A Balm for Failing Spirits, Dr. Robert Zuber

11 Oct

Just a drop of something sweet cannot change a taste that is powerfully bitter. We must persist in the face of failure. Dalai Lama XIV

Paying attention will take its toll on your mental health.  Lauren Elizabeth

Discouragement is the illegitimate child of false expectations. Lane Adams

I became quite discouraged at moments, I must admit. What’s the point of telling the truth if nobody wants to hear it?   Margaret Atwood

Too many sorrows I have known,
too many sadnesses unsaid.
A lake of woe surrounds my heart,
the last remains of tears unshed.   Susan Noyes Anderson

Sometimes a work week will grind you into sand, pulverize you into particles. Colson Whitehead

 Fatigue, discomfort, discouragement are merely symptoms of effort.  Morgan Freeman

Over the past six months, I’ve been asked by several people to explain “where I’ve been,” why I’m not writing as much, why I don’t seem as attentive as in the past to impediments to human health, peace and dignity.

I’m still in the game, but together with  the fact that I have lost a few miles off my metaphorical fastball, I haven’t felt particularly energized by the direction that the world has taken, a direction which I now control, if at all,  in the smallest measure but a direction which I lament has clearly gone considerably off the rails on my watch.

Another reason I have been writing less is that I honestly don’t know what to say any longer, know what to say that I haven’t already said, time after time.  I now have a “reputation” of sorts given the values and policies for which our UN project  advocates and which we have been determined to incarnate in some fashion or other.  But while we might occasionally have gotten high marks for effort, we have no illusions about our current and legacy organizational impact.  Nor do we any longer have illusions about the impact of other efforts in other contexts, to more than a few of which we have contributed skills and resources.

If we are honest, there is discouragement which hovers over many of us like dense fog.  Discouragement that the institutions where we have invested energy have been co-opted or merely under-performed. Discouragement that our officials with considerable outside encouragement have chosen to reinforce the worst in our collective character.  Discouragement that the young people we revere have not been spared the consequences of our illusions and even our arrogance.  Discouragement that we have not been up to challenges from storms that gather even as ideas and energies like my own slide into contexts more quaint than relevant.

The quotations above describe some of what we feel even in our bones.  The “lake of woe which surrounds our hearts.” The expectations which our psychic history has largely crafted for us and which we then, too often, hold the rest of the world responsible for.  The constant sharing of the truth we are privileged to speak while recognizing how difficult it is now for people to truly hear, drowned out by endless distractions and the truths which they, too, seek to convey.  In my little vector of society, we are after all, more proficient at sharing our vision than at listening to the vision of others.   

And yet we must, as the Dalai Lama intones, find the means to persist.  Despite our frailties and discouragements, we must discern how to stay in the game with whatever energy and wisdom we can muster.  We must try to add a modicum of sweetness, not matter how modest, to a world which has become more than a tad too bitter.  Failure is always an option in this life.  Surrender must not follow as a consequence.

The title for this piece is a quotation from Barbara Kingsolver, a favorite writer for me. Yes, many of our spirits are failing.  And yes we need to find that “balm” which will allow us to carry on even on those days when we feel that circumstances around and within us have “pulverized” us into particles.  

What we should ask might that “balm” look like? 

My suspicion is that the answer is somehow reminiscent of finger prints, a feature both common to fingers with prints unique in design.  It is a balm which we can live out and communicate in common with others, but inevitably craft out of our needs and aspirations, the life experiences we cherish and those we would gladly eject, the legitimate and false expectations we have foisted on an unsuspecting community, the environments we help to create that make us feel most alive and inspire  our capacity for repair and healing, and those which we have done too much to compromise.

For many of us, this balm consists of local matters of family and gardens, houses of prayer and hobbies that turn into passions, wildlife encounters, life with pets, life with the arts, our music, out dance, our forests.  These are just a few of the contexts which allow our unique pattern of interests and investments to find expression in ways that our systems and institutions often do not.

