Archive | August, 2022

Bomb Shelter: Deferring the Risks We are Expected to Face, Dr. Robert Zuber

24 Aug

All choices are fraught with peril, but inaction is the most perilous of all.  Frewin Jones

To become spring, means accepting the risk of winter. To become presence, means accepting the risk of absence. Antoine de Saint-Exupéry

A bend in the road is not the end of the road…Unless you fail to make the turn. Helen Keller

To really ask is to open the door to the whirlwind. The answer may annihilate the question and the questioner.  Anne Rice

To save all we must risk all.  Friedrich von Schiller

The desire for safety stands against every great and noble enterprise.  Tacitus

Burning bridges behind you is understandable. It’s the bridges before us that we burn, not realizing we may need to cross, that brings regret.  Anthony Liccione

I have been asked often over these past two weeks by widely dispersed colleagues about the 10th Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty (NPT) Review Conference taking place this month in New York.

While I no longer expend enough energy on the issue of nuclear weapons to be branded anything but an active onlooker, I have spent more time in these NPT sessions than I might have done otherwise.  This is due to the (relative) lack of policy activity inside the building, the exceptions this past week including some appropriately moving tributes to humanitarians killed or injured in the service of others and another policy event designed to extend treaty protections for the oceans and its biodiversity to areas beyond national jurisdiction (BBNJ). 

While many stakeholders came to New York in the hopes of informing the NPT and BBNJ negotiations, to ensure that urgency rather than propriety dominated the affective policy landscape, processes continued the post-pandemic trend in UN spaces of calling for NGO involvement on the one hand while marginalizing it on the other.  Despite a few glimpses courtesy of short, infrequent plenary sessions, the BBNJ has been conducted almost entirely in informal sessions to which our collective participation is largely unwelcome.   The NPT has offered more opportunities to watch the proceedings but rarely to challenge their content or direction.  Moreover, the most important of the discussions, those taking place in the “subsidiary bodies” have been almost completely off-limits to those, many with considerable expertise themselves, who dared (foolishly or otherwise) to risk time and treasure (and burn considerable carbon)  in yet another attempt to ensure that delegations embrace a larger portion of their generally under-implemented treaty obligations and otherwise “meet the moment.”

Aside from stakeholder marginalization, what the NPT and BBNJ process have in common is that both are treaty processes dealing with what are widely regarded as existential threats to our very survival as a species.  The humanitarian consequences of nuclear weapons use have been in full view since the “duck and cover” days of my youth, and more contemporary efforts to modernize arsenals (as opposed to de-commissioning them) have produced weapons which are quicker to deploy, more powerful, better able to avoid detection and other features which provide little comfort to those tracking the impacts of nuclear explosions on our already violence-prone and over-heated planet. 

In much the same manner, our oceans are rapidly approaching their own tipping points as water temperatures and sea levels rise, as the PH of the oceans continues to slide towards unhealthy metrics and as the open ocean remains in some of its areas a massive water-borne dump for ocean-going vessels and other polluters with degraded plastic becoming an increasingly prominent feature of the diets of marine wildlife.  As we need an NPT which is functional and accountable, especially to its disarmament obligations, so too do we need a BBNJ process to result in treaty obligations that extend and amplify our concerns for the oceans beyond national jurisdiction to the ubiquitous areas of our inter-connected seas negatively impacted by human activity.

In both instances, there are grave reasons for concern.  The clock is ticking on both existential threats, and it is clear from the vantage points that we are still able to occupy that there is insufficient urgency on the part of delegations and negotiators to create and/or move existing agreements forward in ways that both speak to this uneasy moment and serve to bring us back from the brink of a ruin which we (including our policy leadership) have literally brought upon ourselves. We have created space to deliberate on this ruinous state of affairs but have largely failed to ask the questions that might set off a “whirlwind” of change beyond the narrow confines of diplomatic control. We have spent much energy (and wasted the energy of others) in an attempt to justify the unjustifiable, such as recent Russian nuclear weapons threats against Ukraine and the US position that, despite all evidence to the contrary, my government is upholding its commitments under Article 6 of the NPT.  For those of you fortunate to have escaped previous iterations of this double-speak, Article 6 is the disarmament pillar of this treaty, a condition which has been piously flaunted for the most part by the nuclear weapons states since the NPT first entered into force.

