Advocacy and Agency in Discouraging Times, Dr. Robert Zuber

18 Jan

One should try to be honest with oneself almost as a daily devotion.  Ian Brady

Never try to discourage thinking, for you are sure to succeed. Bertrand Russell

The world was to me a secret which I desired to divine. Mary Shelly

It is an illusion of idealistic children of light to imagine that we can destroy evil merely by avowing ideals.  Reinhold Niebuhr

An hour of innocence builds more trust than years of diplomacy.  Abhijit Naskar

History does not care about intention. It records outcomes.  Leo Croft

When a philosopher happens to read some of his older texts, and most of the time he shakes his head in disapproval, he can be sure that he is on the right path. For this is an infallible sign that his thought has evolved and that he possesses the capacity to learn, to unlearn, to adapt. Giannis Delimitsos

Why do we call all our generous ideas illusions, and the mean ones truths? Edith Wharton

I have been writing and advocating in the peace and security space for many long years, trying to maintain poise and principle amidst updrafts of needless violence and now the crumbling of an international order that, though far from perfect, has helped hold together some semblance of security and dignity amidst the oppression and greed to which too many of us succumb.

Relative to many people I am privileged to know in this world, I have had a relatively drama-free life.  But I must acknowledge, albeit with some hesitation, that my engagement with an increasingly unruly world, and even with some of the people and organizations with whom we ostensibly share goals and principles, have taken an increasingly heavy toll.

I have attempted over many years to keep my own counsel in part as a service to those with whom I interact, especially the younger people for whom bursts of cynicism or other careless emotional reactions only serve to  push them away from the very work I would wish for them to undertake.  And though I’m clearly losing more and more miles off my proverbial fast ball as time progresses, I do my best to maintain a posture of hopefulness and competence amidst the current chaos.

After all, in a world of sometimes grave suffering, my own drama has been, and remains, more self-inflicted than due to any objective influence.

All this said, I’m not going to keep my own counsel here, which means that some of you who still  read these posts might wish to close this file and move on to more productive endeavors.  For those who remain, which likely includes several folks  also struggling with the current weight of bewildering, unwelcome change, perhaps they and others will relate to what is coming below and, if only for a short while, swap out  their own masks of rationality and competency for a few additional moments of honesty.

As some of you know, I’ve been re-reading some of my graduate school texts and my earlier writings.  In both of these instances, my main take-away has been some iteration of “what were you thinking?” Why did you underline that paragraph while missing the more salient insights down the same page?  Why did you allow yourself to think that articles of yours which were for some unknown reason accepted into journals or magazines might actually be breaking some new ground?  And why did you not run more confidently with insights that you knew to be true but which lacked the courage to pursue? And, finally, why have you been so slow to unlearn and adapt?

These questions seemed especially pertinent as I re-read “The Children of Light and the Children of Darkness” by Reinhold Niebuhr, a book now 80 + years old which had a stunning impact on me at the time of first reading even if its influence on my subsequent writing and activities would remain uneven.

Niebuhr’s Christian realism (not nationalism) spoke to me as one who took the violence and discrimination of the world seriously but felt that many of the responses to such ills were more sentimental than impactful.  By “sentimental” I mean (and Niebuhr mostly meant) the largely unexamined belief that the breakthroughs of history are inevitable; that institutions in which we have spent years such as  the UN are grounded in fundamental principles which ensure their survival and even their prosperity;  that the hard-won achievements of humanity are assured to persist even absent the hard work, dedication and self-analysis required to weed out the hypocrisies that make most of us unworthy stewards of our most profound ideas and values; that we can confront and nullify threats and evils merely by spouting rhetorical condemnations and avowing abstract ideals.  

For Niebuhr, history is creative but not redemptive.  This is how I had come to see it also.  A space where we can participate in and offer correctives as needed regarding the complexities of the world and ourselves, the successes and inadequacies of our policies, practices and aspirations.  To the extent that we can escape our own limitations, our knee-jerk forgiveness of mixed motives and unimplemented ideals, our “rooting interests” which cause pain to those who “root” differently, then history holds possibilities for maximizing dignity, empathy and care.

Possibilities not inevitabilities. 

We now find ourselves at a particularly discouraging moment not only because institutions are crumbling and violence and cynicism are wildly on the loose, but because we humans have not proven ourselves up to current challenges. Indeed, this current, oppressive moment seems utterly beyond our remit. Too many people in shoes similar to mine have allowed ourselves to be blinded by a light of virtuous aspiration which is largely self-manufactured. Such light remains possible in our age as it was in others, and yet our sentimental attachments to what is good, but not yet good enough, have resulted in more fog than illumination, more abstracted diagnoses about the status of institutions and fewer concrete diagnoses about the status of ourselves and our promises to others..

For me, this has long been a double discouragement; in the outsized malevolence of riches and power politics, to be sure, but also in our failure to seize the creative opportunities of the present without turning what works for us into what works for all. We know we can do better, but too many people like me who should also know better as we choose to push our chips into the center of an unstable table that we forget we must vigorously maintain if the table itself is to remain functional.

I am blessed with places to go and friends and loved ones in many of them. I am also someone who has tamed his wants such that he infrequently wants for more of anything.  But as with other friends and colleagues I know, I am veering too close to a tipping point of emotional insolvency. I have become the person  who watches sports instead of movies and documentaries because sports don’t break any of my emotional bubbles. I have become the person who can’t even sing Christmas songs in private without shedding tears. I have become the person who bonds with cats more easily than with many humans, someone whose faith tradition is now in the hands of largely unfathomable forces whose theology offers no truth or comfort, someone who harbors too many secrets  even from himself.

I am not alone in any of this even if the peculiar sources of my discouragement are not always in alignment with others.  Many rightly wonder, even despair over what might still be salvageable in our world, wonder how we can best save what is left of structures that promised much of value but also promised considerably more than they have delivered. Such persons wonder how to adjust to the dismantling of rights and institutions that we have dedicated our lives to improve but too often have also idealized and even taken for granted.

Niebuhr spent much of his writing highlighting the power of self-interest not only in those promoting the darkness of tyranny and injustice, but in the rest of us as well.  Our serial inability to remove the logs in our own eyes such that we can better see the specks in the eyes of others was a cardinal sin of my early years and a deep sadness of my later ones.  As I have come to learn, the moment we disregard our own willful blindness, the moment that we replace honest critique of personal motives with behavior now known as “virtue signaling,” we open the door to violence and worse by those content to heap scorn on our self-congratulatory claims of virtue as they seek to consign such virtue to the scrap heap of history.

When you sit in UN conference rooms day after day over many years as we have done, it is easy to point out the cynicism which infects the practices of many nations, especially but not exclusively the large and powerful ones.  Nations which come to places like the UN to put their best faces on often abusive policies.  Nations which turn their backs on treaties and international law obligations whenever such suits their interests.  Nations which create convoluted rationalizations for behaviors which are clearly contrary to the commitments which led them into the UN in the first instance.

But I have also fudged things when it served some need of mine.  I have also indulged rationalizations for choices that clearly should have taken a different direction. I have also created invitations to cynicism by not saying what needed to be said, by not betting sufficiently on the value of our own critical lens, by not insisting firmly enough that the institutions we say we care about are ultimately not going to improve in any sustainable way until we improve  ourselves as well.

Niebuhr understood well this dilemma of how to confront cynicism in the powerful and malevolent without becoming cynical ourselves. He maintained, rightly I think, that “the children of light must be armed with the wisdom of the children of darkness but remain free from their malice.”  This is a high bar, even for folks in my circles of commitment, as we are persons battered in ways that we can only begin to understand, persons in diverse global settings whose emotional bank accounts have suffered from too many withdrawals and too few deposits. 

