Europe’s Undersea Sensor Race Has A Hidden Cost: Resolving The Alerts – Analysis


Image: ChatGPT

September 23, 2026

By Burak Oktenli

Key Takeaways:

After a Sept. 10 Reuters report on a disrupted Russian-linked operation near Svalbard and EU MARSEC EU 26 drills, plus Portugal’s REPMUS 26 uncrewed-system trials and NATO Task Force X-Arctic, the author says Europe is shifting from worrying about seabed cables to fielding sensors, drones, and procedures to watch them.

More detection is not the same as more knowledge: internal waves, tides, and dragged anchors can look like threats. A useful metric is resolution burden—how many contacts, analyst hours, and extra patrols it takes to settle two real incidents.

Interoperable pictures can multiply one sensor’s false alarm across five screens. Unresolved should stay a valid label. The advantage, the piece argues, goes to the network that can close cases without exhausting itself—not the one that rings the most alarms.

Europe is building more ways to detect suspicious activity around cables and pipelines. The next bottleneck may be the ships, analysts, environmental data and follow-up collection needed to determine which alerts actually matter.

Europe is rapidly building the machinery to watch what happens beneath its seas.

On September 10, Reuters reported that NATO allies had disrupted what Western officials described as a covert Russian operation near Svalbard involving technology intended to disable critical undersea cables. A week later, the European Union’s MARSEC EU 26 exercise practiced information sharing, coordinated decision-making, and vessel boarding around a simulated threat to underwater infrastructure.


The experimentation is continuing in Portugal. REPMUS 26 is bringing operational users, industry, academia, NATO organizations, and the European Defence Agency together around large-scale maritime uncrewed-system trials. NATO’s Task Force X-Arctic is using the exercise to continue testing integration and connectivity after maritime-sensor trials around Iceland earlier this year.

The direction is clear: Europe is moving from worrying about seabed infrastructure to building the sensor networks, unmanned systems and operational procedures intended to protect it.

That progress creates a less visible problem. The more successfully Europe detects anomalies underwater, the more anomalies somebody will have to resolve.
The alert is only the beginning of the bill

Finding something unusual near a cable is only the first step. A suspicious acoustic return, surface pattern, vessel maneuver, magnetic signature, or unmanned-system contact may justify attention. Turning that observation into a useful operational judgment can require comparison with shipping records, environmental information, additional sensors, another patrol, an underwater vehicle, analyst time, and sometimes physical inspection.


Each step consumes scarce capacity.

The ocean also produces ambiguity naturally. NASA has shown that subsurface internal waves can change sea-surface roughness strongly enough to appear in radar imagery. Tidal flow over submerged ridges can generate similar internal waves without any vessel or hostile activity being involved.

Human activity creates another layer of ambiguity. During Finland’s September maritime-security exercise, Reuters reported that authorities were preparing for sabotage involving divers or underwater drones while also noting that dragged anchors had been the most common explanation for recent damage incidents involving undersea infrastructure.

A damaged cable does not arrive with its cause attached. Neither does an anomalous sensor contact.
More detection can create more work

This produces an acquisition problem that ordinary detection metrics handle poorly.

Suppose one sensor architecture generates 100 suspicious contacts and eventually helps resolve two meaningful incidents. Another generates 20 contacts and identifies the same two. Their headline sensitivity may look similar. Their operational burden is not.

The first system consumes more analyst attention and follow-up collection. Patrol vessels may be redirected. Additional unmanned platforms may be tasked. Environmental data may need to be processed. Other intelligence requirements may wait.
The hidden variable is the resolution burden.

It can be measured. For every useful finding, how many candidates required investigation? How many analyst-hours were consumed? How much additional collection was necessary? How long did resolution take? How many contacts remained genuinely unresolved? How often did pursuing a false lead displace another mission?


Those figures do not replace probability of detection or false-alarm rate. They describe what happens after those familiar metrics reach the operations center.

That is increasingly important as sensing becomes cheaper and more distributed. Satellites, autonomous underwater vehicles, surface drones, hydrophones, radar, and commercial maritime feeds can generate more candidate information than a smaller surveillance architecture can comfortably absorb.

Detection can scale faster than interpretation.

Unresolved is a legitimate outcome

When follow-up capacity becomes scarce, organizations face pressure to turn ambiguity into a binary answer. A contact becomes benign or hostile. An unusual pattern becomes explained or unexplained. A suspicious vessel becomes responsible or cleared.

The ocean will not always cooperate.

Sometimes the available evidence supports only a narrower conclusion: the contact was unusual, additional collection was attempted, several ordinary explanations remain plausible, and the event cannot presently be resolved.

That outcome has operational value. It prevents a surveillance system from gaining apparent precision by forcing every observation into a category. It also preserves the event for comparison if another incident later supplies new evidence.

The same principle matters when coverage disappears. A contact detected once may move outside sensor coverage before another platform can examine it. Confidence during that gap cannot simply inherit the confidence of the original observation.

A useful surveillance picture needs to preserve what disappeared along with what was seen.

Interoperability can multiply ambiguity

Europe is placing considerable emphasis on interoperability. MARSEC EU 26 tested cross-border information sharing and a shared maritime picture. REPMUS is designed to integrate heterogeneous maritime systems in operational conditions. The European Defence Agency’s Critical Seabed Infrastructure Protection project is explicitly seeking an interoperable, AI-enabled underwater situational-awareness capability built from advanced sensors, autonomous systems, and resilient command-and-control networks.

That integration offers obvious benefits. It also changes the economics of a false alarm.

A dubious observation contained inside one national sensor system consumes local attention. The same observation distributed across an interoperable network can trigger investigation by several organizations unless its provenance, uncertainty, and dependencies travel with it.

Five screens displaying the same contact are not five independent observations when all five ultimately depend on one sensor.


The information architecture therefore matters as much as the sensor architecture. Operators need to know which observations are independent, which are copies, which environmental explanations remain open, and what additional evidence would actually resolve the contact.

The next bottleneck is resolution

Europe is unlikely to suffer from a shortage of sensors. The current investment cycle is producing satellites, autonomous vehicles, seabed systems, artificial intelligence, commercial data services, and increasingly sophisticated maritime command networks.

The harder constraint may become the capacity to convert their alerts into defensible conclusions at a sustainable cost.

That distinction matters particularly for undersea infrastructure because the consequences of interpretation extend beyond repair. A cable break can be an engineering failure, an accident, negligent maritime activity, or deliberate sabotage. Those possibilities carry very different diplomatic and security implications even when the physical damage looks similar.

The sensor cannot settle that question by becoming more sensitive. It can only provide evidence.

Undersea programs should therefore budget for resolution as deliberately as they budget for detection: analyst capacity, environmental characterization, follow-up collection, independent confirmation, and the ability to preserve unresolved cases without forcing a conclusion.

A sensor that generates intriguing candidates without a workable way to check them may move uncertainty from the ocean into the command center rather than reduce it.

Europe’s undersea advantage may belong less to the network that generates the most alarms than to the one that can resolve the most ambiguity without exhausting itself.


About Burak Oktenli
Burak Oktenli holds an MBA and a Master of Professional Studies in Applied Intelligence from Georgetown University. His research addresses the governance of authority in autonomous and AI-enabled systems, and his writing has appeared at the Modern War Institute at West Point, RUSI, RealClearDefense, RealClearMarkets, and Geopolitical Monitor. He is the author of Authority Architectures for Autonomous Systems, a ten-volume series on how authority in autonomous systems is delegated, monitored and recovered, at authority-architecture.me.
View all posts by Burak Oktenli →

How A Handful Of Big Agriculture Companies Have Taken Over Food Production – Analysis




September 23, 2026

 SwissInfo

By Anand Chandrasekhar

In 2025, Swiss-headquartered agribusiness giant Syngenta made $13.7 billion (CHF11.3 billion) from the sale of crop protection products alone, an increase of 4% over the previous year. Buried inside the company’s annual report was a figure that offers a broader glimpse of the strength of the company in the global pesticide market: Syngenta had registered, re-registered or extended the registration of almost 1,800 plant protection products.

