Archive | July, 2024

A Time for Care and Reflection:  A Tribute to Saul Mendlovitz, Dr. Robert Zuber

21 Jul

At the end of the recent High Level Political Forum on Sustainable Development held at the UN, the president of the Economic and Social Council convened what for us was certainly  one of the most inspirational events of the entire two-week sequence, a session devoted to caregiving and its gendered impacts. 

Featuring the newly minted Foreign Minister of Mexico and featuring other presenters from within and outside the UN system, the session made plain both the almost-universal need we humans have for caregiving and the degree to which that responsibility falls on women – women whose labors are often unrecognized, often uncompensated, often inadequately shared with their male partners, often keeping them from developing other talents or joining together to pursue the “power” for which the Foreign Minister advocated  in this session.

Needless to say, most of us do not take sufficient time to reflect on our pathways, contexts and conditions as human beings.  We certainly do not, as a professor from Buenos Aires chimed in during this UN session, spend sufficient energy in taking down the “patriarchal scaffolding” which inhibits women who choose to be caregivers from achieving both compensation for their families and the dignity and respect their caregiving is surely due.  As bombs continue to rain down on communities, as fields lay fallow due to climate change impacts, and as more and more families face grave uncertainties as they take to hostile byways in search of secure places for their children, the need for caregiving is both profound and acute.  It cannot be, must not be, the informal, unpaid and unacknowledged province of women alone.

This is background for what is intended to be a tribute to the recently deceased Saul Mendlovitz, one of three co-founders (with Jonathan Dean and Randall Forsberg) of Global Action to Prevent War and Armed Conflict back in 1999.  Saul took his leave of GAPW some years ago, and the project has certainly (for better and worse) evolved in his absence, but his legacy, to some significant degree, is embedded in this project as it was in the World Order Models which preceded it and to which I also made contributions.

Beyond his role in Global Action, Saul was a professor at Rutgers Law School and, as his scholarly interests over the years shifted to incorporate a more literary lens, his stature as teacher only grew further.  He was a passionate speaker, conveying urgency and more than occasional wit, which drew a number of students to his lectures who had no institutionally coerced reason for being present.

In some ways, Saul’s vision for Global Action was a continuation of his work with the World Order Models Project.  His community was a solid, talented group of World Order scholars with all their strengths and limitations.  At the same time, the target audience for both the Global Action “Program Statement” and the project for a “UN Emergency Peace Service” a standing, rapid-response service to prevent mass atrocities, was the United Nations itself, an entity often referenced but less often engaged with sufficient depth.  Proposals often emanated from GAPW towards a system which was ill-equipped to absorb them due in large measure to what I and others came to believe was an over-reliance on our ideas and an under-reliance on both the often-frustrating politics of implementation and the growing testimonies emanating from communities under siege, people who increasingly demanded a hearing and generally dared to hope for significantly more than that. 

As we say often at the UN, policy proposals have life when states adopt them not when NGOs (or academics) introduce them.  And, in a system where words are far more plentiful than decision-making authority, what comes “out of our heads” is certainly less impactful  than our willingness to swim in the soup of UN politics while endeavoring as best we can to preserve our policy independence.

Especially in the early years of Global Action, Saul was integral to preserving that culture of independence.  While his circle of fundraising contacts was relatively small, it was larger than those of the rest of us and he unabashedly and routinely asked for money from those who found his personal vision compelling. There was never enough to manage even a spartan life in New York City but there was surely enough to eschew the sort of arrangements which would require us to support policies which we felt were more likely to result in broken promises than in prospects for concrete caregiving for those facing the end of their capacity and resilience.  

From the note which Saul’s daughters sent to some and circulated to others following his death, it was clear that his life and priorities had a profound affect on his family.  His vision forged over 99 years of life resonated with them as it did with others. Indeed, for all the limitations inherent in academic worldviews, Saul communicated clearly that there is a need for global values and policy rigor to complement policy negotiation and ensure successful outcomes for people.  It is important that we do all we can to prevent violence and indignities of all kinds at a macro level such that the burdens of care at family and community levels can be sustainably reduced.  Otherwise, we are left mostly to heal physical and psychological wounds which, if we in the policy world were honest with ourselves, probably never needed to happen in the first instance.

