On Monday, the president of Colombia Álvaro Uribe will come face to face with president Barack Obama. The meeting is scheduled at a very sensitive moment for Colombia. Used to considerable familiarity with president Bush, Colombia is probably one of the few countries in the world where the election of the first U.S. African-American president was greeted with skepticism. The leadership of the country has been anxious to approve a free trade agreement currently opposed by the U.S. Congress. Colombians took offense for such resistance.

Domestic concerns urge Uribe to meet with President Obama; blamed for neglecting relationships with democrats, he needs to demonstrate to the country’s leadership that he is in good terms with the Obama administration.

The anxiety many feel in Colombia about Obama is inflated. Beyond the rhetoric of change, the first months of the Obama administration have indicated a pragmatic and prudent approach to international affairs. Such attitude will guide also the relation with Colombia, an important U.S. ally in the region. Nevertheless, president Uribe arrives in Washington when grave scandals question his government. At a time when Washington is designing a new Plan Colombia, many elements may complicate the relation between the two countries: a second reelection of Uribe — which he is strenuously pursuing; illegal wiretaps and surveillance of judges, journalists and political opponents by the Colombian intelligence agency; and the extrajudicial killings, the so-called “false positives,” of hundreds if not thousands of civilians by the army.

The Obama administration, in continuation of the Bush years, vigorously supports the stabilization and reconstruction policy to consolidate former guerrilla dominated areas secured by the Colombian armed forces. The strategy mirrors U.S. efforts in Afghanistan and Iraq. But it is very likely that if there will be a second reelection Congress will deepen its inflexibility, conditioning in significant ways the aid to Colombia. A new reelection sends the message that Colombia has no leadership beyond Uribe and that Colombia’s democracy is after all not in optimal health.

Uribe will need to convey two messages to president Obama: that he renounces to a third term because the conditions subsist for a new president to consolidate Uribe’s security policy; and that the so-called “false positives” will not fall into forgetfulness and impunity. The Obama administration has still not delineated in an accurate manner its policy towards Latin America and Colombia in particular. Apart from a photo opportunity, the meeting between the two presidents can turn into an important political opportunity. But much will depend on the message president Uribe will relay to the White House.

