Somali pirates are now firing on ships hundreds of miles from shore, extending their range of operations deep into the Indian Ocean. Flush with ransom payments from past operations, the pirates are able to buy increasingly sophisticated weapons and ships.
It’s likely that we will see more of this. Al-Qaeda was the first modern NGO to develop a significant war fighting capacity; it probably won’t be the last. Drug cartels in South America and Afghanistan fuel insurgencies from their profits; in Rio de Janeiro drug gangs managed to down a police helicopter last month. In Mexico, levels of violence from drug wars have reached levels found in some war zones.
Unfortunately, we can look forward to a world in which ‘non-governmental organizations’ will increasingly be able to wage war and otherwise do harm.
That’s not historically unprecedented. The huge gap that opened up between the capacity of states and non-state organizations was a feature of modern history — beginning in the West in the late eighteenth century and in the rest of the world in the twentieth century. Before then, groups of bandits, independent-minded local officials, religious movements and sects and other non-state actors often defied weak central governments. Economically, states spent much lower percentages of GDP than they do now. In the West, central banks were often privately owned; large corporations sometimes had revenues that matched the government’s financial revenues.
It’s likely that the balance between states and private actors will change again in the twenty first century. This will cause problems; just ask the victims of Somalian pirates. And the fear that some of these super-empowered NGOs could acquire weapons of mass destruction is a real one.
Younger readers, take note. The world you will inherit is going to be more complicated and in some ways significantly more dangerous than the world you’ve grown up in.
Good luck!