President Obama’s emphasis on “smart power” diplomacy has thrust the need for international volunteer service into the global spotlight. On June 23, Global Economy and Development at Brookings and Washington University’s Center for Social Development (CSD) will host a forum examining how international volunteer service can address multiple global challenges simultaneously and build international cooperation. The forum will frame international service as an effective tool for increasing international social capital as well as building sustainable cross-cultural bridges.

This event begins with an address by service champion, Ambassador Elizabeth Frawley Bagley, who leads the Department of State’s Global Partnerships Initiative. Bagley is well poised to foster innovative public-private partnerships, an approach she describes as “Ubuntu Diplomacy: where all sectors belong as partners, where we all participate as stakeholders, and where we all succeed together, not incrementally but exponentially.” The need for multilateral approaches to development has been analyzed by Brookings scholars Jane Nelson and Noam Unger, who explore how the U.S. foreign assistance system works in the new market-oriented and locally-driven global development arena.

This spirit of cross-sector collaboration will carry the June 23^rd forum, beginning with a research panel releasing beneficiary outcome data from a Peace Corps survey completed with over 800 host country nationals, including community members, direct beneficiaries, and collaborators. Peace Corps colleagues, Dr. Susan Jenkins and Janet Kerley, will present preliminary findings from this multi-year study measuring the achievement of “helping the people of interested countries in meeting their need for trained men and women” and “promoting a better understanding of Americans on the part of the peoples served”. Aggregate data about respondents’ views of Americans before and after their interaction with the Peace Corps will be discussed.

This work complements the release of new data on the impact of international service on volunteers, which is supported with funding from the Ford Foundation and a joint Brookings-Washington University academic venture capital fund. Washington University’s CSD has studied international service over the last decade. The current research, first in a series from the quasi-experimental study, compares international volunteers’ perceived outcomes to a matched group who did not volunteer internationally: volunteers are more likely to report increased international awareness, international social capital, and international career intentions.

Building on the demonstrated potential of international service, policymakers and sector leaders will then discuss options for enhancing international service, and provide recommendations for bringing international service to the forefront of American foreign policy initiatives. This policy plenary will introduce and discuss the Service World policy platform: a collaborative movement led by the Building Bridges Coalition, National Peace Corps Association and the International Volunteering Initiative at Brookings. This powerhouse of sector leaders aims to scale international service to the levels of domestic volunteer service with increased impact through smart power policy proposals. What Service Nation did to unite Americans around domestic service as a core ideal and problem-solving strategy in American society, Service World hopes to do on a global scale.

Next week in New York City, the Points of Light Institute and the Corporation for National and Community Service will convene to further spotlight the Service World Platform at the 2010 National Conference on Volunteering and Service. This event will bring together more than 5,000 volunteer service leaders and social entrepreneurs from around the world, including local host Mayor Bloomberg. Michelle Nunn, CEO of Points of Light Institute noted in Huffington Post that “demand, idealism and presidential impact are leading American volunteerism to its…most important stage – the movement of service to a central role in our nation’s priorities.”

Nunn’s statement illustrates the momentum and power that make the voluntary sector a unique instrument in the “smart power” toolbox. According to successive polling from Terror Free Tomorrow, American assistance, particularly medical service, is a leading factor in favorable opinions toward the United States. A 2006 survey conducted in Indonesia and Bangladesh showed a 63 percent favorable response among Indonesian respondents to the humanitarian medical mission of “Mercy,” a United States’ Navel Ship, and a 95 percent favorable response among Bangladeshi respondents.

Personifying the diplomatic potential of medical service abroad is Edward O’Neil’s work with OmniMed. In the Mukono District of Uganda, OmniMed has partnered with the U.S. Peace Corps and the Ugandan Ministry of Health as well as local community-based organizations to implement evidence-based health trainings with local village health workers. Dr. O’Neil is now working with Brookings International Volunteering Initiative and Washington University’s CSD on a new wave of rigorous research: a randomized, prospective clinical trial measuring the direct impact of over 400 trained village health workers on the health of tens of thousands of villagers. 