Also noteworthy in Saul’s daughters’ communication is the news that, as his life was coming to an end, Saul swapped out his preoccupations with world order and the ruminations of the New York Times for a more contemplative, introspective engagement consistent with living through (rather than denying) one of the two most profound transitions in human experience.  As a man who, in his younger years, often seemed to prefer professional ambition over a concern for caregiving (though he certainly did some of that), who frequently indulged in competition with far-flung colleagues to the exclusion of solidarity with those in his more immediate professional circle, it was reassuring to think of Saul engaging in that urgent, poignant, honest, self-directed exploration as his earthly life over nearly a century was nearing its end.

I and any number of others would surely have wished to know what he discovered in those meditative moments.  It would have been a fitting last lesson for Saul to have left for those of us still struggling to discern and to care.

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A Generation of Engagements on Peacekeeping Operations, Dr. Robert Zuber

14 Jul

Editor’s Note: Deep thanks to Professor Peter Hoffman for organizing the New School’s “UN summer study” course and for, once again, allowing us to share ideas on a topic close to our hearts with such a diverse group of younger people.  As I remind such audiences on a regular basis “it is your turn now” to direct this leaky ship, to practice the skills and values that can move forward the confused and volatile species we have become. I especially honored this group for exploring options through this course to do exactly that. 

I want to begin today by pointing out that the UN has changed significantly regarding the presence of NGOs since we started down the road of UN engagements, indeed even since the end of COVID.  Some delegations, even those who appreciate our work and our “fairness” have championed a system where states are more firmly and fully in charge while  the rest of us have to scramble to have voices and proposals heard, a condition which was rarely an issue pre-Covid as a range of our publications and co-hosted UN events over 20 years would attest. It’s been a tough slog in some ways being at the UN since the onset of Covid, even as lots of our NGO colleagues, like ourselves, lost much of what we once had during those pandemic months. Many left the system. For better or worse, we have yet to do so.

We’ve tried as best we know to make our modest contributions over 20 years while preserving our independence and taking the UN’s full policy ecosystem into account rather than branding around specific activities for which we could get funded.  We’ve also kept a low profile understanding that change occurs at the UN when states own a proposal, not when NGOs make a proposal.  That said, we have been deeply involved previously in  monitoring of Arms Trade Treaty negotiations, in the promotion of  gender lenses on disarmament and atrocity crime prevention, in efforts to create broader support for the creation of the Peacebuilding Commission, in identifying hopeful projects opening space for more diverse civil society involvement in UN conference rooms,  and much more. Perhaps our most visible contribution was through the promotion of what we called a “UN Emergency Peace Service,” supported by the late Sir Brian Urquhart and other UN luminaries, which was envisioned as a standing, rapid-response capacity which could serve as both a deterrent to and an effective, prompt response to outbreaks of atrocity-level violence.

To that end, we held conferences and consultations on every inhabited continent and penned  numerous publications including “Standing for Change in Peacekeeping Operations.” The news in all of this  is that the project did not survive into the present.  This was OK as the actual point of UNEPS was to help move the international community and regional organizations to assess key aspects of peacekeeping in the transition to more effective, protection-oriented commitments.  The point was not to draw attention to ourselves or to promote our work as being somehow more “fundable” or valuable than other initiatives of its kind. We were clear from the beginning that if a UNEPS-style service was ever to see the light of day, it would not be us who would liberate the idea in all its complexity from its  conceptual shadows.

Our Concerns

Between the creation and current transition of our UNEPS proposal, and happily so, DPKO (now DPPA) officials and experts  have largely addressed our collective concerns.  They have fixed many force generation and peacekeeper training challenges, addressed abuses alleged to have been committed by peacekeepers, helped streamline to some extent reimbursements for troop and police contributing countries, added layers of protection and medical access for peacekeepers, embraced revised mandates related to elections, protection of civilians and climate change impacts, initiated  substantial efforts to diversity peace operations especially by gender, eliminated some if not all deployment “caveats” which limit mission performance,  minimized the environmental footprint of large operations such as MONUSCO in DR Congo, and taken with renewed seriousness the importance of ensuring that peacekeeping deployments are closely tied to viable political processes.  All of this is good and important work and we are grateful for it.

