It’s official Talk Like A Pirate day today, a day that seems to have particular appeal for copyfighters like Cory Doctorow (who react to the media industry’s technique of describing media sharing as “piracy” with a hearty “Arrr!”) and new theologians like Father Bobby Henderson (who demonstrates a clear correlation between the shrinking pirate population and global warming in his seminal letter on the Flying Spaghetti Monster.) Clearly, in the blogosphere, pirates are pretty cool.

Here’s thing thing: piracy sucks.

Not media piracy – I’m not particularly interested in that debate, and I dislike the term a great detail, at least when it’s applied to file-sharing individuals and not folks cranking out copyright-violating CDs and DVDs.

I mean real piracy. The guns and knives and folks seizing ships type of piracy. The type of piracy defined by the International Maritime Bureau as “…the act of boarding any vessel with an intent to commit theft or any other crime, and with an intent or capacity to use force in furtherance of that act.”

You know, the sort of piracy that’s keeping 850 tons of rice, designated as food aid for Somali victims of the Indian Ocean tsunami, on the MV Semlow rather than in the hands of people who need it. The ship, enroute from Mombassa to Bossaso, was seized by Somali pirates on June 27th. Its crew (eight Kenyans, a Tanzanian and a Sri Lankan captain) and cargo were being held for $500,000 ransom. After ransom demands were refused, the pirates agreed to leave the ship so long as their allies within Somalia were permitted to supervise the distribution of the stolen rice. The ship has recently docked in Elmaan, north of Mogadishu – it’s unclear whether the crew, the cargo or the ship will be released.

Piracy – real piracy – is experiencing a renaissance, especially in developing world ports. The waters off Nigeria are especially dangerous, as are the Malacca Straits of Indonesia. But the waters off the coasts of Somalia are now so dangerous that the ICC’s Weekly Piracy report carries this alert:

Somalia – East and NE coast
Twenty incidents have been reported since 15.03.05. Heavily armed pirates are now attacking ships further away from the coast. The most recent incident took place 120 nm off the eastern coast. Ships are advised to keep as far away as possible from the Somali coast.

(There’s one possible – and, perhaps even plausible – scenario that brings a smile to my face – the thought of pirates seizing one of the ships Swiss and Italian firms have used to bring barrels of toxic waste to Somali shores, paying local warlords for the right to poison Somali waters. Would the crew just hand over the cargo? “All yours, if you want it…”)

Vast quantities of data on piracy on the International Chamber of Commerce Commercial Crime Services website, including pretty maps of instances of marine piracy in 2004.

It’s almost enough to make me take off my eyepatch and take down the Jolly Rodger. Arrrr!, indeed.

Jay Rosen offers a preview of the chapter he’s writing for our book… which I suspect is, in part, a preview of the book he’s working on. He explains that, historically, much of the literature about journalism focuses on “the sociology of the newsroom”, looking at how news actually gets made by journalists. Something that becomes abundantly clear from these works is that “mainstream journalists work under vastly imperfect conditions” – under tight deadlines, often with little background knowledge of a story, frequently with difficult editorial constraints.

Jay believes that the overwhelming emotion most journalists feel is “the fear of getting it wrong.” As a response to the perpetual fear of being wrong, journalists have stopped taking responsibility for the truth claims of their reports, just that they’ve followed the rituals correctly: “We called you for your reaction on the story. We followed our rules.” These rituals – many of which focus on reporting what a person said without an analysis of whether it’s factually correct – are designed to prove “the political innocence of the press”.

Jay contends that all political journalists work basically the same way. This results in “he said, she said” coverage, and “horserace coverage” of political races. It also leads to an “inside baseball” mentality , which doesn’t claim to tell people what’s true, what’s important or what they care about… but what the inside players are saying and doing.