Of course these wounds are all relative in volume and impact, but all offer important lessons. For instance, I  have long maintained the view that there is sanity in agency, that the ability to address and resolve (or at least attempt to do so) personal and even global crises is ultimately less taxing on the emotions than feeling trapped in impotence and its oft-accompanying  despair. But agency for myself and others is, indeed must be, more than defending values and ideals, more than rhetorical arguments and clarifications, more than sentimental attachments to institutions and their rules which have proven less effective than advertised and which we have ultimately done too little to energize.  My own life used to be more practical, more personal, more about enabling the agency of others than about brandishing a second-tier policy lens. For the sake of our still-numerous, still-inspirational global connections and my own, now-teetering emotional health, I need to find that missing piece of agency once again.  

May you who have read this to the end find it also.

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Manger Motivation: A Christmas Reflection, Dr. Robert Zuber

21 Dec

To handle yourself, use your head; to handle others, use your heart. Eleanor Roosevelt

Our chief want is someone who will inspire us to be what we know we could be. Ralph Waldo Emerson

Keep your fears to yourself but share your courage with others. Robert Louis Stevenson

You will see a great chasm. Jump. It is not as wide as you think. Joseph Campbell

Example is not the main thing in influencing others. It is the only thing.  Albert Schweitzer

If your actions inspire others to dream more, learn more, do more and become more, you are a leader. John Quincy Adams

Leadership is not about a title or a designation. It’s about impact, influence, and inspiration. Robin Sharma.

Last week under the presidency of Slovenia, the UN Security Council held a debate on the topic “Leadership for Peace.” 

Needless to say I was intrigued though recognizing that these terms connected by “and” are not straightforward; indeed they often cover up more light than they reveal.

Peace is ostensibly what Global Action was created to promote and inspire.  Our track record over 20+ years is mixed to be sure.  We haven’t sufficiently inspired people to transcend their own anger and grievance, nor governments to honor their political agreements and commitments; nor groups like ours to self-reflect on how endless fundraising compromises integrity and effectiveness.  Peace, after all, is something we do as much as something we promote.  As Albert Schweitzer intimated above, we have done a better job of advocating for peace than setting a peaceful example, forgetting at times that any success in our chosen  realm requires an intentional, thoughtful blending of both.

And what of leadership?  For many of the delegations present in the Council chamber, the issues which consumed their interest were related to whom the next Secretary-General might be after Antonio Guterres’ two terms in office.  This is not an irrelevant consideration given the current state of the UN and given the complex role that the SG plays in that space; a role as many others have noted, more “secretary” than “general, more implementer of the wishes of the large and powerful states than enforcer of the UN Charter and international law.  The current SG has a bit of “chicken little” in him, constantly pointing out the ways in which international law and the basic rights of civilians have been trampled, climate change threats have  largely been ignored, and conflicts continue to rage under the umbrella of large power interests and in clear violation of the UN Charter. He has surely been in a tough spot. Nevertheless, pleading for change and constructing a system which can inspire, make and sustain change are not synonymous. The next SG must do some of both but the latter tasks constitute a higher bar.

I am in the process of writing a longer piece on leadership as a contribution to a project which we will help unveil in Kosice, Slovakia in February, a project tentatively entitled the Carpathian Leadership Fellows Program and currently being facilitated by our board members Dr. Robert Thomas.  The project will focus on various aspects and incarnations of leadership pertinent to Ukraine and surrounding areas, organized around key questions including, What does leadership entail for post-conflict Ukraine?  What does it require for the various stakeholders – teachers, engineers, clergy, architects, police, merchants, artists, farmers, health workers and more – who will be asked to play prominent roles in helping Ukraine and the region recover from damaged and aging infrastructure, from young people whose education and hope for the future have both been compromised, from people internally and externally displaced by violence waiting more and less patiently to return to their communities?

I will briefly share aspects of this project (and this season) which are of particular importance to me – some relevant to the UN and others more directly relevant to the baby in the manger which is our one and only Christmas point of origin.

On leadership, what the UN cannot easily accommodate, indeed most bureaucracies cannot, is leadership’s organic nature.  Quotation after quotation at this stage of my investigation highlights this aspect of leadership, organic in the sense that it is intimately related to the active consent of those being led and is entirely related to context and condition, requiring administrative skill but also the inspiration that comes from the heart and connects to the heart.  The testimony I have found reflects leadership which inspires us to jump over chasms which seem too daunting; leadership which insists that there is a better part of ourselves yet to be revealed to self and others;  leadership which not only knows what needs to be done but also who needs to do it and how to inspire the energy, trust  and perseverance to rebuild schools and communities, hospitals and transportation; leadership which makes hope more tangible especially for people whose need to believe again in the hope of a better world, hope which has too long been buried under rubble of various forms and not of their own making. 

At the UN, leadership claimed is undermined by several factors including the machinations of the large global powers, the disconnect between policymakers and constituencies, but especially by  the promises which we make through that policy, promises which elevate many more expectations than they satisfy, promises unkept which damage the trust needed for our leadership, such as it is, to inspire broader-based action for the more peaceful, just and prosperous world we claim to want, for our children and grandchildren if not for ourselves.

And this leads me back to the Christmas manger and the inspiration of a child.  There is a lovely and oft-quoted passage from the Talmud, shared by sages as remarkable as Martin Buber and Abraham Joshua Heschel, that with the birth of each child, “the world begins anew.”  Indeed, with each child the hope of the world is restored in measures small and large.  Leadership of course should also be about instilling and growing that hope, helping people find a reason to believe that their lives and labors matter beyond fiscal outcomes.  In this way, leadership can reinforce what I understand to be a Christmas call to reach beyond the confines of what we imagine ourselves to be, to demonstrate skill and courage in larger measure in whatever contexts and conditions we find ourselves. 

For me and for many others, it is the child in the manger, the child of meager circumstance and divine significance, who remains my foundational source of hope especially through what for us has been a long season dark and cold in aspects far beyond climate.  For me, this incarnation of hopefulness lies well beyond the province of officialdom and bureaucracy. It points us towards what we often long for but also find elusive, the power and grace to be more than we are now for the people who need our example as they seek to call out more from themselves as well. These bonds of influence and inspiration now seem to be in serious need of repair. The promise and power of Christmas make such repair well within our remit.

Blessings to all in this season,

Bob

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Cruel and Incessantly Usual: An Advent Reflection, Dr. Robert Zuber

30 Nov

Cruelty has a human heart
And jealousy a human face,
Terror the human form divine,
And secrecy the human dress. William Blake

I discovered in myself sweet dreams of oppression.  Albert Camus

If God is keeping out of sight, it’s because he’s ashamed of his followers and all the cruelty and ignorance they’re responsible for promoting in his name. Philip Pullman

We can never be gods, after all–but we can become something less than human with frightening ease. N.K. Jemisin

You cannot use cruelty against yourself to justify cruelty to others. Marie Lu

All cruel people describe themselves as paragons of frankness. Tennessee Williams

Cruelty is easy, cheap and rampant.  Brene Brown

It seems to me that liberal and humane people, of whom there are many among us, would, if they were asked to rank the vices, put cruelty first, intuitively they would choose cruelty as the worst thing we do. Judith Shklar

Those of you who have endured many years of these annual messages know of my personal fondness for the image of the Jewish man or woman sitting on the end of a remote cliff, staring into the vastness of space, wondering if there is any relief for the suffering borne of an enveloping cruelty  part personal and part embedded in the institutions of the day, sadly including that embedded in  religious institutions.  

It is hard for some of us to imagine that moment of being seemingly rebuffed by such a vastness and then having to return to domiciles and communities under oppressive occupation complete with religious leaders who have turned their backs on the needy and dispossessed, people longing for relief who will accept even its faintest hope, a  veritable whiff of a world that is kinder and more just than the one which defines most all of their daily business.