Moreover, while peacekeeping’s relationship to human rights abuses and the prevention of atrocity crimes remains to some extent a work in progress, the decision to prevent the direct military engagement of peacekeepers with terrorists was, at least in our view, a wise one.  Ultimately the point of peacekeeping is to allow for transitions which lead to political settlement while enhancing the ability (and the will) of national and regional forces to maintain their own protection functions and address their own security threats, including from terror and other armed groups.

This last contribution is not without controversy as more and more countries seem to be deciding on security-related alternatives to UN peacekeeping, some of that via enhanced domestic capacities which may not quite be ready for prime time, but some of that through agreements with the Russian entity formerly known as the Wagner Group and other external players. What these entities  seem to have in common is a willingness to suspend human rights concerns in the name of countering national security threats from terrorists and other armed groups, a suspension which UN peacekeepers may not indulge and which we would not wish for them to indulge.   

Especially since the transition between peacekeeping as primarily guarantors of truce/peace agreements to a more robust mandate for protecting civilians, threats to peacekeepers have grown dramatically.  Increasingly we send peacekeepers into highly volatile environments with daunting protection needs and threats and challenges emanating literally from all directions.  Efforts to engage communities, especially now by women peacekeepers constitute an important dimension of the work, but high levels of peacekeeper casualties on an annual basis speak to training deficits among troop contributors but more to challenges related to discerning friend from adversary  in multiply uncertain and often hostile contexts.

At the end of the day, while peacekeeping is not a substitute for viable political processes, it is also not a substitute for failures regarding our primary commitment to conflict prevention.  I grew up in a family of multiply deployed military personnel.  I heard all their stories, some of them quite gruesome, some of which you all could probably replicate from your own cultural and national contexts.  As arms flow in all directions, as climate change and resource extraction fuel local tensions and food insecurity, as the scales of inequality continue to be tipped in favor of people like me (for absolutely no reason), prospects for conflict prevention often appear dim. But it is effective conflict prevention which holds the greatest promise for effective civilian protection, for children spared trauma and recruitment, for women spared sexual violence while trying to conmfort children they cannot feed, for men spared participation in the armed violence which accomplishes little beyond shortened or ruined lives.

Prevention isn’t sexy, but it should be noted that much of the international community has, from our vantage point at least, become exhausted from trying to protect, trying to deliver, trying to restore and reconcile once armed violence has been given license.  We humans have some significant blind spots that we refuse to examine, one of which is related to our propensity for metaphorically deciding to close barn doors only  after all the horses have escaped.  If your generation is to avoid mass trauma, if you are to have the funds you need to promote justice and healing rather than cleaning up after what seems like endless messes of criminality and violence, if you are to be able to raise children without armed guards and gas masks, then we need to collectively show more maturity and courage, to commit to readjusting the established order of things when that order is unable to deliver, to privilege prevention rather than endless reconstruction of the rubble of armed violence, to make a better and stronger case for a world less inclined to disruption and violence hosting people more inclined to relinquish destructive habits and otherwise encourage their better selves. 

We can do this together.  We can do this separately.  But we must do it.  And, to belabor an otherwise obvious point, time is decidedly not on our side.

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The UN Security Council and Climate Change:  Struggling  to Connect the Dots, Dr. Robert Zuber

6 Jul

Editor’s Note: This piece was written in response to an invite from a university in Kenya, a zoom presentation which never materialized due to communications issues related in part to the unrest which had exploded in Nairobi in late June. So….here it is for you to read if you so choose. I hope its worth your time.

I want to begin this presentation to all of you with a sober look at where we are vis a vis the climate crisis.  Put simply, we have collectively failed to address climate risks and, in the case of the wealthier countries, have failed to meet our obligations to climate victims.  The burdens of climate change are felt by all including displaced women and an increasing number of women farmers, but they are not responsible for the growing climate-related carnage.  These people, like most of you, are suffering from a crisis they did not cause.   