Jay believes that mainstream journalists have their own ideology. It’s not left or right, but “savvy”. The “savvy ideology” includes the beliefs that surfaces are always misleading, that one needs to dig to find the actual stories, that the public is manipulable, and therefore polling and campaigning are important and worth explaining. Savviness allows journalists to be knowledgable but politically innocent, staying within their rituals of objectivity.

Jay feels that several factors have recently make the constraints on mainstream political journalism untenable. One is the fact that some journalists became pundits, making it clear that they were not, in fact, politically neutral. Another is the fact that political operatives understand the rituals of journalism and manipulate them, releasing bad news on Fridays, for instance – this has made political journalism even less effective in communicating realities, and more a tool of communicating manufactured perceptions.

Jay believes that blogs became such a powerful force in political discourse because because political journalism is so constrained. Journalists can’t evaluate truth claims – bloggers can. Journalists aren’t permitted (or don’t permit themselves) to go beyond the usual suspects – bloggers can and do. Journalists have to represent themselves as free of political bias – bloggers don’t and are transparent about their biases.

Jay believes that by 2000, political journalists were incapable of truth telling. Bloggers could tell the truth, and therefore become powerful. It’s not that journalists don’t know the truth, Jay believes – they simply can’t deal with the implications of speaking that truth.

Another reason Jay thinks political bloggers are powerful is that they serve as a “court of appeals” regarding media attention. If a story doesn’t make it big within 24 hours, it traditionally dies in mainstream media. Blogs can overturn the judgement of the lower court of mainstream media and give new life to a spiked story.

(I like this analogy a great deal, in no small part because it implies that there are other stories that never get a hearing in lower court. We can’t blame bloggers for failing to amplify news from some parts of Africa if those stories are never reported in the first place.)

Daniel Drezner observes that blogs are only one of several responses to the sclerosis of political journalism Jay is describing, including talk radio and opinion journalism. Are blogs unusually successful as compared to these other reactions?

Jay suggests that bloggers are skilled in the new medium of writing on the web. Writing on the web requires writing with hyperlinks, which is a surprisingly difficult art – bloggers are more skilled at this new technique than offline writers, wich implies they’ll be more effective communicators in this new medium.

The question that I’d love Jay to answer, but I don’t think I can ask in this setting: is there an optimistic vision for political journalism that involves truth-telling, in the way that blogs tell the truth? Can journalism survive this revolution, or does the rise of the blog signify the death of political journalism?

Cass Sunstein offered us a preview of his new book, tentatively titled “Mobs, Markets and Blogs”. As with Republic.com, it sounds like he’s asking tough (and eminently worthwhile) questions about whether the cybertools I know and love make us better citizens and better people.

Sunstein opens by quoting the first post from Judge Richard Posner’s blog, which reads, in part:

Blogging is a major new social, political, and economic phenomenon. It is a fresh and striking exemplification of Friedrich Hayek’s thesis that knowledge is widely distributed among people and that the challenge to society is to create mechanisms for pooling that knowledge. The powerful mechanism that was the focus of Hayek’s work, as as of economists generally, is the price system (the market). The newest mechanism is the “blogosphere.”

Sunstein is curious how groups find ways to pool widely distributed knowledge. He suspects that certain models of deliberation are better at destroying knowledge than creating it. He references a study on deliberation, where groups of Americans were invited to deliberate divisive political issues in small groups with likeminded individuals. In almost every case, individuals’ opinions on the issues being debated were more polarized after deliberation than beforehand – liberals ended up more liberal, conservatives more conservative. And differences of opinion within groups of likeminded people were squashed during the deliberative process, leading to more homogenous opinions.

Sunstein observes that shared information has more weight in group settings than unshared information. We like a speaker more when she says something we already know (and agree with), so a group tends to settle on shared information and filter out unshared information. Groups can amplify error, rather than correcting it. And cascading effects mean that, if the first few speakers state an opinion, it can be very difficult for subsequent speakers to disagree with the stated opinion.