When colleagues ask us about the status of treaty negotiations and/or review, they are largely asking about functional levels of urgency in evidence amongst the delegations.  Do the people responsible for creating normative and/or legal frameworks to help ensure a future for human and other life genuinely understand the dynamics of this precarious moment?  Do they understand that the “inter-governmental processes” which they increasingly seek to protect from the undiplomatic utterances of those of us focused on doomsday clocks rather than UN clocks, that these processes and the “consensus” outcomes which more often ensure non-compliance than inspire its opposite have simply not yet delivered the goods, have not allowed constituents to rest easier or, in many cases, to rest at all?

After countless hours in UN conference rooms, I still wonder myself.  More to the point, the colleagues reaching out to us about these treaty processes are generally expressing more anxiety than confidence, more skepticism than gratitude. They are asking, as we might also, questions more human than diplomatic, questions that go beyond the diplomatic calculus of sufficiency to the wider concern of a world in flames that those tasked with response have done too little to remediate.

Is the diplomatic community both authorized and willing to turn a corner when a corner urgently needs to be turned?  Are they prepared to engage the hard (and possibly unauthorized) questions and not only the ones which will “cause no trouble” to their permanent missions or careers?  Can they properly assess the bridges we have carelessly burned such that we also avoid burning the ones we will need to cross over to escape the damage wrought by our endlessly tepid policy outcomes and the sometimes-misleading promises they communicate to constituents?

The polarities of the UN community’s relationship to risk have been clearly evident over the last week.  On the one hand are the humanitarians, those who feed and protect under dangerous conditions, those who lay their lives on the line to compensate for the policy failures of the states who pay the UN’s bills and largely – increasingly unilaterally – govern its policy processes.  And while peacekeepers are being attacked and humanitarian workers are being abducted, we fail to resolve the conflicts which threaten them (let alone prevent their occurrence). We continue to speak in repetitive tones in this UN space about “leaving no one behind” without communicating clearly that we understand the dramatic political and economic risks which need to be taken  in order to address what in our complex human history would be the fulfillment of a genuinely unprecedented SDG mandate.

And so we go forth in a system made up of often-bewildered civil society organizations, NGOs who too often reinforce a game we are running out of time to change, and diplomats who represent positions, often ably, which they largely do not create themselves.  Ours (if I might be so presumptuous) is a system which privileges consensus, not as an aspiration but as a de-facto veto, resulting in resolutions and other obligations likely to be implemented only in part if at all, documents couched in language likely to inspire only states already walking the pathways which our oft-compromised resolutions and treaties seek to define.

 As diplomats continue their work to create documents on which all can agree if not commit to actually implement, we continue to send willing soldiers, security officers and aid workers into the field, people who have worked through their need for safety in order to feed and clothe, house and protect those facing the ravages of war and terror, of drought and flooding, of environmental degradation, of exile from familiar people and places.  We continue to send them into the conflict zones we have not been able to resolve through political means, into zones of deprivation courtesy of endemic economic inequalities and a climate crisis which we are seemingly willing to allow to devour what is left of our forests, biodiversity and ice caps.

We know that diplomats around the UN generally work hard.  They are skilled at compromise, at pouring over text that would make the eyes of the rest of us glaze over.  They are also able to keep the windows of diplomacy open, to refuse to allow personal or national grievances to impede the potential for negotiating progress.  But their energy is not the energy that global constituencies can easily relate to, the energy that communicates that we are genuinely in trouble, and that we are willing to do what is needed and all that is needed to remove threats to our existence while we are still able to do so. 

Moreover, that we are willing to put more of ourselves on the line; we who function mostly within our bureaucratic and career bubbles, we who cannot pretend not to know, not to know what is coming, not to know what will happen once it comes, once the tipping points of violence and environmental degradation have been crossed for good.