This large portfolio of pesticides has only become more valuable as authorities globally take a tougher stance on pesticide approvals and renewals to protect consumer health and the environment. For example, the European Union has cut the number of authorised active substances in pesticides from over 1,000 to around 500 in the last 25 years. It can take seven to ten years to get a new pesticide approved in the EU; and approval is only valid for a maximum of 15 years at a time.

Those with large product portfolios and the resources to re-register and extend approvals gain a significant advantage over new entrants in the plant protection market. This is reducing competition and leaving farmers with fewer choices.

Who controls what?

“Market concentration in the agricultural sector is very high. Markets for agricultural inputs, such as seeds, pesticides and fertiliser, are dominated globally by a small number of firms. The machinery market is also highly concentrated,” says Robert Finger, a professor of agricultural economics and policy at the Swiss federal technology institute ETH Zurich.

The numbers testify to the concentration of corporate power, as shown in a report released by agricultural research collective ETC.

“Ten years ago, the top ten companies in the global commercial seed sector controlled 40% of the market. Today, the top two companies control almost 40% of the market,” Taarini Chopra, a co-author of the ETC report, told Swissinfo.

How did so few companies concentrate agribusiness assets?

The concentration of today’s farm inputs industry is not a recent phenomenon. It can be traced as far back as 150 years ago, according to Jennifer Clapp, a professor at the University of Waterloo in Ontario, Canada and author of the book Titans of Industrial Agriculture. Farm equipment manufacturers like John Deere built major industrial companies and were targeted as monopolies by farmers’ movements in the United States in the 1870s that also pushed back against banks, railroads and commodity traders.

The early decades of the 20th century also saw a few firms dominate seeds and agrochemical sectors. These companies began merging in the 1980s to consolidate their businesses. Recent years have witnessed mega-mergers, like the acquisition of Monsanto by Bayer in 2018, Dow and Dupont coming together to form Corteva Agriscience in 2019, fertiliser heavyweights Potash Corporation and Agrium forming Nutrien in 2018 or the acquisition of Syngenta by ChemChina in 2017 and subsequent merger with Sinochem in 2022.

“Although mergers and acquisitions are happening all the time in these sectors, major episodes of consolidation have historically tended to occur in spurts – typically in moments where there are opportunities due to technological change or in response to downturns where firms are seeking to improve profitability by expanding their market share,” says Clapp.

How is this concentration impacting farmers?

This concentration of corporate power can have a negative effect on farmers because they have limited choice when it comes to purchasing seeds, chemicals and farm machinery. High concentration exists in downstream markets too, with a small number of companies dominating processing and retail.

“This often leaves agricultural producers in a difficult position between these concentrated upstream and downstream markets,” says Finger at ETH Zurich.

The high investment required to develop new products also creates major barriers for new entrants that can offer competition and encourage incumbents to lower prices. This is further exacerbated by these companies seeking to grow even bigger to benefit from the economies of scale.

“In industries like seeds or pesticides, long product development and admission cycles, high development costs, and patents protecting intellectual property create market entry barriers. Mergers with, and acquisitions of, other companies has been a successful strategy to create synergies in research and development and realise economies of scale,” says Max Koppenberg, assistant professor of business economics at the Wageningen University & Research in the Netherlands.

Critics of corporate concentration also claim that relying on just a few companies can make farmers more vulnerable to shocks like the blockade of the Hormuz Strait.

“Anytime there is a supply shock, a system like our current industrial food system is going to be much more vulnerable to that supply shock. And the war in Iran, of course, is a great example. Fertiliser prices are skyrocketing, food prices are spiking and hunger levels have gone up,” says Chopra.

Is this legal?

Concentration of corporate power is not illegal per se. A dominant agricultural firm can fall foul of anti-trust law if it uses practices, such as selling products below cost price, to suppress competition. Mergers that concentrate power in a market with few players can also trigger scrutiny from competition authorities.

Koppenberg cautions that high concentration does not necessarily result in an abuse of market power. He gives the example of food retailing, which is highly concentrated in many economies. Retailers strongly compete with each other, leading to small profit margins and comparatively low consumer prices.

“In many agricultural input industries, we see high concentration which does not translate into high profit margins, as companies must invest their gross profits in marketing, sales, and research and development to sustain their market shares,” Koppenberg says.
How can the market dominance of ‘Big Agri’ be reined in?

One way to rein these companies in is to put in place policies that could lower barriers for entry for new companies. Koppenberg recommends policy instruments like the acceleration of admission processes for new crop protection products. Limiting the validity of patents is another strategy, though Koppenberg warns this could backfire.


“A reduction of intellectual property rights could also lead to more intense competition, lowering input prices for farmers, but would simultaneously reduce the incentive to invest in research and development, as the economic gains would no longer be exclusive to the innovating firm,” he says.

Antitrust or competition law and its enforcement is another tool to tackle. For example, the acquisition of Monsanto by Bayer was obstructed by US and EU competition authorities. It was ultimately allowed, but only after significant divestitures, including Bayer selling its global seed business to rival BASF.

Competition authorities have quantitative tools to measure concentration levels like the Herfindahl-Hirschman Index (HHI). This figure is small in a market with many small players and reaches a high of 10,000 when there is only one firm in a market. In the US, antitrust authorities qualify any marker with a HHI above 1,800 as highly concentrated and a change of more than 100 points as a significant increase.


About SwissInfo
swissinfo is an enterprise of the Swiss Broadcasting Corporation (SBC). Its role is to inform Swiss living abroad about events in their homeland and to raise awareness of Switzerland in other countries. swissinfo achieves this through its nine-language internet news and information platform.
View all posts by SwissInfo →

As Military Spending Mounts, Parliamentary Oversight Must Keep Pace – Analysis


U.S. and South Korean F-16s demonstrate an 'Elephant Walk' at Kunsan Air Base. Photo Credit: Senior Airman Brittany Y. Auld, Wikipedia Commons.

September 23, 2026
SIPRI
By Dr Diego Lopes da Silva, Dr Hans Born and Dr Dawn Lui

Key Takeaways:

The authors say extra-budgetary and off-budget military funds—Germany’s €100 billion Sondervermögen, Poland’s Armed Forces Support Fund, similar steps in Estonia and Lithuania, and two Taiwan funds since 2021—let governments spend fast but weaken parliament’s usual hold on the defence budget.

UN bodies (First Committee, IPU, the 2025 SG report The Security We Need) now talk more about governance than raw totals: without ex ante approval and audit, waste and corruption risk rise and funds can last for decades.

Fixes proposed: strong defence committees and SAIs with classified access; using ICESCR non-retrogression to demand fiscal-impact evidence; IPU best-practice sharing; and UN language—modeled on the small-arms Programme of Action—that tells states to give parliaments power over exceptional financing. Article 26 of the Charter is cited: peace with the least diversion of resources.

At a time of increasing regional tensions, several states have taken extraordinary steps to increase funding for their militaries, bypassing regular budgeting procedures. For example, shortly after Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine in 2022 Germany created an extra-budgetary fund, or Sondervermögen, worth €100 billion (US$112 billion) for military procurement. Around the same time, Poland created an off-budget mechanism that accounted for a third of its military spending in 2023, the Armed Forces Support Fund (FWSZ). Other European states, such as Estonia and Lithuania, have also taken similar steps. Meanwhile, amid deteriorating relations with China, Taiwan has created two extra-budgetary funds for military procurement since 2021.