These effects make Sunstein suspicious of the effects documented in Surowiecki’s “The Wisdom of Crowds”, where large groups of people are asked for answers to quantitative questions (“How many jellybeans are in this jar?”). While individual answers are usually off-base, the mean of answers is often remarkably close to the reality.

Sunstein analyzes the effects Surowiecki sees in terms of Condorcet’s jury theorem: if each individual in a group has a better than 1 in 2 chance of making an accurate determination, as the size of the group increases, the chance of a consensus decision being correct approaches 100%. Conversely, if each person in a group has less than a 1 in 2 chance of being correct, Sunstein proposes that the chance of a group making the correct decision approaches 0%.

With this in mind, Sunstein believes he has an explanation for why prediction markets – like the Iowa Electronic Market – are so successful. Most people don’t participate in prediction markets unless they have a reasonably good chance of making a good prediction. And bad predictions are punished economically, and quickly squeezed out of the market.

Sunstein wonders whether other group production methods are able to take advantage of the “Posner-Hayek” effect, using market methods to gather disparate data to make intelligent decisions. He sees Wikipedia and the Open Source movement as two examples where large groups can aggregate information, pointing to Eric Raymond’s assertion that “with enough eyeballs all bugs are shallow”.

Blogs, however, aren’t a Hayekian market, Sunstein speculates. They’re more like “an expansive deliberative forum that contains diverse information”. This can lead to amplification of errors, cascades of false information… in other words, all the bad effects one can see in group decisionmaking behavior.

There was some good pushback from the audience (myself included) to the notion that participants in open software projects, Wikipedia and the blogopshere were undifferentiated, equal participants in a deliberative process. I pointed out that most open software projects tend to be highly hierarchical, relying on large groups to report bugs, but a very small number of developers who fix them and make code changes. Daniel Drezner pointed out that there are hierarchies in the blogosphere based on expertise about different topics – in Rathergate, it became clear very quickly that some bloggers had a great deal of esoteric knowledge about typewriters and typesetting – those bloggers had more authority in the discourse than bloggers who didn’t have expertise.

I’ll be very interested to see how this pushback – which Sunstein accepted graciously and gratefully – affects his thinking moving forwards. Sunstein continues to raise some of the most interesting questions about the implications of our tools and I’m very much looking forward to learning more about his take on this subject as it develops.

Henry Farrell and Daniel Drezner have invited a handful of academics who focus on blogs to a meeting in Chicago to present papers that are intended to become chapters in a book titled “The Power and Political Science of Blogs”. Today and tomorrow, a number of the authors are presenting drafts of their papers for group critique. Up today were Eszter Hargittai and Cass Sunstein. (I’ll cover Hargittai’s talk in this post, Sunstein’s in the next.)

This was a particularly well planned grouping, as Hargittai’s research focused on testing a theory put forward by Sunstein in his book, Republic.com. Building on an idea from Nicholas Negroponte – “the Daily Me”, a digital newspaper custom-tailored to a reader’s interests and concerns – Sunstein worries that the Internet enables users to cocoon themselves in information, hearing only viewpoints they want to hear and never encountering dissenting voices. (Sunstein’s book is very much worth reading, but you can get a feel for his arguments in a shorter essay available online, “The Daily We”.)

Hargittai and collaborator Jason Gallo set out to test what they call Sunstein’s “fragmentation hypothesis”. If Sunstein is right, and the ability to select the news sources we interact with allows us to hear only our own views, we’d expect to see top political bloggers linking only to bloggers with similar political persuasions.

So Hargittai and Gallo created a list of 40 top bloggers (as selected from three blogranking engines), 20 from the left, 20 from the right, all well-linked and all focused on US politics. Then they retrieved seven weeks worth of post data from the blogs and analyzed interlinking between the blogs. In seven weeks, the blogs generated 13,329 posts and 2,609 links to the 40 blogs being tracked. (I think that’s a remarkable finding – roughly one in five blogposts, on average, linked to another very highly ranked blog – that starts looking like something of an insular conversation.)