We moderns who like to imagine the superior manner in which we conduct our earthly affairs are more than occasionally guilty of scoffing at the cruelty of those earlier times and the misery they inflicted, scoffing as though we have somehow graduated from the lusts of degrading and subjugating other human beings, graduated from muck to which too many of our ancestors were consigned and about which they felt they could do little.  Look at how far we’ve come.  Look at our “mixed blessing” achievements and successes. Look at our evermore fancy gadgets and the clever economic predations they enable. Look at our decision making which consistently magnifies current interest to the detriment of future interest. Look at the overly confident, divisive, self-satisfied proclamations that our modernity privileges some of us to spout. 

Maybe this isn’t the Advent to look too closely at ourselves.  Or maybe it is precisely the moment to do so.

For the sojourn at the edge of the cliff is not only about the longing for a redeemer.  It is also about the discomfort – at times severe – during those all-too-rare moments when there is nothing but vastness and quiet to distract us from ourselves, to remind us of our relative impotence, the many things we have done and especially left undone, the potential once identified and then summarily squandered, the love and care we failed to provide in sufficient measure or rebuffed as others tried to provide for us.

And the cruelty.  Always the cruelty, perhaps the most shocking feature of our current, collective incarnation, cruelty disturbingly linked to those long-ago days of occupation and crucifixion, those days which relegated sickness to the demonic and branded as unclean anyone who broke any of the complex regulations brandished by religious elites, regulations which such elites often felt entitled to ignore themselves, regulations sold as revelations of a God who ostensibly prioritized honor and deference over compassion and reconciliation.

As many of “God’s people” try to sell in our own time. Psychologists such as Erich Fromm had long identified the “death wish” that can consume people defined by grievance, some of whom are people of faith, a wish that manifests itself in decisions which are short-sighted and anger-fueled, decisions neither in our best interest nor in the interest of generations to come who may well face formidable trouble coping with the massive damage we now eagerly inflict with full impunity. 

Let’s be honest with ourselves.  Cruelty has always been our species companion, the demon that literally consumes much of our life energy and conspires to make a mockery of our values once we stop identifying and wrestling with its threats and allures.  There are certainly many moments when kindness, compassion, fairness and other, deeper and more “horizontal” virtues seem to have pride of place, when we seem to “have it in us” to rise to a higher, more attentive and more responsive standard.

But then we too often allow ourselves to get complacent, or self-satisfied, or we give in to multiple impulses which should have been thoroughly examined and then placed under wraps. In all of this we tend to neglect the uncomfortable spaces which remind us of uncomfortable truths.  And at such times, cruelty is poised to make a comeback, returning to a stage complete with autonomous weapons and violent rhetoric, with ethnic cleansing and partisan hatred, with all of the self-serving justifications one could possibly invoke including willful, decontextualized misinterpretations of religious texts which are at times astounding in their arrogance.

It is a truism of sorts to insist that we are responsible both for what we do and what we enable, that which our own actions inadvertently grant permission for others to do.  A bit like children in a kindergarten class, we defend our own behavior by pointing fingers at those who not only behave contrary to our own interests but who we might feel get away with it, serving personal preferences petty and more profound with what appears to be full impunity. In a similar vein, we trend towards laser focus on behavior we find offensive in others and then too often try to attribute the offense to an entire class of human beings defined by race or ethnicity or gender or religion, all while doing what we can to ensure that the laser never turns back on us.

Amidst all of these manifestations of self-deception is a pervasive cruelty.  While recognizing the degree to which social media skews judgments on this matter – providing compelling visuals on incidents individual and collective which would have remained hidden in previous times – it is nevertheless the case that our human compassion has taken a serious hit.  At levels both official and community, a generic indifference serves to  endorse and justify the most obvious instances of cruelty, those which have dented our rational and moral capacities – rapes in El-Fasher and Goma, target practice and food insecurity against Palestinian children in Gaza, brown-skinned people brutalized by aggrieved and poorly trained ICE agents in US cities, religious bias, domestic violence, racial discrimination and killing largely without remorse, without accountability, without any sense of the implications of such brutality for a world which must sooner or later be passed on to children in whatever shape we leave it.  And beyond active cruelty, we move with lightning speed from individual instances of abuse to more categorical denunciations of “other” humans which ultimately encourage more abuse than they identify.

I certainly do not believe that cruelty constitutions our entire genetic and social footprint, not by any means, but from my UN policy vantage point it seems to occupy more of our current frame than most of us would have deemed possible, certainly more than our civilizations can likely survive over the long term.

Returning to the lonely figure at the edge of a cliff, it is also important to acknowledge the degree to which making time and space for self-reflection is also to make time and space which can be filled by anxiety, by self-doubt, by disappointment.  The space of Advent is a moment for reminding me of how far I’ve come but how very much is left undone, the self-honesty and amendment of life which remains an insufficient portion of my seasonal preparation, the  vestiges my own “sweet dreams of oppression” which have led over the years to trespasses which are to be forgiven only in the same measure that I forgive the trespasses of others. 

Collectively, our demons are now well out of the places where they had been at least partially confined, tricking us into renewing cycles of distrust and outright violence that compromise our politics, our faith and possibly our future.  It remains alarming at how quickly we can sacrifice our compassion and dignity at the altar of anger and grievance.  It is equally discouraging (if numerous films are any indication) how easily we can become addicted to dystopian worldviews that, beyond entertainment, reinforce the belief that the world is in its essence a harsh, violent, deceitful and fearful place in which values such as cooperation, discernment, kindness and compassion are naïve if not outright dangerous. 

It may be, as Judith Shklar maintains, that cruelty is the behavior which represents the very worst of ourselves.  But what we fail to recognize as often is how this “worst thing we do” lurks just below the surface of civility, just out of sight and reach until it bursts forth like a plague of long-dormant insects which we then choose to feed and otherwise encourage until the outburst has run its course, leaving in its wake a veritable wasteland of disinformation, intolerance and cynicism. This cycle is compounded by the widespread and insufficiently countered belief that cruelty is an inevitable manifestation of our genetic makeup. Cruelty may represent a pervasive factor in human history, but “inevitable” it is not.  

The reason I particularly honor Advent, year after year, is that it represents yet another opportunity for people of much faith and little faith to confront and overcome what Dostoyevsky termed the “artful” cruelty which dominates far too much of our current human landscape. In our words, in our actions and reactions, we very much have it in us to set a tone that can serve to counter the worst of current influences and thereby ensure places where children can live and thrive when we have finally left this world to their loving care. But this “tone” requires more of us, replacing grievance with thanksgiving, swapping out indifference with caring, renouncing in words and deeds what Fromm worried was “our craving for evil,” pledging to take more risks and give in less to cynicism and fearfulness. 

If the opportunities of Advent seem more dauting this year it is because the “syndrome of decay” which we have over-indulged like Thanksgiving leftovers has been allowed to consume larger and larger swaths of our human condition.  But we can roll it back.  We can recover our shattered faith, our lagging courage, our indifferent stewardship of a world which will eventually no longer be ours to pillage.  For me, Advent represents the latest, best opportunity to restore our collective dignity, prepare to better incarnate my understanding of the divine promise, and “save what’s left” of our ailing planet.  This year, let’s agree to honor that potential.

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A Dialogue on Sustainable Development and Peace, Neema Kihwelo and Robert Zuber

2 Nov

Dear All,

In lieu of another piece from me at this time, we decided to post this back and forth between myself and Neema Kihwelo a young woman of Tanzanian origin and formerly a student at Columbia University.  Neema is not in New York at this juncture but has been helping us fill a gap with respect to our concerns with human rights and peace and security issues – the widening development inequalities and debt burdens which exacerbate tensions which can (and do) lead to violence in various forms.  Neema has shared expertise which we would otherwise only sporadically have access to, expertise which helps to “round out” our core policy concerns and more directly links progress on sustainable development to progress on peacebuilding.