While they allow governments to react quickly and flexibly to changing threat perceptions, extra-budgetary and off-budget mechanisms (EBOBMs) can also come at a cost to transparency and democratic oversight. With military spending rising around the world, the role of national parliaments in approving military budgets and scrutinizing expenditures should be protected. Parliaments are key to ensuring that military spending decisions remain aligned with the principles of good security sector governance—that is, they are made in a manner that is accountable, effective and inclusive—and with the wider interests of society.


The impacts of rising military expenditure are being discussed in the United Nations disarmament bodies, like the First Committee and the Conference on Disarmament, and at the General Assembly of the Inter-Parliamentary Union (IPU). Several UN reports have highlighted the potential negative effects of surging military expenditure. In the past couple of years, however, the focus has moved beyond discussion of spending levels per se to national-level governance issues. In 2023 the Advisory Board on Disarmament Matters argued that institutionalized checks and balances, including better oversight by legislative bodies, and a whole-of-society approach could help to minimize waste and misuse of funds as well as reducing the risk of corruption in military spending. In 2025 the UN Secretary-General called on member states to ‘promote transparency and accountability around military expenditure to build trust and confidence … and increase domestic fiscal accountability’, in his report The Security We Need: Rebalancing Military Spending for a Sustainable and Peaceful Future.

But whatever concerns or recommendations emerge from the First Committee and other multilateral forums regarding military spending levels and governance, they will require action by national parliaments. At a time when military spending is rising and new military funding structures are complicating parliamentary oversight, coordination between the UN disarmament machinery and parliaments can no longer be neglected.

Extra-budgetary and off-budget mechanisms and the erosion of parliamentary control

EBOBMs are structures for military spending that are outside the ministry of defence’s allocation in the state budget. They can draw on other lines within the state budget (extra-budgetary) or from loans, bonds or special taxes (off-budget). Some may have clear expiry dates or spending limits, while others are open-ended. Rules governing how the resources are spent, how spending decisions are made, and accountability and transparency provisions can vary widely.

Because EBOBMs are often created in response to urgent needs, there may be pressure to waive the regular bureaucratic and legislative processes. As a result, they may be adopted with minimal parliamentary scrutiny and debate—concerning both the mechanisms themselves and any broader implications. For example, the Sondervermögen breached Germany’s long-standing government debt ceiling. And experience from around the world indicates that once EBOBMs have been introduced, it can take years and even decades for governments to stop using them.

The different rules and procedures governing EBOBMs and the fact that they are often debated separately from the regular defence ministry budget can greatly complicate oversight of military spending as a whole.

From a security sector governance perspective, EBOBMs raise questions not only about how much states spend on the military, but about how decisions on military expenditure are made, implemented and scrutinized. Parliaments are integral to the security sector governance architecture, alongside executive authorities, defence institutions, supreme audit institutions and other independent oversight bodies. Furthermore, involving parliaments is the only way in a democracy to assure buy-in and legitimacy for costly increases in military spending, especially when they affect other state budget expenditures.


EBOBMs are the clearest expression of the special status military spending often enjoys. Even when they are designed in a way that gives parliaments a degree of involvement, EBOBMs by their nature bypass the normal safeguards governing military expenditure. In particular, they remove the need for ex ante approval, scrutiny and audit of military spending decisions.
Possible measures to safeguard parliamentary control over military budgets

There are several ways in which parliaments could reassert their role in overseeing military spending. For example, they can maintain strong parliamentary defence committees, or collaborate closely with supreme audit institutions (SAIs), which independently audit the use of public funds. The effectiveness of these measures, however, depends on having access to relevant information (including classified material), sufficient expertise, and formal requirements for executive reporting and response.

One underexplored legal instrument for parliaments to exert political control over military budgets, especially over EBOBMs, is the International Covenant on Economic, Social and Cultural Rights (ICESCR), which as of 2026 has been ratified by 173 of the 193 UN member states.

The ICESCR can provide an additional reference point for parliamentary scrutiny of EBOBMs. Under General Comment No. 3, deliberately retrogressive measures affecting economic, social and cultural rights require careful consideration and justification in light of the state’s maximum available resources. While this would not in itself limit increases in military expenditure or the use of EBOBMs, it could be used to support requests for evidence on their fiscal and distributional consequences, including possible effects on expenditure relevant to economic and social rights.

The 2016 statement on Public Debt, Austerity Measures and the ICESCR of the UN Committee on Economic, Social and Cultural Rights offers tools that, although initially meant for situations of fiscal consolidation and sovereign debt crisis, could inform bodies tasked with scrutinizing EBOBMs that constrain public resources or bypass ordinary budget procedures.

An important caveat is that the use of the ICESCR depends on how the treaty was internalized by each country. In some legal systems, ratified international treaties automatically become domestic law, whereas in others specific implementing legislation is required. However, even in countries where the ICESCR is not yet domestic law, the fact of ratification already provides an important rhetorical instrument to support the principle of non-retrogression and to argue for human rights impact assessments.

Another avenue for strengthening transparency and oversight over off- and extra-budget military spending involves sharing best practices and lessons learned among parliamentarians and parliamentary staff. The IPU could be a critical player in this regard, not only as a forum to exchange views but also for diffusing knowledge.

Finally, closer engagement is needed between parliaments and the UN. The UN could facilitate parliamentarians’ participation in disarmament and arms control forums through structured consultations, observer arrangements where appropriate, and dedicated parliamentary sessions held alongside relevant UN meetings. More broadly, UN-parliamentary engagement on military spending matters could be supported through partnerships with organizations such as the IPU, which has permanent observer status at the General Assembly. Moreover, the IPU could also be brought into ongoing and future Advisory Board on Disarmament Matters processes that touch on military expenditures.


Side events at high-level disarmament conferences could also be organized for parliamentarians, exploring how parliaments can push for more efficient, effective and transparent military spending. In this vein, collaborating with like-minded states to support discussions at the UN could be an avenue to further parliamentary involvement in disarmament discussions.

Another possibility is for the UN to develop consistent language encouraging member states to establish or strengthen the legal, regulatory and administrative arrangements needed for effective oversight of military expenditure. Where parliaments exercise budgetary authority, this should include granting them adequate powers to scrutinize, approve and monitor defence spending, including exceptional financing mechanisms. Such arrangements could help to ensure that development-related expenditure is considered transparently alongside military priorities and is not disadvantaged by opaque or preferential budgetary mechanisms.

This suggestion follows well-established language in other domains of arms control and disarmament. For example, the UN Programme of Action on Small Arms and Light Weapons calls on states to put in place ‘adequate laws, regulations and administrative procedures’ to exercise effective control over arms-related activities. Adapting an existing formulation like this to the context of oversight of military expenditures may be less politically contentious or difficult compared to new language or frameworks.

The dissemination of standardized language on the role of parliaments overseeing military expenditures would serve as a focal point for parliaments, diplomatic representations at the UN and the UN disarmament bodies to converge around. Often, conflicting views and approaches to military expenditure within the UN—pushing for international transparency versus pushing for reductions, for example—have hindered the development of a more constructive and practical conversation.
The way ahead

Responses to ongoing changes in the international security landscape are challenging parliaments. As threat perceptions heighten, there is pressure to sacrifice democratic principles for the sake of security. Yet if anything, democratic oversight should be strengthened under these conditions. Parliaments have a critical role to play in making sure military spending is effective, efficient and transparent, and in line with society’s best interests.

Article 26 of the UN Charter calls for ‘the establishment and maintenance of international peace and security with the least diversion for armaments of the world’s human and economic resources’. This should guide closer engagement between the UN and parliaments. The UN is increasingly recognizing that discussions about ‘excessive military expenditure’ that do not include national parliaments or fiscal institutions are futile. Parliaments approve and scrutinize military budgets, and their ability to do this effectively is not only a matter of good governance but also a condition for more international transparency, confidence and stability.

