Predictive Policing and Race

On facing pages in The Economist's print edition this week: a piece on predictive policing and a piece on Trayvon Martin. The juxtaposition raises questions that are worth exploring. Will predictive policing help keep future Trayvons, Oscar Grants, and Amadou Diallos alive? Or will it make matters worse?

Predictive policing purports to identify high-risk locations for crime within neighbourhoods, based, in part, on recent crimes there and nearby. It also promises to help identify likely perpetrators (see also this unfortunately gated New Yorker piece on predicting domestic violence in Massachusetts). I want to start with the direct effects on police interactions with the public, before turning to vigilantes like Zimmerman and how predictive policing might change regulation.

The first Economist piece outlines some problems with prediction:

Misuse and overuse of data can amplify biases. It matters, for example, whether software crunches reports of crimes or arrests; if the latter, police activity risks creating a vicious circle. And report-based systems may favour rich neighbourhoods which turn to the police more readily rather than poor ones where crime is rife. Crimes such as burglary and car theft are more consistently reported than drug dealing or gang-related violence.

However, the Economist is still overall optimistic about the effects of predictive policing on race:

But mathematical models might make policing more equitable by curbing prejudice. A suspicious individual’s presence in a “high-crime area” is among the criteria American police may use to determine whether a search is acceptable: a more rigorous definition of those locations will stop that justification being abused. Detailed analysis of a convict’s personal history may be a fairer reason to refuse parole than similarity to a stereotype.

In sum, prediction will allow the cops to do profiling better, and more fairly. I think this is overly optimistic. When a model identifies a high-risk location, the police show up and look around. But what are they looking for? Many appear to be looking for "suspicious-looking" black male teenagers with "furtive" movements. A mathematically-derived predictive model won't stop them doing so, no more than a hunch or prejudice about a violent neighbourhood.

It might, indeed, make matters worse. We're not just bad at predicting. We are bad at understanding prediction. We don't think enough about margins for error, we distort extreme probabilities badly, and we have very weird patterns of risk acceptance and risk aversion, especially at extremes of probability. What's more, the ex ante likelihood of crime on any given night in any given location is pretty small. So even if Block A is more likely than Block B to experience a robbery, we can't say with much confidence that a robbery will occur at Block A. You could make money betting that robbery is more likely to occur on Block A than Block B, but not by betting, at even odds, that a robbery was going to happen on Block A on a given night. But I don't know that we understand all that well: we may become inclined to believe that because Block A is "risky" in the sense of "more risky than Block B," it is then risky in the sense of "having an absolutely, not relatively, high risk of crime." That would be a non-sequitur, but it's one I think people will commit. Under the illusion of computers and their cachet, police may well become more inclined to shoot first. And what goes for a police goes for a jury.

Ultimately, if a cop thinks a location is high-risk and sees a black kid looking "furtive," whatever the hell that is supposed to mean, I don't think it matters much whether a computer told them the location was high-risk or whether their hunch told them. Whether we have a dead kid or not comes down to the cop's ethics, training, professionalism, and prejudice. How a jury responds depends on their prejudices and those of the legal system. There are massive problems with each.

As for vigilantes: it is probably not encouraging to contemplate Zimmerman having access to predictive crime models. Even absent that scenario, I think I'd ideally want the predictive models that are being used to be able to predict when a vigilante is about to be a Zimmerman. I have no idea how feasible this is. It may not even matter: Zimmerman was told by a police dispatcher that he shouldn't chase Travyon, and he did anyway. A cop on the scene may have helped, or, going by all of the above, may have made everything worse. But it is, in any case, well to remember the Economist's warning about what kinds of crime get plugged in to a predictive model. Is it the break-ins alone--i.e. what supposedly prompted Zimmerman to be driving around that night? Or is it the act of a Zimmerman taking the law into his own hands? And if that isn't defined as a crime, what happens?

This was a coup. But then, so was 2011.