Tracking only links in blogrolls, Hargittai and Gallo turn up some evidence that conservatives are more willing to link across ideological lines than liberals… but that neither side is particularly good about it – less than 10% of blogroll links are across party lines. Looking at links on a week by week basis, the news is a bit more encouraging – only 40% of conservative blogs hadn’t linked to a liberal blog in the set at least once, and the pattern with liberal blogs was fairly similar.

Using a nifty algorithm I hadn’t seen before – Krackhardt and Stern’s EI Index – Hargittai and Gallo score liberals and conservatives on their insularity – their tendency to link inside their network, rather than outside their network. Unsurprisingly, both groups are highly insular, linking to likeminded blogs more often than those from opposing viewpoints. In one week’s worth of data, liberals look more insular than conservatives; in another, conservatives look more insular than liberals.

Lots of what Hargittai and Gallo cover has been covered by Natalie Glance and Lada Adamic in a paper called “Divided they Blog” – I blogged Natalie’s presentation of the paper in Chiba a few months back. But Hargittai and Gallo go an interesting step forward and hand-classify the content of some of the posts in their set. (Given the size of the set, and the work involved, it’s not a surprise that they’ve only been able to classify a small subset.) They classify each post as “Agreement”, “Disagreement”, “Redirect” – i.e., a value-neutral reference to another post, “non-Political” – i.e., a reference to another blogger in a non-political context, and “Straw Man”, a dismissive and unfair attack on another position. (This last category proved problematic for some of the audience today – dismissing someone as a jerk is more common in this category than restating a weakened version of their argument, a true “straw man”.)

You’ll be unsurprised – though possibly disappointed – to discover that most cross-ideological blogging falls into the “straw man” or “dismissive” camp – 41% of conservative to liberal links, 62% of liberal to conservative links. Redirection is pretty frequent within ideologies, substantive agreement is pretty infrequent (right on, David!) and substantive disagreement is almost nonexistent within party groupings – there’s one instance of a liberal blog linking to another liberal blog and disagreeing and no instances within the conservative blogs. (Admittedly, it’s a small sample set – it will be interesting to see if the finding holds in a larger set.)

Hargittai argues that links across ideological boundaries are indications that conversations are taking place and that people are encountering different views in the blogopshere, even if they’re responding to these views by writing about them dismissively. I suspect Sunstein might have been more interested in the lack of disagreement finding, a result that paralells some of the findings on group deliberation he spoke about today.

Jay Rosen pointed out that an interesting dimension to the study might be to look at what media sources conservatives and liberals link to. Do both link equally to the New York Times, or do only liberals link there? Or do conservatives link and dismiss or critique coverage? It strikes me that some of the work I’ve been trying to do on my headliner research, looking to see which headlines from the Times, the BBC and other sources bloggers choose to link to, could be pretty easily adapted to try to answer this question. Hmm, more papers to write.

More about the research Eszter presented today on her blog.

I’m in Chicago for about 36 hours at the invitation of Daniel Drezner and Henry Farrell. They’re a pair of smart academics who wrote one of the more useful articles on blogs to appear thus far, which was featured in Foreign Policy magazine. They’ve convened a small meeting of academics who are studying blogs from the perspective of political science, and they’ve invited a few of us who aren’t explicitly political scientists to join the fun.

I’m so new to the world of academia that I didn’t realize that a talk at an academic conference meant that I was expected to come with a formal paper in hand. (You know, the kind with footnotes, rather than the way I generally write on this blog.) So I’ve been spending the last several days writing up small bits of research I’ve done here and there into a coherent document about bridgeblogs. After a round of criticism at the conference, I’ll post a draft here and ask for your feedback. And I’ll try to post a couple of pieces about experiments I’ve been working through to answer questions about the size and nature of blog communities outside the US.

