Archive | August, 2021

Summer Stock: Assessing Progress of our Conflict Priorities, Dr. Robert Zuber

29 Aug

I don’t know where I’m going, but I’m on my way.  Carl Sandburg

Never confuse movement with action.  Ernest Hemingway

By every act that glorifies or even tolerates such moronic delight in killing we set back the progress of humanity.  Rachel Carson

You’ve gotta know when it’s time to turn the page.  Tori Amos

Those who do not move, do not notice their chains.  Rosa Luxemburg

Progress means getting nearer to the place you want to be. And if you have taken a wrong turn, then to go forward does not get you any nearer. C.S. Lewis

Life is the principle of self-renewal, it is constantly renewing and remaking and changing and transfiguring itself.  Boris Pasternak

It is late August in what is finally a cool, if misty New York Sunday.  The UN, our principle “cover,” has been relatively quiet this past week as many NGO folks have fled the city and the diplomats who remain behind struggle to find even a bit of respite before their ministers and heads of state descend on New York in a few week’s time.

For those of us who have spent the month locked in place with eyes and ears tuned into the world, we are reminded yet again that crisis takes no holiday.  Those who watch helplessly as Hurricane Ida approaches New Orleans or the flames from the Caldor fire approach communities on the western shores of Lake Tahoe; those threatened with terrorist attacks at the Kabul airport while begging for passage on literally anything that can get airborne; those in places like Tigray longing for vaccines and other provisions while wondering when and how the abuses which now daily characterize their existence can ever be made to stop.

There is more, of course, more to consider, more to correct, more to assess, more about which to take stock of and, as necessary, change course.  For weary diplomats and burned-out NGOs the prospect of pushing forward on crises both urgent and stubborn is less than fully welcome.  But crises indeed take no vacation, nor do those most directly affected by them.  The wounds live with them daily as will the scars from struggles lost, childhoods denied, community livelihoods in ruins.  We who choose to engage at this level, despite our diminished August capacities (on top of our more generic limitations), recognize that a lack of vigilance on our part may well contribute to a lack of progress on peace elsewhere, that in some fashion our collective determination to push for real action and not mere movement might somehow, some way, facilitate guns being lowered, abuses being curbed.

Late August notwithstanding, there was much movement of a sort this week at the UN where five of the most painful and, in some instances, longest-tenured global conflicts were highlighted – Afghanistan, Syria, Yemen, Iraq and Tigray (Ethiopia).  While each has its own context and history, and two of them (Tigray and Afghanistan) presented greater immediacy, all five of these have in common their residual sense that the international community doesn’t entirely know where it’s going on conflict prevention, doesn’t entirely know how best to reassure conflict parties and communities that we are in fact doing the best that we can –and more importantly all that we can – to silence the guns, restore livelihoods, protect civilians and bring perpetrators of grave abuses to account.

We mostly talk a good game, me included, but so many of our words lack impact or at times even sufficient substance.  We continue to double down on what are essentially “wrong turns” of priority or rhetoric, valuing consensus more than impact, including through our overuse of multilateral jargon which obscures intent as much as clarifies a way forward.   Such jargon premises the same objectives, over and over, but rarely offers a viable implementation plan or provides evidence of a thoughtful assessment of plans already in place, mostly guaranteeing that the same issues will present themselves to the Council and other UN bodies, month after month, quarter after quarter, misery after misery.

On Syria, on Yemen, on Iraq the briefings at the UN are frequent and frequently communicate a lack of progress on key indicators needed for successful political resolutions.  While the focus in Syria and Yemen is largely on enhancing humanitarian access and nationwide cease fires, there has been some movement reported by the SRSG in Iraq on securing viable elections (with the support of the UN Assistance Mission) for October and on implementing a new law recognizing and addressing the need for reparations due to grave violations by ISIL against the Yazidi people (this despite ongoing ISIL threats).  As for Syria, sporadic cease fire violations, severe water restrictions, arbitrary detentions and the continued presence of foreign forces and terrorist groups continue to impede political progress and “exhaust” Red Crescent and other workers seeking to maintain essential flows of relief.  As for Yemen, while famine has been averted for now, there are (as noted by UNICEF ED Fore) “few tangible signs of peace on the ground,” enabling still-grave consequences for children caught in the crossfire, children who have known mostly conflict and deprivation in their young lives. In addition Mexico, as they often do in these contexts, highlighted the seemingly unending challenge of arms flows that inflame violence, damage schools and other infrastructure, and dampen peace prospects.

And what of Afghanistan and Tigray?  Earlier this week, the Human Rights Council in Geneva met in special session to air human rights concerns as the Taliban completed its swift takeover of the Afghan government (see report on the session from Universal Rights Group here).  As were a number of NGOs, many Afghans themselves had to be bitterly disappointed in the results, including what Human Rights Watch labelled as an “insulting” outcome document that did not heed calls for a special investigative mechanism, that did not mention the Taliban by name nor sufficiently articulate threats from terror groups embedded in the Taliban’s loose confederation, and that did not specifically reference legal entities to ensure even a modicum of accountability for abuses committed, rights denied.  What it offered, in the words of Pakistan, was “solidarity,” an important principle to be sure, but only if it is incarnate in specific commitments to protect the vulnerable and alleviate suffering.

