Indefensible

ABOUT THE PROJECT

Project Indefensible emerged out of a series of research and discussion workshops sponsored by the World Peace Foundation with leading experts on the global arms business. Together, the group defined a goal for their collaboration of fostering an evidence-driven, accountable, and transparent approach to public discussions of the global arms business.

The end result of this collaboration is the text of Indefensible.

It reveals how the global arms business plays an over-sized role in global and domestic politics: it defends its own interests to the detriment of democracy. It makes us less safe, our governments and leaders more prone to corruption, and our economies dragged down by wasteful and often useless spending that could far better be used to solve the world's truly pressing problems. Weapons manufacturers and traders turn to a set of time-honed and well-packaged arguments to justify the vast resources they consume and their privileged position in the corridors of power. This text systematically explores and explodes the myths that sustain this bloated, secretive, corrupt and reckless business. Presenting a wide array of data, analysis of deals, and country case studies, we explain how and why the arguments made to defend the defense sector are flawed, both factually and logically.

Indefensible forms the core of Project Indefensible, an online resource for members of the public and activists to better educate themselves about the corruptive impact of the global arms business and how it uses myths to deflect criticism. By educating themselves, the public can counter these myths and create political systems that scrutinize the industry, increase security and benefit public wellbeing.

We aim stimulate a new conversation and to spur new campaigns to counter the most dangerous aspects of the business.

As the project grows, we will continue to add new educational content, updates about campaigns and how you can get involved, and research that unearths new dimensions of the global business.

ABOUT THE WEBSITE

In order to stimulate this conversation, LUST approached the design and implementation of the website as a critical tool for collaborative reading and writing—offering speculations on scalable reading experiences between all target audiences, situations, and locations centered on the thematics of the Indefensible text.

LUST has always been interested in interpretive practices associated with reader/text relations, often borrowing methodologies from the discipline of literary anthropology. In literary anthropological research, the relationship to a literary text can become an interesting point for the continued interpretation of culture and the way culture is weighted. Each time a previously annotated ‘narrative’ is re-visited, or marked, the context of the last reading changes, therefore affecting the current reading as well. Using similar recursive methodologies, a codex of data (or millions of points of entry) that supports multiple research questions and interests can be developed.

On this website, we offer the reader the following tools to facilitate this discourse.

Contextual search

The contextual search provides the reader with an ability to generate an alternate compilation of a text from their own search terms. The occurrence of these terms is reflected in the n-gram; a graph that visualizes their frequency within flow of the original text. This re-interpretation creates an new narrative structure and approach to literary reading. Endless interpretations are possible, sourcing from the reader’s own interests within the text. This opens discussion on audience-generated interpretation and linearity in media as a critical media-making tool.

Focus Mode

Focus mode provides a method of engaging with literary media under time constraints. While skimming through a piece by scrolling quickly, the key passages become apparent to the reader in contrast to the remainder of the text. This allows readers to engage with core passages without them being decontextualized, as with the traditional pull quote. These sections are integrated within the text non-hierarchically to activate only in situations where a reader is scrolling quickly. Focus mode is an experiment in forms of reading that reflect the audience’s behavior.

Annotations

The creation of reader annotations is generative of a parallel narrative to the original text. The audience is invited to engage with the content by taking notes and reacting alongside the original. As their own set of annotations is compiled, the annotations take on their own form as a piece of literary media. As the original text and annotations exist laterally, they come together to produce an new and anthropologically-rich reading.

Session Sharing

Each unique session of annotations produces a sharable link, where the reader can invite others to collaborate in session of annotating. This way of reading, note-taking, and reflection is a facilitator critical engagement and discussion. These sessions invite multiple narratives to exist in dialogue with text, generating multiple readings of the literature.

Social Sharing

Social sharing allows one to share their session or portions of the reading onto social media. This launches a re-contextualization of the text onto new platforms of community phenomena to result in discourse and meaning-making within larger cultural spheres.

Visual Index

The visual index is a miniaturization of the text, providing an overview of the text for navigational purposes. This is an immaterial method of way-finding within long texts—analogous to the pages in a printed book. As an index to the content, it gives context for the content readers interact with, as well as a means to reinterpretation of reading through navigation.

