Tuesday October 7, 2014 – 10am
Posted Oct 7, 2014 02:42:34 PM.
This article is more than 5 years old.
10:00- The KWCF 2014 Priority Report on Community Vitality
Brendan Sheehan, Director of Philanthropic Services at the KW Community Foundation
The Kitchener and Waterloo Community Foundation (The KWCF) released the 2014 edition of Waterloo Region’s Vital Signs – The Priority Report today. This year marks the second year of a three-year cycle, now focused on the priority areas established in 2013: Belonging & Leadership, Arts & Culture, Health & Wellness and Getting Started (in life and in this community). “We are now looking to deepen the community’s understanding of each of the priority areas in an accessible way,” shares Rosemary Smith, CEO of The KWCF. “As such, a new infographic format was used that allows us to do just that. We wanted the report to be readable, understandable, but continue to share the credible, reliable data that you have come to expect from a Vital Signs report.” This year’s report will also highlight the data from the 2013 Waterloo Region Community Wellbeing Survey; a result of a partnership between The KWCF and Canadian Index of Wellbeing.
10:30- ISIS debate continues
Simon Palamar, Research Assistant with the Global Security & Politics Program at The Centre for International Governance Innovation (CIGI)
There was a time, as recently as 25 years ago, when military staff colleges around the world taught a reasonably effective doctrine for dealing with terrorism. Then it was forgotten, but we need it back. It would be especially useful in dealing with the terrorist state that has recently emerged in northern Iraq and eastern Syria. The doctrine was painfully worked out back in the decades of the 1960s, ’70s and ’80s, when terrorism was one of the world’s biggest problems. Most of the time, the strategy worked, whether the threat was the urban terrorists who plagued most Latin American countries and a number of big developed countries, or the rural guerrillas who fought the government in many African and Asian countries. The key insight was this: Terrorist movements always want you to overreact, so don’t do it. The terrorists usually lack the popular support to overpower their opponent by force, so they employ a kind of political jiu-jitsu: they try to use the adversary’s own strength against him. Most domestic terrorism, and almost all international terrorism, is aimed at provoking a big, stupid, self-defeating response from the target government. International terrorism has a somewhat better record of success, mainly because these terrorists are not actually trying to overthrow the government they attack. They are merely trying to trick that foreign government into using massive violence against the countries where they really do want to take power. The attacks of the foreigners will outrage and radicalize the local population, who will then give their support to the local revolutionaries. The most successful operation of this kind was 9/11, a low-cost attack that incited the United States to invade two entire countries in the region where the revolutionaries of al-Qaida hoped to replace the local governments with Islamist regimes. The local population has been duly radicalized, especially in the Sunni-majority parts of Iraq, and 13 years later an “Islamic Caliphate” has taken power in the northern and western parts of that country.
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