Do social media help make international intervention less likely?

The question may seem a bit counter-intuitive at first. The common, if not yet quite conventional, wisdom is that, the more social media buzz there is around an issue, the more people get engaged in it, and the more popular pressure can be brought to bear on decision makers to take action.

Indeed, that probably works with many topics, including national and international crises. If there’s been a flood or an earthquake, for example, social media can help get the word out, transmitting messages in all formats -- text, audio, stills, video -- through those networks of personal trust that make tools like Facebook and Twitter so effective.

If an aid organisation plays it right, it can no doubt link up with the inevitable outpouring of international sympathy via social media and bring in new individual donations to apply to its work helping the victims. Perhaps it can even corral public pressure and direct it toward governments to get them to announce fresh aid packages in response. That seems reasonably straightforward.

In a conflict, however, things are very different.

Lessons from a Decade of Conflict

Looking back at the last ten years, it is tempting to wonder if the world has not learned anything at all about conflict and conflict resolution in that time.

Afghanistan may have been a war of necessity after 9/11, but the international community continues to under-value the need for functioning government institutions to deliver services and justice free from corruption, and consequently the insurgency is now stronger than ever. Pakistan, where millions of people have been displaced by militancy and counter-terrorism activities, enjoys no more stability than ten years ago. Iraq, a thoroughly avoidable war justified through a political abuse of the memory of 9/11, took the lives of over 100,000 Iraqi civilians and more than 4,400 US military, far more Americans than were killed on that fateful day in September 2001.

In monetary terms, these wars alone have cost trillions of US dollars and played no small part in the crippling government debt crisis in America today.

Equally worryingly, universal values took a serious hit over the past decade. We witnessed extrajudicial renditions and imprisonment at the hands of Western governments supposedly dedicated to universal human rights. Even worse, torture became an issue of public debate rather than a moral red line.

Friends, Followers and Policy Makers

Social Media and High-Level Advocacy in International Affairs

Facebook and Twitter are impacting even the last bastion of the traditional power establishment, the world of international affairs and diplomacy. This is not simply the wishful thinking of some new media guru a few years ahead of the curve. I'm not dreaming about the future; I'm looking at real numbers today. And no, I don't mean the counts of those who have signed up to ambassador X or Y's stream of fairly dull Tweets. "Followers" is vanity, web stats are sanity.

The specific example I'll use to prove my case comes from the International Crisis Group's recent work on Libya, but really I could use just about anything current, as we've had identical lessons from other cases, ever more so as time goes on. The following represents a trend we've seen building over the last two years.

Lessons from Kosovo

This is a piece I wrote from Pristina for TIME magazine. It ran on 12 November 2001. I was reminded of it in early April 2011, when the editor of an American magazine asked me if they could reprint it as part of an examination of international intervention over the past decades in light of current events in Libya.

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Two-and-a-half years after NATO bombers attacked Yugoslavia to force a resolution to the Kosovo conflict, the breakaway region is holding its first general elections on 17 November. The election will lead to a 120-seat assembly and a president, institutions that will hold little power but have great symbolic significance.

Most Kosovars feel they know the outcome of those elections already. Ibrahim Rugova's Democratic League of Kosovo (LDK) is likely to win a majority just as it did in local elections last year, and Rugova will likely be Kosovo's first president. The campaign has mostly been straightforward and without incident, and this lack of excitement is generally seen as a victory for the international community. Being in Kosovo as U.S.-led bombing continues in Afghanistan, I cannot help but think back to 1999 when the same bombers were pelting this country. Like many people here, I find myself wondering what lessons Kosovo holds for the international community and Afghanistan today.