The increasing reliance on EBOBMs is one way in which two very concerning trends—the weakening of democratic controls and rising insecurity—can be mutually reinforcing. Strengthening the role of parliaments in overseeing military budgets can be an entry point to control this potentially dangerous interaction. If military expenditures are to keep rising, parliamentary oversight must keep pace.


This essay forms part of a research collaboration between the Stockholm International Peace Research Institute (SIPRI) and the Geneva Centre for Security Sector Governance (DCAF) that seeks to identify and share good practices for strengthening transparency, accountability and parliamentary scrutiny of military budgets. These themes will also inform discussions at the side event ‘Rising Military Expenditures: Alternatives to Achieve Durable Security’, which will take place during the UN General Assembly High-Level Week on 24 September 2026, with participation from both organizations, UN member states, the UN Office for Disarmament Affairs and the Inter-Parliamentary Union.

About the authors

Dr Diego Lopes da Silva is a Senior Researcher in the SIPRI Military Expenditure and Arms Production Programme.

Dr Hans Born is Head of Research and Training at the Geneva Centre for Security Sector Governance (DCAF).

Dr Dawn Lui is a Programme Manager at the Geneva Centre for Security Sector Governance (DCAF).

Source: This article was published by SIPRI


About SIPRI
SIPRI is an independent international institute dedicated to research into conflict, armaments, arms control and disarmament. Established in 1966, SIPRI provides data, analysis and recommendations, based on open sources, to policymakers, researchers, media and the interested public. Based in Stockholm, SIPRI also has a presence in Beijing, and is regularly ranked among the most respected think tanks worldwide.
View all posts by SIPRI →

Albania’s Intelligence Chief Suspended For Allegedly Aiding Crime Group


The head of Albania’s State Intelligence Service, Vlora Hyseni. Photo: LSA.

September 23, 2026

Balkan Insight

By Fjori Sinoruka

Key Takeaways:

SPAK on Tuesday put Vlora Hyseni, head of Albania’s intelligence service SHISH since 2023, under house arrest and suspended her for alleged leaking of state secrets and assisting an offender in the AKSHI digital-tenders scandal; media said she is not in Albania.

 A forensic-police sector chief and a businessman were also arrested; former police chief Ilir Proda was questioned and his home searched.

AKSHI runs e-Albania and state IT systems. SPAK says director Mirlinda Karcanaj and deputy Hava Delibashi steered tenders worth about 5.9 billion lek (~€59 million in 19 procedures) toward IT businessman Ermal Beqiraj and Ergys Agasi, who are accused of rigging contracts; Agasi was caught Aug. 27 after months on the run, Beqiraj earlier in France after flying over a nuclear plant. They deny the charges.

Hyseni, once Edi Rama’s security adviser and a former Kosovo KIA deputy dismissed in 2021, is described as the gravest national-security crisis of this kind. The opposition wants President Begaj to convene the State Security Council; Socialists say wait for the courts.

Anti-corruption prosecutors on Tuesday placed Vlora Hyseni, head of Albania’s State Intelligence Service, SHISH, under house arrest and suspended her for allegedly revealing state secrets and assisting an offender.

The Special Prosecution Against Corruption and Organised Crime, SPAK, has also questioned the former Chief of Police, Ilir Proda, it announced. Media reported that Hyseni is not currently in Albania.

SPAK added that a sector head of the Forensic Police and a businessman had been arrested in relation to the same case.

Hyseni is being investigated over a corruption scandal surrounding tenders of the national agency overseeing the development of state information systems, the National Agency for Information Society, AKSHI.

Hyeni has headed the SHISH, the most important institution handling national security, since 2023, and her alleged involvement with the AKSHI corruption scandal potentially marks the most serious crisis over national security in the country’s history.

Hyseni was appointed head of SHISH after serving as Prime Minister’s Edi Rama national security adviser for about two years. She had earlier been deputy director of the Kosovo Intelligence Agency, KIA, but was dismissed from that post in June 2021 by Kosovo President Vjosa Osmani and Prime Minister Albin Kurti.

Her appointment as head of SHISH in 2023 was controversial because of her Kosovo citizenship and the unclear reason for her dismissal from Kosovo’s top security institution.


Meanwhile, former police chief Proda was seen at SPAK offices on Tuesday where, according to the media, he was questioned in relation to the AKSHI scandal and his house was searched.

AKSHI coordinates the development of state information systems and digitalisation procedures and administers the state public services portal, e-Albania.

The agency has managed a massive budget; some 19 of its procedures investigated by SPAK alone had an estimated total value of 5.9 billion lek, or about 59 million euros.

The SPAK investigation alleges that AKSHI’s director, Mirlinda Karcanaj, and her deputy, Hava Delibashi, placed many of these funds in the hands of a group linked to organised crime, pre-selected tender winners and ensured the diversion of tens of millions of euros into the accounts of IT businessman Ermal Beqiraj and Ergys Agasi.

Agasi is accused of forming a criminal group with Beqiraj to rig and extort tenders from the AKSHI, even using violence and hostage-taking.

Agasi was arrested in August 27 after being on the run for months. Beqiraj was arrested earlier in France on July 24 while flying a light aircraft through restricted airspace over a nuclear power plant.

Karcanaj, Delibashi and Agasi all deny charges while Beqiraj is still under arrest in France. SPAK alleges that he transferred a portion of his illicit proceeds to France, using the cash to purchase a château, two apartments and motor vehicles, while also depositing over 2 million euros in bank accounts.

The alleged involvement of top security officials in this scheme, providing criminals with information and assisting them, has left many in the country in shock.


“Whenever something happens, we say: ‘This is the end; nothing worse than this could possibly happen.’ But in this country, the problem is that even the end has no end,” Mentor Kikia, a journalist and analyst, wrote on Facebook.

The opposition has urged President Bajram Begaj to call an urgent meeting of the State Security Council.

Ruling Socialist Party MPs are urging caution. “We must await the final judicial verdict. Nothing is true until proven by the courts,” Blendi Cuci, a Socialist MP, told a meeting of parliament’s Committee on Internal Affairs and Defence, after opposition MPs asked for the issue to be urgently included in parliamentary sessions.




About Balkan Insight
The Balkan Insight (formerly the Balkin Investigative Reporting Network, BIRN) is a close group of editors and trainers that enables journalists in the region to produce in-depth analytical and investigative journalism on complex political, economic and social themes. BIRN emerged from the Balkan programme of the Institute for War & Peace Reporting, IWPR, in 2005. The original IWPR Balkans team was mandated to localise that programme and make it sustainable, in light of changing realities in the region and the maturity of the IWPR intervention. Since then, its work in publishing, media training and public debate activities has become synonymous with quality, reliability and impartiality. A fully-independent and local network, it is now developing as an efficient and self-sustainable regional institution to enhance the capacity for journalism that pushes for public debate on European-oriented political and economic reform.
View all posts by Balkan Insight →

Two ‘Russian’ Elections Whose Outcome Really Matters: South Ossetia And Udmurtia – Analysis




By Paul Goble

Key Takeaways:

The author says Russia’s latest Duma vote did what the Kremlin wanted: opposition was barred and United Russia kept a rubber-stamp majority Putin can call a mandate for the Ukraine war.

Two quieter votes may matter more. In South Ossetia, Moscow-backed Marat Kambolov—an official from North Ossetia—won the presidency after a deeper cooperation pact and a sacked local governor, which the piece reads as a step toward annexation if Russia loses leverage in Armenia, even though Tbilisi and the world still formally oppose border changes.

