Now the time has come. There’s no place to run. Chambers Brothers
They always say time changes things, but you actually have to change them yourself. Andy Warhol
Here we are, trapped in the amber of the moment. There is no why. Kurt Vonnegut
Yesterday is gone. Tomorrow has not yet come. We have only today. Let us begin. Mother Theresa
The future is uncertain but the end is always near. Jim Morrison
The future came and went in the mildly discouraging way that futures do. Neil Gaiman
Time moves slowly but passes quickly. Alice Walker
In an earlier phase of the work of our small organization, we were preoccupied with the development of an Emergency Peace Service (UNEPS), a rapid-response, gender-inclusive mechanism under UN auspices which could respond rapidly and effectively to threats of genocide and other mass atrocities. UNEPS was designed to combat abuses which our current system of conflict response is still unable to address at sufficiently early stages to prevent the long-term damage – to families and communities, to farms and civilian infrastructure – which remain as a horrific legacy of so much armed violence and gross rights violations in our current, famine-stricken, gun-saturated world.
Despite some of the large and unwieldy egos which congregated around this initiative, and despite some persistent disputes over the contingent size and funding mechanisms for such a force, the underlying premises of UNEPS remained sound. It recognized that where response to grave violence and other crises is concerned, time is always of the essence. Prevention is always preferable to resolution in the conflict sphere, and our collective record on matters of prevention is not yet particularly laudable. But once a looming crisis is recognized, there is – or should be – no time to waste. When dealing with threats of mass violence, delay means death and misery. Moreover, the longer a conflict is allowed to fester, the more elusive a negotiated peace or even an adopted cease fire tends to become.
With UNEPS, we often used the analogy of firefighting in our outreach, as firefighters are acutely aware of the need to arrive at fire scenes rapidly and with capacity adequate to the blaze. Any delay in response merely intensifies the threat to both citizens and firefighters, and often ensures that a fire that might have easily been contained turns into a blaze that scorches thousands of acres and uproots life both human and animal. The same logic applies during injury car crashes or when a mother recognizes that her child’s illness is more than a garden-variety cold. In these or other circumstance, emergency response is not a luxury but a priority, one which gives the sick and injured the best chance of a full recovery.
While there is no UNEPS incarnate in the world , the UN system and several of its regional partners have taken on board the importance of rapid reaction, including in both peacekeeping operations (where late arrival endangers civilians and complicates peace prospects) and disaster risk response (where early warning combined with even earlier preparations gives communities the best chance of surviving more frequent, violent storms and other climate shocks). But the UN is also hampered by fungible timelines largely dependent on the will of member states: the will to agree on resolution language with measurable impact; the will to fund the structures and personnel needed to make prevention viable; the will to honor multilateral commitments through dedicated national implementation strategies; the will to ensure an end to impunity for abuses as the best means for preventing their recurrence.
To spend as much time as we do in UN discussions and processes is to participate in a twilight zone of urgency and delay, a place where crises are recognized but invariably subject to the vicissitudes of extended and often intense negotiation, wherein states have the space, if they choose to use it, to both join the consensus on crisis language and impede the consensus on crisis response. We see elements of this “zone” evident in our pandemic response where practical (and funded) responses to the urgent need for “vaccine equity” still fall well-short of our rhetoric. We also see elements of this in the willingness of states to pat themselves on the back for their virtuous commitments to the alleviation of famine and other global threats, commitments which are often not honored in full (and at times not even in part) and which, in any event, represent only small percentages of what we liberally allocate for mass casualty weapons, fossil fuel exploration and other civilization-threatening investments.
What we don’t see nearly as often as we would wish is sufficient progress towards what Kenya’s Minister of Foreign Affairs in the Security Council this past Friday called “an architecture of shared burdens,” a multilateral system made up of what she called “capable states” that both protect their own citizens and contribute more of their national skills and capacities to the global commons.
What else might be implied by this notion of “capable?” In part it refers to states which understand, as DSG Amina Mohammed noted in several venues this week, that the success of our world depends on our ability to localize key commitments, to promote public involvement rather than more state control, to invest in the skills and capacities needed to make our responses to conflict and other global crises more than token, more than piecemeal. “Capable” states recognize when their policies are actually “pushing” people further behind, as noted this week by a Bangladesh professor. Capable states acknowledge, as Niger recently confessed, that our humanitarian responsibilities are often invoked to “remedy the shortcomings” of our human community, that so much of the “need” we seek to address is the product of conflict and climate threats we could do much more to prevent. Capable states also recognize that what the president of ECOSOC referred to as our current “prefect storm” of economic, heath and environmental challenges cannot be resolved in isolation or half-heartedly, nor can we delude ourselves that time alone will heal what we must commit much more to heal ourselves. Capable states know that they must model the norms and behaviors that they seek to promote in others, that an architecture of shared burdens cannot be built on the backs of states which themselves decline to share or which insist on talking more than listening or, for that matter, acting.
And capable states know that our collective clock is ticking, our global hourglass is quickly draining its sand, the metaphorical wolves we have ourselves brought into being are making ample progress in bringing our very house down. Despite some stunning technologies and many hopeful local initiatives, we have allowed threats to our present to flare largely out of control and we can hardly miss their effects in the form of flooding and fires, unprecedented levels of heat and intensity of storms, and a global community that seems often to be in meltdown mode, eager to attack and reluctant to share, eager to exploit and reluctant to respect, eager to withdraw and reluctant to protect.
Pakistan’s Ambassador Akram was right this week to point to a “emerging global consensus” on debt relief, universal vaccination, women’s participation, climate mitigation and adaptation, and ending the digital divide, elements of a consensus that he did much to promote during his ECOSOC presidency and his stewardship of this year’s High Level Political Forum (HLPF). And yet the Ministerial Declaration from the recently adjourned HLPF is a testament as much to the politics of the UN as to an active consensus that can reassure communities in need or distress that their trust in multilateralism remains well-founded.
The representative of Slovenia, speaking on behalf of the European Union, acknowledged as much. Despite helping to beat back amendments to the declaration (proposed mostly by Russia) that would have stymied references to matters as fundamental (to us) as human rights, gender equality and biodiversity protection, the EU statement lamented the absence of a more “action-oriented” document which takes ample responsibility for “building back greener” and vigorously preparing our global society to prevent and address the “future shocks” which are virtually certain to come our way.
And perhaps also to reference in clear and unambiguous terms that the future envisioned in 2015 at the adoption of the Sustainable Development Goals is a long way from realization; and that as a result there is now literally “nowhere to run” from the ubiquitous drought and pandemic variants; from the heatwaves that now stretch to the Arctic and the deadly flooding which impacts communities across the so-called developed world; from the food insecurity that is quickly becoming a discouraging global norm and the violent outbursts from people with malevolent intent or who simply, if mistakenly, see no other pathway to express themselves.
As we learned from our own, uneven UNEPS experience, sound policy is about more than saying the right things but is about ensuring timely and capable response to threats which, as we now see in this global moment, are only becoming harder to tame. Despite some good efforts at global level underscored by innovative technology and abundant data, we often seem “trapped in the amber of the moment.” Our hourglass has almost drained, and yet we continue to squander precious time to demonstrate the courage and cooperation needed to free ourselves and our constituents from our largely self-imposed constraints. Time may seem to move slowly, but our chance at a sustainable future is passing much too quickly. We cannot allow another moment to drain away. Let us begin in greater earnest to reverse current trends while the opportunity to do so still beckons.
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