THE QUICK ROAD TO GLOBAL INSURGENCY

Notes on this century's global depression (D2) and the wars that will emerge from its onset.  Here's one potential scenario.  Enjoy.

The summer of 2009 will see protests in the 'West' as the newly financially destitute vent their anger at both the incompetence (unable to anticipate events or formulate plans that work) and corruption (due to looting of government coffers by firms like AIG, RBS, an Citibank) of their respective governments.  However, this phase of the crisis will likely quickly pass as:

1. The realization that peaceful protest, from marches and placard waving, has ceased to be effective tool of political change.   Efforts are lost in the noise. 
2. Regulations on protest have neutered it.   Protesters can't even get within earshot of 'protected' targets -- from the President to targeted firms.
3. Police departments will crack down on protesters.   From the use of counter-insurgency tactics and legal pressure against organizers to a rapid escalation to violence in the street (as the police in London are planning -- as in, no repeat of Athens here). 

The unanticipated result will be that as protest quickly fades and the depression deepens, an open source insurgency will begin as groups form based on new primary loyalties (global guerrillas).  A plethora of groups, from criminal to nationalist to family to religious to ethnic, will form in an attempt to address the needs of specific/targeted populations.  Many of these groups, as we have seen elsewhere, will quickly resort to violence in order to advance their interests.  

This will create a 'long or fat tail' of violent groups, made possible by the growing weakness and demonstrated failure (in that it can't protect its population from the harshness of the now dominant global market system and its financial predators)  of the nation-state as a system of governance.*  The common themes of these groups, will be opposition to the ineffectual state and the advancement of the group's economic interests.  The result will be: 

1. the rapid proliferation of temporary autonomous zones as these groups take control of localities (as in, co-opt or cow police/local governance and coerce local populations not in the group membership), 
2. new forms of 'off the grid' economic activity (black market, smuggling, etc.) flourishes, and
3. an open insurgency, mostly disruptive events meant to coerce and distract, between these groups and the national government that is trying to regain control.  

The Resilient Community Alternative

The option for those not interested in advancing economic interests through the projection of violence, is to disconnect or firewall your community via efforts at resilience.  The most critical element of that effort in the short term is a tremendously difficult judo move:  

How do you prevent the undertow of the failing global financial system from gutting your community via foreclosure/bankruptcy and debt (and thereby driving the development of global guerrillas) while at the same time building alternative forms of local commercial and/or cooperative endeavor?  That's the big question.

*  One thing that makes this "fat tail" of small violent groups interesting is that cumulative violence it can project is much greater than the modern nation-state can project.  Why?  Nation-state power is confined in a 'box' of its own making -- a combination of moral limits, legal restrictions, and global financial pressure enforce the walls of the box.