In Udmurtia, émigrés and locals used an anonymous online ballot to pick a 10-member opposition assembly under journalist Andrey Grigoryev, reviving a 1990 sovereignty line for all peoples of the republic. Moscow faces a cross-ethnic protest vote; other émigré groups face a test of who can claim to speak for a region.

The outcome of Russia’s latest Duma “election” has been as expected. The Kremlin banned opposition figures from taking part, whose presence might have cost the ruling United Russia Party its constitutional majority. As a result, the Kremlin has gotten almost precisely what it sought. The elections resulted in an even more tightly controlled Russian parliament that will rubber-stamp whatever Russian President Vladimir Putin asks for. He will use these results to claim the legitimacy of his regime and overwhelming Russian popular support for his war against Ukraine (e.g., CNN, September 21).

Because the Duma vote involved all of Russia and because the Kremlin trumpeted its supposed importance, the just-completed Russian vote unsurprisingly attracted enormous attention both in Russia and abroad. Two other “Russian” elections held at the same time, though they drew far less attention, appear set to prove more fateful. First, a Kremlin-backed Russian citizen was elected as president of South Ossetia, the Georgian breakaway territory Moscow helped wrest from Tbilisi in 2008 (OC Media, September 9; Vot Tak, September 19; Kavkazskiy Uzel, September 20; RITM Eurasia, September 21). Second, an opposition assembly in the Udmurt Republic in Russia’s Middle Volga region was selected via a secure internet channel (Region.Expert, September 18; Udmurtia, accessed September 22). The first sets the stage for Russia’s annexation of South Ossetia, and the second challenges the Kremlin by laying the groundwork for a legitimate alternative to Moscow’s rule there, as well as for opponents of Putin’s rule in emigration who do not move to organize similar bodies in similar ways.

After Putin invaded Georgia in 2008, South Ossetia along with Abkhazia became partially recognized states, controlled, especially in the case of South Ossetia, by Moscow, and have diplomatic relations with only a handful of countries. Many expected Moscow would annex South Ossetia and join it to Russia’s North Ossetian republic just north of the border. That has not happened for at least three reasons. First, international opposition to border changes, including in the South Caucasus, continues (EXO FM, August 7). Second, Moscow wants to deepen its rapprochement with Georgia, a goal that could be compromised if it absorbed one or both breakaway republics (Svobodnaya Pressa, August 8). Third, the Russian government is getting almost everything it wants without the downsides of annexation and the other financial costs of doing so, including having a military base there (Window on Eurasia, June 12, 2024).


In recent months, significant changes appear to have set the stage for eventual annexation (see EDM, June 26). First, the international community, while still officially opposed to annexations, has shown through its response to Moscow’s moves against Ukraine and Donbas that it is not prepared to take action when and if they happen. Second, Georgia, while still opposed to annexation, has fewer choices than it did and might not end its cooperation with Moscow even if Russia annexed South Ossetia. Third, the Russian military base in South Ossetia has become vastly more important for Moscow given that Russia may soon lose its base in Armenia or be forced to reduce its size and capabilities to remain (see EDM, September 8; Window on Eurasia, September 19).

Since his actions began last spring, Putin has been seen as willing to move toward annexation. He signed a far more comprehensive cooperation agreement with Tskhinvali, giving Russia even more control over that republic. He sacked the governor and endorsed Marat Kambolov as his successor, an Ossetian from the north whose entire career has been in the Russian Federation. This is a step the Kremlin had never taken before, and it has now been formalized by the snap election in that republic on September 18 (OC Media, September 9; Vot Tak, September 19). While some observers expect that these moves reflect a desire by Putin only to clean up the increasingly troubled situation in the South Ossetian government, most view them as another step toward annexation. They argue, however, that the move may not be imminent, since Kambolov will have to gain control of the government there (OC Media, September 9).


Moscow and Kambolov may move more quickly toward annexation, especially if Moscow loses its base in Armenia. If so, that by itself would make the vote in South Ossetia more significant than the orchestrated elections in the Russian Federation.

If what is taking place in South Ossetia reflects Kremlin calculations and interests, another electoral development far removed from the North Caucasus does not. That is Udmurtia, a Middle Volga republic with a long history of resisting Moscow from the Russian Civil War to this day (Window on Eurasia, September 14, 2019, August 13, 2023, February 22, 2022). Its tradition in that regard is typically ignored because the republic is small, with only 1.5 million residents, two-thirds of whom are ethnically Russian and only one-fifth are ethnically Udmurt. These Finno-Ugric people are traditionally animist but are now counted by many as Russian Orthodox.

In recent years, Moscow has responded by repressing the Udmurt minority, arresting protesters and driving even more into emigration, where the Udmurts are increasingly active (Window on Eurasia, March 1). Instead of retreating into a narrow nationalism, however, that emigration has retained its internationalist positions. Last year, it reissued its 1990 declaration of sovereignty for all the peoples of the republic (Window on Eurasia, September 21, 2025). Last month, it planned to create an independent national assembly through an election on September 20 (Udmurtia, accessed September 22). That election, organized under the leadership of journalist Andrey Grigoryev, naturally had to be held online using a new internet technology that allows voters to remain anonymous (Region.Expert, September 18; OpaVote, accessed September 22).

Details about the election beyond a report that 10 members were elected to the assembly have not been announced (Facebook/Sergey Antonov, September 21). Still, the very fact that such an election was held to fill such a body represents a serious challenge to Moscow, as well as to émigré groups of ethnic Russians, individual national groups, or a combination of both. For Moscow, the challenge comes from individuals willing to stand as candidates and from the readiness of people both in the republic and in the emigration to vote in an election the Russian government opposes, all the more because it encourages Russians and non-Russians to work together against Moscow. For émigré groups, in turn, the challenge of what the Udmurts have done is almost equally great. Their action calls into question both the claims of groups without such a demonstration of backing to speak for their regions and republics and the unwillingness of many to reach across ethnic lines to seek greater freedom, autonomy, and even independence for their regions. As a result, this “Russian” election may also have a greater impact than the much-ballyhooed one for the new Duma.

This article was published at The Jamestown Foundation


About Paul Goble
Paul Goble is a longtime specialist on ethnic and religious questions in Eurasia. Most recently, he was director of research and publications at the Azerbaijan Diplomatic Academy. Earlier, he served as vice dean for the social sciences and humanities at Audentes University in Tallinn and a senior research associate at the EuroCollege of the University of Tartu in Estonia. He has served in various capacities in the U.S. State Department, the Central Intelligence Agency and the International Broadcasting Bureau as well as at the Voice of America and Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty and at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace. Mr. Goble maintains the Window on Eurasia blog and can be contacted directly at paul.goble@gmail.com 
View all posts by Paul Goble →

The Udmurtia Republic, Russia Guide

How War Propaganda Justifies Conscription Into Unjust Wars – OpEd

September 23, 2026

MISES

By Dr. Wanjiru Njoya

Key Takeaways:

Drawing on Murray Rothbard, the author calls conscription indentured servitude: no one may coerce another to fight; hazardous service should be paid, not seized. The debate revived when Britain floated drafts amid Russia fears and a 13-group petition demanded a ban.

New York’s July 1863 draft riots after Lincoln’s Enrollment Act are the cautionary tale: $300 exemptions for the rich, Irish and German immigrants who saw the Emancipation Proclamation as a war measure that skipped Union slave states and occupied South, plus more than 100 dead and a sharp drop in the city’s Black population.

Abolitionists such as Garrison often stayed home while others fought. Mises, the piece says, allowed a draft only for true home defense. A YouGov poll of 3,044 Britons found 38% of under-40s would refuse a world war and 30% even an invasion. Unpopular governments, Lew Rockwell is quoted, should not say “we” when they make war.