What just happened in Egypt was a coup, by prevailing scholarly definitions. But the thing is, by the definitions offered, so was the endgame in 2011. Here is Zoltan Barany in Journal of Democracy:

The generals concluded that Mubarak’s mix of concessions (agreeing not to seek reelection or have his son succeed him) and repression (the February 2 attacks) had failed, and that rising violence and disorder would only hurt the military’s legitimacy and influence. Thus, on February 10, the Supreme Council of the Armed Forces (SCAF) assumed control of the country and, the next day, persuaded a reluctant Mubarak to resign and head for internal exile.

This sounds rather similar: the armed forces replacing a leader unconstitutionally (say what you will about the constitution in question) after several days of hundreds of thousands of people protesting. I want to throw out a new word for the conjunction of uprising and coup: the "couprising." Let me explain.

Even at the time, some scholars and commentators treated Mubarak's ouster primarily as a revolution but also as a coup. Posts at the Monkey Cage referred to comparisons to 1989, the revolutionary, authoritarian-durability, collective action, and media frames; Erik Voetens also referred to a paper by Marinov and Goemans on the consequences of coups on democracy. He did so again today. The armed forces are, as was recognized at the time and as corresponds well with what we know about nonviolent uprisings, pivotal to revolutionary success: there isn't necessarily too much contradiction.

But looking back now, it's easy to forget that it was a coup. I think it's the case that when people now, in the present, talk about what happened in 2011, they'll remember that the military got involved and was ultimately the agent to oust Mubarak. But they won't mention that the intervention constituted a coup at the time. Here, for instance, is the New York Times editorial today (emphasis added):

Despite his failings, and there were plenty, President Mohamed Morsi was Egypt’s first democratically elected leader, and his overthrow by the military on Wednesday was unquestionably a coup. It would be tragic if Egyptians allowed the 2011 revolution that overthrew the dictator Hosni Mubarak to end with this rejection of democracy....

The military was the force behind Mr. Mubarak, then became the protesters’ protector when Mr. Mubarak was overthrown. Subsequently, the generals became the interim government, only to incur the peoples’ wrath when they proved inept at governing yet clung to power even after Mr. Morsi was elected.  

So, in the first paragraph, the current coup is juxtaposed against the 2011 revolution. Then, in the second, the passive voice allows the editorialist to avoid the question of who it was who, in the end, overthrew Mubarak. The military "subsequently...became the interim government", but this is a little misleading: subsequently suggests a time lag between Mubarak's ouster and the military becoming the government--a lag that did not take place.

There are several possible reasons why the two events are viewed rather differently from our vantage point--why 2013 is a coup, but we don't remember as easily that 2011 was too. I want to consider two related ones.

The first is that "revolution" was an available frame in 2011, but not so much in 2013. And this is, to a large extent, fine: just a sensible way of dealing with different events. Treating the events of 2011 as a revolution captured the major reason why they mattered: the ousting of a dictator of thirty years and the end of a seemingly invulnerable regime in favour of a major shakeup in political rules. To zero in on the coup instead would be, to some extent, to miss the forest for the trees. In contrast, on July 2nd, 2013, Egypt was probably a hybrid, "competitive-authoritarian" regime trapped in that difficult "grey zone"; after July 3rd, 2013, it is probably just the same, with someone different at the helm.

So, it is entirely possible that the "revolutionary" frame has pushed the "coup" frame out in the memory of many thinking back to 2011. If--as seems rather unlikely--the coup this year manages to install a stable democracy, we might come to treat it similarly.

A second reason is correspondence to normative positions. Morsi was elected, Mubarak was not, and so Morsi's ouster makes it feel more appropriate to use a term with more pejorative connotations, like coup, over one with more positive connotations like revolution. But this corresponds well, also, to the resistance among many Egyptian liberals to calling what happened a coup. Coup seems to lend Morsi an air of legitimacy (to use Morsi's word) that he should not have had, given his "Calvinball" approach to government--making up rules as he went along to further his own control of the situation.

On this analysis, whether you call what happened a coup has a lot to do with whether you support it or not. And there are, to be sure, good reasons why liberals in Egypt and elsewhere would be against it: like it or not, Morsi was elected, and the massive wave of popular protest in the last few weeks could potentially have been channeled into votes, even in an election without a level playing field. Calling it a coup draws attention to the strong possibility that the Egyptian "deep state" military establishment is reasserting its control.