    The war on drugs is a failure. How then to severe the tentacles of the drug cartels? To legalize drugs is the solution put forward by some voices that are getting lauder and lauder. Maybe legalization can change the dynamic of the drug trade for the better, but it will not erase the mafia phenomenon. It will force organized crime to undergo a mutation but not to disappear nor to diminish significantly its power of corruption. Legalization alone does not resolve the root causes of the phenomenon.
    No doubt a dramatic shift in drug policy is needed. “Prohibitionist policies based on eradication, interdiction and criminalization of consumption simply haven’t worked,” wrote candidly in the Wall Street Journal at the end of last month three former presidents, Fernando Henrique Cardoso, Cesar Gaviria and Ernesto Zedillo. Last November the U.S. Government Accountability Office admitted that the goal of the war on drugs “was not fully achieved.” Antonio Maria Costa, head of the UN Office on Drugs and Crime, at the recent summit in Vienna acknowledged the “world drug problem has been contained but not solved” and that “when mafias can buy elections, candidates, political parties - in a word power - the consequences can only be highly destabilizing.”
    The United States spends $1,400 a-second in the war against the drug cartels but with no satisfactory results.  Consider the Colombia case. For a decade the U.S. Congress poured almost $6-billion into “Plan Colombia,” those explicit goal was to eradicate the production and exportation of cocaine. The U.S. aid contributed to the counter-insurgency strategy of the Colombian government, but did not curtail the cocaine business. According to the CIA, after a decrease between 2001 and 2004, the production of pure cocaine was more then 600 tons in 2007.
    Drug cartel violence is not the only perpetuated. Too often state violence was a manifestation of the dark site of the war on drugs. The arbitrariness of power has translated into an increase of human rights abuses, as documented by a report released recently by George Soros’ Open Society Institute. Consider again the Colombian case, where the armed forces and the national intelligence agency face a major scandal because of extrajudicial executions, “false positives,” and close ties to paramilitary leaders who are also drug kingpins. In these cases, by committing systematic abuse the state ends up mimicking the horrors of those it defines as its enemy.
    Before this grim picture, some suggest legalization as the only viable path to victory. The proponents claim legalization would put kingpins out of business, decrease violence, increase the emphasis on treatment of addicts, and would raise taxation by almost $33 billion annually (according to Harvard professor Jeffrey A. Miron).
    What the legalization proponents fail to consider, is that organized crime has proven to bee extremely adaptive. If as a consequence of legalization, cocaine will no longer be a profitable business, the mafias will turn -as it is already happening - to other illegal and lucrative profits. New waves of violence will accompany this process of mutation. Colombia is again a case in point. Over the last years, so-called emergent groups, reminiscent of the demobilized paramilitary, are occupying territories where the central government expects to promote development projects such as industrial oil palm. Aleman, the former top commander of the Elmer Cardenas paramilitary group, revealed to prosecutors that Vicente Castaño (a founder of the Colombian paramilitary and a major drug kingpin who was allegedly killed a few months ago) “has some people who have staked out land for palm in the [Choco] region.” The accumulation of land for African palm cultivation is one reason internal displacement has not decreased in Colombia.
    In regions of Colombia marked by the armed conflict, long-standing and deep inequalities and structures of exclusion, the trade of cocaine has represented a means for survival and an opportunity to ascend rapidly the social latter and influence the political process. Legalization will not in itself address these root causes of the cocaine phenomenon in Colombia. Promoting fair conditions for human security will be decisive in transforming social reality.
    Supporters and critics of drug legalization agree on the need for a shift in focus from repression to prevention and treatment. “The long-term solution is to reduce demand for drugs in the main consumer countries,” wrote the three former Latin American presidents. This has been also a long-standing position of Barack Obama, who as a president already started to implement the campaign promise to “focus more on a public-health approach” to drug abuse. Indicators were the recent appointment of Gil Kerlikowske, the chief of the Seattle Police Department, as the White House drug czar and Vice President Biden’s announcement of a new emphasis on alternative drug courts. These are important steps, but are not sufficient. When it comes to the emergency in Mexico, for instance, the Obama administration needs to stop the flow of US guns to Mexican drug cartel and review the Merida Initiative, which assures US aid to Mexico and Central America; having an exclusive focus on military assistance, the aid needs to support a more comprehensive approach.