There is discouragement potential here as well, of course.  Children don’t always mature in ways we would hope.  Gardens wilt under the intense heat which is now a yearly feature of our weather forecasts.  Religious leaders don’t always take us places that we haven’t already taken ourselves or are content to move a community based on their own, sometimes skewed version of divine expectations.  Some of our loveliest natural retreats are sacrificed to material “progress” in the form of shopping malls or data centers. Some of our art is too self-indulgent to assist the viewer in seeing a larger and richer world.

Discouragement, yes, but also opportunities for our souls to expand or find respite. However, we recognize that while the balm to which Kingsolver’s quotation points has distinct local elements, it is not entirely local. A full dose encourages more localized attentiveness but also agency on a larger canvas, one on which people with massive power and resources have now foisted their own version of the good on the rest of us, a “good” which in so many instances is relegated to serving only their own agendas. Their hubris also requires our attention, especially in these moments when the myths and structures of the US national experiment are giving way to corruption and cynicism of a form I have rarely witnessed in my long and semi-productive life.

Thankfully, corruption and cynicism are not the final words.  There are so many out there who refuse to quit, refuse to give in to distractions and material comforts, refuse to abandon values for which their ancestors advocated and even died, refuse to give in to the fatigue and discouragement which so often accompany even our best efforts.  There are still  people who have found ways to  stay attentive to an often mind-numbing present without losing focus on the people and places which give them comfort. There are still people who help respond to mental health challenges which might otherwise shut our contributions down for longer periods than we would wish. We honor their dedication and seek to learn from it.

It is understandable that other people feel the need to isolate their emotional life from stories of wars, rumors of wars and other global disturbances about which they can generally do little. However, there is also substantial evidence, including through the UN, that prompt attention to the balm our failing spirits require can lead us back to the fulness of our good work in the world. In this vein, I beseech all of us to commit as best we are able to resisting the harmful fruits of this current, discouraging age, adding whatever hints of sweetness we can to a world which for many of our fellow humans (and other life forms) has become a bitter pill indeed. 

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From Inside the UN: What You Gain, What You Learn, and What Still Needs to Be Heard by Andrea Viviana Araujo Muñoa (Political Scientist)

20 Sep

Editor’s Note. It is important to us that interns take the tine to reflect on their experience at the UN before their lives get busy with other commitments. In the end, some take this responsibility seriously and others don’t. Andrea’s effort here is most appreciated.

For a month I had the opportunity to be selected as a fellow for Global Action to Prevent War at the United Nations, which allowed me to experience the High-Level Political Forum (HLPF) 2026, the General Assembly, and in a rare opportunity sessions of the Security Council, the UN’s most restricted body when it comes to peace and international security. I also had access to dozens of side events, including ones organized by the diplomatic missions of Switzerland, Canada, the United Kingdom, South Korea, Germany, Spain, and the Netherlands, as well as international organizations. All of this happened in an international context marked by the highest number of active conflicts since 1946 (65 active conflicts in 35 countries in 2025), and growing pressure on development financing (Peace Research Institute Oslo, 2026).

The HLPF 2026 and the critical cycle of the 2030 Agenda

The HLPF 2026 took place from July 7 to 15 and deeply reviewed SDGs 6 (water and sanitation), 7 (affordable energy), 9 (industry and innovation), 11 (sustainable cities), and 17 (partnerships for the goals). Being consistently present at the Security Council, the General Assembly, and the HLPF meant experiencing the same critical cycle of 2026: the penultimate one before the SDG Summit 2027, with only a third of the 2030 Agenda targets on track in Latin America and the Caribbean, and, according to the United Nations Inter-agency Task Force on Financing for Development (2026), a financing gap that now exceeds 4 trillion dollars annually.

This cycle also coincides with a time of strong pressure on international cooperation: according to the OECD (2026), global Official Development Assistance (ODA) fell by 23% in 2025 — the largest annual contraction on record — following an 8.5% reduction in 2024, with a further 6.9% decline projected for 2026. This would bring ODA to its lowest level since 2014 and mark a third consecutive annual decline, something that has only happened once before in history (1992–1995). In this context, the Sevilla Commitment on financing gained prominence as the reference framework to support the implementation of the 2030 Agenda.