The Security Council discussion on Tigray was a bit more practical, if not always more hopeful, and included thoughtful messaging from elected members Kenya and Ireland.  Kenya’s Ambassador Kimani was particularly on point, noting that for too many in this world, “war is seductive” and reminding of the need to blend the short-term project of cease fire and relief assistance with the longer-term project of meditating aspirations tied to ethnic identities that seem forever on the cusp of conflict.  Ireland’s Ambassador Geraldine Byrne Nason highlighted the children who, in Tigray and elsewhere, are dying in wars “not of their making” and pointedly called out Council colleagues for forgetting that “we” are the international community that needs to take urgent action in this and other instances of conflict and abuse.

And yet, here again, the culture of the system we honor and into which we have long been immersed continues to showcase its limitations regarding its most fundamental responsibility – to a more peaceful planet.  In a system with funding and policy priorities provided by member states and with a seemingly unyielding regard for narrow definitions of sovereignty and consensus, it is common for states under scrutiny – including in the instances under discussion here – to highlight their principles rather than their practices, to push responsibility away from themselves and on to their adversaries, and in varying degrees to reject the notion that UN bodies have legitimate jurisdiction over their internal affairs.  This triad of responses has been commonly articulated in the instances of Syria and Yemen, but was also seen this week in the case of Tigray where the Ethiopian Ambassador shared a statement noting that Ethiopians “are people of values,” denying any accusations of discrimination based on religion, culture or ethnicity, pointing fingers at the Tigray People’s Liberation Front as the party exclusively responsible for the misery in that region, and seeking international support while “respectfully” affirming sovereign national interests.

In our view, this is a formula conducive to “movement” (including in the case of Ethiopia allegations of fresh military recruitment) but much less to progress on peace.  With all due respect for the bureaucratic limitations under which most Ambassadors serve, it is disheartening to listen to the same formulas day after day, witness the same wrong turns that we stubbornly refuse to abandon even when it is clear enough that we have, simply and collectively, lost our way.  We all know we can do better, but the halls of the UN remain populated by those who are often more skilled at upholding national or organizational interests than human interest. This can and must change.

This Monday, at the end of India’s presidency, the Security Council will discuss the Israeli-Palestine conflict.  We will watch this discussion unfold in real time, hoping for some fresh thinking, some new options for policy renewal, especially some sense that our collective tolerance of violence and illegal settlements, of intimidation and retribution, of hate speech and even more hateful actions, has finally begun to run its course.

I’ll let you know if any of this happens, but we’re not particularly optimistic. We’re tired.  The diplomats are tired.  The people facing violence in this world are especially tired. And yet they still seek more from us, every one of us, even those of us who are consigned to a role of providing advice that states are under no obligation to consider, let alone accept; of suggesting fresh ideas for pathways for progress that often drown under waves of protocol and consensus; of reminding those who make decisions of some of the uncomfortable truths about our world and those who perpetually suffer within it, persons to whom our policy decisions should offer more tangible, dependable support.

As we take stock of ourselves, and of the institution of which we have long been a part, we confess our own considerable limitations, but also the opportunities presented to think harder and act more decisively, to listen better and share more abundantly. And we’re holding out hope that the cooler breezes of fall will revive and renew; will dispel some of the fatigue and confusion that I, at least, have not been able to manage as effectively as in years past; and that we can all find it within ourselves to do more than merely stay the course, but reverse and redirect that course as needed in greater service to our fractured world.

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Power Grid: Accompanying the Traumatized and Those who Serve Them, Dr. Robert Zuber

22 Aug
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To know someone who thinks & feels with us, & who, though distant, is close to us in spirit, this makes the earth for us an inhabited garden. Goethe

When the remembering was done, the forgetting could begin.  Sara Zarr

The ripples of the kind heart are the highest blessings of the universe.  Amit Ray

You remember only what you want to remember. You know only what your heart allows you to know.  Amy Tan

I am weary of this frail world’s decay.  Murasaki Shikibu

I never live my life for itself, but always in the experience which is going on around me.  Albert Schweitzer

When you don’t think you can, hold on.  James Frey

While riding the subway to and from our shared office this week, I noticed a new public service announcement among the placards which adorn each of the cars.   This one read, “connections are stronger than addiction.”  

This reminded me of what has now been years of accumulated evidence from neuro-biology that humans are, indeed, “hardwired for connection,” that as Dr. Amy Banks and colleagues put it over a decade ago, before the onset of a death-scattering pandemic and the systemic degrading of our politics, “we need to get back to the real basics of having relationships be at the center of our meaning.”

The implications of her work (and others in her field) lie far beyond the realm of the drug and alcohol addictions which were the sub-text of the subway messaging.  Indeed, one can make the case that our “addictions” are, perhaps even more than they always have been, much broader and more pervasive than substances alone: the stubborn habits of the heart that bring pain to ourselves and others but that we feel powerless to change; the ideas and values which we have allowed to ossify into conspiracy, becoming more and more divorced from any human realities they might once have been intended to address; the defensiveness that rises to the surface at the slightest provocation, indeed often absent any provocation at all; the paranoia which comes from social isolation (often now self-imposed) and which attempts to project on to others a malevolence which has often taken shape first within our own souls.

