most effective to date.     

Anarchy’s anatomy: Two-tiered security systems and Libya’s civil wars

ABSTRACT

No issue deserves more scrutiny than the mechanisms whereby popular unrest unleashes civil wars. We argue that one institution – two-tiered security systems – is particularly pernicious in terms of the accompanying civil war risk. These systems’ defining characteristic is the juxtaposition of small communally stacked units that protect regimes from internal adversaries with larger regular armed forces that deter external opponents. These systems aggravate civil war risks because stacked security units lack the size to repress widespread dissent, but inhibit rapid regime change through coup d’état. Regular militaries, meanwhile, fracture when ordered to employ force against populations from which they were recruited.