Conscription is a form of indentured servitude. Murray Rothbard argued that everyone has a natural right to self-defense, but “we have no moral right to use coercion—the bayonet or the revolver—to force someone else to defend us.”

Rothbard argued that if we want men to stand in our defense, “the way to induce people to volunteer for hazardous jobs is to pay them extra as compensation.” And yet, instead of offering a wage that would reward men who sign up willingly, governments rely on force to press conscripts into service. The conscript is,

. . .seized by the authorities and inducted into the armed forces. There his body and will are no longer his own: he is subject to the dictates of the government; and he can be forced to kill and to place his own life in jeopardy if the authorities so decree.

This debate recently returned to public attention when it was reported that the United Kingdom is reconsidering conscription due to what the UK government sees as escalating hostilities with Russia.

Campaigners are protesting over the prospect of conscription returning amid mounting Russian threats against Britain. A coalition of 13 British peace and faith organisations has launched a petition demanding the Government rule out military conscription, or any compulsory form of national service involving the armed forces. . . There is currently no conscription in Britain, although concerns about World War 3 have fuelled renewed discussions on how the armed forces could be expanded.

For conscription to be even remotely tolerable by the public, it is, at the very least, necessary for warmakers to persuade the public that the war is just, and worth fighting. Otherwise, people are likely to revolt, as happened in New York when the Enrollment Act of March 1863 drafted men to fight Lincoln’s war.

On July 11, 1863 the first names for induction into the army were called. The next day, New York erupted into some of the most violent riots in American history. The office of the provost marshal—charged with enforcing the draft—was burned, railroad lines were destroyed, and telegraph lines cut. . . . Over one hundred people died in the rioting, thousands were wounded, and thousands of African Americans fled New York.

This attempt to corral New Yorkers into the war against their will followed soon after the Emancipation Proclamation of January 1863. The implication, following the Proclamation, was that what had started out as a politically-driven war to save the Union was now a moral crusade to free the slaves of the South—surely a just cause! But very few were convinced. John M. Taylor observes that, under the Enrollment Act of 1863,

Wealthy Northerners could either fight or pay a $300.00 exemption from the draft. The Irish, mostly coming from meager circumstances, typically lacked the funds to buy exemptions. Whereas large numbers of wealthy Southerners fought, few wealthy Northerners did. William Tecumseh Sherman alluded to this, stating, “that without conscription there would have been no way to ‘separate the sheep from the goats and demonstrate what citizens will fight and what will only talk.’”

The Emancipation Proclamation was not seen by the draftees as moral justification to fight. For one, the Proclamation belied its own moral authority by failing to free all slaves and only purporting to free those under Confederate control. Freeing only the slaves of one’s enemies, almost two years into the war, marked the Proclamation as a war measure rather than a humanitarian edict.

Further, the Proclamation did not apply to the five slave states fighting on the Union side—Delaware, Maryland, West Virginia, Kentucky, and Missouri—nor did it free slaves in parts of the South that had already been brought under federal control. For example, Tennessee and parts of Louisiana—New Orleans and Union-held parishes—were excluded from the Proclamation.

Far from the Emancipation Proclamation persuading the rioters that Lincoln’s cause was just, they saw emancipation as a threat to their own precarious socioeconomic circumstances. They turned their ire against the authorities and Lincoln’s friend Horace Greeley, but also against the black population who were not to blame for Lincoln’s stratagem.

The long term damage to New York’s black population was significant: In the aftermath of the riots, the city’s black population plummeted by more than 20 percent, to below 10,000 (the lowest number since the 1820s), as blacks fled the city in droves.

It is often observed that warmakers do not personally tend to show up to fight in their own wars. This gives them further incentive to rely on conscription. Many New Yorkers were against the war in the first place, but, in total numbers, far more of them ended up fighting in the war compared to the abolitionists of Massachusetts who had backed the war from the beginning. Professor Clyde Wilson observes that,

Historians have often noted that, generally speaking, the best generals and soldiers in the “Union” armies were not supporters of the Republican Party or the Lincoln administration. Republicans and especially abolitionists tended to avoid military service in the war they had initiated.

For example, the abolitionist William Lloyd Garrison was a pacifist, and so were his fighting-age sons. They declared that they were conscientious objectors and would not serve even if drafted. Although Garrison was a vocal supporter of Lincoln’s war, he regarded pacifism as his Christian duty and denied that it was hypocritical to refrain from personally joining the war he publicly supported.

One of Garrison’s sons did acquiesce to serve if drafted. He was eventually offered an officer’s commission, which, coincidentally, worked out as an opportunity for him to burnish his racially-enlightened credentials by leading an all-black unit.

One concern many have is that without conscription a country might come under attack and lack the manpower to mount a defense. However, when the cause is just, and seen by citizens to be necessary in their own defense, a government that rules by consent need not fear that no one would be willing to stand defense. In this context, fighting defense of hearth and home, Ludwig von Mises saw conscription as justified. This justification would not apply to an aggressive war.

In “Did the South Have to Fight,” Thomas Fleming observes that, “Many Southerners resented conscription not because they were unwilling to fight but because they wanted the honor of fighting as volunteers.” They saw the cause for which they fought as one for the defense of the South, not just for the selfish interests of a few warmakers.

The case is entirely different when an unpopular government already knows that many people do not trust its motives and would therefore be unwilling to fight its wars. In the UK, the Daily Express reports:

A YouGov survey of 3,044 people found 38% of under-40s would refuse to serve if a new world war broke out, while 30% said they would refuse even in the event of an imminent invasion of the UK.

Unpopular governments that rule by the bayonet are most likely to resort to conscription. In the case of the New York Draft Riots, many of the conscripts were immigrants who had recently arrived from Germany and Ireland and did not see any reason to get involved in Lincoln’s war.

As Lew Rockwell has observed, often the warmakers wage war for reasons that have little to do with popular opinion. It is no surprise that they deem war propaganda and use of force against their own citizens to be necessary, after the fact, to persuade people to support their war effort. As Rockwell counsels,

The people and the warmakers are two distinct groups. We must never say “we” when discussing the US government’s foreign policy. For one thing, the warmakers do not care about the opinions of the majority of Americans. It is silly and embarrassing for Americans to speak of “we” when discussing their government’s foreign policy, as if their input were necessary to or desired by those who make war.

About the author: 

Dr. Wanjiru Njoya is the Walter E. Williams Research Fellow for the Mises Institute. She is the author of Economic Freedom and Social Justice (Palgrave Macmillan, 2021), Redressing Historical Injustice (Palgrave Macmillan, 2023, with David Gordon), “You Stole Our Land: Common Law, Private Property, and Rothbardian Principles of Justice” (Journal of Libertarian Studies, 28 (1): 91–119 (2024) and “Individual Liberty, Formal Equality, and the Rule of Law” (Palgrave Handbook of Classical Liberalism, forthcoming, 2026).

Source: This article was published by Mises


About MISES
The Mises Institute, founded in 1982, teaches the scholarship of Austrian economics, freedom, and peace. The liberal intellectual tradition of Ludwig von Mises (1881-1973) and Murray N. Rothbard (1926-1995) guides us. Accordingly, the Mises Institute seeks a profound and radical shift in the intellectual climate: away from statism and toward a private property order. The Mises Institute encourages critical historical research, and stands against political correctness.
View all posts by MISES →

The K-Shaped Economy Is Not In Your Imagination – OpEd


Illustration explaining K-Shaped Economic Recovery. Image: Grok

September 21, 2026

MISES

By Michael Matulef

Key Takeaways:

The letter is not the cause. Author: S&P 500 up over 90% in three years; top 10% of earners near half of consumer spending. Moody’s, Morgan Stanley, NY Fed: a K—assets up, wages vs rent and groceries down. Peter Atwater coined the label in covid; Mark Zandi calls it structural. Top 40% of households ~85% of wealth. Naming it, he says (via Mark Thornton), is not explaining it.