At the end of March, Hillary Clinton will be heading to Mexico to address the escalation of drug related violence and the expansion of the drug cartels, which are an increasing threat also to the United States. In preparation for her trip, Clinton should call to mind the visit that in 1999 she paid as first lady to the city of Palermo in Sicily. At the time mayor of the city, Leoluca Orlando had illustrated her how his administration had effectively fought against the mafia by promoting a culture of lawfulness and human rights. A few years ago, in an interview with an Italian newspaper, Hillary Clinton suggested Orlando for the peace nobel prize.
The Secretary of State’s upcoming trip emphasizes the urgency of the matter for the United States. About 90 per cent of all the cocaine consumed in our country transits through Mexico. The drug trade generates for the cartels an estimated 13 to 15 billion dollars earning per year. Some 150 thousand people are directly involved in the narcotics business. There are worrying spill over effects; members of the Mexican cartels are already present in 230 American cities.
Violence is rampant. In 2008, there were more then 6 thousand drug cartel related homicides in Mexico, and in the first months of this year they already exceed more then 1,000. Beside violence, another dangerous feature of narcotrafficking is widespread corruption, a means to assure impunity and territorial control.
What can the Palermo model suggest to the Mexican case? In the living room of his house, Leoluca Orlando showed to Hillary Clinton a reproduction of the traditional two-wheeled Sicilian cart; a metaphor for his strategy. One wheel, he explained to the first lady, is the state, with law enforcement and a working judiciary; jailing mafia bosses, fighting corruption and money laundering. The second wheel is a vibrant civil society. If only one wheel rolls, the cart goes around in circles. For the cart to move forward both wheels need to spin at the same pace.
The key component of Orlando’s model, is the empowerment of civil society. In a society where the mafia had absolutely occupied and corroded the public sphere, the effort of the mayor of Palermo lied in giving back the city to its citizens. He proposed a definition of security, which was not rooted in a zero-tolerance approach, but in the empowerment of civic leaders. This meant improving the general quality of life in the city and convincing ordinary citizens that the Mafia was not an evil they were inevitably obliged to live with. Orlando’s model was not a counterinsurgency strategy, but one that strengthened governance and participatory democracy.
The model proved successful. The homicide rate in Palermo decreased dramatically and Moody assigned a AAA rating to Orlando’s administration. It was not by chance that the United Nations chose Palermo for its 2000 conference on transnational crime. Studying the Palermo case, and with the initial advise of Leoluca Orlando, Roy Godson, president of the National Strategy Information Center, elaborated a policy model to promote in different parts of the world the Culture of Lawfulness approach. Leoluca Orlando, who in the past few years has been traveling extensively to Mexico, has also advised the mayor of Medellín Sergio Fajardo, now a presidential candidate in Colombia. Medellín is another success story, in which civic participation played a decisive role in reducing violence.
If the savvy combination of a working judiciary with an active civil society has proven to be an effective strategy in fighting organized crime and endemic corruption, then the strategy implemented so far by the government of Mexico with the aid of the United States is still insufficient. In light of a weak and often corrupted police, the Mexican government has so far embraced a primarily military approach to the phenomena, sending almost 30,000 troops to patrol urban centers. This strategy is rising serious human rights concerns. The most recent State Department’s Human Rights Report cites an increasing number of arbitrary killings of civilians by the armed forces. This only adds to the horrors committed by the drug cartels.
What the Mexican citizens need are positive encounters with the State. This is the meaning of promoting a Culture of Lawfulness. Fighting impunity, strengthening the judiciary system, while at the same time promoting civic participation should become a priority for the Obama administration in supporting Mexico’s efforts to curb the drug cartels. Providing mainly military aid and better border surveillance (or even its militarization) - that is an exclusive emphasis on repression and law enforcement - will not do it. If this administration is about change, then a more creative and constructive approach to the narcotrafficking problem should be explored and tested. With Palermo in mind.

The second episod of my PodCast Conflict Zone, features an interview with Shlomo Ben Ami about the Arab-Israeli conflict. He was educated at Tel Aviv University and Oxford University from which he received a Ph.D in history. In August 2000, when David Levy resigned as Foreign Minister during talks with Palestinian leaders in the United States, prime minister Ehud Barak deignated Bel-Ami to be the acting Foreign Minister and he was officially appointed to the role in Novemeber 2000. He remained Foreign minister and security minister until March 2001, when, having won elections, Ariel Sharon took over from Barak. Ben-Ami refused to serve in the Sharon government and resigned from the Knesset in August 2002. Shlomo Ben-Ami is currently vice-president of the Toledo Center for Peace.

In my interview, Shlomo Ben-Ami welcomes the appointmet of Senator George Mitchell as a special envoy to the Midle East; enlightens the aspects of intractability of the Arab-Israeli conflict; highligts the challenges faced by recent events in Gaza, and identifies opportunity for ripeness.

Why is Israel applying such an overwhelming use of force against Hamas? What are the consequences of the offensive for a peace process and for stability in the Middle East? Why did Hamas have a wider popular support and what will be the future of this organization? What are the options for President Barack Obama when he will take office on January 20?
Prominent experts respond to these and other questions concerning the crisis in Gaza in my podcast CONFLICT ZONE at Columbia University. The Podcast features:
Robert Malley, Program Director for Middle East and North Africa at the International Crisis Group. He was a former special assistant to President Bill Clinton for Arab-Israeli Affairs;
Gaith Al-Omari, senior research fellow at the New America Foundation. He served in various senior positions within the Palestinian Authority including Foreign Policy Advisor to the Palestinian President. He was a senior advisor to former prime minister Abbas.
Marc Gopin is the director of the Center on Religion, Diplomacy and Conflict Resolution at George Mason University and has been engaged in second track diplomacy in the Middle East for many years.