In the Security Council this past week, the US representative shared his disdain for the Sustainable Development Goals believing them to be a needless distraction from the “real work of peace.”  Contrary to this view, we affirm that such Development which includes a fairer system of international finance, urgent debt relief, counter-corruption measures and greater international solidarity and trust are actually indispensable to any peace which can ultimately be sustained.

Neema started off the conversation with her review of the important UN event below.

Towards a Risk-Informed Approach to Development Financing Resilience Today for a Sustainable Tomorrow Second Committee Side Event, UN General Assembly

UNDRR and UNDP opened with a strong call for country-led transformation moving from project-by-project interventions to a “systems finance” model. They stressed integrating risk analysis and financing into core government policy across all sectors, anchored in three pillars: scaling risk-informed investments, strengthening national systems, and promoting cross-sector action.

Panel 1: Financing Gaps, Local Capacity, and Innovation

Key Highlights:

● Global disaster risk financing needs are estimated at USD 2.3 trillion annually, yet only 25% is currently mobilized, signaling an urgent need for more effective resource allocation as ODA continues to decline.

● Panelists identified a risk appetite mismatch between capital holders and the credit profiles of vulnerable nations, with perceived or actual credit risks obstructing private and institutional investment in resilience.

● The UNCDF and partners showcased practical de-risking innovations such as climate insurance programs in the Pacific and Africa, financial inclusion facilities for African small banks and SMEs, and mobile-based insurance payouts that provide citizens rapid  compensation after climate shocks.

● Subnational governments face fragmented and misaligned financing options. As highlighted by Paul Smoke, private financing remains scarce, concessional funds unevenly distributed, and infrastructure transfers often bypass local resilience priorities.

● The panel called for expanding incentive-based and intermediary finance, such as municipal development banks and blended finance partnerships, to empower local  governments, improve creditworthiness, and attract sustainable private investment.

● Strengthening loan repayment systems, targeted bond frameworks, and aligning financial instruments with measurable resilience outcomes were seen as central to enabling locally owned, durable disaster risk investments.

Critical Reflections: While Panel 1 presented innovative tools and strong technical solutions, the discussion revealed persistent structural obstacles. Many pilot initiatives depend on external actors and lack domestic ownership or policy mainstreaming. Subnational entities where vulnerability is greatest still face limited capacity to absorb, implement, and sustain risk-informed investments. National reforms to integrate resilience into public budgets remain incomplete, and incentive frameworks for private investment are not yet delivering at scale. The price of inaction, however, is rising without deeper collaboration, governance reform, and equitable access to finance; innovation risks outpacing inclusion.

Panel 2: Tailored Solutions for Vulnerable and Local Contexts – Financing strategies, concessional mechanisms and partnership

Rwanda: Rwanda presented a strong example of national ownership in risk-informed development. A roadmap for universal early warning coverage by 2027 is being implemented through coordination across ministries and financing from the Rwanda Green Fund and National Risk Reduction Fund. Its partnership with the World Bank’s contingent credit line mechanisms represents a shift from reactive to proactive financing, anchoring resilience in domestic resource mobilization and job creation within green sectors.

Portugal – “Safe Village, Safe People” Programme: Portugal’s model of community-led wildfire risk reduction demonstrated how local partnerships can operationalize systemic resilience. The program combines structural safety measures with behavioral change, conducting local drills, appointing Local Safety Officers, mapping safe zones, and training volunteers in vulnerable rural areas. Recognized by the EU, World Bank, and G20 as a leading example, this initiative highlights how risk preparedness can be localized effectively to address vulnerable demographics such as older and isolated populations.

Private Sector & Digital Finance – Global Policy House: Michelle Chivunga (Global Policy House) emphasized digital transformation as a driver of resilience finance. She urged governments to invest in data ecosystems, digital literacy, and energy sustainability for data centers to support AI-readiness and analytics for disaster response. Highlighting alternative capital sources such as digital assets, tokenized resources, and cryptocurrency, she framed private-sector innovation as essential for inclusive growth. Her remarks underscored the need  for citizens to be co-architects, not beneficiaries, ensuring that digital transitions are participatory, ethical, and community-led.

Comparative Insights and Overarching Gaps

● Financial Innovation: The event showcased diverse instruments, contingency funds, DRF strategies, Cat DDOs, and risk pooling but large-scale blended mechanisms involving private and digital finance remain nascent. Sustained pilots, harmonized regulation, and stronger domestic financial ecosystems are crucial for scaling impact.

● Data, Digital, and Equity Challenges: While digital readiness was frequently mentioned, data ethics, infrastructure, and harmonization gaps persist, particularly across low-capacity and rural contexts.

● Decentralized Capacity: Subnational entities require tailored tools and credit enhancements to invest in risk management autonomously, supported by practical governance and fiscal reforms.

● Participatory Shift: Rwanda and Portugal reframed local actors as partners in design and delivery. Similarly, Chivunga’s proposal linked digital and financial inclusion directly  to SDG progress, envisioning resilience as both an economic and social justice outcome.

Zuber Response

Hello Neema,

I’m sitting in a UN cafe waiting for 6th Committee to start and thinking about your good reflections on the Thursday event.  You are more on top of all this than I am, and I appreciate it very much.

One part of your assessment struck me particularly: “National reforms to integrate resilience into public budgets remain incomplete, and incentive frameworks for private investment are not yet delivering at scale. The price of inaction, however, is rising without deeper collaboration, governance reform, and equitable access to finance; innovation risks outpacing inclusion.” 

The UN has been pushing states to adopt more robust early warning mechanisms for the SIDS and other small developing states.  And there is plenty of discussion on the importance of blended finance and domestic resource mobilization.  But amidst all of the positive interventions, something doesn’t add up and I can’t put my finger on it.  

Clearly one issue relates to the gaps, sometimes enormous, between pledged funds and delivered funds.  It is so easy to promise, but delivery runs into obstacles including funding already promised for other purposes (ie. peacekeeping, specialized agencies), the proliferation of earmarked funds rather than general operating funds which can be mobilized quickly to meet crises, the relative lack of anti-corruption policing as well as measures to ensure that natural resources remain in domestic hands and can thus contribute to domestic budget priorities.    

All of this is important, and all of this seems insufficient to building a more peaceful world.  What is missing? 

Pinning some of this resource inadequacy on “colonial legacies” is true, in my view, but doesn’t illuminate the path forward aside from demanding a reset to ensure that domestic resources remain under domestic control and that colonial puppeteers cut the manipulative chords for good. 

But governments don’t always have the best interests of constituents at heart, and in some instances the “theft” of resources has occurred with the active support of governments which have also in some instances enabled the “illicit flows” that we spend so much time talking about here and which the wealthier nations and investment banks have enabled as well in their own way.  

I don’t know, Neema.  Seems at times like we have too many culprits and not enough solutions.  We humans and our motives are a mixed bag for sure. 

All best,

Bob

Neema Response

I hope you are well and have had a good start to the week. I completely agree with your sentiments, and I guess this is what I have always found challenging about policy work versus the realities of implementation. The moderator at the end of panel one captured it perfectly when she said that solutions exist, but financing remains a challenge. That struck me, because again it raises the question of what a real resolution forward looks like.

I agree with you that humans are a complicated bunch. While colonial legacies have undeniably shaped today’s inequities, they can’t fully explain the persistent dysfunction in how we mobilize and govern resources. What has been needed for a while now is  a genuine overhaul of governance systems at both global and domestic levels. The protests we’re seeing across the Global South, from Nepal, Madagascar to Kenya and beyond, reflect deep frustration with governments that feel disconnected from citizens’ realities and with global systems that still appear extractive rather than empowering.