The Security Council: reading power from the inside

In July 2026, under the presidency of the Democratic Republic of the Congo, high-impact topics were discussed such as sexual violence in conflicts, natural resource governance as a basis for peace, the Middle East, Ukraine, Haiti, Sudan, and the peace process in Colombia. Being there right when the multilateral system is discussing how to sustain itself with fewer resources gave me an early view of where international cooperation is heading, and how geopolitics are increasingly intersecting directly with access to capital, regulatory risks, and new public-private partnerships. What you see from the inside, day by day, is how three layers that the private sector and high-level diplomacy need to read precisely are either articulated—or blocked: power and veto dynamics in the Security Council, position and coalition negotiations in the General Assembly, and the translation of those balances.

A recurring pattern in side events

In side events, important and balanced panels are usually convened. There is openness to dialogue, as indicated by the official schedule, but in practice, many of these spaces end up being just a place to listen to the panelists’ presentations. Requests to speak from attendees — such as civil society representatives, young people, or smaller delegations attending with their own resources or as scholarship recipients — are not always prioritized. Sometimes, it is simply omitted.

This matters because these forums are not just one among thousands of international events. They are some of the most important spaces the world has for bringing together those who make decisions and those who experience them, and not just from the panel, but from the other side of the seat.

Why is this more urgent now 

This pattern becomes especially relevant at a time marked by at least three intersecting forces: the historic cut in international cooperation mentioned earlier, a growing distrust of multilateralism and democratic institutions, particularly among younger people, and a climate crisis that has already crossed thresholds that once seemed distant. 

Data from the Americas Barometer (LAPOP, 2023) show that support for democracy declined sharply after 2016 and remained low for nearly a decade. Younger generations, moreover, consistently expressed less support than older ones. However, the most recent survey, the 2026 Pulse of Democracy, found the first broad regional upturn in a generation: support for democracy in Latin America rose to 65%, six points higher than in 2023, with gains recorded across nearly every country, age group, and education level.

Even so, this recovery appears fragile and paradoxical. It coincides with serious institutional erosion across the region, ranging from the suspension of elections in Nicaragua to the removal of presidential term limits in El Salvador; this suggests that the renewed support for democracy does not necessarily reflect a deeper commitment to its liberal norms, that is, to the checks that limit those in power, such as the separation of powers, an independent judiciary, respect for political opposition, and the protection of minority rights.

According to the report itself, many citizens in the region associate democracy more with satisfaction with government performance than with institutional commitment. In other words, they value above all whether the government in power addresses their concrete everyday needs, such as security, the economy, and public services, without this necessarily implying support for or respect for institutional checks and balances.

On the climate front, the Global Tipping Points Report 2025 (University of Exeter et al., 2025), authored by 160 scientists from 87 institutions in 23 countries, documents the first climate tipping point that humanity has already crossed, namely the massive and unprecedented die-off of coral reefs due to ocean warming, an ecological collapse that threatens the livelihoods of nearly a billion people and a quarter of all marine life. On top of that, the World Meteorological Organization (WMO, 2026) estimates a 91% chance that at least one year between 2026 and 2030 will temporarily exceed 1.5°C above pre-industrial levels, with an 86% chance that one of those years will surpass 2024 as the warmest year on record.

Cuts in funding, institutional distrust, and the climate crisis are not three parallel problems: they feed into each other. And those who are going to live with the consequences the longest, and largely those who are already organizing to face it, are the younger generations.

Who is going to solve this? 

The question is not rhetorical: who is going to fix these overlapping problems? Generation Z is already part of the present and the future. They are a generation that has built its own social awareness movement, in the middle of the digital age and, at the same time, a widespread mental exhaustion. Without their involvement, it’s hard to imagine that the upcoming leaders, those who will inherit these same crises, can solve them on their own. 