If the processes at the UN these past two weeks are any indication, especially with regard to the NPT, it is still unclear if delegations can move beyond their training and instructions and convince the global public that they truly understand the moment.   We will find out tomorrow if global constituents have been misled once more by rhetoric insufficiently backed by devotion, the sort of energy that keeps humanitarian actors seeking out lives to save in our numerous killing fields.  Given the likelihood of insufficient movement, it behooves us to remind delegates that constituents deserve more than summary overviews of a month-long engagement, more than pledges “to do better next time.”

They deserve an apology. 

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Grasping the Proverbial Straw: A Policy Nod to Customary Wisdom, Dr. Robert Zuber

2 Aug

Do not call the forest that shelters you a jungle.   Ghana

There is no medicine to cure hatred.  Ghana

The teeth are smiling but is the heart?   DR Congo

A fool looks for dung where the cow never browsed.  Ethiopia

One who conceals their disease cannot expect to be cured.   Ethiopia

One who continually laments is not heeded.  Cote d’Ivoire

Seeing is different from being told.   Cote d’Ivoire

Evil knows where evil sleeps.  Niger

Fine words do not produce food.   Nigeria

The heart is not a knee that can be bent.   Senegal

One who upsets a thing should know how to rearrange it.   Sierra Leone

A roaring lion kills no game.   Uganda

Those of you who continue to read these missives know that the quotations at the head of the posts are often as impactful as the prose which follows.  These quotations mean much to me and often to the readers as well.  The ability to capture important human lessons in a sentence or two, to be suggestive without taking on the burden of being  definitive, to leave people with things to ponder as well as ways to grow, this is to my mind a considerable gift.

We who ply our wares in the halls of policy, with few exceptions, do not search hard enough for the images that can stimulate thought and growth beyond their initial utterance.  We use so many words – so many — words which are too-often redundant, repetitive and entirely metaphor-phobic, words often spoken as though we were merely reciting lessons handed down to us in some secondary school, words which may fulfill the “assignment” given to us by our superiors but offer little in the way of inspiration or takeaways, conveying little reason for others to hope or care.  Indeed, inside the UN as with other large institutions, there is little reason to believe that any of our “fine words” will survive the end of the meetings in which they are uttered, if indeed anyone much was listening in the first instance.

We are all constrained by our habits of thought and communication, it seems, and this surely applies to the language of diplomats and those of us on their margins who have internalized the culture of the UN and perhaps misplaced the reality that too many of our alleged constituents have largely tuned us out.  The world remains conceptually-speaking largely absent from our policy bubbles, not because there is an absence of truth in those bubbles but because the conveying of that truth is so often deficient in urgency, in potency, indeed in poetry.  Even during what could be construed as potentially profound UN events – last week’s successful General Assembly discussion and resolution on the “right to a healthy environment” and this week’s NPT Review Conference (nuclear weapons) the language used to convey concern is overly constrained by time in part but also by temperament.  We rush through presentations on important issues as though we have a train to catch.  We speak in the tones to which we are authorized, tones which rarely convey or capture the deep anxieties and misgivings of diplomats, but also of a global public now attempting to cope with a wider range of emergencies than they ever would have imagined.

Thus the decision was made some time ago to balance our own narrative of global events with some profound utterances from other times and through other mediums. So far as I can tell, the only downside of this decision has to do with their sources, likely from too many men and too often emanating only from western cultural contexts as well.  That the quotations in the posts are still more likely to motivate and inspire than any of the “clever by half” prose that generally follows is, to my mind at least, an indication of how much we long for rhetoric which is more compelling than hard concepts gleaned from hard data, more than recitations about the “importance” of institutions and their policy products which have not done nearly enough to inspire our trust or confidence, more than concepts that pull us out of the contexts which still have much to teach if we would only pay more attention to sources of local wisdom and just a bit less to its relentless alternatives courtesy of major policy centers, corporate media outlets, university-based think tanks and published reports emanating from our global institutions.