As at least some have been reminded during this seemingly endless pandemic, connection remains a good portion of the cure for what now ails us.  Unfortunately, it has also become uncomfortably clear across lines of age, of gender, of race, of culture, that we simply don’t know enough about each other — or perhaps even care to know — to nuance our responses to the complexities of other lives, to see the flaws but also the promise, to appreciate the contributions more than the inconveniences, to resist the rush to judge and to punish which often serves interests far darker than any alleged nobility of justice.   We have “wearied of the world’s decay” in part because our experience of that decay is less and less first-hand, a product of images that tell us less than we think they do, as well as accounts from diverse media that tell us mostly what some think we want to hear or, perhaps more to the point, that share only what they think “our hearts will allow us to know.”

If as the neuro-biologists increasingly accept, that we are “hardwired to connect,” then much of our current behavior constitutes a dangerous denial of our very essence, a particularly distressing challenge to those who seek to keep connection at the heart of their own life’s mission, but also for those have suffered in greater measure and who understand the degree to which the “ripples of kind hearts” are indispensable to their own healing, indeed to the full restoration of their own capacity for kindness and compassion. 

This week at the UN, amidst some appropriate hand-wringing over the fall of Afghanistan and its implications for everything from women’s rights to state corruption, amidst the latest crises of high winds and shifting earth heaped upon the already-traumatized people of Haiti, we gratefully joined with others in modes of reverence, mourning and connection.  At a series of events honoring the sacrifices of peacekeepers, UN field personnel and humanitarian workers (as part of World Humanitarian Day), an array of speakers paid homage to those who choose to place their life energies at the service of others, to stay the course and “hold on” when others would be tempted to flee the scene or lift their hands in desperate frustration, those who choose to remain at their demanding posts, insisting as one staffer boldly said this week  that threats from terrorist violence, a pandemic and climate-related factors often closing in around them are simply not enough to “deter humanitarian vocations,” are not enough to distract their attention from those “traumatized from attacks” including women made widows and children made orphans by weapons, famine or other forms of abuse.

While many in the audience resonated with the words of UN High Commission Bachelet honoring this “work of a lifetime,” to accompany survivors and raise our voices on their behalf, many also recognized that this is now, in places from Yemen to Tigray, much easier said than done.  Yes, we must learn better how “to support each other” along life’s journey.  Yes we must, as SG Guterres notes this week, place more services at the disposal of those facing unimaginable “heartbreak.” And yes, we must continue to honor and support the sometimes-incomprehensible risks taken each and every day by humanitarian workers in conflict zones — but this requires the rest of us to ensure an end to the violence which complicates every facet of their life-preserving work and which also claims the lives of far too many of the workers themselves well before their time. 

And then there were the discussions focused on the survivors themselves, survivors of often horrific terrorist violence which represented, as noted by the Iraqi Ambassador to the UN in Geneva, “attacks on humanity itself.”  As USG Voronkov acknowledged, there are times when our preoccupation with fighting terrorism “obscures our view of the victims who need more from us.” Indeed it can also obscure from view the testimony of victims who know for themselves what they need in order to overcome the trauma that generally lingers longer than they could possibly have imagined, trauma that, as one said, can change life dramatically “through no fault of your own.”

And what did they say they most need?   For starters, they need people around them who can resist the temptation to forget, to forget about the dark side of the what this world can continue to offer up once the remembrances have concluded and the symbols of honor have been stored away for another year.  Moreover, survivors of terror, or mass atrocity violence, or sudden displacement or tragic personal loss recognize that the pain can never be healed through social isolation, can never be restored by allowing personal trauma to metastasize into a life force, an addiction if you will, one which denies the core of our biological essence.  It was so encouraging to hear one survivor after another call for “platforms for healing and connection,” for “powerful victims’ networks” which can help restore something close to full functionality in this challenging world.  It was also encouraging to note the support expressed by survivors for the humanitarian workers who so often stand in courageous attention between those vulnerable persons for whom “time seems to be running out” and the person-centered services that can help them re-engage with more of the life which can still be experienced in many places as a kind of “inhabited garden.”

For those who doubt that lives of trauma can become lives of healing and purpose, for those who believe that the deep pain of violence and abuse is forever consigned to impede and isolate, we end as we began, with words from Amy Banks and her neuro-biology colleagues, those who understand that lasting change in our distraught human community is still possible despite all contrary evidence.  The key to this change, they make clear,  is within us, in the quality and steadfastness of our “motivation and interest in making different choices which will stimulate new areas of the brain and re-wire us.”  And as they know, and as the survivors of violence and abuse we heard from this week and those humanitarians who accompany them also know, there is no choice more impactful to healing and change than the choice to connect, to widen our circles, to reinvest in what we think we know of others including those we have already “given up on,” to have the courage let whatever kindness we have at our disposal flow to every corner of life that needs it, to refute the lonely conspiracy and paranoia that a life of isolation and distance is prone towards, to affirm what is most natural to us rather than investing in what are often vast quantities of energy required to keep connection buried under layers of resentment, suspicion and grievance.

Every once in a while in our UN spaces, the traumatized and victimized among us serve up reminders to those of us who seek to “re-wire” our national and global institutions, to both recover the core of why they were founded in the first place and help them meet current expectations. One such reminder is directed squarely at us; that we also can recover and nourish that capacity at the core of our human condition, the connection that alone can ease the deepest pain, stem chronic suffering, vanquish isolation, and restore that kind, human presence which can steadfastly rewire our institutions and refresh relationships with those they are mandated to serve.