Cantillon’s spigot. New money is not a bathtub that fills evenly (1755). First drawers—banks, big firms, the Treasury—spend at old prices; wages catch prices late. Cheap rates lift stocks, bonds, houses; big debtors repay in thinner dollars. Under commodity money, Thornton says, wages and wealth move together. The K, for this school, is central banking, not “capitalism.”

Wrong cures, hard ones. Tax cuts, rate cuts, controls, tariffs, checks rerun the same injection. Treasury saying the K is “over” does not shut the tap. Author’s list: spending cuts, market rates, sound money—and a bust that liquidates the boom. Mises’s second job: make that story palatable so anger hits the printer, not the neighbor. His brief, not a forecast.

Open the financial pages and a strange creature stares back at you. The S&P 500 has climbed over 90 percent in three years. The top 10 percent of earners now account for nearly half of all consumer spending. Moody’s, Morgan Stanley, and the New York Fed agree on the shape of the thing: the economy has split in two. Asset-holders ride the upper arm of the “K” upward while wage earners slide down the lower one, watching groceries, rent, and insurance devour paychecks that no longer stretch.

The commentators have responded the way they respond to everything: with a label. Call it “K-shaped” often enough in the news and the naming starts to feel like an explanation. It is not. As Mark Thornton has observed, journalists and mainstream economists love to place simple labels on things they do not understand to cover for their ignorance. The label tells us what is happening. It tells us nothing about why.

Mises described the stakes exactly in Human Action:

The flowering of human society depends on two factors: the intellectual power of outstanding men to conceive sound social and economic theories, and the ability of these or other men to make these ideologies palatable to the majority.

The first factor was supplied long ago: Cantillon conceived the theory in 1755—a century before the Austrian School was born—and Mises, Hazlitt, and Rothbard spent their careers refining it. The second factor’s failure is the world we live in, and it has a name: what Murray Rothbard called economic ignorance.

The Most-Discussed, Least-Studied Subject on Earth

Rothbard put the problem bluntly: “It is no crime to be ignorant of economics. . . But it is totally irresponsible to have a loud and vociferous opinion on economic subjects while remaining in this state of ignorance.”

Notice what makes economics unique. Nobody lectures their electrician about voltage, yet nearly everyone holds strong opinions on prices, wages, and money, because these things feel knowable in a different way. Ignorance of electricity threatens nothing about how electrons flow; the engineers proceed regardless. But as Mises warned, public opinion ultimately determines the course of economic policy. Mass ignorance of economics does not stay in the voting booth. It converts directly into bad policy, and bad policy into bad outcomes.

Frédéric Bastiat identified the error’s shape in 1850: the bad economist confines himself to the visible effect; the good economist accounts for what is seen and what is not seen. Henry Hazlitt built Economics in One Lesson on it: trace the longer effects of any policy, for all groups, not the immediate effect on the favored group in the headline.

The K Is Real, and It Is No Mystery

Peter Atwater coined the term early in the covid era: white-collar workers shifted to Zoom while lockdowns crushed service workers. What began as a label for an uneven recovery has hardened into a description of the economy’s structure. Moody’s Mark Zandi calls it “not a cyclical or temporary phenomena” but a structural, fundamental issue. The top 40 percent of households control roughly 85 percent of national wealth; everyone else rides the lower arm.

The mainstream explanations are remarkably thin. Either they restate the pattern (the wealthy own stocks; the poor face inflation) or they default to a vague narrative about capitalist greed. Neither identifies a mechanism. Both imply that the cure is more of the interventionism that produced the disease.

Cantillon’s Spigot

Here is what economic ignorance conceals: money is not neutral.

The textbook assumption—smuggled into nearly every mainstream model—is that new money raises all prices and wages proportionally and at once, like water filling a bathtub. Cantillon demolished this in 1755. New money enters the economy at specific points, and the injection redistributes real purchasing power as it spreads. Those closest to the spigot spend at yesterday’s prices; those furthest away get it last, after prices have risen.

Now ask: where is the spigot in a fiat-money, central-banking system? Inside the banking system. The first recipients are banks, large corporations, and the biggest borrower of all—the federal government. As Thornton explains, artificially-low rates push up stock, bond, and real estate prices, and “the wealthy by definition are the largest holders of physical assets.” Meanwhile, “wage rates are undermined by a declining purchasing power of currency,” and big borrowers repay their loans in deflated dollars, transferring wealth from savers to debtors.

That is not a metaphor. That is the K-shaped economy: the Cantillon effect, one of the core mechanisms within Austrian business cycle theory. Washington has flooded the economy with spending and suppressed rates for a quarter century, opening the spigot all the way after 2008 and 2020. The divergence was no side effect of this policy, it was the policy.

Under commodity money, Thornton adds, such divergences do not appear; wages, incomes, and wealth move together. The K is not what capitalism looks like. The K is what central banking looks like.

Ignorance Compounds the Error

Because the public and its pundits cannot diagnose the cause, they reach for remedies that repeat it. The usual prescriptions—tax breaks and interest rate cuts—will backfire, because they rerun the same asset-inflating, wage-eroding process. Add price controls, tariffs, and stimulus checks, each sold on its visible effect while the unseen effects fall on everyone else: Bastiat’s broken window as fiscal policy. When the Treasury secretary announces that the K-shaped economy “is over,” ask: over because the money stopped? Of course not. The spigot is still running. The K is still being drawn.

A society whose two halves move in opposite directions does not stay polite. The family on the lower arm has never read a page of the Austrian School, but it can read a bank statement, and it knows the game is rigged. What ignorance does is aim that anger at the wrong target: at capitalism instead of central banking, at the neighbor instead of the money printer, at “the rich” instead of the policy that made proximity to new money the road to riches. Every demagogue in history has harvested that rage, and the crop is always the same: more intervention, more inflation, more divergence, more rage. The demagogues, notice, are winning Mises’s second factor. They know how to make an ideology palatable to the majority. That is how economic error becomes social unrest, and unrest into something uglier. The K is not an economic curiosity, it is a fuse.

The Painful Cure

Ideas rule the world, Mises taught, which makes the K-shaped economy an intellectual problem before a monetary one. The monetary fix is easy to state and brutal to enact: deep spending cuts, program eliminations, market-determined interest rates, and ultimately sound money that no committee can conjure into existence.

Let us be honest about what that correction involves: pain. Real cuts mean real checks that stop arriving. Market-determined rates mean asset prices fall to what reality, not the money printer, can support, and a quarter century of malinvestment gets liquidated: businesses close, jobs vanish.

But the Austrians understand what the panic-monger does not: the bust is not the disease, it is the healing. The damage was done during the boom, when artificially-cheap credit steered capital into ventures that could never pay. Every rate cut and spending bill that postpones the reckoning enlarges the correction. Fear the booms, not the busts. The boom is where the wealth is destroyed; the bust is merely where the destruction is admitted.

The Foundation for a Better World

This brings us back to Mises’s two factors. Economics is not an academic hobby. It is the study of how human beings cooperate peacefully, the operating manual for the only system that has ever lifted ordinary people out of poverty: free exchange under sound money. A citizenry that understands cause and effect cannot be stampeded into demanding its own impoverishment. A citizenry that does not will keep trading liberty for stimulus and calling the bill compassion.

The fight, then, is the one Mises named in Human Action: the fight against error. Not by begging the central planners for a fairer share of the plunder. Learn the causal chain yourself. Teach it to your kids, your coworkers, your neighbors. Every person who understands why new money enriches the connected and impoverishes the distant is one less voter drawing the K wider, and one more brick in the foundation of a freer world.