That’s why it’s crucial that the UN doesn’t just invite them. It’s about giving them, in a strong way, a real opportunity so that the return of trust in multilateralism also falls on them. They are one of the most decisive age groups for the future of these institutions. We also must not forget the youth organizations that, for years, have been promoting democracy and peace in their own countries and regions, often without the recognition or the speaking space their work deserves.

The pending challenge

If the UN seeks to regain legitimacy in a moment of global distrust, the challenge is not just to bring more diverse voices to its side events. It’s truly listening to those who are already in the room.

Referencias bibliográficas

Global Tipping Points. (2025). Global Tipping Points Report 2025. University of Exeter / Stockholm Resilience Centre. https://www.stockholmresilience.org/research/research-stories/2025-10-13-world-reaches-first-climate-tipping-point—widespread-mortality-of-coral-reefs.html

Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development. (2026). ODA projections for 2026 and the near-term: Implications for vulnerable countries and sectors. OECD Policy Briefs, No. 59, OECD Publishing, Paris. https://www.oecd.org/en/publications/oda-projections-for-2026-and-the-near-term_d7c74fa2-en/full-report.html

Peace Research Institute Oslo. (2026). Conflict Trends: A Global Overview, 1946–2025. Based on data from the Uppsala Conflict Data Program (UCDP), Uppsala University.

United Nations, Inter-agency Task Force on Financing for Development. (2026). Financing for Sustainable Development Report 2026: Implementing the Sevilla Commitment. United Nations. https://financing.desa.un.org/iatf/report/financing-sustainable-development-report-2026-implementing-sevilla-commitment

Vanderbilt University, LAPOP Lab. (2023). Support for democracy in the Americas remains low, opening door for politicians with undemocratic plans, Vanderbilt survey finds. https://news.vanderbilt.edu/2023/11/29/support-for-democracy-in-the-americas-remains-low-opening-door-for-politicians-with-undemocratic-plans-vanderbilt-survey-finds/

Vanderbilt University Center for Global Democracy & University of Notre Dame Kellogg Institute. (2026). 2026 Pulse of Democracy. https://news.nd.edu/news/new-americasbarometer-report-finds-modest-but-widespread-recovery-in-support-for-democracy-across-the-americas/

World Meteorological Organization. (2026). Global Annual to Decadal Climate Update: Target years 2026–2030. https://wmo.int/publication-series/wmo-global-annual-decadal-climate-update

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Annalena Baerbock: It’s the tone that defines the crisis, by Lia Petridis Maiello

11 Sep

Editor’s Note: Lia formerly served as our media specialist before moving to Germany and taking on media-related positions of greater prominence. She has always demonstrated a fine eye for both “things unsaid” and “things which should never have been said,” which made her a particularly valuable colleague in New York. While supporting what appears below from Lia, and despite having my own concerns about her candidacy from the start, I found her to be a better PGA than I had feared. There were some reckless moments to be sure, and I had expected a stronger response to the end of her presidency, on protocol grounds if nothing else. She did, after all, champion women’s issues from a dais which has seen few women predecessors. And she did come to a more balanced, nuanced place of support for Gazans and Palestinian West Bank residents. But there was something else about her, something not quite right. Lia as she often has done, has put her finger on what some of that might have been.

Some positions, by the very nature of their job description, are an invitation to elegant understatement and calculated invisibility. The presidency of the UN General Assembly has, by definition, always been one such role: a year of chairing meetings, organising consensus, smiling for the record, and above all, under no circumstances becoming the news itself. Annalena Baerbock has distilled something quite different from this role description: namely, a one-woman show with her sights set on the Security Council.

Her term of office expired on 8 September 2026, and rarely has an outgoing office-holder demonstrated so loudly that, for her, ‘diplomacy’ was more of an attitude than a professional craft. Generally speaking, social contexts and gatherings of people from a wide variety of backgrounds in the US always and under all circumstances require the ability to ‘read the room’, to engage in rhetorical indirection, and to make subtle innuendos. In such settings, the German ‘assertiveness’ – well known in the US and often met with derision – can quickly come across as vulgar. What applies to the cultural context of the US, particularly in New York City, applies to the UN context many times over – and it is something that has to be learnt.