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Why is Israel using such overwhelming force in Gaza? I am posing this question not with any moral intention. It is futile, in such complex and intractable situations, to chop up reality between who is right and who is wrong, who is good and who is evil. Such dichotomies only widen the gaps, and deepen the conflicts. Rather, I feel the urgency to understand, to ponder, to go beyond immediate causes in order to grasp some of the unconsciousness of cultural practices that produce and sustain an imaginary of war.

Of course there are domestic and international triggers for the Israeli government’s “shock and awe” strategy; being fed up with Hamas’ rockets, upcoming elections in February, so crucial for defense minister Ehud Barak, and this time of transition in the United States waiting for president elect Obama to take office. This sounds all rational, and what about the irrational site? What about self-perception? and about the imaginary? I started looking for an answer in some writers from both Israel and Palestine, believing that literature might offer better insights then current news coverage and analysis. Thus, I got me novels by Ghassani Kanafani, David Grossman and A.B. Yehoshua.

I started reading through some pages of Writing in the Dark, a collection of essays on literature and politics by David Grossman, the Jerusalem based author who lost his son, a soldier, during the 2006 attack of Israel against Hezbollah in Lebanon. Grossman is adamantly and almost disturbingly honest in his words. He says that a state of war is more comfortable then a state of peace. It is a comfortness that sprouts from the normality of violence. What is it like to live without an enemy? “I my self - he writes - have never known a life without an enemy. I do not know what it means to live my life without the constant presence of an existential threat.”  Grossman highlights that there is a sense of impending annihilation in the Jewish people self-definition. There is a perception of fragility when imagining the future :”This is not trivial matter. For most Israelis the possibility of a future cannot be taken for granted.”

The thought of peace, therefore, comes with a significant anxiety:

It will be a huge challenge: to learn to live a life that is not defined by hostility, anxiety, and violence. To foresee a continuum of existence and a constant future. To educate children based on views and beliefs that are not shaped inevitably by the fear of death.

The challenge is not to justify the violence of one or the other side. The challenge is to understand. And I have a sense that these days Israeli’s overwhelming use of force has something to do with the deep running fear of a people to disappear as a state and as a people. And likely, very analogous feelings and fears run among the Palestinians. Fear gives space to violence and war, not to peace. And this is why - and perhaps now all the more vigorously - we must constantly, as Grossman writes “think about the image of this remote peace, and regularly ‘massage’ the way we envision it.”

How can peace emerge? The question characterized many of my meetings in Colombia in the past two weeks. Peace was also the cry of  Juanes in his concerts.  The Colombian rock-star well interprets the longing for peace of his fellow countrymen. Now, from the airport in Bogota, I want to summarize some of the thoughts that wandered in my mind during this time.

It’s time to change - Juanes sang in Medellin before 125,000 fans; to change hate for love. Peace is a matter of orientation. We feel comfortable, at home, when we are orientated and in protracted and so-called intractable conflicts it feels natural to be orientated towards violence and war. Violence makes us feel at home, while the thought of peace can be disorienting and raises anxieties. It is the comfortness of the familiar vs. the unfamiliar. “I cannot imagine Colombia without violence. It would be no longer Colombia,” told me a 19 years old university student a few days ago in Bogota while we were enjoying some good live Cuban salsa. Also this belongs to the familiarity of violence; to talk about the armed conflict while drinking a beer and listening to music. War becomes a way of life, and - as Foucault argued refrasing Clausewitz- politics is the continuation of war waged by other means.