The outstanding men did their part. Cantillon, Bastiat, Mises, Hazlitt, Rothbard: the theories are conceived, written in plain language, much of it free. The second factor is unclaimed. We are far down the wrong road, and the way back runs through a bust that will be blamed on everyone but its authors. So be it. Mises did not ask for an army. He asked for men and women with the courage to make the truth palatable to a majority raised on poison. Be one of them.

About the author: Michael Matulef works in construction by day and is an independent student of Austrian Economics by night. Mike associates philosophically with crypto-anarchism and is interested in learning how Bitcoin and other open source technologies can create parallel systems based on consent rather than coercion.

Source: This article was published by the Mises Institute


About MISES
The Mises Institute, founded in 1982, teaches the scholarship of Austrian economics, freedom, and peace. The liberal intellectual tradition of Ludwig von Mises (1881-1973) and Murray N. Rothbard (1926-1995) guides us. Accordingly, the Mises Institute seeks a profound and radical shift in the intellectual climate: away from statism and toward a private property order. The Mises Institute encourages critical historical research, and stands against political correctness.
View all posts by MISES →

Breaking Through Infoglut: The Anger-Information Overload Cycle – Analysis




September 4, 2026

 360info

By Axel Bruns

Why are we so angry? The easy, lazy and entirely wrong explanation is that our technologies are to blame: the Internet, smartphones, social media, artificial intelligence, and so on.

That’s the argument behind Australia’s doomed social media ban for young people, which is inspired by the deceptive claims and cherry-picked statistics peddled by pop-psychology influencers like Jonathan Haidt in his roundly debunked book The Anxious Generation, and driven by a moral panic that was cynically manufactured by the Murdoch media.

So why are we so anxious, and angry? Take the average 20-year-old in Australia: born into the aftermath of the 2008 Great Financial Crisis, they have seen companies reap record profits while for ordinary Australians the prospect of affordable housing has slipped ever further from their grasp.

They grew up in the shadows of the unresolved conflicts in Iraq and Afghanistan and today encounter a daily dose of death and destruction in the reporting from Ukraine, Gaza, Iran and other conflict hotspots. They spent their most formative teenage years in COVID lockdowns and Zoom schooling, while conspiracy theorists tried to convince their parentsthat the pandemic was a hoax perpetuated by some global cabal.

They’ve experienced more than a decade of the hottest years in human memory during their lifetime, most likely lived through one or more natural disasters in their area and yet have seen utter political inaction on the climate crisis. And those of us who are older have simply experienced all that for longer.

So how could they, and we, not be anxious and angry – regardless of whether we use smartphones and social media, or not? As David Weinberger wrote as early as 2004, in his fabulous take-down of the ‘echo chamber’ fallacy, “the problem with an extraterrestrial-conspiracy mailing list isn’t that it’s an echo chamber”, facilitated by the digital platforms of the day: rather, the problem is “that it thinks there’s a conspiracy by extraterrestrials”.

The same goes for climate crisis denialists, anti-vaccination activists, sovereign citizens, far-right extremists, and other anti-social, anti-societal, and anti-democratic groups: it’s their angry, extreme, exclusionary and uncompromising views that are the problem, rather than the technologies they use to express and spread them; if they didn’t have X as a platform that actively endorses their views, they’d find another.


Wherever that anxiety and anger comes from, whether ‘the Internet’ (whatever that means these days) or the other threatening scenarios: together they have highlighted the complex world we live in.

Conspiracy as comfort

Let’s take one example: the observation that pandemics like COVID-19 simply happen from time to time and that there’s little more we can do than simply to prepare for the next one, is entirely correct, of course, but also deeply unsatisfying. It’s a great deal more convenient to comfort ourselves with fairytales of bioweapon factories, lab leaks, depopulation agendas, or interference by the Illuminati, aliens, or the Antichrist: they provide a concrete target for our anxiety, anger and action.

Where our modern communication technologies do come in is in the fact that they’ve made all that information – ‘real’ as much as ‘fake’ – so much easier to access and circulate, globally and instantly.

This substantially contributes to an information overload: we can readily access WHO reports about the pandemic and its causes, the more or less careful and insightful coverage of those reports by the world’s media, but also the ‘explainer’ writings and videos of conspiracy theorists and influencers that cherry-pick and misrepresent those facts in order to perpetuate their ‘alternative’ worldviews.

We’re overloaded by this infoglut: we, all of us, have neither the time nor the subject matter expertise to be able to reliably distinguish verified facts from made-up stories, or well-supported conclusions from far-fetched conjecture.

Ironically, the problem we are facing – the reason we are so angry – is the very opposite of the claims made by those still peddling the ‘echo chamber’ and ‘filter bubble’ fallacies that see us all in self-insulating bubbles: rather, the hyperconnectivity enabled by our current media environments produces an information overload which we are ill-equipped to process or reduce.


We may not consciously articulate this all the time, but deep down we recognise this, and that makes us anxious, and even angry; for many, the coping mechanism is to reach for easy explanations and ready-made scapegoats (elites, migrants, secret societies, other countries – or generally, others who simply are not like us).

But that story isn’t new; in fact, it is perhaps as old as humanity itself, even if it now plays out across a different media landscape.

It can’t be solved by banning smartphones, or social media, or AI; indeed, conspiracy theories and other disinformation usually only reach a broader audience when they’re also amplified by politicians, celebrities, and mainstream media.

Anxiety fuels scapegoating

Uncertainty produces rumours, which generate anxiety, which results in the scapegoating and exclusion of others; the commercial imperatives of mainstream media as well as social media encourage this further, as both seek sustained audience engagement.

Any attempts to deal with these destructive dynamics must focus first and foremost on the underlying causes of our anxiety and anger, of course; to return to where we started, as governments in Australia and elsewhere are beginning to find out, you don’t make young people less anxious by preventing them from communicating about their anxieties, but by paying serious attention to their actual concerns.

At the same time, we must confront the challenges of hyperconnectivity and information overload more directly, and central to this is to improve literacy in all its forms. This includes, of course, news and digital media literacy, to enable citizens better to distinguish quality, reliable information and sources from those that seek to mislead and enrage them; societal and civic literacy, to improve public understanding of the mechanisms of government and governance in Australia and elsewhere.

We must also ensure that citizens understand their individual rights and (just as importantly) obligations towards others within society, and enhance scientific literacy (across both social and natural sciences) to prevent them from falling prey to scientistic cherry-picking, whether on climate change or the effects of social media use.

Together those initiatives aim to save Australia from a trajectory that promotes deeply polarised, winner-takes-all politics as we see it played out in US politics. Instead, they redirect citizens towards an understanding of political debate that is oriented towards workable compromise between legitimate diverging opinions, even if consensus remains unattainable.

To achieve that will not be a quick fix. It will be a generational project. However, Australia can learn from other countries here: from Finland’s successful media literacy strategy, and Germany’s Federal Agency for Civic Education.

Indeed, education at all levels, from primary to tertiary and beyond to lifelong learning, is central to this, and a substantial boost in investment will be required even just to avoid a further decline in media literacy levels across the population in the short term. All the more important that we confront this urgently, then: if we don’t, we’ll only grow more anxious and ever more angry.

About the author: Axel Bruns is an Australian Laureate Fellow and Professor in the Digital Media Research Centre at the Queensland University of Technology, Brisbane.

Source: This article was published by 360info

About 360info
360info provides an independent public information service that helps better explain the world, its challenges, and suggests practical solutions. Their content is sourced entirely from the international university and research community and then edited and curated by professional editors to ensure maximum readability. Editors are responsible for ensuring authors have a current affiliation with a university and are writing in their area of expertise.
View all posts by 360info →