The good news is that we still have what it takes to do this, though we must resolve to return to the path of connection without delay.  The longer we deny who we truly are, the longer we bury the power of our own hardwiring, the longer we will have to deal with the consequences of people and institutions being less, sometimes far less, than we need them to be.

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Speech Therapy: A Youth Lens on Urgent UN Discussions, Brady Sanders

17 Aug

Editor’s Note: A student at Georgia Institute of Technology, Brady spent part of the summer with GAPW on what turned out to be a completely virtual internship. While not what he had hoped for, and not what we hoped for him, Brady was a diligent follower of summer UN processes, asking good questions while not allowing the steep learning curve which the UN often presents to newcomers deter him from engaging with complex issues in the Security Council and, especially, in the ECOSOC High-Level Political Forum.

When signing up for an opportunity with GAPW at the end of May, I was very anxious at first, as I had no idea what I was getting myself into. I expected a lot of dialogue on subjects that I knew very little about, people talking too fast for me to understand – as New York has a reputation for being all hustle and bustle, and meetings consisting of solely legal or technical jargon that I would not know how to digest. 

For the first few days, I was lost and thought everyone was repeating each other. So much was going on with the High-Level Political Forum — my very first UN engagement — that it was hard to keep all of the countries and their agendas straight, especially for someone who has no prior experiences with these countries. However, once I began to look in on more meetings and learned about some of the counties’ histories, the subtleties made more sense, and I could then fully digest what the delegations were discussing. 

Of the meetings I attended, my favorite ones discussed climate change, hunger, and the crisis in Myanmar. While these topics are interesting to me in general, I feel like these were the best presentations: not only because of the material, but because of the speakers themselves. They rallied their respective audiences by talking with us instead of to us. For the food security sessions, Mr. David Beasley was by far the most compelling speaker. He was able to rally the room behind what he said because of his level of enthusiasm which most other speakers did not seem to have. Another speaker I enjoyed was a diplomat from Colombia who talked about her experiences with the cartels there. She brought in very personal details and accounts of how her life changed due to the violence from the drug trade. By being vulnerable like that, she was able to form an emotional connection with people in the meeting, which made what she had to say so much more impactful. In my opinion, finding speakers like this is singlehandedly the most important thing the UN can do to garner support from people in the wider world. 

While there have been many things that I thought the UN did well, there are a few things I thought could have been improved upon. One of which is the UN’s stated goal for youth involvement. While the UN encourages youth involvement, they seem to talk more about this than acting on it. Sure, there were two days during my internship when youth leaders held meetings, but besides that, there was not much evidence of youth participation. Additionally, these meetings simply highlighted the work already done by young adults rather than a discussion with young adults about what they want to see done now, what they are eager to do now. So, to the UN, include more young adults in your discussions instead of just highlighting how we have been trying to change the world. This is our future at stake, so it would be proper if we had a more substantial influence on what happens to it going forward, the priorities that will shape the future. 

To close, I want to talk about one more concern I have witnessed from the meetings. Delegations are, to put it frankly, moving too slowly. While I understand treaties and resolutions take time to complete, action must occur rapidly when our future is at risk. Climate change won’t slow because delegations need time to talk about the wording of resolutions. Rising hunger rates won’t slow because delegations need time to talk about wording. Terrorist organizations won’t slow their advances because delegations need time to talk about wording. If we want our future to be peaceful and equitable for all, we must demand that delegations work more swiftly to actively and practically address looming crises. Because on matters such as climate change we will soon pass a tipping point, and then no resolution will be able to stop what is now well in motion. 

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Kid Rock: Youth and the Struggle for a More Harmonious Planet, Dr. Robert Zuber

15 Aug
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One day, you will be old enough to start reading fairytales again.  C.S. Lewis

For society to attempt to solve its desperate problems without the full participation of even very young people is imbecile.  Alvin Toffler

The older I grow, the more I distrust the familiar doctrine that age brings wisdom.  H.L. Mencken

I can tell you that you will awake someday to find that your life has rushed by at a speed at once impossible and cruel. Meg Rosoff

“Sure, everything is ending,” Jules said, “but not yet.” Jennifer Egan

That’s the duty of the old, to be anxious on behalf of the young. And the duty of the young is to scorn the anxiety of the old.  Philip Pullman

When I was a boy the Dead Sea was only sick.  George Burns

This was a week when many members of the UN family took a bit of rest from the grind of multilateral diplomacy, a time to restore at least a bit of the energy to the “batteries” which seem perpetually in need of a charge.

The world, however, doesn’t privilege holidays.  Indeed, our community was peppered this week by news both urgent and discouraging:   a massive earthquake in “snake-bitten” Haiti, the discovery of new Ebola cases in Guinea and Côte d’Ivoire, the rapid fall of Afghanistan to the Taliban and their enablers, an enhanced potential for civil war in Myanmar, even an increase in piracy and other crimes against maritime trade and the very health of the oceans themselves as acknowledged during a High-Level Security Council debate on Monday hosted by India’s Prime Minister Modi. 

Added to that, surely the most discouraging news of all; the release this week of the “Climate Change 2021: the Physical Science Basis” by the UN’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change.  The report is difficult to wade through (despite its inclusion of an interactive Atlas) and the main conclusions of the report are even more difficult to process: that even if we are able to somehow meet our climate targets, the patterns we now experience are sure to endure: storms of increasing violence and frequency, fires raging on multiple continents depleting even more of the forests we need to absorb excess carbon, water scarcity becoming increasingly the norm in a number of global regions, biodiversity threatened at multiple points on the chain of life endangering both agriculture and human health.  