Blended finance continues to be celebrated as a silver bullet for unlocking private capital, but in practice it often reproduces the same hierarchies it claims to fix. Risk perceptions make finance prohibitively expensive for small or climate-vulnerable states, while accountability mechanisms remain weak. Without tackling the systemic biases about who defines risk, who controls resources, and who truly benefits, even the most innovative mechanisms risk becoming old tools repackaged.

Maybe what is missing is the connective tissue between global ambitions and local realities. That means putting greater focus on institutional intermediation and trust infrastructure. National systems need the capacity and credibility to absorb and direct funds effectively, while international institutions must learn to share rather than centralize risk and decision-making.

Best,

Neema.

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Rejecting Nuclear Testing

1 Nov

Dear All, The recent decision by president Trump to resume nuclear testing is reckless at several levels, including its inaccurate and dangerous assumption that others (aside from the DPRK) are testing their own weapons. Our colleague Jacqueline Cabasso follows nuclear weapons issues more closely than I do and offers this reflection. Please follow these developments as they evolve and respond as you are able.

Donald Trump’s Truth Social announcement, “Because of other countries’ testing programs, I have instructed the Department of War to start testing our Nuclear Weapons on an equal basis. That process will begin immediately,” has raised alarms. But it’s hard to know what to make of it. The announcement is full of mistruths. Russia and China are not conducting explosive nuclear tests, so the U.S. has no basis to respond in kind. They are conducting missile tests, but so is the U.S. The Department of Defense (Department of War) is responsible for missile tests, but it is the Department of Energy that is responsible for preparation for explosive nuclear testing. It’s not clear to me that Trump understands any of this, or that his “announcement’ changes the status quo regarding explosive nuclear testing. I note also that Russia has previously said it would resume nuclear explosive testing if the U.S. conducts a test. Of course we must remain vigilant, but I caution against overreacting. I think we should try to use this as a teachable moment. 

Since then, Hegseth has said that the DOD would work with DOE to conduct nuclear explosive tests, and DT, when asked about what kinds of nuclear tests he was referring to said, “We’ll see.” So I’m pretty sure that DT and Hegseth don’t know what they’re talking about, and we have no clarity about what DT’s tweet means. I will say that Project 2025 calls for a return to explosive nuclear testing. But I’m not ready to offer a definitive interpretation.  – Jackie

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10,000 Steps: The Security Council searches out a health regimen, Dr. Robert Zuber

21 Sep

Are we being good ancestors?  Jonas Salk

The lawn-cutter might just as well not have been there at all; the gardener will be there a lifetime.  Ray Bradbury

Carve your name on hearts, not tombstones. Shannon Alder

It’s the greatest legacy you could ever leave your children or your loved ones: The history of how you felt. Simon Van Booy

The songs of our ancestors are also the songs of our children. Philip Carr-Gomm

This light of history is pitiless; it has a strange and divine quality that, luminous as it is, and precisely because it is luminous, often casts a shadow just where we saw a radiance. Victor Hugo

The marks humans leave are too often scars. John Green

The planting of a tree is a gift which you can make to posterity at almost no cost and with almost no trouble. George Orwell

They realize the no money, no church service, no eulogy, no funeral procession no matter how elaborate, can remove the legacy of a mean spirit. Abraham Verghese

What you create today might not go viral. It might not even be noticed. But years from now, it may be the seed someone else needed to survive. Lawrence Nault

Lead in a way worth remembering. Farshad Asl

The real currency of life isn’t money—it’s meaning. And meaning compounds.  Narendra Tomar

On Thursday, the Security Council under the presidency of the Republic of Korea, held its 10,000th meeting in the Council chamber. The theme for this meeting was the situation in the Occupied Territories, a fitting item given how long it has been on the Council agenda, and how little sustainable policy success it has enjoyed over that history.

This 10,000th event itself was highlighted by several delegations including elected members Korea, Guyana and Pakistan, part of the contingent of 10 elected members frustrated by a US veto of a resolution it deemed “slanderous” on the situation in Gaza backed by all E10 members and 4 of the 5 permanent members.  Such frustration emanating from the E10 continues to build as resolutions from the Council are blocked by veto, unimplemented due to a lack of political will, or watered down by policy disagreement to such a degree that their implementation potency remains in serious doubt. 

As one of a handful of groups which have prioritized Council monitoring, we have watched these sessions for over a generation, muffling our share of gasps as the Council failed again and again to embrace,  what Denmark called this week the “decency to act,” or when the Council acts in a manner already compromised and virtually certain to inadequately addressing global threats with the determination and foresight required.

The Council Chamber, of course, is not always given to policy inadequacy, nor is it the only forum in which Council activity occurs. Even the best resolutions require careful and often protracted coordination from penholders and other diplomats assigned to the Council.  Moreover, the Council has mandated subsidiary organs – including sanctions regimes and more thematic considerations such as Children and Armed Conflict – which rightly consume Council attention though largely via the efforts of elected members.

But the Chamber remains the place where peace and security crises and potential resolutions have some transparency, and what is shown to the world which still bothers to care is not always hopeful.  Such was in good measure the case on Thursday as the will of a single permanent member defiantly nullified the desire of Council colleagues for a cease fire, humanitarian access and hostage release for Gaza.  But it was also a rare moment of emotional transparency for many Council members used to more often than not showing off their policy chops mostly by repeating, sometimes word for word, the briefings carefully provided by SRSGs and other Secretariat officials. 

This time there was no briefing to copy, nothing to help convince colleagues and viewers that they know what they were talking about.  But they all knew – about the carnage that they failed to either prevent or end, about the numerous violations of international law which continue with impunity, about the sullied reputation of a Council which cannot or will not uphold its core Charter principles, a Council that will not do what is needed to preserve its own reputation but, much more important, to bring an end to the traumas inflicted on children from Gaza to Sudan, children multiply displaced and deliberately starved, children who may survive the immediate carnage but who will bear scars for life and who will surely will be future candidates for resistance to a world which now abandons them in multiple ways.

Amidst all the pomp and circumstance surrounding the Council, the endless honoring of diplomats and governments, the predictable reading of statements often written by officials not actually present in the Chamber, it is the lack of growth and maturity that is so puzzling, so frustrating, so indicative in these dark times of a failure to heed a “heal thyself” dictum.  As much as we acknowledge the potential still present in Council spaces and the efforts of diplomats, we must also share the concern of a body increasingly in its own way and, more to the point too often in the way of positive change for constituents as well.  Whether we like to admit it or not, when a resolution is passed there are perhaps millions of global constituents who want to believe – need to believe – that something materially is about to change for the better in their circumstances, their communities.  When this does not follow, it is not clear that any amount of calling attention to vetoes and other “constraints” highlighted by Pakistan and others on Thursday will appease these constituents.  How could it possibly?

Most delegations including Pakistan clearly understand this.  Indeed, among the moving statements on Thursday, Algeria seemed to capture the moment best (and arouse the ire of Israel most directly).  The Ambassador didn’t pretend to have answers that the Council given its current limitations would be willing to accept.  Instead, in an all-too-rare moment, he simply asked for forgiveness, forgiveness for not being able to defend Gazan doctors, journalists, aid workers, entire extended families. Forgiveness for the famine which spreads as we write and which the Council has done little to stop.

As moving as this was for us and surely for some others, we must remind ourselves that forgiveness is part of a two-step process, the latter of which is amendment of life — that determination to pay attention to patterns of inadequacy and dysfunction followed by the resolve to break those patterns.  At this moment  it is unclear whether this Council can overcome its current constraints or whether the Ambassadors gathered around the oval would even be authorized to jettison the limitations which undermine both the Council’s legacy and a meaningful chance at a peaceful and prosperous life for the children of the world.

There are ongoing, some would say “endless” efforts within the UN to “reform” the Council mostly focused on the veto and the Council member “makeup,” searching over and over for consensus on how to make the Council more representative of the modern world. But this protracted process runs the danger of largely reinforcing the Council’s current culture, configurations and state interests. The “culture” of the Council, the culture which must be healed so that is can better effect the healing of others, remains largely off the radar. Perhaps this concern would be considered an “insult” to states. However, to fail to heal the culture of this divided and acrimonious Council could well be seen — and we would wish to do so — as an insult to global constituents bearing burdens which none should bear alone.