In the course of writing this paper, I found myself thinking a great deal about blogging communities that explicitly try to reach audiences in other countries. It’s pretty clear to me that many of the middle eastern bloggers I read regularly are self-consciously writing for audiences in North America and Europe, hoping to challenge stereotypes about their nations, the Arab world, and Muslims as a whole. Ahmad Humeid of 60east says as much in an interview we did for Global Voices. My friend Haitham Sabbah builds projects like NoToTerrorism.com to demonstrate that the majority of Arabs are as horrified by terrorism as most Americans are. And Mahmood Al-Yousif, on the “about” page of his blog, Mahmood’s Den, says the following:

Now I try to dispel the image that Muslims and Arabs suffer from – mostly by our own doing I have to say – in the rest of the world. I am no missionary and don’t want to be. I run several internet websites that are geared to do just that, create a better understanding that we’re not all nuts hell-bent on world destruction.

In the spirit of dispelling understandable, but incorrect, images people across the world have of us, I felt compelled to react to a statement recently made by the Governor of my home state, Massachusetts. Governor Mitt Romney, in a speech to the conservative Heritage Foundation, suggested that US authorities consider putting wiretaps in mosques.

As my friend David Weinberger points out, some Americans made need to replace the word “mosque” with “church” to see how absurd and offensive a suggestion this is.

In the spirit of some of the bridgebloggers mentioned above, allow me to state the following very clearly:

- I didn’t vote for this jackass. I voted against him, and I’m sorry I didn’t work harder to prevent him from being elected.
- Many people in our state were surprised that Romney turned out to be as conservative as he’s proven to be. Many more are disappointed that he’s chosen to use our state as a platform to campaign for the presidency, taking stances strongly contrary to stances held by most state residents.
- I do not believe that terrrorists speak for Islam. I do not believe that Islam is a violent faith. I believe that the vast majority of Muslims want to live peacefully with members of all other faiths, much as the vast majority of Christians, Jews, Hindus, Buddhists and others do.
- I do not believe that indiscriminate wiretapping of sacred places makes anyone safer. I believe that any erosion of constitutional freedoms in attempting to prevent terrorist attack is a mistake.
- I’m sorry that this statement will be used to justify further suspicion of American motives, values and goals. Mitt Romney’s not speaking for me.

There’s an understandable tendency to pin some blame on Belgium for the 1994 genocide in Rwanda: Belgium’s policy of indirect rule empowered Tutsis over Hutus, and early European eugenicists made studies of Hutu and Tutsi anatomy, making “scientific” conclusions that Tutsi were superior to Hutu. Belgian authorities formalized ethnic distinctions by issuing identity cards which identified all Rwandans as Hutu, Tutsi or Twa. And when killing began in 1994 – with the death of 10 Belgian peacekeepers who were protecting Rwanda’s prime minister – Belgium withdrew its troops, accelerating the descent into genocidal chaos.

But I believe Rwanda’s “gacaca” genocide tribunals are making a mistake in prosecuting Father Guy Theunis, a Belgian Catholic priest who served in Rwanda from 1970 to 1994. The first European to be charged in Rwanda in conjunction with the genocide, Father Theunis was arrested in Kigali airport while he was in transit to Belgium from the Democratic Republic of Congo.

Father Theunis ran a magazine called “Dialogue”, which republished translated excerpts of articles from a pro-Hutu extremist magazine, “Kangura”. The editor of that magazine, Hassan Ngeze, has already been sentenced to life imprisonment for his role in inciting genocide. (“Kangura” was notorious for publishing articles comparing Tutsi to cockroaches and encouraging Hutu to smash them.) As of Sunday, Theunis has been transferred from the Gacaca courts to Rwanda’s conventional court system, where he could face the death penalty.

Father Theunis asserts that his republication of articles from Kangura was part of his human rights work: “I sometimes wrote articles to press for human rights. I never republished articles from Kangura, but just translated as part of press review”. Human rights organizations, including Human Rights Watch and Reporters Without Borders have come to his defense. RSF notes that Rwanda has classified Theunis as a “category one” genocidaire, accusing him of being one of the “planners, organisers, inciters, supervisors and leaders” of the genocide, which seems unduly harsh, given Theunis’s defense that he was featuring statements from “Kangura” to condemn their hateful content.