But the word coup, if that's how the events of the last few weeks are reduced, also draws attention away from the massive protests that Egypt has had, again provoking the resentment of some Egyptian opposition members. A friend of mine, a liberal Egyptian activist, posted to Facebook one of the ubiquitous overhead photos of Tahrir Square, with the caption "Egypt's 'Coup.'" This is with plenty justification. This terrific piece by Trinity College Dublin PhD student Catriona Dowd, based on ACLED data, suggests graphically that protests have, if anything, lasted longer and happened more broadly this year than two years ago.

Dowd asks whether Egypt is experiencing a second revolution. Karl Sharro, getting right at the ambiguity of the officers' motives and intentions, poses a similar possibility in a more cynical vein:

at some point in the future you will realize the army in Egypt intervened twice to prevent a revolution from happening.
— Karl Sharro (@KarlreMarks) July 4, 2013

I think it is very important to note that what happened in Egypt, in 2011 as in 2013, involved both a popular uprising and a coup. One also involved a clear change in the rules of the political game, the other... we don't know yet, but there's a good chance not. We have a tendency to apply one label to complex processes. So 2011 is easy to read as a revolution--covering the public uprisings, the change in rule, and, if we think about it but often not, if we don't think about it, the military intervention. 2013: not a revolution. And now, to fight over one term for 2013--coup or uprising?--would be to miss that it was both.

Perhaps we need a single word for the conjunction of an uprising and a coup, capturing their ambiguity. Off the top of my head, how about "couprising"? Thus Egypt had a couprising in 2011, and in 2013; the first was also part of a revolution, the second, we don't know. Or it may be that settling on a single word is itself a problem.

Returning to "Coup-Proof" with some stuff on coup-proofing

I have finally been poked out of blog-lethargy (blothargy?) by a very interesting discussion about the integrity of some African regimes in the face of rebellion. James Fearon was provoked by M23's seizure of Goma to muse:

Being the president in African countries (and many others besides) can be an incredibly lucrative deal.  Why don’t these rulers, in their own self-interest, take some of that money and use it to build crack units, presidential guards, or strong and loyal army divisions that would protect their hold on power against two dozen putchists, or a hundred or a couple thousand rebels armed with rifles and maybe some mortars?

Fearon's intuition is then the same as mine--that the best explanation is the tradeoff between coup risk and rebellion, as developed in the work of, inter alia, Philip Roessler: 

Keeping the military weak  may lower their coup risk somewhat, but effectively trades coup risk off against higher risks of rural rebellion, insurgency, and foreign depredations such as we are seeing in Eastern Congo. 

But then he notes that Congo is a pretty extreme case in Africa. There are lots of countries that don't seem to have these recurrent problems. It is unclear what, structurally, differentiates these two groups of cases, according to Fearon.

One bit of brush clearing about what we're talking about. Laura Seay, in comments on Fearon, points out that Congo's President Joseph Kabila has in fact done a bit of what Fearon suggests: 

like leaders in most African states, Kabila has a well-trained, equipped, and paid presidential guard that has saved him from at least one coup/assassination attempt as well as a military battle in Kinshasa in 2007.

Goma is pretty far from Kinshasa, as Seay points out, so for the moment Kabila is fine. But clearly he would rather that Rwandan-backed (that seems clear enough) rebels not control a major town in the east. So there is indeed a bit of a puzzle. 

I'm going to try to think through the strategic dimensions of this a little bit, as a first cut. If we want to understand why some countries face these tradeoffs and others don't, I think our best bet lies in predictors of coup risk, and in generating comparative statics through a better characterization of the strategic situation facing leaders.

I think Fearon captures the demand side of things pretty well: presidents do have a pretty compelling interest security services that are (a) effective and (b) loyal, if they can get them. Now, the threat of a successful coup is worse for the leader than the threat of a successful civil or international war, because at least in the latter case, the president probably has a better chance to flee before he/she is captured. Hence the president has to ensure against coups first, rebellions/international wars second. In practice, there are coup-proofing techniques, such as divide & rule, or running multiple internal security agencies all monitoring each other, or relying on loyalists from a communal in-group, that can help reduce the risk of a successful coup, but weaken the army in the face of wars (international and internal). So the president tends to reduce effectiveness for the sake of not having a coup.