There is a belief among some medical authorities that walking 10,000 steps is key to preserving and restoring human health.  It is unclear at this moment that 10,000 meetings have resulted in a healthier Council, one which is committed to “carving its name on hearts and not tombstones,” one which understands the abiding need to touch the lives of people with pressing needs which transcend national interests, one which grants honor and attention to others which it seems endlessly to demand for itself, one which incarnates the understanding that we are merely caretakers in the transition from what we inherited to what we bequeath to others.

The Council, needless to say, is not required to listen to me or any other NGO voice, and it is not clear that it is equipped to do much more than patronize those who do speak out, even if requested by the Council to do so. But I’m pretty confident about at least one thing; if the Council fails to grow into its responsibilities, to fix what needs to be fixed and heal what needs to be healed, it will have lost for good the attention and trust of states and constituents long before its next 10,000 meeting milestone.

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Workday, Every Day: A Labor Day Reflection, Dr. Robert Zuber

1 Sep

Each of us needs to withdraw from the cares which will not withdraw from us. Maya Angelou

All happiness depends on courage and work.  Honoré de Balzac

In the name of God, stop a moment, cease your work, look around you.  Leo Tolstoy

Work without love is slavery. Mother Teresa

The caterpillar does all the work, but the butterfly gets all the publicity. George Carlin

We can only see a short distance ahead, but we can see plenty there that needs to be done.  Alan Turing

People might not get all they work for in this world, but they must certainly work for all they get. Frederick Douglass

I’ve written on many Labor Days about our growing labor pains, the consolidation of economic power and the alienation of too many people from labor itself but also from the laborers who, in some real sense, both define and sustain their lives.

In reviewing quotations for this piece, I found many more sentimental than relevant – quotes rightly extolling the dignity of work while attempting to convince the reader to find and pursue passions, or locate better work-life balances, whatever that might mean. A bit of that sentiment is reflected in this post.

I have no particular axe to grind regarding these aforementioned bits of labor advice, except to remind ourselves of a few things – that we often don’t honor labor or even seek to understand the connections between those who sweat and grind out a living and the lifestyles those people make possible.  Nor are we entirely mindful of the degree to which “following passions” is literally not on the radar of so many of our fellow citizens, domestically and globally.  Many people simply need jobs.  They have mouths to feed.  And the jobs they find are too often conveyor belts to uncertainty and on-the-edge living.  Passion is an indulgence, important for those who are privileged enough to pursue it let alone attain it, but it is also a pursuit which does not always lend itself to more general solidarity with those who preserve the social and physical infrastructure which makes our individual pursuits possible.

And then there is this matter of balance.  We are all familiar with the “live to work, work to live” dichotomy, but perhaps are less conscious of the social and economic requirements of whatever balance is to be achieved.

One key ingredient would seem to be time.  Time to do something special with your family.  Time to give your aching back some relief.  Time to cultivate a hobby that doesn’t involve television or twitter.  Time to plant a tree, or paint a fence, or share a bit of neighborliness.  Time to be what most people’s jobs do not allow them to be, a human in a broader and more satisfying sense, with time to look around and behold all the things people have missed while they’re serving up Happy Meals or cleaning out other people’s gutters.

I am overly blessed with the wherewithal and even more the time to “cease my work and look around me.”  I am sitting in a Manhattan apartment (such as it is), eating an apple, drinking my sorry excuse for coffee, and contemplating labor-related issues on a federal holiday.  But my privilege is shared by relatively few others.  Today, the shopping malls and most local stores are open.  Police and First Responders are on call.  Public transportation is operating and will shortly gear up even more as fortunate folks return to their homes from mountains and beaches. Teachers are frantically finalizing lesson plans as school is set to resume tomorrow, if it hasn’t already.  Immigrants remain on the harvest while dodging the masked bounty hunters seeking to further decimate agricultural workers and their families.   

Labor Day weekend is a chance for some to “withdraw from the cares of the world.”  For others, it’s merely another day of living on the edge.

Our US president, on whom skeptical eyes are and will remain locked, sent out a Labor Day message which says so much – about him of course, but also about our diminishing responsibilities to each other’s well-being.  “Too many non-working holidays in America,” he rants. “Soon we’ll end up having a holiday for every once working day of the year. It must change if we are going to make America great again.”

What “must change” in my humble view is our relationship to labor and to those who perform the tasks that the rest of us cannot – and apparently don’t wish to – live without.  How can we ignore that people need a livable return from their labor which would allow their families at least a modicum of economic security.  People need dependable, accessible health care.  People need protection from ICE and other government entities which have swapped out “the worst of the worst” with indiscriminate and cruel quotas.  On this Labor Day, too many workers have none of this. Yet again.  

All people need a break in their routine, a break to take their children on an outing, restore their eyes and muscles, throw a fishing line into a lake, fix their leaky faucet, see a doctor.  In this country and others, there is so much work to be done if we are to spread prosperity and honor our creeds.  There is so much work to be done if we are to take care of our soldiers, farmers and teachers, or care for those elderly and disabled cast aside by self-satisfied, compromised politicians.  Especially now.  Especially in these conditions.

But people also need more unencumbered time and likely more respect as well. The problem here is not our number of holidays of which, if anything, we probably have too few.  The problem is more that we have willfully segregated ourselves and especially our consumption patterns from many of the people whose labor makes those patterns possible, people particularly in need of healing and rest with their loved ones but for whom Labor Day is just another day. 

This is a problem which it is within our competence to fix and today would be an appropriate time to head in that direction.

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Empodérate Vecino-a: The Youth Spark Defying Peru’s Democratic Crisis, by Andrea Viviana Araujo Muñoa

20 Aug

Editor’s Note:  Andrea was recommended to us by a close friend and colleague, Dr. Toh Swee-Hin, who had her as a student in an online course he was teaching through UNESCO.  After several conversations and a review of her CV, it was clear that Andrea has special gifts which she liberally shares with people – especially women from more marginal communities – in her native Peru. It was not possible to bring her to New York for a UN internship this summer, but we hope to try again soon.  In the meantime, and with a generous gift from our friend Lois Whitman, we were happily able to send funds to Lima to supplement support Andrea already receives from Global Changemakers. 

Amid citizen distrust, political fragmentation, and the violence affecting Lima’s neighborhoods, a grassroots youth organization is proving that democracy can be reinvented from the ground up. Empodérate Vecino-a empowers excluded women and has become a beacon of resilience and innovation at one of the most critical moments for Peru’s democracy.

In the hills of southern Lima, where poverty, exclusion, and distrust in politics shape daily life, a youth organization is rewriting the rules of civic participation. Founded in 2022, Empodérate Vecino-a promotes women’s leadership at the margins of democracy and has become a benchmark of civic innovation in one of the most fragile times in Peru’s political history.

With the support of Global Changemakers, the organization is currently implementing the Qhapaq Ñan Cívico project in Villa María del Triunfo. The initiative focuses on 100 women who face triple exclusion due to their gender, age, and migrant status. Through participatory workshops, intergenerational mentorship, and culturally inclusive content, the program seeks to strengthen their political leadership and civic voice.

In an innovative twist, the project integrates a unique cultural component: an animated mascot inspired by the Andean cock-of-the-rock, Peru’s national bird. Its name is Chasqui, a tribute to the Inca messengers who traveled the Qhapaq Ñan to connect distant communities. With humor and wisdom, Chasqui accompanies the participants, weaving together knowledge, stories, and experiences along the democratic journey.