Baerbock’s career, by contrast, is a case study in how to squander what little diplomatic leeway one has through excessive rhetoric. Even as Foreign Minister, in 2023 she spoke before the Council of Europe of a “war with Russia” – a statement that triggered crisis meetings in Berlin and provoked outrage in Moscow, and which, moreover, was quite simply diplomatically incorrect. She referred to Xi Jinping on television as a “dictator”, a phrase that even well-meaning foreign policy experts deemed unnecessarily escalatory. Anyone elected as president of the most courteous body in global politics with such a track record must either possess remarkable self-confidence or a remarkably short memory. Baerbock has proved that it is possible to possess both simultaneously. The former German UN ambassador, Christoph Heusgen, summed it up even before her election, calling her nomination an “outrage”. A politician who had made a name for herself more through pithy press statements than through persistent “grunt work”. One might suspect Heusgen of malice; after all, his preferred candidate, Helga Schmid, was sacrificed in favour of her more prominent party colleague. A year on, however, his warning reads less like resentment and more like a prophecy with an expiry date.

The real moment of reckoning came at the end of her term of office. Unsurprisingly, it was on the very issue that would have demanded the greatest restraint: the succession of the UN Secretary-General António Guterres. Organising public hearings with the eight candidates has been standard practice for years. So far, so unremarkable. However, at a dialogue event in late July, Baerbock had the audience assess the candidates live, without giving them or official observers any prior warning. She subsequently wrote to the Security Council, stating that it should not even consider candidates who had not taken part in her events. So far, so embarrassing.

As a result, the US and Russia – who are otherwise on opposite sides of the fence on virtually every UN issue – found themselves in rare agreement – united against Baerbock. The US representative to the UN, Jennifer Locetta, accused her in the Security Council of “overstepping her remit” and “irresponsible actions”, describing the audience poll as “unfair, non-transparent and unprecedented”. Her most scathing barb, however, was aimed at Baerbock’s self-image: she was portraying herself as a “diplomatic superstar”. A “hypocrisy” which, taken as a whole, casts a bad light on the work of the General Assembly. The Russian ambassador, Vasily Nebenzia, echoed this by warning against the President overstepping her authority. When Washington and Moscow agree on an issue within the UN context, it usually raises questions. Nevertheless, this pattern of overreach has run through Baerbock’s entire term in office. Even her nomination was criticised as a party-political ploy to secure a post. Heusgen smugly referred to ‘Operation Abendrot’ in support of a ‘has-been’. Of course, within this context, mean spirited remains mean spirited, no matter who verbalises it. Baerbock’s inaugural mission then sounded correspondingly grandiose: she wanted to “show 8 billion people why this organisation remains important”, as if no one had done so before. Moreover, it was a phrase that sounded less like chairing a meeting and more like personal brand-building.

In her dealings with African states, too, the pattern of using a rhetorical cleaver rather than a graceful foil was repeated. A former president accused Germany of “condescending and disrespectful behaviour” after invitations had gone unanswered for months, whilst CDU politician Gitta Connemann spoke of a “foreign policy underpinned and driven by moralising” which had been perceived as overbearing in the Global South. And Baerbock’s staunchly pro-Israeli stance during the Gaza offensive – she described South Africa’s genocide case before the International Court of Justice as “baseless” and refused to support key ceasefire resolutions – sparked protests from human rights groups barely after she had taken office. As if German national interests (Staatsräson) and objective criticism were suddenly incompatible. As is well known, the irony comes at the end: Baerbock is not returning to Berlin, but is moving to New York City’s prestigious Columbia University to take up a ‘practice-oriented’ professorship in feminist foreign policy. Her successor as President of the General Assembly, Khalilur Rahman, a 72-year-old veteran diplomat from Bangladesh, was elected by 99 of the 193 member states and is likely to lead the office exactly as intended: unobtrusively.