I would point out an additional problem attendant on rebellions: they disrupt the calculations of coup-proofing. If, from sources that are in the first instance outside the military, the likelihood that the president is going to get ousted suddenly and dramatically increases, soldiers have much more of an interest in defecting. This was a problem Mobutu Sese Seko faced in 1996-97, or Gaddafi in 2011. The problem in rebellion is then not just effectiveness per se, but also, quite often, loyalty too, and what a president does to keep loyalty against a coup plot might not be enough to keep loyalty against a rebellion.

In any case, the President has a clear preference for a strong & loyal army, and has lots of money, but money doesn't seem to translate into that strong & loyal army. We observe in reality security services are often not effective, and if they are loyal, it's only in the sense that they are not actually launching a coup right this second, not that they are willing to fight particularly hard, or not desert in the face of a rebellion (see Jeffrey Gettleman's masterpiece of sarcasm: In New Tack, Congo’s Army Starts to Fight). There are then three non-mutually-exclusive possible short-run explanations, as I see them:

(1) The problem is on the supply side, not the demand side. That is, the population of individuals willing to supply their military services loyally is too small to meet the demand.

(2) Even if those individuals existed, identifying them is going to be pretty hard. It would probably require credible signals of some kind, but it is unclear what kind of credible signals can be offered.

(3) Direct cash payment is not what is needed to secure loyalty. If I am a colonel, I can hope for a payoff from the next president, not just from this one. In any case promises of cash can attract mercenary careerists over committed professionals. If it is hard to identify one from the other, it sets up something like Jeremy Weinstein's information problem in rebel recruitment, applied to governments. So the money that African presidents have just isn't all that useful in building effective, loyal armies.

So these are some areas where I think we can clarify just what the problems are. I happen to think the identification problem is a seriously tricky and important one. In my paper "Loyalty Strategies and Military Defection in Rebellion," I investigate some of its consequences. I see the reliance on a core group, such as an ethnic minority, as a way of constructing a way of identifying loyalists from the suspect endogenously. A president believes that members of group X are particularly loyal; so promotes members of group X; so members of group X cannot easily defect in the face of a rebellion and hope for good treatment by the other side, being too tightly associated with the old regime. It is a kind of self-fulfilling prophecy. This does, of course, alienate non-Xs, who will be more likely to defect, and as Roessler argues in a terrific paper, it can provoke rebellions in the first place. My paper shows how this played out in Syria in the Muslim Brotherhood uprising that culminated in the Hama Massacre of 1982, in a manner similar to the reliance of the Jordanian monarchy on certain East Bank groups in the Jordanian Civil War in 1970 (and also Saddam Hussein's Iraq), and in contrast to individualized reward-and-punishment approaches like the Shah's in Iran. I think some version of it has been playing out, horribly, in Syria again since 2011.

So, these are some strategic considerations. I think picking them apart will provide further insights into the short run.

But what makes one country more likely than another to have these tradeoffs in the first place? That is, what about Fearon's question about structural preconditions? In general, I suspect that if there are, indeed, structural predictors of the kind of coup-rebellion tradeoff that's at issue here--the specific problem of having a military too weak to deal with these kinds of challenges--that we'll find them in structural predictors of coups, not structural predictors of civil wars, if a coup is indeed the more important threat of the two.

Otherwise, I'm not really sure. Perhaps the mechanisms I suggest above can point us in the right direction on structural conditions. Perhaps the ethnic-identity piece depends on the president having close ties to a communal groups of a particular size (not too big, or else identity gets to be not very predictive of loyalties; not too small, or else it doesn't provide enough manpower), but even then, there are multiple ways to use group identities: Saddam relied on Sunnis specifically from Tikrit, for example. We could maybe look for structural conditions in which there is a large supply of individuals willing to fight loyally to overcome the supply problem. If we game this out, we can come up with some comparative statics. But this all remains a neat puzzle without an obvious answer.