Beyond its local impact, the initiative takes a “glocal” perspective, linking the challenges of exclusion and political disaffection in Lima to global debates on democracy, justice, and sustainability. In the organization’s own words: “transformative education can be a bridge between local realities and global aspirations.”

Recognition from Global Changemakers is highly competitive: thousands of young people from around the world apply each year, and only a few projects are selected after a rigorous three-stage process. In 2025, Empodérate Vecino-a became the only self-managed youth organization in Peru to secure this $1,000 grant to implement Qhapaq Ñan Cívico—formerly known as Voces Migrantes—with an electoral focus.

The project arrives at a decisive moment. Peru is preparing for the 2026 general elections, which will feature more than 43 registered political parties—an unprecedented figure at this complex moment in the country’s democratic history, according to the National Office of Electoral Processes (ONPE). The situation is unprecedented in other ways: just months before the elections, no candidate surpasses 10% approval in the polls, while confidence in the electoral system has dropped to a staggering 8%, according to the Institute of Peruvian Studies (IEP).

Meanwhile, citizens live in a climate of insecurity marked by corruption and extortion including in public transport and schools, fueling political disaffection. In this context, Empodérate Vecino-a stands as a beacon of resilience and innovation, proving that even from the most vulnerable neighborhoods, youth can reinvent democracy, helping it become more participatory, inclusive, and alive.

Today more than ever, initiatives like Qhapaq Ñan Cívico are urgent. In the face of government inaction and institutional weakening, Peruvian youth remind the country and the world of a simple but powerful truth: if not now, when? Democracy cannot be taken for granted; it must be defended, nurtured, and reinvented. In fragile societies like Peru, young people associated with  Empodérate Vecino-a are rising up to keep democracy alive.

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The Humpty Effect:  Finding an Antidote to Brokenness, Dr. Robert Zuber

17 Aug

Take these broken wings and learn to fly. Paul McCartney

I think of the painting by van Gogh, the man in the chair. Everything wrong, and nowhere to go. His hands over his eyes.  Mary Oliver

He ruins things. That’s what he likes. To ruin things. Holly Black

Pick up your pieces. Then, help me gather mine.  Vera Nazarian

There was no part of him that was not broken, that had not healed wrong, and there was no part of him that was not stronger for having been broken.  Leigh Bardugo

This planet is a broken bone that didn’t set right, a hundred pieces of crystal glued together. Tahereh Mafi

We are all wonderful, beautiful wrecks. That’s what connects us. Emilio Estevez

Genius is brokenness harnessed. Abhijit Naskar

She felt as if the mosaic she had been assembling out of life’s little shards got dumped to the ground, and there was no way to put it back together. Anne Lamott

The storm is out there and every one of us must eventually face the storm. Bryant McGill

One small crack does not mean that you are broken, it means that you were put to the test and you didn’t fall apart. Linda Poindexter

Everything had become works.  Like trees these works were tainted by diseased growths, were often hypocrisy, imaginary merit, idleness. Soren Kierkegaard

One of the benefits for me of being away from New York is the ease of exercise.  Not easy exercise but being able to go for runs, even in the early morning, without dodging dogs and people scurrying around inattentively on sidewalks which have long needed a facelift.

But in some places, including Los Angeles, the streets are occupied by the unhoused, people (mostly men) huddled each morning around public bathrooms at the end of municipal parking facilities.

They never bother me.  They often say good morning.  They are equally, quite often and quite clearly at the edge of being broken. Some are food insecure.  Multiply displaced on a weekly basis.  Searching trash cans and alleyways for something to sell or add to their collection of worldly goods crammed into appropriated shopping carts, men waking up to the same reality as yesterday and the day before, hands over their eyes much like the man in the Van Gogh painting, trying to keep from recognizing an immediate environment where so much of what they experience is just plain wrong.

There was a time in my life here in the US, or perhaps I simply conjured it up, when this level of brokenness was the exception more than the rule, a time when institutions of all stripes seemed to be trying to be responsive, when neighbors seemed to be trying to be good neighbors, when people were willing to feel at least a tinge of shame when discriminatory thoughts and the actions which followed crossed into consciousness.

Of course, we have often been some version of broken, often been willing to take our foot off the accelerator of equity and kindness, often  been willing to duck the impending storm rather than face its threats head on.  We have often been insufficiently conscious of an inconvenient human truth, that our propensity for creating and building mirrors at best our propensity for destruction and brokenness. We have experienced as parents and teachers how much easier it can be to destroy than to build as we watch small, angry children knock down Lego structures in a nano-second that it took other children hours to construct. 

But even knowing these uncomfortable truths about ourselves, even knowing of people close to and far from us who simply like “ruining things,” there is something about this moment that feels different, the small armies of ruiners delighting in identifying those people and structures that can be thoughtlessly pushed off the wall towards certain destruction.  A seeming delight in the cruelty of so many Humptys lying in pieces, mindfully shattered almost beyond any hope of repair, one example after another of how much easier it is to ruin lives than to set the many broken bones of traumatized humans to their best healing positions. 

In my own country as in too many other places, we are being “led” by people whose singular skill is breaking things – breaking convention, breaking trust, but also breaking wills.  Breaking them not through the force of argument but through force itself.  If you pay any attention at all to the cruelty which we have a society has unleashed on each other, cruelty which has a good bit of its precedents in many US government administrations prior to this one, it is easy to understand why so many are losing sleep over the destruction of things we have claimed to long cherish, even if we didn’t always act like we did.

This current US administration, like others in various global regions, has learned its “Lego-lesson” well.  Take a wrecking ball to families and programs rather than fixing them.  Push Humpty off the wall with such force and perhaps even righteous delight that it explodes into a thousand pieces, too many for others to gather up let alone reassemble.  This is at the heart of the Project 2025 agenda – too much cruelty to effectively counter, too much destruction to fully repair.  The combination of trauma and uncertainty, as well as once-reliable institutions gutted of functionality and presided over by people for whom ascriptions of “merit” too-often seem as one more figment of their ideology-saturated imaginations, this surely defines a formidable agenda for all of us going forward.  

We are doing our business on a planet akin to a “broken bone that didn’t set right,” a world of grave issues still within our capacity to resolve but with too much stubborn, self-interested, even cruel officialdom reacting to the coming storms by wildly casting blame on predecessors or simply by denying they exist at all.

Most of you who still read these posts are fully aware of what I have laid out here.  You have witnessed the will to destroy and subjugate. You have perhaps even benefited materially from a world tilted in favor of the well-educated and comfortable, tilted to such a degree and for such a long time that our society has taken on the metaphorical shape of a certain tower in Pisa, a shape that has also and perpetually resisted returning to the straight and narrow.

In this context, I recall recently reading a letter to the Washington Post from a self-described “liberal” who apparently is quite pleased with the current White House occupant because her 401K is doing great and she isn’t seeing so many immigrants in her neighborhood.  Clearly, the abject cruelty of some has given license to others to release their very own self-interested genies out of their respective bottles.

So what do we do?  How do we resist this ruinous trend at a time when the odds seem heavily stacked against our better selves, when our societal “arc” is now directed less towards justice and more towards inequity  and lawlessness?   I think there are two lanes that we must pursue together.

The first is the citizenship lane.  Write letters.  Post to blogs.  Join demonstrations.  Organize people around common aspirations.  Learn as much as you can about the origins and history of our now-floundering democratic institutions.  It is important for all of us, but certainly for our erstwhile political leadership, to be reminded that not everyone agrees with them, believes them, supports their agendas, accepts their hypocrisies and dubious ascriptions of  merit.  Not by a longshot.  But it is also important for us to recognize that there are priorities for opposition – that not everything proposed by our political adversaries is adversarial or destructive.  And that a good chunk of our own political supporters have indulged in dubious policies and practices as well.

