Jared Cohen - The New Digital Age

Despite these achievements in communications, Somalia remains an exceptionally insecure country, and insurgents have used the country’s connectivity to further this volatility. Al-Shabaab Islamist insurgents send threatening calls and messages to African Union peacekeepers. Islamist radicals impose bans on mobile banking platforms and sabotage telecommunications infrastructure. Pirates on the Somali coast use local telecom networks to communicate because they worry their satellite phones can be tracked by international warships. In a February 2012 report, the United Nations Security Council added the head of Somalia’s largest telecom, Hormuud, to its list of individuals subject to a travel ban after identifying him as one of al-Shabaab’s chief financiers. (The report also said the man, Ali Ahmed Nur Jim’ale, set up Hormuud’s mobile money-transfer system in order to facilitate anonymous funding to al-Shabaab.)

Certainly, the situation in Somalia is complex. But should the country emerge from its cocoon of instability anytime soon, the new government will surely find willing partners in the national telecom operators.

Ideally, reconstruction efforts strive not only to re-create what existed before, but to improve on the original and develop practices and institutions that reduce the risk of repeated disasters. The majority of postcrisis societies, while diverse in detail, have the same basic needs, roughly analogous to the basic components of state-building. These include administrative control of territory, a monopoly on the means of violence, sound management of public finances, investment in human capital, ensuring the provision of infrastructure and creating citizenship rights and duties. 2Efforts to meet these needs, while heavily dependent on the international community (financially, technically and diplomatically), must be led by the postcrisis state itself. If reconstruction is not seen as homegrown or at least consistent with the political and economic aims of the society, the likelihood of failure increases dramatically.

Technology will help protect property rights, safeguarding virtual records of real assets so that those assets can be quickly reclaimed when stability returns. Investors are not likely to put their money into a country where they feel insecure about the safety and ownership of their property. In post-invasion Iraq, three commissions were created to allow local people and returning exiles to reclaim or receive compensation for property seized during Saddam Hussein’s regime. A parallel authority was set up to resolve disputes. These were important steps in the reconstruction of Iraq, serving as a moderating factor to the exploitation of post-conflict instability and instances of claiming property by force. But despite their good intentions (more than 160,000 claims were received by 2011), these commissions were hampered by certain bureaucratic restrictions that trapped many claims in complicated litigation. In the future, states will learn from this Iraqi model that a more transparent and secure form of protection for property rights can forestall such hassles in the event of conflict. By creating online cadastral systems (i.e., online records systems of land values and boundaries) with mobile-enabled mapping software, governments will make it possible for citizens to visualize all public and private land and even submit minor disputes, like a fence boundary, to a sanctioned online arbiter.

In the future, people won’t just back up their data; they’ll back up their government. In the emerging reconstruction prototype, virtual institutions will exist in parallel with their physical counterparts and serve as a backup in times of need. Instead of having a physical building for a ministry, where all records are kept and services rendered, that information will be digitized and stored in the cloud, and many government functions will be conducted on online platforms. If a tsunami destroys a city, all ministries will continue to function with some competence virtually while they are reconstituted physically.

Virtual institutions will allow new or shell-shocked governments to maintain much of their effectiveness in the delivery of services, as well as keep those governments an integral part of all reconstruction efforts. Virtual institutions won’t be able to do everything that they might otherwise do, but they will be of enormous help. The department of social services, charged with allocating shelter, still needs physical outposts to interact with the population, but with more data it will be able to allocate beds efficiently and keep track of the resources available, among other things. A virtual military can’t instill the rule of law, but it can ensure that the military and police are paid, which will assuage some fears. While governments will still be somewhat wary of entrusting their data to cloud providers, the peace of mind that backed-up institutions ensure will still be enough to justify their creation.

These institutions will offer a safety net for the population too, guaranteeing that records are preserved, employers can pay salaries, and databases of citizens both in the country and in the diaspora will be maintained. All of this will accelerate local ownership of the reconstruction process and help limit the waste and corruption that typically follow a disaster or conflict. Governments may collapse and wars can destroy physical infrastructure, but virtual institutions will survive.

Governments in exile will be capable of functioning far differently from the Polish, Belgian and French governments that were forced to operate from London during World War II. Given how well virtual institutions will function, future governments will operate remotely with a level of efficiency and reach that is unprecedented. This will be a move born of necessity, because of either a natural disaster or something more prolonged, like civil war. Imagine if Mogadishu suddenly became inoperably hostile for the beleaguered Somali government, perhaps because al-Shabaab insurgents captured the city or because clan warfare rendered the environment uninhabitable. With virtual institutions in place, government officials could relocate temporarily, inside or outside the country, and retain some semblance of control over the civil administration of the state. At a minimum, they could maintain a level of credibility with the population by arranging for salaries to be paid, coordinating with aid organizations and foreign donors, and communicating with the public in a transparent manner. Of course, virtual governance done remotely would never be anything but a last resort (surely, the distance would alter how accountable and credible the government would appear to its citizens), and certain preconditions must be in place for such a system to work, including fast, reliable and secure networks; sophisticated platforms; and a fully connected population. No state would be ready to do this today—Somalia least of all—but if countries can begin building such systems now, they will be ready when they are needed.

The potential for remote virtual governance might well affect political exiles. Whereas public figures living outside their homelands once had to rely on back channels to stay connected—the Ayatollah Khomeini famously relied on audiocassette tapes recorded in Paris and smuggled into Iran to spread his message in the 1970s—there are a range of faster, safer and more effective alternatives today. In the future, political exiles will have the ability to form powerful and competent virtual institutions, and thus entire shadow governments, that could interact with and meet the needs of the population at home.

It’s not as far-fetched as it might sound. Thanks to connectivity, exiles will be far less estranged from the population than their predecessors. Acutely attuned to the trends and moods at home, they’ll be able to expand their reach and influence among the population with targeted messaging on simple, popular devices and platforms. Exile leaders won’t need to be concentrated in one place to form a party or movement; the differences between them that matter will be ideological, not geographic. And when these exiles have a coherent platform and vision for the country, they’ll be able to transmit their plans to the population at home without ever stepping foot inside the country, quickly, securely and in so many million copies that the official government will be unable to stop the flow.