Such alternatives have literally conquered the conceptual landscape in all but the most remote communities while demonstrating a limited ability (as have we all) to solve problems which now threaten our future as a species.  And thus we’re trying something different today, quotations not from literature and philosophy, not from the recognizable figures in our own fractured western history, but from proverbs; stories and images which people in diverse cultures have long used to communicate truths that, given the difficult and/or complex logistics which define so many of our lives, we have overlooked or forgotten altogether.  The underlying lesson of all these proverbs is that clues to a better life, to better communities, are at least as much in the seeing as in the telling.  The best proverbs take their material from the life around them, life that is available to all if not availed by all, life that has its own lessons to convey beyond rhetoric and textbooks, life calling on us to pay more attention to the insights knocking at our doors, to use all of our senses, to look for and share gifts of insight which can help us exercise caution where such is the more sensible path, and take a deep breath and push forward when more courageous action is warranted.

One of the limitations in the deployment of the proverbs above is my own inability to designate authorship beyond the nation-state.  The best proverbs, of course, have impact across cultural and even national borders.  But we also know that, in African and other global contexts, such borders are functions more of colonial convenience than local assent.   That the proverbs listed here mostly do not have a more specific cultural reference point underscores my own limitations.  Thankfully the lessons embodied in these and other kernels of insight have relevance across cultural divides as they have relevance beyond the limitations of the English in which they are here communicated.

But despite this, it is also the case that we now live in a world dominated far more by fact-checkers than storytellers, a world in which the data sets of our times are as  likely to drive us to despair as to trust and confidence, drive us towards indifference rather than engagement, drive us to see if we can “wait this one out” rather than participate in remediation with the energy and wisdom still at our disposal.   

On top of this, we also inhabit a time where many are championing their own truths in response to what has become a veritable sea of disinformation undermining confidence in any and all institutions and individuals who seek to do their homework and “play it straight” with what they know. We forget that while truth is not subjective as so many now seem to claim, it is always partial, valuable in the contexts in which it appears but not in all contexts, not in all circumstances, at least not in the same manner. 

I would suggest that our erstwhile preoccupation with “truth” grounded in an endless series of verifiable “facts” has not reduced lying – to ourselves and others – even while the cameras are rolling.  We have cultivated an extraordinary ability to accumulate masses of “facts” assembled to create arguments to justify ideas and behaviors which are barely, if at all, justifiable.  Even in global institutions such as the UN, complex arguments leading to one-sided critiques or inflexible assertions of “national interest” have become more and more the coin of the realm.  Acknowledgements of wrongdoing are almost non-existent.  Direct apologies are even rarer.  Clarifications of position are occasionally offered, but little is conveyed indicating that positions have been significantly rethought or revised based on fresh experiences or circumstances. We give lip service to the wonders of science as well as to the need to reach constituents “where they are.”  But the language of bureaucracy is rarely the language of community or culture, and our dominant syntax remains generally too conceptually complex, too “flat” in its application, too-often lacking in thought-provoking affect to inspire the local consent and revitalized initiative upon which the successful pursuit of something truly important like a “right to a healthy environment” ultimately rests.

We need softer landing spots for the accumulation and transmission of human wisdom.  The proverbs listed above and innumerable others of their kind from all corners of the world offer (at least to my mind) a more straightforward, if also incomplete, path to wisdom from a range of sources and from which the rest of us have become too-often detached.  Indeed, a “roaring lion kills no game.” Indeed, “one who conceals a disease cannot expect to be cured.”  Indeed, “one who continually laments is not heeded.”  Indeed, “fine words do not produce food.”  Indeed, “there is no medicine to cure hatred.” On and on, kernels of truth which instruct and provoke, which take what has been seen and convert it into words and images that can connect and inspire. 

Whether in this form or other, we in policy-land need to find more of those simpler and wiser forms of discourse which can stretch our experience, which can make our hearts smile as well as our teeth, and which can forge stronger and more urgent links between the world we are trying to build, the constituents we are trying to reach, and the people we need to become. 

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