RSF’s press release advocating for Theunis’s release strays surprisingly far into the realm of speculation about Rwanda’s motives in arresting Theunis. They note that Theunis had visited Rwanda several times, always with a government issued visa, and speculate that he was trapped this time by a government interested in settling a score. They further note that almost all the witnesses for Theunis’s prosecution are ruling party members, and speculate that Theunis may be being punished for airing views from multiple political perspectives in his magazine, including views critical of Kagame’s political party and army, the RPF.

Theunis isn’t the first European to be charged in the Rwandan genocide – Belgian journalist Georges Ruggiu was sentenced to twelve years in prison by a UN tribunal for inciting genocide through radio broadcasts. But Theunis is the first to be tried in Rwanda, and his trial may be an indication of things to come, as Rwanda’s national prosecutor Emmanuel Rukangira notes that the government is developing cases against several Europeans.

I’m watching Theunis’s case not only because I’m interested in Rwanda’s recovery from the 1994 genocide, a response that’s included not only legal responses, but ongoing military involvement in the Democratic Republic of Congo, destabilizing the entire region. I’m also interested in the question of what responsibility one has in redistributing content.

A few months ago, before we had regional editors at Global Voices, one person had responsibility every day for picking several dozen blogposts from around the world to feature on the site. My friend Zephyr Teachout volunteered to take on the task one day, and described it as “one of the most terrifying experiences of her life.” What she meant, I think, was that it’s extremely difficult to know whether the opinion a blogger expresses is mainstream or extreme without understanding the full context of the political situation in a country. This is one of the reasons we moved towards asking regional editors to choose posts to reblog – they’ve got a much better understanding of politics in Morroco or Mongolia than I do and understand how to contextualize these posts in a way that it’s hard for people outside the region to do.

Obviously we haven’t reblogged any posts where someone has advocated the extermination of other people. But I can understand the need Father Theunis felt to bring to light the extreme views being expressed in magazines like “Kangura”. What’s the responsibility of a site like ours in reporting on extreme views? Is it to give an accurate picture of the views being expressed in a country? Or is the responsibility not to amplify hateful voices?

The thermometer hit 40F (about 4C) the other night, the time of year where smart residents of Western Massachusetts start thinking about how they’re going to heat their homes this year. Most years, I am not a smart resident – I usually wait until there’s snow on the ground until I order my cordwood. But there’s been enough news about the price of heating oil that I started moving wood around a few weeks ago to make room for two new cords.

For those of you who don’t live in cold places, the “cord” may not be natural unit of measurement. A cord of wood is a pile of tightly stacked, split hardwood, measuring four feet by four feet by eight feet – 128 cubic feet, or 3.6 cubic meters. If the wood is “seasoned” – air-dried for several months – a cord of wood will weigh 2 tons (1800kg); wet, it can weight a lot more.

Rachel called our wood guy this evening and arranged to have him start hauling over two cords of seasoned wood. Price per cord? $175. I opened our checkbook and discovered that last year’s cordwood cost $135. In other words, we just saw a 30% increase in the price of cord wood from last year to this one.

I’m not complaining about $175 wood – a quick web search turns up offers for $190 wood not far from me… and over in the eastern part of the state, where they light fires for atmosphere, not warmth, seasoned cordwood sells for a ludicrous steep $300 – $350 a cord. (For that price, I hope they stack it for you.) In other words, my wood guy isn’t screwing me over.

(Update: Tom, who’s selling wood at $300 a cord was good enough to stop in and explain why it’s so expensive in the comments below… doesn’t sound so ludicrous to me anymore.)