The criticism that can be levelled at Baerbock in all seriousness after twelve months at the helm of the General Assembly is not incompetence in the traditional sense. It is something more subtle: a chronic inability to hold office without overstepping its bounds. Diplomacy thrives on allowing one’s own importance to fade into the background in favour of the cause. In New York, Baerbock proved the opposite, and for that she deserves precisely the title that American diplomacy smugly bestowed upon her: ‘diplomatic superstar’. It was not meant as a compliment. And yet it captures the essence of the matter with astonishing precision.

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Our World Beyond Work: A Labor Day Reflection, Dr. Robert Zuber

7 Sep

Every day I remind myself that my inner and outer life are based on the labors of others, living and dead, and that I must exert myself in order to give in the same measure as I have received and am still receiving. Albert Einstein

We are being “saved” from work, then for what?  Wendell Berry

If you care about farmers, let the potatoes stay home. Barbara Kingsolver

Writing is a labor of love and also an act of defiance, a way to light a candle in a gale wind. Alice Childress

This world in arms is not spending money alone. It is spending the sweat of its laborers, the genius of its scientists, the hopes of its children. Dwight D. Eisenhower

Thou, of God, dost sell us all good things at the price of labor. Leonardo da Vinci

Those of you who have followed these posts over the years know of my personal fondness for holidays and other events that call attention to our current “crisis of labor.”

Though not without caveats, Global Action has long supported the call of the UN for “decent work,” a specificity-challenged notion which nevertheless underscores the chronic need for work which allows individuals to have dignity, families to have security, and communities which have at the very least the prospect of greater prosperity. 

It also calls attention to that which undermines decency, including radical and growing economic inequalities, oligarchies which have much,  control much, and have secured the means to ensure that acquisition, predation and control are unassailable features of our current economic landscape.  It even calls attention to labor issues specifically affecting immigrants, such as those farmers who thought they were being clever by subscribing to the MAGA brand and sending away migrant workers to return home or otherwise be deported by ICE, farmers who now cannot attract enough workers to harvest crops while their fearless leader sells out their ranches to import inferior foreign beef.

I won’t take up your time with too much of this, but a few images have consumed a good bit of my conscious life over this last period, all of which have implications for the incessant and even desperate scramble which is modern labor. 

The first takes the form of the proliferation of data centers, critical for artificial intelligence but also for surveillance technologies which seem to incarnate the most dystopian features of our increasingly “big brother” world.  Like prisons, slaughterhouses and other entities we would prefer to keep out of public view, these data centers are generally placed in communities far from the mainstream, certainly far from the domiciles of the billionaire classes, communities which have in many instances stated their preference for data centers to be placed elsewhere, or nowhere at all.

My feeds have been full of images from “town halls” in mostly rural areas where the decision to host these data centers appear to have been made in advance and where those who protest the loudest are not heeded but aggressively removed from the premises.  It isn’t clear what the decision makers receive for their acquiescence to these large corporate interests, and in a few instances there apparently have been some local economic benefits at least in the short term.  But for others across the political spectrum, the often-vague promise of employment has given way to water shortages, higher energy costs, and the constant whirring sounds of “progress” which are much more likely to ruin sleep than pay down mortgages.

As the US president has intoned, these data centers are here to stay (as long as he is here to stay at least) and there really isn’t anything the rest of us can do about it.   They are “here to stay” despite vociferous bipartisan protests against  the technology which is now being sold to us in a format making it clear that, as with other “advances,” we have essentially no choice but to buy. 
Government officials apparently have little interest in regulating AI and its clear and present dangers, aside from ensuring that stock portfolios are fully loaded with the investments which their AI corporate friends largely control.  The UN has sincere interest in governance though its tendency is to attempt to govern matters such as AI which are accelerating far faster than they can be regulated. 