In the words of Peace Corps architect and former U.S. Senator Harris Wofford, the pairing of new data and policy proposals on June 23^rd will support a “quantum leap” in the scale and impact of international service, advancing bipartisan calls to service from President Kennedy to Bush 41, Bush 43, Clinton and Obama.

Event Information

Around the world today, there are more than 15.5 million refugees and over 28.8 million internally displaced persons (IDPs) uprooted by conflict, in addition to some 32.4 million displaced in 2012 from their homes due to natural disasters. These displacement crises are not simply humanitarian concerns, but fundamental development challenges. Forced migration flows are rooted in development failures, and can undermine the pursuit of development goals at local, national and regional levels.

Linking humanitarian responses to displacement with longer-term development support and planning is not a new concern. Beginning in 1999, for example, the “Brookings Process” – under the leadership of Sadako Ogata and James Wolfensohn – sought to bridge humanitarian relief and development assistance in post-conflict situations. But the challenge remains unresolved, and has acquired new urgency as displacement situations are becoming more protracted, and situations such as the Syrian crisis show no signs of resolution.

The Brookings Global Economy and Development Program and the Brookings-LSE Project on Internal Displacement held a roundtable on these issues on May 14, 2013 with Sadako Ogata, former UN High Commissioner for Refugees, former Director of the Japanese International Cooperation Agency, and Distinguished Fellow at the Brookings Institution. Megan Bradley, Fellow with the Brookings-LSE Project on Internal Displacement, facilitated the roundtable, which followed Chatham House rules.

The roundtable addressed several key topics including:

• The relevance of the concept of human security to addressing displacement and development challenges
• Displacement as a development challenge in fragile states
• Protracted displacement
• Contrasts in the approaches and processes adopted by humanitarian and development actors

The event report provides a brief overview of the discussion.

Event Materials

• Brookings IDP Roundtable with Sadako Ogata May 14 2013

Event Information

Despite the attention on the mid-term races, few elections are competitive. Electoral competition, already low at the national level, is in decline in state and primary elections as well. Reformers, who point to gerrymandering and a host of other targets for change, argue that improving competition will produce voters who are more interested in elections, better-informed on issues, and more likely to turn out to the polls.

On October 27, the Brookings Institution—in conjunction with the Cato Institute and The Pew Research Center—presented a discussion and a groundbreaking survey exploring the attitudes and opinions of voters in competitive and noncompetitive congressional districts. The survey, part of Pew's regular polling on voter attitudes, was conducted through the weekend of October 21. A series of questions explored the public's perceptions, knowledge, and opinions about electoral competitiveness.

The discussion also explored a publication that addresses the startling lack of competition in our democratic system. The Marketplace of Democracy: Electoral Competition and American Politics (Brookings, 2006), considers the historical development, legal background, and political aspects of a system that is supposed to be responsive and accountable, yet for many is becoming stagnant, self-perpetuating, and tone-deaf. Michael McDonald, editor and Brookings visiting fellow, moderated a discussion among co-editor John Samples, director of the Center for Representative Government at the Cato Institute, and Andrew Kohut and Scott Keeter from The Pew Research Center, who also discussed the survey.

Transcript

• Transcript (.pdf)

Event Materials

• 20061027
• 20061027ppt

Editors’ Note: The mass-casualty terrorist attacks in Paris and now in Brussels underscore an unsettling truth: Jihadis pose a greater threat to France and Belgium than to the rest of Europe. Research by Will McCants and Chris Meserole reveals that French political culture may play a role. This post originally appeared in Foreign Affairs.

The mass-casualty terrorist attacks in Paris and now in Brussels underscore an unsettling truth: Jihadists pose a greater threat to France and Belgium than to the rest of Europe. The body counts are larger and the disrupted plots are more numerous. The trend might be explained by the nature of the Islamic State (ISIS) networks in Europe or as failures of policing in France and Belgium. Both explanations have merit. However, our research reveals that another factor may be at play: French political culture.