Paul Holden

A South African-born and London-based historian, researcher, writer and activist. He regularly publishes on issues related to corruption, governance and democratic practice in South Africa, including The Arms Deal in Your Pocket (2008) and Who Rules South Africa (2012) which were national best-sellers. His major investigative work to date was the book The Devil in the Detail: How the Arms Deal Changed Everything (2011), which collated the result of years of detailed investigation into South Africa's biggest post-apartheid scandal. Since 2009, Paul has worked closely with Andrew Feinstein, acting as the lead researcher for Feinstein's The Shadow World and as co-author, along with fellow colleague Barnaby Pace, of the lead article in the Stockholm International Peace Research Institute's (SIPRI) 2011 Yearbook. Paul has appeared regularly on South African and international news platforms discussing issues related to corruption and its impact on development and democratisation in developing countries.

Bridget Conley-Zilkic

Bridget Conley-Zilkic is the Research Director of the World Peace Foundation and Assistant Research Professor at The Fletcher School. At WPF, she is the lead researcher on the Mass Atrocities program, and editor of How Mass Atrocities End: Studies from Guatemala, Burundi, Indonesia, the Sudans, Bosnia-Herzegovina, and Iraq (Cambridge University Press 2016). She has published on issues related to the 1992 – 1995 war in Bosnia, mass atrocities and genocide, and how museums can engage on human rights issues. She previously worked as Research Director for the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum's Committee on Conscience, where she led the Museum's research and projects on contemporary threats of genocide, including curating an exhibition, From Memory to Action: Meeting the Challenge of Genocide Today.

Alex de Waal

Alex de Waal is the Executive Director of the World Peace Foundation. Considered one of the foremost experts on Sudan and the Horn of Africa, his scholarly work and practice has also probed humanitarian crisis and response, human rights, HIV/AIDS and governance in Africa, and conflict and peacebuilding. He has set up two independent human rights organizations, African Rights (1993) and Justice Africa (1999), focusing respectively on documenting human rights abuses and developing policies to respond to human rights crises, notably in Rwanda, Somalia and Sudan. He was on the list of Foreign Policy's 100 most influential public intellectuals in 2008 and Atlantic Monthly's 27 "brave thinkers" in 2009. His latest book is The Real Politics of the Horn of Africa (Polity Press, 2015).

Sarah Detzner

Sarah Detzner is a PhD candidate at the Fletcher School of Law and Diplomacy. Her research is focused on international security, particularly post-conflict stabilization/reconstruction and security sector reform. In addition, she serves as director of the Fletcher Graduate Writing Program, on the board of The Fletcher Security Review, as a Fares Center Fellow, and as a consultant for the World Peace Foundation. Previously, she served in the Obama Administration as a speechwriter for former Secretary of Defense Robert M. Gates, campaigned as an Obama 2008 staffer, and worked with the National Democratic Institute in Washington, D.C., Lebanon, and Jordan. She is a graduate of Macalester College and originally from the Chicago area.

J Paul Dunne

J Paul Dunne is Professor of Economics and Associate of SALDRU, in the School of Economics, University of Cape Town and Emeritus Professor at the University of the West of England, Bristol. He has worked at the British University in Egypt and the Universities of Middlesex, Leeds, Cambridge, Warwick and London. An applied economist, his main area of research is the economics of peace, security and military spending. He edits the Economics of Peace and Security Journal with Jurgen Brauer and is a Fellow of Economists for Peace and Security (EPS). Links his publications are available at: https://ideas.repec.org/e/pdu43.html

Andrew Feinstein

Andrew Feinstein is Executive Director of Corruption Watch UK in London. A former ANC Member of Parliament, he is the author of "After the Party: The ANC, Corruption and South Africa's Uncertain Future" and "The Shadow World: Inside the Global Arms Trade" described by the Washington Post as "the most complete account [of the arms trade] ever written". A film based on the book premiered at the TriBeca Film Festival in April 2016 and won the award for Best Documentary Feature Film at the 2016 Edinburgh International Film Festival. Andrew was named by AVOV as one of the 100 most influential poplin the world working against armed violence.