Instead, his costs have increased. With diesel fuel at $2.85 a gallon, it costs a pretty penny to haul four tons of wood from his house to mine. It costs more money for him to drive his truck into the forest as well, to run his chainsaw and his hydraulic splitter. In other words, the rising price of oil is responsible, at least in part, for the rise of the price of wood.

A cord of wood provides as much heat as 100 to 150 gallons of fuel oil. At $2.60 a gallon for fuel oil – up at least 60% from last year – my $350 pile of wood looks like $650 worth of oil.

In other words, it’s probably time to order two more cords. Which leads to another, little-discussed benefit of using cordwood to heat: the steroidal biceps I’ll have after stacking 8 tons of wood in my garage.

The Katrina PeopleFinder project is still hard at work. There are a few hundreds sets of data still available for entry on the PeopleFinder wiki, and the PeopleFinder team has now started focusing on resolving shelter databases in a project called ShelterFinder.

I’ve gotten great feedback on my earlier post listing some lessons learned from my brief period of work on PeopleFinder. One of the best comments came from Steven Skoczen, who did a great deal of the heavy lifting to generate assignment pages for Katrina. His post offers additional pearls of wisdom: “Keep an Eye on the Top of the Tree” and “Entropy Takes Breaks Sometimes”. That we were able to cooperate on the project despite never having spoken in person or on the phone might or might not call into question my contentions about the importance of posses.

Also doing yeoman service on assigning data to be entered was Matt Hurst of Blogpulse. Matt’s excellent Data Mining blog features a post about “wrappers”, a piece of software that accesses a web-based data source and gives structured access to otherwise unstructured data. Matt was able to use some wrappers he’d already written to deal with bulletin board data for Blogpulse to rapidly chunk data for assignment. His post suggests that a wrapper strategy might help efforts like ours react more quickly in the future, and wonders whether the problem isn’t going to be wrapping the data, but finding all the relavent databases. Worth a read.

While Dina Mehta and I didn’t get to work together on Katrina Relief, I watched the project she was helping lead – a Skype-based virtual call center based around Katrinahelp.info. Dina writes on SkypeJournal about her experiences helping displaced people in the US gulf coast from her living room in Mumbai – it’s a wonderful reminder of how small the world can be when we choose to let it. The ability to build ad-hoc phonebanks like this in the future is guaranteed to be an important part of Recovery 2.0.

If you take just a cursory glance at the headlines from Africa, it’s easy to get the impression that the continent is torn apart by wars, from Cote d’Ivoire to Darfur. Looking closely at the numbers, as the Uppsala Conflict Data Project does, a different story emerges. While Africa still hosts more major conflicts than any other continent (it shares this unhappy distinction with Asia), the number of these major conflicts is down from 11 in 1998 to 6 in 2004.

(The Uppsala project defines a “major” conflict as one – civil, or cross-border – that cause at least a thousand battlefield deaths over the life of the entire conflict. Some of the conflicts Uppsala lists as continuing have been largely quiet in recent years, though they’ve been bloody in the past.)

And even in the six major conflicts still taking place in 2004 – in Rwanda, Burundi, Uganda, Democratic Republic of Congo, and two in Sudan – there have been major steps towards peace. And while international organizations like the UN can rightly take credit for peacekeeping efforts, much of the actual peacemaking has been the province of visionary Africans who’ve dedicated themselves to bringing conflicts to a close.

When I last saw Abraham McLaughlin in South Africa, he was ebullient about the project he was reporting, a set of profiles of African peacemakers. That series is featured in the Christian Science Monitor this week, and begins with a profile of Kenyan General Lazaro Sumbeiywo. Ordered by former Kenyan President Daniel Arap Moi to make peace in Sudan’s north/south civil war, Sumbeiywo did an astounding job of bringing both sides to the table… and ensuring that input from third parties was constructive rather than destructive. The series features Betty Bigombe’s efforts in Northern Uganda tomorrow, and Petronille Vaweka’s struggles in the Ituri region of the Democratic Republic of Congo on Wednesday.