Last fall, we began a project to test empirically the many proposed explanations for Sunni militancy around the globe. The goal was to take common measures of the violence—namely, the number of Sunni foreign fighters from any given country as well as the number of Sunni terror attacks carried out within it—and then crunch the numbers to see which explanations best predicted a country’s rate of Sunni radicalization and violence. (The raw foreign fighter data came from The International Centre for the Study of Radicalisation and Political Violence; the original attack data came from the University of Maryland’s START project.)

What we found surprised us, particularly when it came to foreign fighter radicalization. It turns out that the best predictor of foreign fighter radicalization was not a country’s wealth. Nor was it how well-educated its citizens were, how healthy they were, or even how much Internet access they enjoyed. Instead, the top predictor was whether a country was Francophone; that is, whether it currently lists (or previously listed) French as a national language. As strange as it may seem, four of the five countries with the highest rates of radicalization in the world are Francophone, including the top two in Europe (France and Belgium).

Knowledgeable readers will immediately object that the raw numbers tell a different story. The English-speaking United Kingdom, for example, has produced far more foreign fighters than French-speaking Belgium. And fighters from Saudi Arabia number in the several thousands. But the raw numbers are misleading. If you view the foreign fighters as a percentage of the overall Muslim population, you see a different picture. Per Muslim resident, Belgium produces far more foreign fighters than either the United Kingdom or Saudi Arabia. 

[W]hat could the language of love possibly have to do with Islamist violence? We suspect that it is really a proxy for something else: French political culture.

So what could the language of love possibly have to do with Islamist violence? We suspect that it is really a proxy for something else: French political culture. The French approach to secularism is more aggressive than, say, the British approach. France and Belgium, for example, are the only two countries in Europe to ban the full veil in their public schools. They’re also the only two countries in Western Europe not to gain the highest rating for democracy in the well-known Polity score data, which does not include explanations for the markdowns.

Adding support to this story are the top interactions we found between different variables. When you look at which combination of variables is most predictive, it turns out that the “Francophone effect” is actually strongest in the countries that are most developed: French-speaking countries with the highest literacy, best infrastructure, and best health system. This is not a story about French colonial plunder. If anything it’s a story about what happens when French economic and political development has most deeply taken root.

An important subplot within this story concerns the distribution of wealth. In particular, the rate of youth unemployment and urbanization appear to matter a great deal too. Globally, we found that when between 10 and 30 percent of a country’s youth are unemployed, there is a strong relationship between a rise in youth unemployment and a rise in Sunni militancy. Rates outside that range don’t have an effect. Likewise, when urbanization is between 60 and 80 percent, there is a strong relationship.

These findings seem to matter most in Francophone countries. Among the over 1,000 interactions our model looked at, those between Francophone and youth unemployment and Francophone and urbanization both ranked among the 15 most predictive. There’s broad anecdotal support for this idea: consider the rampant radicalization in Molenbeek, in the Parisbanlieus, in Ben Gardane. Each of these contexts have produced a massively disproportionate share of foreign fighters, and each are also urban pockets with high youth unemployment.

As with the Francophone finding overall, we’re left with guesswork as to why exactly the relationships between French politics, urbanization, youth unemployment, and Sunni militancy exist. We suspect that when there are large numbers of unemployed youth, some of them are bound to get up to mischief. When they live in large cities, they have more opportunities to connect with people espousing radical causes. And when those cities are in Francophone countries that adopt the strident French approach to secularism, Sunni radicalism is more appealing.

For now, the relationship needs to be studied and tested by comparing several cases in countries and between countries. We also found other interesting relationships—such as between Sunni violence and prior civil conflict—but they are neither as strong nor as compelling.

Regardless, the latest attacks in Belgium are reason enough to share the initial findings. They may be way off, but at least they are based on the best available data. If the data is wrong or our interpretations skewed, we hope the effort will lead to more rigorous explanations of what is driving jihadist terrorism in Europe. Our initial findings should in no way imply that Francophone countries are responsible for the recent horrible attacks—no country deserves to have its civilians killed, regardless of the perpetrator’s motives. But the magnitude of the violence and the fear it engenders demand that we investigate those motives beyond just the standard boilerplate explanations.