Here at the UN, we continue to pass resolutions with levels of enthusiasm  for implementation which tend to drop as soon as those resolutions are adopted. On climate, the threat is felt acutely in small island states and in the Sahel, but not quite as much in most middle income and wealthy states, precisely the states responsible for the bulk of global emissions. Even when the rhetoric is sufficiently urgent, Council climate action continues to fall well short of what is needed.  Young people have in some instances filled the leadership gap created by older persons on addressing climate risks; and yet for many young people the preparations they are taking in their lives, their studies, family matters and more  are likely confronting a future of extreme heat, equally extreme weather events, growing threats of  food insecurity and I would add life insecurity as well.  You in this university audience didn’t do this to the planet, and you don’t deserve the consequences  either.

It is commonplace to note this, but how we assess in life is largely a function of what we expect, and it is the expectation of many young people that we aging folks from the west in our relatively comfortable contexts should have done more, could have done more to stem the increasingly inevitable climate tide.  What were we thinking?  Were we thinking at all? 

And if we were thinking at all, what were we thinking about?  About gender-balancing our climate action? About helping to unleash the diversity of youthful  talents across the world that can break through some of the policy bubbles and stale air which exist in the diplomatic world?  Were we metaphorically thinking about “sharing the ball” with youth and others which is the only way human civilization can possible win this game of climate ruin?

There is  at least a growing sense within the international policy community that climate change is, at least, a conflict multiplier that the climate is evolving much quicker than we have the ability to address, including its impacts on international peace and security.  But there is also a growing sense, and I agree with it,  that we have mis-positioned our climate action, focusing much too much on the activities of officials and diplomats making (and often failing to make) climate policy largely through resolutions without “teeth” or through large international events which burn more carbon than make change, rather than on communities seeking pathways to more resilience and abundance.

From our base in New York, we have identified and assisted programs around the world which are attempting to promote inclusive, gender sensitive local lenses on sustainability.  My favorite of these is Green Map (greenmap.org), a set of tools including culture-specific iconography to help local communities identify environmental assets and liabilities,  to use mapping to reintroduce people to the resources and habitats which are worth protecting and which make their communities special.   Our slogan – think global, map local – is symbolic of a deep belief that we will never fulfill our climate or sustainability goals without pragmatic engagement by local leaders in all global regions, including many more women and youth participants.

While affirming local action in all we do, I often sit in a very different place, in the UN Security Council, which has an uneven relationship with the climate issue.  It could even be said that the Council also has an uneven relationship with its own Women, Peace and Security agenda, an agenda 24 years old with a host of gendered gaps and discriminations still largely unaddressed.  On climate the pattern is similar: recognition by some Council members, especially elected members, that climate is a major contributor to conditions which make conflict more likely.  On the other hand some members simply don’t see the linkage, or  think that climate issues should be handled by the UN agencies tasked specifically with climate or other environmental matters.  The concern here, made most forcefully at the moment by Russia, is that there is a division of labor in the UN and that these divisions should be respected.

But while mandates may have similar force, the mechanisms of enforcement do not.  Russia and other Council members know full well that while Council resolutions are often ignored, the Council at least has Charter-mandated coercive tools at its disposal that other UN agencies do not.  And if the Council cannot make states uphold their promises on issues such as gender and climate, then the hands of the full UN are surely tied in terms of enforcing any agreements whatsoever – including climate agreements. 

Some Council members are fighting back, more and more, recognizing that we have set forces in motion that promise more violence, more misery, more displacement and that we must robustly address those forces. These states recognize that the Council can fulfill an important enabling role vis a vis the UNs climate priorities without usurping the authority of the agencies tasked with responding to this crisis.

One example of this “fight back” occurred during its Council presidency of the United Arab Emirates in June 2023, as that delegation tried to rally Council colleagues to take climate risks and their implications for peace and security with the urgency they deserve.  It should also be noted that the UAE at that time was also prepping the Council as well for its COP 28 presidency which ultimately turned out pretty much like all the other COP events – burning more fossil fuel than changing the course of climate threats and making promises of change that are generally  not kept.  But this meeting was at least asking the right questions about the Council’s role in ensuring more diverse climate action and remaining seized of the many ways in which climate change makes conflict more likely.