There is more of course, more to be concerned about even than these. The SG’s response to the IPCC report, a “Code Red” for the planet, was widely disseminated throughout the global media.  The response of the young people around our office as well as those who gathered online this week to acknowledge UN “International Youth Day” was equally firm in the insistence that more can and must be done to “reverse the trend” (as our office colleagues would say), that the speed of our lives, the speed of global changes, must be matched more than has been done to date by the speed of our own responses, our own adaptations, our own resolve and, where appropriate, our own leadership – all of which beckons the skills and energies of young people at its core.

If this indeed is “code red” for the planet, it is surely “code red” for the future of young people, a future already compromised by high levels of economic uncertainty and even higher levels of social inequality and armed violence.   There is much to love about the world, beauty within people and in the wider planet which our short-term and self-referential decisionmaking has not yet managed to eradicate.  But the vantage points of too many elders suggest trouble; the lack of wisdom and discernment that such folks too-often bring to policy, the “advice” we are happy to dispense (often unrequested) without a similar acknowledgement of the crises made more dangerous on our watches, the fires we have not extinguished and which will continue to consume after we have passed on from this life, the frustrations that will keep spinning out of control as more and more people see through the half-hearted, overly-politicized efforts of many of the powerful and affluent to attend to the needs and aspirations of the desperate.

The times may seem a tad distressing, but the social and technological options which govern life in our times remain in healthy motion. We face problems which are unprecedented, but we also have access to avenues of response which are unprecedented as well, technologies which can remove plastics from our oceans and carbon from our atmosphere, communication tools that can help broaden the stake and integrate hopeful responses from youth and others geographically isolated from the global centers of policy.  While people like me press the buttons on our smart phones and just hope for the best, while others attempt to sentimentalize a past that was never as good as we claim it was, many young people are staking out a fresh, hopeful reality which, remarkably, does not reject the ideas, anxieties and suggestions of their elders as much as they might.  As a rule, they know better how to adapt the problem-solving and communications-rich technologies at their disposal to make issue linkages and identify new stakeholders.  They are often more comfortable in multi-cultural settings than their elders were and they are assuredly more comfortable in front of cameras than people like me who can barely stand to have their own picture taken.

 Many young people are also, and thankfully, fairly well attuned to the need to mirror changes in technology with changes in persons. Many seem to understand at some level that neglect of character in pursuit of social change is likely to lead to the same ends as the generations which proceeded them, a world with too many weapons, too little water, and health and other quality-of-life indices which strain existing resources and provide yet another rationale for armed violence. It was reassuring that the interns of Reverse the Trend (RTT) who met with the Kiribati Ambassador to the UN this past Friday on our “patio” seemed inspired by the kindness and hopefulness of his words, but also energized by his resolute stance that young people from every continent and every culture must come prepared to participate meaningfully in the affairs that characterize these times, prepared not only with their skills and ideas, but with their compassion, discernment and creativity. 

Such RTT and other youth may not be quite ready to once again take up fairytales, but they well understand and convey the importance of cultural expression to peacemaking; they recognize that poetry, dance and painting are not auxiliary aspects of an intentional life but are rather fuel for that life. 

During a typical week, we hear from (and respond to) a good number of young people from various cultures and on diverse life paths.  Some of these youth are discouraged; some are angry; some are thoughtful and determined; some are anxious that the current uncertainties will ultimately consume their potential contributions, that the wildly unequal access to resources which defined current generations will characterize yet another one.  And yet, despite their anxieties, we are heartened by how some young people have chosen a path not always taken, a path that calls them to invest in persons even younger than themselves, persons even more uncertain about their identities and threats from a world in turmoil.  Together they plant trees, they clean riverbeds, they grow healthier crops, they resolve conflict, they support victims and they presume to call on current leadership, including those rightly skeptical of the wisdom of age, to use their positions to better enable that transition to youthful energies which most UN diplomats now advocate.

We too, support this transition in every aspect. And just maybe, we’ve influenced some transition recipients more than we think.  One of our more active twitter followers is a young man (known only as “Sam”) from Côte d’Ivoire who recently wrote: “The values of a servant leader are the same as the values of a mentor: integrity, humility, respect and truth.”  Servant leadership, a concept and practice core to our own mandate. On those rock-solid values espoused by Sam, on those promises he strives to honor, we can surely build a movement for health and harmony that can truly sustain itself, that can blend inspiration and technology in new and life-enhancing ways, that can serve and be served beyond the boundaries of status and hierarchy, and that does not wait for official permission to share and to act.

And maybe, just maybe, Sam and his young colleagues can sneak in a bit of time for fairytales, or at least for the wise stories and accumulated imagination that remind us all why human life and human community remain so precious.

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From a Distance: Autonomy and Sanity in Weapons Systems, Dr. Robert Zuber

8 Aug

Empires are never built or maintained on the basis of compassion.  Empires live by numbness.  Walter Brueggemann 

To be in hell is to drift; to be in heaven is to steer.  George Bernard Shaw

A quietly mad population is a tractable one.  Naomi Wolf

Be not angry that you cannot make others as you wish them to be, since you cannot make yourself as you wish to be. Thomas à Kempis

It was like being in a car with the gas pedal slammed down to the floor and nothing to do but hold on and pretend to have some semblance of control. Nic Sheff

It’s possible to name everything and to destroy the world.  Kathy Acker

Disillusion comes sooner or later, but it always comes, it doesn’t miss an appointment, it never has.  Juan Gabriel Vásquez

Over this long weekend, we and a number of groups with whom we work (including our colleagues at Reverse the Trend) have acknowledged the anniversary of the still-controversial use of a nuclear weapon on the residents of the city of Hiroshima, Japan (August 6, 1945) and the even more controversial bombing of Nagasaki on August 9.