But beyond civics, we have a responsibility to respond more resolutely to our current climate of violence and brokenness, to ensure that the shards of what has to this point been a formidable eruption of destructiveness do not, to the best of our ability, impact people and places closer to us, leak any closer to our circles of meaning.

We must, in effect, declare and maintain zones less affected by ruin, zones which can demonstrate and reinforce more of the best of which we are capable.  Zones where children are safe, zones where people look after each other, zones where our brokenness can be a source of strength and learning so that we might soar beyond current and inherited limitations. Zones which communicate to those whose business is ruin that ruin shall not be allowed to take root everywhere.  

And this is some of how we might communicate such messaging.  Be better neighbors.  Plant more trees.  Support the people who harvest our crops, heal our wounds and respond to our emergencies.  Volunteer with children.  Extend yourself to strangers.  Dare to inspire others.  Pick up the pieces of your own brokenness and then help others to pick up theirs so that you and they might fly once again.

What I’m sure appears at one level to be pious indulgence must now become an integral part of our struggle with the world and with ourselves.  Don’t let the ruin extend any further.  Let it end with the people and places dear to you, but also with those people and places less known to you, those on whom you still depend and who still remain dependable. Our circles of concern, our circles in defiance of ruin, must continue to expand beyond the confines of domiciles and neighborhoods.

I firmly believe that Humpty can eventually be put back together again, can regain at least some semblance of a dignified place on that proverbial wall.  So too can the unhoused men at the edge of a Los Angeles parking lot.  We are breaking for sure, most all of us in our various contexts, but we are not irreparably broken. Not yet.

If we haven’t already done so, this might be the perfect time for us to get over ourselves, to widen the circles of our interest and our practical concern.  This is our test, the questions are still coming, and we must not permit ourselves to fall apart until all are effectively answered.  

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Accountability, Compromise and the Future of the UN: A Reflection by Tazia Marie Mohammad.

14 Aug

Editor’s Note:  This reflection is courtesy of one of the more insightful interns/associates we have had at Global Action in my 23+ years.  Tazia did what we want all of our colleagues to do – throw themselves into many areas of UN policy and practice and then assess the current relevance of the UN as convener and problem-solver on an increasingly volatile planet. This task was made easier during July’s High-Level Political Forum when so many UN issues and concerns come to the fore.  But the HLPF also magnified opportunities for frustration, especially for younger people worried about their future and the capacities of existing global institutions to shape a more compassionate, just and sustainable world.

The day after my internship with Global Action ended, I took a 6:00 AM connecting flight from JFK to Tokyo-Haneda. Since then, I have been working as an English tutor in multiple prefectures across Japan, a welcome respite from the bustle and grit of life in New York City. The curriculum I work with, more content-based than instructional, focuses on multicultural communication and attainment of the UN Sustainable Development Goals—noticeably reminiscent of the Japanese mission’s own interventions on the General Assembly floor.

It feels a bit hypocritical to be getting these kids excited about our grand plans to change the world only days after walking out of a circle that blatantly disregards them. America, the country I effectively represent to my students, has rejected the SDGs and withdrawn from the Financing for Development conference—a culmination of decades of unwillingness to commit to its climate promises. Simultaneously, it funds the killings of over 60,000 Palestinian men, women, and children, while strong-arming sovereign bystanders into complicity in the Security Council and beyond.

The UN, over its near-eighty-year tenure, seems to have refashioned itself in America’s image: swift and adept at bullying the weak, but slow and inefficient at aiding those in need. This has long since graduated from mere unfairness: with 2030 just around the corner, only 17% of the SDGs are on track, and each state’s unwillingness to shape up digs us deeper into a grave that seems less escapable each day. If we cannot face ourselves and implement a hard narrative reset, we may well not survive.

Perhaps the greatest hindrance to SDG attainment is the UN’s inability to hold member states accountable. In the Security Council, this dearth of responsibility can be attributed to an irreconcilable truth: every resolution, stance, and condemnation issued is overshadowed by each nation’s own military exploits and casual brutality. Every law-breaker seemingly feels emboldened by the tacit understanding that they will face no substantial punishments for violating international laws, for the states responsible for upholding these laws are often the most infamous violators themselves. This is evident in Israel and America’s noncompliance with the Geneva Convention despite near-universal condemnations, and in Russia’s stubborn continuation of its invasion in Ukraine despite its pariah status in Europe. Until more rigid and autonomous frameworks for unlawful intervention are implemented, the UN cannot in good faith claim to protect the sovereignty of its members or the safety of their citizens.

This accountability crisis also stems from the Western hegemony’s open use of reality-bending narration as a shroud for its own failings. Iran, for instance, engages in a more rigorous nuclear reporting process than any other UN member, yet its compliant status with the IAEA was revoked immediately preceding Israel’s unprovoked terror attacks on its IAEA-protected nuclear plants on June 13th. Iran, which has never been recorded to possess nuclear arms, was declared a volatile adversary seemingly overnight to justify Israel’s warfare. Statements by nearly every Security Council member focused more on urging that Iran—a known non-nuclear entity—must never obtain nuclear weapons than on addressing any details relevant to the matter at hand. This air of favoritism is accentuated by the fact that Israel itself is estimated to possess 90 nuclear warheads yet refuses to sign any non-proliferation treaty or register its arsenal with the IAEA.

One must also look to Palestine, where the plight of Israeli hostages—prolonged solely by Israel’s ceasefire violations and rejection of negotiations with Hamas—is measured at equal, if not greater weight, than the deaths of over sixty thousand Palestinians. Moreover, Israel’s core arguments about the hostages are never challenged despite the obvious question: how can one protect Hamas’s prisoners while simultaneously bombing them? Even factual realities are pushed aside to make room for Israel’s excuses: some member states still push the debunked claim that Palestine’s aid blockages are caused by Hamas’s banditry and not Israel’s denial of humanitarian entry. This utter obedience to the flawed, dehumanizing logic of uncompromisingly self-interested tyrants degrades the credibility of the United Nations, and if there is to be a future for international cooperation, such atrocities cannot continue.

At the same time, efforts at achieving SDG 13 and other climate goals are undercut by the naivete of many member states, who support climate efforts only if they are cost-effective, complementary to their development ideas, and inoffensive to corporate sponsors. To illustrate this, I recall a panel I attended during the early days of the High-Level Political Forum on AI integration into bureaucratic institutions. While charismatic and well-spoken, the presenter painted a future in which AI technology is so ubiquitous that it will become inseparable from our logistical frameworks—a beautiful idea, but without any word on where the energy for such technology would come from, or how environmental implications might be reconciled. When I pressed him on this point, the answer I received was certainly optimistic: “AI will solve for AI.” Though it would be lovely to see this clever catchphrase prove true, it is irresponsible for any diplomat or lawmaker to operate with this notion in mind. The “do no harm” principle dictates that it is the innovator’s responsibility to prove her creation isn’t harmful, and there is no alternative that makes it viable to create and then market problems in hopes of fixing them later.

Yet, it seems the consensus for most wealthy and middle-income nations is to have your cake and eat it too. Climate conversations throughout the HLPF were lathered with appeals for understanding: while states want to try their best for our planet, they refuse to hinder their own economic development. This unwillingness to accept the inherent limitations of sustainability on growth sets us on a dangerous path: climate protection will always require sacrifice, and member states must compromise on growth expectations if they hope to meaningfully contribute to SDG 13 or any of the other goals.

It is easy to be swept up by the pomp and circumstance of the UN Headquarters: diplomats are ushered from their limousines by entourages at every hour, and there is constant pressure to cave to the status quo of self-aggrandizing optimism and verbose inertia. However, we cannot forget the main purpose of its existence: to protect and care for our fellow human beings. Integrity can no longer remain an afterthought on the General Assembly floor; we must be diligent in our moral convictions, and honest in our efforts at carving out a better world. Only then can we look our children in the eye and tell them sincerely that the SDGs are worth being excited about.

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