How to handle uncertainty

Tantawi, Morsi, Enan. Image via Reuters.

The big news: Egypt's president, Mohamed Morsi, announced the retirement of Field Marshal Mohamed Hussein Tantawi, the head of the armed forces and minister of defense, as well as Sami Enan, the chief of staff. The BBC is also reporting that Morsi's cancelled a constitutional ruling issuing limits on presidential power. I don't know whether the ruling in question is the one that keeps the military independent of any real external authority, but one presumes so, given that replacing top military personnel would obviously be in violation of that declaration. (UPDATE: yep; h/t Rex Brynen)

This is a big deal: a sudden announcement that could reset civil-military relations in Egypt. If it carries through, then advantage civilian government.

A brief moment of navel-gazing. This puts punditry and commentary in a weird spot. I love trying to understand and explain things in politics, and I have a bad weakness for speculating when I don't have enough information. But in periods like Egypt is going through right now, when political rules are uncertain, I think it may be best to sit back and watch, rather than trying to explain. Morsi could well pull this off. Perhaps this was all negotiated; perhaps not. I find this doubtful, as I don't think SCAF would accept the public image of unilateral action to which they roll over. Or Morsi could spark a coup: according to Jay Ulfelder, Egypt has structural conditions that, at the outset of the year, placed it at 14th globally in coup risk, even if that risk was still, at the time, only about 3%.

Much of the outcome turns on hidden preferences and intentions, rumour and sketchy information: the ingredients of surprise. And there are no very clear rules at the moment; Egypt's politics, right now, are about setting those rules. What happens in the next few days could set Egypt down one path or another, and we can have a more or less educated guess about which path, but I think there's a very strong element of uncertainty, and I think it's important to remember it. For some, next week whatever happens will just seem inevitable. And who knows: at a certain point we might get good enough at explaining and predicting to be able to make strong judgments about what is likely in Egypt in the coming days, and to devise a compelling explanation about why. (I doubt it.) But in the meantime I think it's incumbent on analysts to remember these stochastic moments, and how they humble us.

COIN training: the pupil becomes the master

So, the US accuses Hizbullah [NYT] of training Syrian forces:

An American official, who spoke on condition of anonymity, said Hezbollah was using “its specialized skill set and understanding of insurgencies” to aid Syria. 

Recently, also, it turns out that Blackwater Xe Academi has trained Canadian Forces as far back as 2006 in some counterinsurgency-related skillz--like evasive driving and bodyguarding--without U.S. government permission, and they've had to pay $7.5 million in fines for breaking U.S. law in this and other matters.

I guess they've learned on the job.

The very existence of private military organizations like Hizbullah and Academi--oh, they'll love getting lumped together--means a limit on the state's monopoly of the use of violence. That's well known. But this phenomenon of non-state actors training state armies in warfare perhaps goes a touch beyond that. Usually in training missions we think about government-to-government (say, the current Canadian Forces mission in Afghanistan) or government-to-non-state-actor (say, the U.S., Soviet Union, and South Africa during the Cold War--or, frankly, Hizbullah itself). Government as tutor, given its specialized knowledge; non-state actor as pupil. But this is the reverse.

It's certainly not without precedent. Non-state actors have trained each other, and in some cases have become state armies through victory. For example, several leaders of the Rwandan Patriotic Front--the rebels in the 1990-94 civil war and genocide--honed their skills with the National Resistance Army in Uganda, fighting alongside them during the NRA's 1980-86 civil war. I wouldn't be surprised to see past instances of non-state actors training state armies in some military tasks; mercenary war in early modern Europe comes to mind. But this is definitely a role reversal in terms of conventional wisdom.

This sort of transaction also seems to go a bit beyond training armed forces in what are, in the first instance, civilian skills--like local knowledge, law, civil engineering, or logistics. Instead, it's a "specialized skill set", but a directly military one--not a non-military skill set applied to a military context. We sometimes refer to the state as a "specialist in violence" (see, e.g., here), and this is what I mean.