Amidst all the important discussion about the morality and legality of testing indiscriminate weapons on urban populations, what is not controversial is that the bombs were launched from US bombers flown by human beings.  The hatch releasing the bomb was controlled by human beings.  The orders to drop these weapons for the first (and only) time in history were given by human beings. And the fireballs which these weapons created were visible to the human beings tasked with chronicling outcomes and consequences.  

This is surely one of Bob’s “duh” moments but the point is that even with respect to the most destructive of weapons and weapons systems, the presumption of human control has always been built into the equation.  Such bombs don’t drop themselves, don’t set their own targeting objectives. While full accountability for military mis-adventurism remains elusive, the presence of human agents and command chains has been understood as indispensable for ascribing at least some accountability for military operations which go off the rails, are deemed disproportionate to threats posed, or cause indiscriminate harm beyond the boundaries of any “reasonable” military objective.

But these erstwhile “human safeguards” are steadily being eroded as weaponized drones attack targets at distances of separation measured in the thousands of miles and as space-based weapons threaten populations at even greater distances.   As our targets become more abstracted from human realities, as the distance between launch and destruction become ever greater, our targeting takes on more and more of the attributes of a video game.  We don’t have to live with the consequences of our attacks in part because we are no longer a witness to those consequences. We aren’t required to experience the fireballs or the hollowed-out communities. We don’t hear the cries of the victimized or smell the burning flesh. More and more, we can push the buttons, clear the board, get on with our lives, and then return to our seats to prompt the systems to hone-in on our next, equally remote targets. 

And as we were reminded this week at the UN, we now have the capacity to develop and manufacture weapons systems which can operate virtually independent of human control, which can make (and implement) autonomous targeting decisions based on algorithms that they might eventually be capable of altering themselves.   

This week, amidst discouraging news from Afghanistan, Myanmar and Tigray, we spent a good bit of time covering the Group of Government Experts meeting on Lethal Autonomous Weapons Systems (LAWS).  The dominant theme of this week was the maintenance of what the UK and others referred to as “meaningful human control “over LAWS and their deployments, taking into account (as the Holy See advocated) “potential implications for international peace and security as weapons systems becomes further detached from human agency.”

While some states such as Australia highlighted the potential military advantages of autonomous weapons – especially with regard to greater targeting precision – most states at this GGE understood at some level that the burden of proof lay with those few states which seemed to minimize the degree of difficulty in maintaining what Brazil referred to as a balance between “military necessity” and regard for legal and ethical principles, including human dignity.  Many states, including those calling for a binding international instrument on LAWS, expressed the concern that as military-related technology increases, human accountability for weapons uses under international law risks becoming akin to a rapidly speeding car which we can now only pretend is still under our control.

Kudos to those states, especially Mexico, Chile and Palestine, for their efforts to keep human agency and dignity at the center of our military doctrine; for ably rejecting (as Chile noted) our current, norm-busing predisposition to “spectator violence,” for our growing comfort (as Palestine maintained) with ascribing accountability for autonomous systems failures to the machines themselves and not to those who program and “manage them,” and for our unwillingness (as Mexico claimed) to draw clear linkages between our work in this GGE to the larger (and oft-neglected) UN project of “general and complete disarmament.” 

And yet, even in these instances, it was easy to come away with a feeling (communicated to me by others as well) that something is missing from these discussions, that ascriptions of “human control” are not a sufficiently high bar, are not sufficiently mindful of the current state of human affairs and its impacts on our emotional stability, indeed even our very sanity. Does not “meaningful human control” assume that we can keep our best emotions switched “on,” that we can maintain the ability (and the will) to integrate implications of weapons deployments beyond the merely technical?

I assume that most readers of this piece have not altogether missed the recent spate of articles in the mainstream and alternative media documenting our growing emotional fragility and “numbness” as the combination of pandemic variants, severe drought and the destructive heat from forest fires and armed violence push many us back into places of social, economic and emotional isolation from which we were just starting, albeit tentatively, to emerge.  We are in danger of saying too much about this, but can also never say this enough – that we are steadily allowing ourselves to become an impaired species, one which is increasingly disposed to see others as adversaries rather than partners; one which has shrunk circles of concern beyond the reach of reason, let alone of multilateral policy and inquiry; one which has generally, even defiantly, succumbed to a default of “numbness,” that place of merely going through the motions, of abandoning any pretense to genuine agency and dignity, let alone compassion; of passively accepting what we are told to do, trained to do, even programmed to do, because it just takes too much energy not to do so.

It is perhaps not the duty of negotiating diplomats to ask themselves these questions, to openly share concern about the basic sanity and humanity of those persons whose agency we rightly seek to guarantee with respect to our more and more sophisticated weapons systems.   But the concerns loom nonetheless, concerns about our escalating levels of high anxiety, disillusionment and “quiet madness” that call into question what remains of our confidence in human agency, eroding the belief that we still have what it takes to keep our technologically advanced weapons systems in line with the international law (IHL) obligations which the weapons themselves never quite agreed to uphold. 