This quote from the UAE’s Concept Note set a proper tone:

Climate change is the defining challenge of our time. Its interconnected consequences – intensified extreme weather, rising sea levels, food and water insecurity, biodiversity loss and heightened health risks – jeopardize human life, livelihoods and ecosystems and have an adverse impact on national, regional and global stability.

And, as also noted in the Concept Note, climate change has implications for the entire peace continuum including those who are unjustly excluded from participation in peace processes:

The gendered impact of climate change has significant implications for international peace and security. Women and girls are disproportionately affected by the adverse effects of climate change, including food insecurity, displacement and increased rates of conflict-related sexual violence. Moreover, women are often excluded from decision-making processes related to climate change mitigation and adaptation. Evidence shows that, by leveraging the role of women as agents of change, gender-sensitive work on climate change and peace and security can serve to advance both stability and gender equality.

This is good policy language from the UAE but of course it is only language.   Little or nothing changed as the result of this meeting.  Little or nothing changes as the result of most Council meetings as much as the global community, sometimes desperately, needs to see evidence of change. Is there a missing ingredient here beyond politics?

I think there is.  As we discuss often here in NY, there is a human dimension to this crisis which we ignore at our own peril.

Whether the Council or other international institutions embrace their responsibility to address climate risks in a timely manner or not, the changes to our world are coming quickly, more quickly than we had originally anticipated, and we seem unable as a species to respond in kind.  We are in many ways, and more than we generally acknowledge, creatures of habit, and those habits make it difficult indeed to shift our course, even when we want to do so, even when are survival depends on us doing so.

Those of us in the west and beyond know of threats to agriculture from multiple climate related impacts including increased drought and flooding, but we (especially in the west) continue to eat and otherwise consume largely as we always have.  We know of threats to biodiversity but we continue to cut down forests, destroy habitats, and plant non-native and fertilizer-intensive plants in our gardens.  We know about  increasing prospects of climate-related disasters including massive storms and pandemics, but we continue along as though we possess some immunity from those impacts.  We know of threats to our ocean environments, but our collective addiction to plastics waste remains largely unchallenged. 

The climate-conflict nexus is in part about the effectiveness of our global policy and in part about we as members of local communities, the sustainable examples we set, the people and actions we inspire, the habits we are prepared to change.  We know something is very wrong.  We feel the heat.  We experience the growing frustration, anger and suspicion at community and national levels. But can we adapt?  Can we learn new skills, can be more mindful and compassionate towards the created order, can we break out of unsustainable habits?  Can we take the data urgently provided by scientists and turn them into sustainable amendments of both policy and life? The jury is clearly out on this.

As we contemplate our resistance to change, I want to end with a couple of quotes from a recent report from UNICEF on climate impacts affecting future generations, which likely directly  applies to you. The report notes that,  “Environmental degradation, including the climate crisis, is a form of structural violence against young people and can cause social collapse in communities and families. Poverty, economic and social inequalities, food insecurity and forced displacement aggravate the risk that children will experience violence, abuse and exploitation.”

There is also a quotation in the report from a young interviewee:  “The environment is our life.” Adults [should] stop making decisions for the future they won’t experience.”  

Taken together, this is quite an indictment of our collective failure to meet this urgent moment. Yes, we should stop making decisions for people and start making decisions with them, with the people who will have to live with the threats we have left for them, threats of gendered and racial discrimination, threats from abusive governments, threats from an overheated world which can no longer preserve biodiversity or support healthy agriculture. And yes we old folks and our institutions of choice (including the Security Council) have reinforced, inadvertently or willfully, strubborn conditions of structural violence which make it harder than it ever should be for young people across the world to chart a more sustainable course for their lives.

A world of increasing climate threats, including threats of armed conflict,  is a world we are running out of time to prevent, and it is the country I call home along with other large consuming states which need to make changes on emissions and consumption quickly and permanently.  We the people of largely undeserved privilege  owe it to the rest of the global community  to somehow reverse our current, unsustainable course, reminding ourselves frequently that the clock on such reversal is loudly ticking.

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