Building peace is thus a matter of reorientation; of reorienting ideas and practices from war to peace. It entails accepting the initial discomfortness and disorientation that the idea of peace might cause. But without the pursue of this riorientation peace will only be another name for domination and control. This is maybe while, as someone told me during these days, a genuine negotiation among armed parties in conflict can occur only if the decision of giving up war and violence has been taken. In other words, as an effect of reorientation.

“Conflict resolution,” as both a field and a necessity, peeps recently through many articles, Op-Eds and reports. Underlying is the ascertainment that the “war on terror” has been an effective sound-bite but a disastrous policy that has made things worst. In certain areas of the world, it radicalized positions and violence.

With regard to the Middle East, for instance, a report sponsored by the Council on Foreign Relations and the Brookings Institute, calls the new U.S. president to use “a new strategic framework,” to inaugurate “a time of diplomatic renewal,” and to prioritize the search for an agreement ending the Arab-Israeli conflict. A week ago, in Washington D.C., former British prime minister Tony Blair hinted that we might soon reach a moment of ripeness in the Arab-Israeli conflict and that in order to reach an agreement “the political process and changing the reality have to march in lockstep.” In other words, the search for a negotiated settlement has to go hand in hand with creating the conditions for security and governance. This is a view in line with a conflict resolution perspective.

In a New York Times Op-Ed, Pankaj Mishra underscored the root causes of the recent horror in India :”The outrage in Mumbai is the latest and clearest sign that the price of India’s uncompromising stance on Kashmir has become too high.” The Op-Ed highlights that “the idea that the road to stability in South Asia goes through Kashmir is as persuasive as the notion that the path to peace in the Middle East goes through Jerusalem.” The author calls for a third party mediation.

The immediate post-September 11 era has marginalized conflict resolution. Those practicing conflict resolution have been described as appeasers, naif, if not terrorist sympathizers. The iron-feast was invoked as the right approach for tough times. Today we realize that the outcomes are disappointing and that the iron-feast method rests on limited wisdom.

The field of conflict resolution, often merely interpreted as mediation, is not necessarily the panacea against all today’s troubles. But one lesson learned in the past few years is that a deeper engagement in all stages of a conflict process by actors with a variety of skills and roles is needed.  As Bernard Mayer puts it, mediation is “just one tool at our disposal for dealing with conflict.” What matters is to engage with the conflict at hand; with its deep-rooted causes, its needs, its perceptions, and its projections. This would be a first important step to move away from a disastrous “war on terror” ideology and policy, and towards a conflict transformation framework that will achieve true security and peace. Maybe the time has come to give conflict resolution a chance.

I was in San Francisco for the past few days, attending the annual meeting of the American Anthropological Association. Many panels (some good, some boring), themes, encounters, exchanges. One theme that stood out in the panels I went to and participated in, was the question of how anthropologists should be engaged with the world surrounding us and in which the human cost of progress is denied and disregarded.
In a panel on the war in Iraq, anthropologists reflected on what we knew about Iraq in 2003, before the invasion, and why is it that anthropologists were not able to make their voice heard, and their knowledge made relevant. Were anthropologists missing in action? Nancy Scheper-Hughes made a compelling intervention, describing the normalization of Berkley University, an icon for free speech and resistance, and called colleagues to civil disobedience. That is, not to be timid, but having the courage of fearless speech - as Foucault would call it. Anthropology has as its mission to speak truth to power.
This was also the core of my presentation, when I intervened as a discussant on a panel in which illustrious colleagues who shaped the field and the anthropological reflection on human rights, presented their reflections. Referring to my own research in Colombia, I spoke about the need for anthropologists to study relationships of power and its effects on those whom writer Eduardo Galeano called the nobodies. Who are today the nobodies? and why are they nobodies? Expenditure, progress and development might be the predominant discourse in a continuum of the modernity’s dream which is deepening its paradoxes and contradictions. But we need the full picture. That is, we need to be aware and to expose the human cost of progress, which comes inevitably with destruction, if we are to explore an alternative paradigm and not to continue observing, as horrified Angelus Novus, the catastrophe that keeps piling in front of his feet.