The numbness which now infects so many dimensions of our eroding social contract has particularly grave implications for our military adventures, especially given our current, weapons-related complexities that stretch both the efficacy of our measures of control and the international laws and regulations meant to ensure “humane” deployments. Indeed, some states this week openly wondered whether current interpretation of international law are sufficient to allow us (as Brazil noted) to “draw the line” on violence lacking adequate human authorization and oversight. Moreover the International Committee of the Red Cross — an agency thankfully as invested in preventing war as in upholding its “rules” — claimed that “it is hard to imagine a battlefield scenario where autonomous weapons would not raise significant IHL red flags,” especially given that so many “battlefields” are now resident in heavily populated areas.

To our own mind, sane and stable human agency is most urgently needed at the point of decision to authorize weapons systems such as LAWS in the first place.  Once that fateful decision is made, it is harder to imagine human agency that is sufficient to their uses, that can maintain the balance between military utility and our obligations under international humanitarian law, indeed that can remove all those “red flags” from their flag poles. One task for us all is to guarantee that “meaningful human control” over our increasingly complex and even autonomous weapons systems does not devolve into some misidentified “trial” conducted by the emotionally impaired on unwitting populations.

Until and unless we can better assure that the humans in control of such systems are not overcome by despair or disillusionment, have not become numbed to the consequences of the weapons they seek to manage, it would be better for what remains of our collective health, safety and sanity to keep those weapons out of circulation altogether.

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Waiting Room: Ending the Global Frustration on Small Arms, Dr. Robert Zuber

1 Aug

I aimed at the public’s heart, and by accident I hit it in the stomach.  Upton Sinclair

I guess that’s what disappointment is- a sense of loss for something you never had.  Deb Caletti

To make someone wait: the constant prerogative of all power.  Roland Barthes

Life is a long preparation for something that never happens.  W.B. Yeats

He had the look of one who had drunk the cup of life and found a dead beetle at the bottom.  P.G. Wodehouse

Disappointment’ s cousin is Frustration, the second storm. Chetan Bhagat

Deep under our feet the Earth holds its molten breath, while the bones of countless generations watch us and wait.  Isaac Marion

I have a (bad) habit of indulging in what is known in the radio business as “sports-talk,” a phenomenon characterized by mostly men calling in to show hosts – also mostly men – and airing mostly grievances about things which, in the grand scheme of things mostly don’t matter.  In this media format, people lose their minds over such important things as how far someone can throw an American football, whether or not so-and-so has the “clutch gene,” or how some player can possibly “earn” a salary which might be, literally speaking, 1000 times larger than those of the callers.

But for all its stunning banality, sports-talk is also a window on culture, a culture which seems increasingly unhinged, where external grievance has almost completely obliterated internal gratitude; where we engage the outside world mostly to satisfy our rooting interests rather than to root out the fear and suspicion causing many of us to build walls rather than open doors, indulge emotions that might otherwise be considered unseemly, and utterly confuse the petty and the profound.

Some of this was on display this week regarding a decision by gymnast Simone Biles to forgo Olympic events she was expected to win due to concerns over her own mental stability and thus her ability to participate in jumps and twists and twirls with high potential for injury if your mind “isn’t right.”  While some radio callers were sympathetic, many others were in the “throw some dirt on it” and get back to business crowd, based on some underlying sense that Biles “owes” the rest of us a performance regardless of her mental state, regardless of the threats her high-wire acts actually pose to herself, and regardless of how many times she has honored her talents – and her audience – in the past.

It occurred to me that these are the kinds of comments we make when there is not enough of life washing over us, when the social isolation of the times breeds what we might expect it to – a suspicion of everything outside our bubbles save for the thing we do well to be most suspicious of in these precarious times – the bubbles in which we have immersed ourselves.  Yes, some of us may well have gotten a bit too “soft” in these times, giving up and giving in, pulling the bed covers over our heads when it is time to get up and face the world to the best of our current capacity.  But many of us have also lost a bit of speed on our metaphorical “fast balls,” a bit of confidence, a bit of judgment, a bit of energy, a bit of perspective, a bit of connection. Many of us are not even close to our mental-best now and, unlike Simone Biles, seem incapable of recognizing as much. Some would seemingly rather lose their proverbial lunches over mask wearing — the current societal equivalent of sports-talk grievances – as though a patch of blue material and two white strings constituted an existential threat to our well-being, as though our “freedom” to consume our metaphorical meals as we alone wish also includes the “freedom” to stick a fork in the stomachs of others.

As the United Nations also recognizes, we are collectively facing a mental health crisis which mirrors and is directly affected by our pandemic-related physical health threats.  Over the past 18 months the losses have been both numerous and challenging to chronicle – people losing their homes and plunging into poverty; people facing grave food insecurity and social isolation; people having to make decisions they thought they would never have to make as incomes evaporate, schools close and threats from armed violence, traffickers, political instability and climate change leave millions in situations beyond precarious.  For too many in our world, the pandemic has done more than merely interrupt our personal goals and aspirations but is more akin to “piling on,” heaping trauma on top of deprivation and fraying a social fabric which represents a mortal loss to people less and less able to meet their own basic needs.  