That Academi violated U.S. law in training CF personnel without permission suggests an effort on the part of the (American) state to control not just violence but knowledge and skill in its use. (It's still a state-centric logic in that the objectionable thing seems to be that the recipient was a foreign military, rather than a citizen; my friend Mike could teach you how to drive evasively if you really wanted to know.)

Now the logical extension of a non-state actor as a specialist in violence is that they can train others in it. In this vein it's worth noting that insurgency and counterinsurgency are pretty low-tech, at least in equipment terms. In fact, using vehicles in COIN is actually a poor idea, as Syria may be finding out. What really counts, it seems, is experience--that is, something Hizbullah and Blackwater have a fair amount of. There would be a steeper curve for an NSA to learn, for example, how to fly fighter planes and be able to teach someone else. (There is an additional political dimension for Hizbullah--if in fact they are supporting Syria, one assumes it is out of a perceived strategic and not strictly financial gain.)

The question is more on the other side, the state recipient of training. Why not train internally--why outsource your training? Can a government buy out an NSA like this or establish its own capacity? When would it try, and when would it keep with a market transaction? Firm theory from economics might have some insights here, but I'm also interested in the politics, especially in light of the apparent use of outsourced training in small wars. In particular, I wonder whether this is just another case of military resistance to being specialists in insurgency and counterinsurgency. If armies become good at COIN over the long term, then they may have to do more of it--which many don't want to. For example, the COIN debates in the U.S. military have very much revolved around training for COIN wars and how much they should bother--consider that setting up counterinsurgency school at Ft. Leavenworth and producing a new field manual on counterinsurgency were two of the key accomplishments of the pro-COIN crowd.

The key question, of course, is whether Academi and Hizbullah use godawful powerpoints.

Drug dealers, stationary bandits, and crack

Still from Cidade de Deus (Fernando Meirelles, 2002)

Here's a neat story on al-Jazeera: some drug dealers in Rio's favelas are starting to stop selling crack. Why? After all there is, as one dealer interviewed says, lots of profit to be had. The dealers themselves, and their surprisingly forthright attorney Flavia Pinheiro Flores, claim an interesting form of civic responsibility: crack is worse in its social effects than other drugs. The police claim this is a PR ploy, to get public authorities to lay off of sales of cocaine and marijuana, in a sort of live-and-let-live deal.

I don't know anything much about drug cartels or Rio, but I find these two interpretations interesting. I suspect that there's an element of truth in both. I wonder whether they are really speaking to the same thing: the logic of stationary bandits.

The great Mancur Olson argued (PDF) that bandits who stay in one place have incentives not to rob people blind. People will stop putting in efforts at making money, and so sources of theft will dry up. They also have good reason to provide public goods, like a degree of security and justice, for similar reasons. (I'd add that the focus is too much on a Laffer curve logic for my liking, and that there's an additional consideration for a bandit to keep in mind: the possibility of flight or defection, with civilians greatly preferring to live under some other sort of order.) In contrast, roving bandits have no such incentives. Olson then uses this "criminal metaphor" to understand the state: even if you think of the state as a predator on the income of the people, it still has some reasons for restraint and for providing something in return. Olson's far from the only scholar to compare the state to a criminal organization, but he spelled out an important part of the link by focusing on revenues.

Applied to the favelas, the logic might be something like this: while crack addicts are for obvious reasons a rather useful clientele, they come at a cost for drug cartels that influence many different facets of life in a district, and especially those who have revenue from multiple different sources. The victims of theft and physical violence have many more reasons to leave, so they're harder to tax. They might even prefer that another, anti-crack cartel take over the district.

So how do we assess the rival claims in light of this possibility? Like I said, Olson's hardly the first to discuss the criminal metaphor; that might be (I'm not sure, but it's a decent bet) Plato, who in Republic (I: 351c-e) used the analogy to suggest that because even a gang of pirates has to practice justice among themselves to be powerful, political society must likewise involve ethics. What is "actually" motivated by self-interest may therefore easily be understood as ethical behaviour. While it isn't a stretch to imagine that there actually can be some stronger ties of community than mere self-interest, it also doesn't do any harm to note how the two correspond.