John Prendergast of the International Crisis Group contends that Sumbeiywo’s strategy for peacemaking might serve as a template for efforts across the continent: a strong, respected African leader backed up by senior envoys from relavent third party nations, plus lots and lots of face time, rather than brief visits from heads of state. Unfortunately, there are still opportunities to test this model, starting with the situation in Darfur.

I’ll be reading Abe’s series with interest this week and would invite other readers to comment about it here, if you’re so inclined, especially my East African readers…

The aftermath of Katrina is – understandably – squeezing coverage of international stories out of many US newspapers. Mubarak’s re-election might have been a good chance for newspapers and bloggers to talk about whether a Potemkin village election is better than no election at all. But it’s easy to understand how the close analysis of FEMA chief Mike Brown’s resume – leading to increased awareness of the national sporting crisis that is horse liposuction – would be more fun to report about than the future of democracy in the Middle East’s largest nation.

(By the way – the White House tells us that the elections – which had no international monitors, no debate between candidates, press reports that Mubarak purchased votes, and an embarrasingly low turnout – were “an important step toward holding fully free and fair competitive multi-party elections”, and that Mubarak should have worked out the kinks in the election process by parliamentary elections in November. In other news, pigs were recently seen flying over an icy patch of hell.)

Which makes it all the more impressive that the New York Times managed to run an insightful, intelligent piece today about Malian laborers in Paris, and the economic importance of remittance income. Taking a close look at the village of Somankindi, in western Mali, the story’s authors observe that money sent home from Somankindian workers in France has paid for wells, a health clinic and concrete-block houses that are much higher quality than in many rural Malian villages. There’s a fund in the village to pay travel expenses for promising young men to travel to France (usually overland, illegally, before crossing the Mediterranean to Marseilles), with the understanding that they’ll join a village association in France and commit to remitting much of their income to support their family and village.

(Tragically, not everyone makes it across the Mediterranean, as the BBC reminds us in a recent article about Eritrean immigrants drowning off the shores of Sicily.)

Recent deadly apartment fires have called attention to the lives of African workes in Paris – dozens of men sharing two-bedroom apartments in dilapidated apartment buildings in forgotten corners of the city. The Parisian city government is threatening to evict immigrants from at least 60 dangerous buildings – these evictions are likely to become deportations, as so many of the immigrants are in the country illegally. Thousands of Parisians marched recently to protest evictions and to lobby the government for better housing.

France’s restrictive immigration policies are part of the reason it ranks poorly in Center for Global Development’s Commitment to Development Index, placing 15th of 21 donor nations – CGD points out that while France is good about accepting students from developing nations, they accept very few unskilled immigrants from developing nations through legal channels.

It’s worth asking why so many Malian immigrants are coming to France despite immigration barriers and poor living conditions. Part has to do with the colonial history of France in West Africa. Until recently, the currency of most francophone West African nations was tied directly to the French franc; extensive French investment in the region means that there’s a natural tendency to look towards France as a land of economic opportunity. (Language plays a role as well, as it’s easier to migrate to a nation where you can speak the dominant language. Malian immigrants would be advised to target semi-francophone Switzerland, which admits a disproprotionate number of unskilled workers from the developing world…)

But the base reason Malians are heading north is that there’s a lack of economic opportunity in Mali. And that’s partially due to cotton subsidies. Mali’s major export is cotton and national income is closely tied to fluctuations in global cotton prices. Mali’s government isn’t wealthy enough to subsidize cotton farmers. The US government is, and does, to the tune of $4 billion dollars a year. Oxfam Mali estimates that Malian farmers lost at least $43 million to US cotton subsidies… an unfortunate counterbalance to the $38 million in development aid the US gave to one of the world’s poorest nations.

Until countries like the US decide that it makes more sense to stop subsidizing 25,000 domestic farmers at the expense of tens of millions of African farmers, it only makes economic sense that the boys of Somankindi will keep making the journey north.