William D. Hartung

William D. Hartung is the author of Prophets of War: Lockheed Martin and the Making of the Military-Industrial Complex (Nation Books, 2011) and the co-editor, with Miriam Pemberton, of Lessons from Iraq: Avoiding the Next War (Paradigm Press, 2008). His previous books include And Weapons for All (HarperCollins, 1995), a critique of U.S. arms sales policies from the Nixon through Clinton administrations. Bill Hartung's articles on security issues have appeared in the New York Times, the Washington Post, the Los Angeles Times, The Nation, and the World Policy Journal. He has been a featured expert on national security issues on CBS 60 Minutes, NBC Nightly News, the Lehrer Newshour, CNN, Fox News, and scores of local, regional, and international radio outlets.

Paul Holtom

Paul Holtom is a consultant for the Small Arms Survey and United Nations Institute for Disarmament Research (UNIDIR) and a non-resident fellow with the "Managing Across Boundaries Initiative" at Stimson. He was the Director of the Stockholm International Peace Research Institute's (SIPRI) Arms Transfers Programme during 2009-2013 and served as adviser to the 2013 and 2016 United Nations Groups of Governmental Experts on the UN Register of Conventional Arms. Paul's research focuses on the arms trade and peace and security, with a particular focus on the Arms Trade Treaty, multilateral sanctions and measures to address arms trafficking and diversion.

Nicholas Marsh

Nicholas Marsh works at the Peace Research Institute Oslo (PRIO) where he researches the international trade in small arms and light weapons, the relationship between war or criminal violence and the acquisition of weapons, arms trafficking, norms concerning arms transfers, and laws and regulations governing the arms trade. He runs a database project on the global trade in small arms and light weapons, has written tens of publications on the arms trade, and has directly participated in numerous civil society and diplomatic attempts to govern and control the arms trade.

Sam Perlo-Freeman

Sam Perlo-Freeman is Program Manager for the World Peace Foundation's Global Arms and Corruption project. Previously he was a Senior researcher and Head of the SIPRI Project on Military Expenditure in the Arms and Military Expenditure Programme, where he was responsible for monitoring data on military expenditure worldwide. He has also been a Senior Lecturer at the University of the West of England, with a focus on the field of defence and peace economics.

Hennie Van Vuuren

Hennie Van Vuuren works on issues of secrecy, access to information and corruption. He is a Senior Research Associate, at the Institute for Justice and Reconciliation in South Africa currently focussing on accountability for economic crimes during political transitions. He is a past fellow of the Open Society Foundation for South Africa and has worked as Director of the Institute for Security Studies in Cape Town and for Transparency International in Berlin. He is active in the South African Right2Know campaign and together with Paul Holden co-authored The Devil in the Detail: How the arms deal changed everything.

Leah Wawro

Leah Wawro manages the Conflict and Insecurity team within TI Defence and Security. She first joined DSP in 2011 working on research and liaising with TI national chapters. During her time here she has led on advocacy and communications, and prior to that was the civil society officer leading on work with the TI chapters and other NGOs worldwide, as well as contributing to the 2013 Government Defence Anti-Corruption Index (GI). From 2014-15, Leah was a Network Fellow at Harvard University's Edmund J. Safra Center for Ethics, where she worked on research into institutional corruption in the defence sectors of states transitioning to democracy. Before joining DSP, Leah worked with War Child (UK), Armadillo at Large, and Air America Media. She also worked as a volunteer with UNRWA and the Iraqi Student Project in Damascus, Syria. Leah holds an MA in International Relations and Arabic from the University of St Andrews.

Contact

This project was made possible by the World Peace Foundation. For more information email: [email protected] or visit World Peace Foundation on their website.

Indefensible – the book

An e-version or hard copy of the book can be purchased through Zed Books.

Copyright

Published under CC BY-NC 4.0

Credits

Research and writing
Paul Holden with Bridget Conley-Zilkic, Alex de Waal, Sarah Detzner, John Paul Dunne, Andrew Feinstein, William Hartung, Paul Holtom, Lora Lumpe, Nic Marsh, Sam Perlo-Freeman, Hennie Van Vuuren, Leah Wawro

Concept Development
Tactical Technology Collective

Design and Development
Lust

Animation
Produced by Tactical Technology Collective