It is hard even to imagine the mental strains associated with this confluence of grave challenges, but to some degree, this is the business of those of us who work in multilateral policy settings. We are mandated to identify at least some of the pain and to ensure that at least some of our policy work is germane to its easing, is at least adequate to those waiting for the relief and restoration that they are unable to effect for themselves.  This week, the UN reflected on those languishing in COVID-infected prisons in Syria, those daring to take to the streets in Myanmar seeking to pry governance from the bloodied hands of the military junta, those in Tigray and Yemen waiting desperately and relentlessly for provisions which have become tactical elements in a larger conflict.  These are just some of the people whom we have encouraged to assume that we have their back, that we have some of what is needed to free them from suffering and help restore them to health, including and especially mental health, health which they will need if they and their loved ones are to navigate a world with high threat levels beyond the immediate levers of misery.

But exposing mental health deficiencies and calling for more “services” is only part of the equation.  At  UN events this week focused on victims of food insecurity and human trafficking, speakers from the UN and from field-based NGOs noted the urgent need for victims to be “seen beyond their trauma,” to be regarded as agents of change and healing and not only recipients of assistance, to underscore the strong desire of many to be “the last victim” of exploitation and deprivation, and thus to be the forefront of efforts to move people to places of self-sufficiency and dignity, aspects long-denied people seeking (and sometimes failing) to outrun the “storms” that seem forever to form on the horizon.

The power of victim testimony was evident this week, insisting on a place at the policy table, noting how much easier it is to “walk strange roads” towards health and recovery alongside others who have walked them previously, affirming with actress Mira Sorvino that the ” bravery and lived experience” of survivors can be amplified and thus help to inspire the international community to do more to prevent and restore what Sorvino referred to as “decimated lives.”  Others, including at the UN Food Systems pre-Summit underscored the urgency of the times, the “children who face starvation while we sit here and make speeches,” our half-measures that too-often reinforce the trauma from the long waiting we have, at some core level, pledged to reduce.

Such half-measures also punctuated what was one of the signature events of the UN week, the 7th Biennial Meeting of States on Small Arms and Light Weapons, a meeting intended to push forward implementation of the Programme of Action (PoA) to combat illicit weapons and prevent their diversion from authorized to unauthorized sectors.

Like other aspects of our collective work, this PoA while not legally binding nevertheless constitutes a promise to communities awash in weapons illicit and otherwise, weapons which intimidate and coerce, weapons which undermine development progress and effective parenting, weapons which in the hands of the stable and (increasingly) unstable cause deaths for some and enable other abuses much easier to commit at the point of a gun.

As I often do, I wondered while watching some of this PoA unfold, how this scene might appear to those in diverse communities begging for relief from armed violence threats, waiting and waiting some more for the solutions that they cannot effect by themselves, wondering if it is the lot of their children to spend their lives dodging bullets and the intimidation of armed bullies, wondering also if those seeming to place national interest before human interest will ever understand the relationship between the global saturations of weapons and the trauma those weapons engender and which are routinely experienced by millions.

There were some excellent proposals put forward by Costa Rica, South Africa, Colombia and others regarding the need to expand the scope of the PoA to include ammunition (the “bullets that kill”), to affirm closer synergies with the Arms Trade Treaty and other international instruments, to affirm that the PoA is related at its core to implementation of the Sustainable Development Goals, to fully integrate women’s participation and victim-centered perspectives into this work, and most importantly, to reinforce the view that reducing production of weapons is the most direct path to ending the diversion of weapons; that the more weapons in circulation the harder they are to manage. 

All of these proposals seemed worthwhile to us, in fact seemed indispensable to fully meeting the promises embedded in the PoA.  And yet resistance to each was considerable, at times fierce, perhaps even borderline irrational from the perspective of those who seek to honor those waiting and waiting for evidence of a reawakened sanity on arms proliferation. Demands to uphold “consensus” rained down on the PoA conference room, claims often made by states with only tepid interest in abiding by the actions which the prevailing BMS consensus had already advocated. This was hardly the “right signal” to the world which Mexico hoped to send, certainly not to those frustrated hearts we are trying to convince regarding our commitment to understand and scale back the growing small arms threat.

Perhaps no reaction to this resistance was as poignant as that of the PoA Chair, Ambassador Kimani of Kenya.  In his closing remarks, he vetted his “learning” from this often-contentious week challenging the value and viability of prevailing notions of consensus and coming to a fresh if disquieting understanding of the frustration of global communities regarding the UN’s alleged ability to “solve their problems.”

He could also have wondered, if he dared, if our global institutions were now destined to magnify trauma and other threats to mental and physical health rather than mitigate them, if we have become hard-wired to use the power at our disposal to force other people to wait – even unto death — until we get our act together, until we recover our full policy sanity, until we recognize who we actually work for and what they now require of us. The victims of gun violence – like those of trafficking, famine and a deadly pandemic –need us to heed their voices and honor their efficacy, need us to walk with them down unfamiliar paths and refuse to contribute to yet more disappointment or loss; but also to do the jobs we’ve been entrusted with, to restore credibility jeopardized or even lost among those who find themselves in situations where there is simply no more time to wait.  

Our still-declining mental health requires increased services and the policy participation of the traumatized; but it also requires safer and more predictable environments in which to feed, educate and raise our children.  A world awash in weapons simply cannot ensure such settings.  We who profess to care about those persons waiting for weapons-related relief simply must find the means to provide it.

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