As for the police, and the possibility of a PR move motivating a live-and-let-live arrangement: again, this can be understood in light of the gang's incentives not to make life absolutely horrible. If life gets bad enough--i.e. violent, chaotic, shot through with theft--more individuals would become inclined to cooperate with the police in a bid to oust cartels from favelas. Given that such efforts generally entail enormous violence and short-run suffering, especially when the cartels are quite powerful to begin with, it's reasonable to suppose that people's decisions about whether to support police action are actually affected by just how bad life is under a cartel.

All of this raises an interesting, really rather weird implication. The logic of the argument turns on the notion that the cartel loses revenue from chaos, much of the latter instigated by crack in ways that other drugs don't. The cartel's lots more likely to lose revenue from violence if its revenue streams are more diverse than just crack--if, for example, it's also involved in other, pricier drugs, or protection and extortion. I wonder if that means something really weird: the more activities a cartel runs, the less socially awful its rule is, generally.

But, to repeat, I don't really know much of anything about the Rio drug trade...

Sudan/South Sudan: Some Sovereignty Speculations

Things seem to be cooling down between Sudan and South Sudan. After pulling its troops out of the disputed, oil-rich region of Abyei, Sudan left 169 police officers. South Sudan claimed they were soldiers in police uniform. Whether this is true or not, apparently those are now leaving too. The two countries have apparently agreed on a "road map" for talks and they're set to begin Monday. This all seems like fairly straightforward Good News given the scary moments in the spring between the two countries.

But at the same time, the conflict between Khartoum and SPLM-North is heating up. Médecins Sans Frontières estimates that there are perhaps 100,000 Sudanese refugees in camps in South Sudan, fleeing the violence. There's a plausible connection between the two. Before South Sudan's independence, it seemed as though there were constant tradeoffs between Sudan's various conflicts. For example, it was after the peace agreements of 2003 that the conflict in Darfur reached its zenith of brutality. Whether because Darfur was left isolated by the logic of minimum winning coalitions (don't give up more than you have to to stay in power) or because peace with the SPLM left Khartoum a free hand to assault its other perceived enemies, it seemed like if it wasn't one war it was another. One wonders whether there's a repeat performance.

If there is, how much "real" difference does South Sudanese independence make?

First, by one way of thinking, inter-state conflicts are a problem for the international community in a way that intra-state conflicts aren't. Since the international community is first a community of sovereign states, the thinking goes, the members of that community have a much clearer interest in ensuring that states don't violate sovereignty by sending troops across borders than they do in ensuring that states don't kill their own citizens. It did take a lot of change for the United Nations Security Council, for example, to start dealing with civil wars. But of course internal wars rarely stay internal for very long: consider the path of death from Uganda through Rwanda to DR Congo, or the West African arc of conflict, or the Afghanistan/Pakistan/Tajikistan cluster. More strongly, many see human security as a vital value alongside or trumping international or national security. So if there is a tradeoff between international war between the Sudans and internal war in Sudan itself, the result is a neat barometer of how relatively important you think international and civil war are.

Second, sovereignty may imply taking on a set of new roles and new interests. Consider Somaliland: there is a case that it's because it has managed not to become independent that it's the most stable part of Somalia. It doesn't have access to rents like aid and international support, so it has to tax its population and thus develop some stability and accountability to its citizens. Now independent, South Sudan needs to get oil flowing again, and has to find a way to cooperate with Khartoum to do so. There are new incentives for it to behave with restraint towards its old enemy, to stay on its side of the border--incentives that were weaker when there was no border to mark the farthest its troops could go. And it is now cut off by this international convention from the SPLM-North. It could certainly outsource its conflict with Khartoum to the latter as it sees fit. But now the interests of the SPLM in Juba now differ from the SPLM-North in important respects. There will sometimes be a strong temptation for South Sudan to sell out its old comrades in arms in order to reach a pricing agreement with Khartoum.

Sovereignty is one of those maddening things: it's arbitrary in some respects, a line on a map. But we act like it is a real thing, and so it is.

(Photo: Associated Press)