To claim that AI is being “oversold” is likely a significant understatement.  Everywhere the media is filled with smiling faces who have apparently figured out how to use AI to solve problems which have ostensibly eluded the human race since its inception.  I will spare you here a recitation of the state of AI “governance” and its many loopholes.  Suffice to say that one of the prevalent concerns is the relationship of AI to employment, specifically the promise that AI will make much of the work we now do irrelevant, that it will do what humans now do in a faster and more cost-effective manner and help the clever manipulators of this technology to keep their own “ competitive edge.”

To say that AI has created some strange bedfellows would be to understate the extent to which AI has enabled reshuffled kingdoms and even motivated the new class of “kings” to embrace ideas more in keeping with their political adversaries.  Such is the case with Elon Musk who has publicly backed a compensatory proposal for Universal Basic Income, a concept pushed responsibly by a few of our colleagues as a way of building an economic “floor” under people which would free them from fiscal distress and allow them to pursue interests and activities which are unlikely for people raising a child or two while working the third shift at Arby’s.

But there are two significant “rubs” here, the first being UBI would be seen  by the ruling political class as an entitlement, a compensation in effect for the technologies that promise to render much of what we are now paid to do to some employment junkyard.  Still the backlash here could well be considerable given that said ruling class is attempting to apply the same entitlement label to (and then dismantle) the Social Security that most of us have worked our entire lives to ensure.  If Social Security can be dismissed as “entitlement” by some political elites the battle over any UBI proposal is likely to be intense.

But even this pales alongside the concerns expressed by the late Wendell Berry and others, that technology which “saves” us from work “saves” us to do what exactly?  UBI or no, how are we to fill our days with meaning and value in the absence of discipline which work confers? How are we to compensate for the loss of identity and dignity which work also and often confers? 

There have been of late a spate of articles chronicling the travails of “retirement” in my country and many of these highlight the degree to which we collectively seem not “to know what to do with ourselves.” For many people I know, performing services to corporations or communities absent compensation runs counter to generational work priorities.  So, then, what?  How do we build a life that honors our skills and passions while opening portals for the development of new ones?  How do we locate and operationalize the callings which can get us off our couches and into community spaces where there are so many gaps to fill – gaps of resources but also of companionship and revitalization which could call out  the best in us and help us to be better still?

AI may well eventually render our labors obsolete.  But it cannot easily help us rebalance lives which are often primarily focused on monetized labor. As many already recognize, we need also to build spaces for active service and engagement within and beyond our families such that those spaces will welcome us after the labor we thought might never end, actually ends.

This is not about killing time but about the emancipation of skills and values which people need to share and from which others need to benefit.  While we labor, we can also make time for feeding and caregiving, for faith and emotional support, for environmental care and biodiversity health, for children and elders not our own, for civic spaces in desperate need of revitalization, for farmers and artists seeking local outlets.  Investments in one or more of these areas, however modest, can identify attributes in ourselves which will serve us well when we come upon those days when “knowing what to do with ourselves” becomes a matter of more urgent personal concern.

The options are numerous. The gaps are daunting. The needs are vast. In the age of AI and its datacenter enablers, for all the threats and promises they represent to labor as we still know it, community investments are important to our own well-being and to all those with whom we might interact. Our societies are currently in a world of hurt, but we can identify and practice skills and passions over a lifetime to help ensure that it hurts a little less.

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An Ode to Wendell Berry (with quotations adapted mostly from “A Continuous Harmony.”), Dr. Robert Zuber

2 Aug

A person can aspire to heaven with his mind and his heart while destroying the earth, and his fellow humans, with his hands.

We are not humble enough or reverent enough.

I am ashamed and deeply distressed that American government should have become the chief cause of disillusionment with American principles.

Most of us do not know how to produce the best food in the best way.  We don’t know how to produce any kind in any way.

The person who is willing to undertake the discipline and the difficulty of mending his own ways is worth more to the conservation movement than a hundred who are insisting merely that the government and industries mend their ways.

The drastic and incalculably dangerous assumption is that farming can be considered apart from farmers, that the land may be conceptually divided in its use from human need and human care.

Our society is one of undisciplined abundance, which is to say a society of waste. And waste is a hideous concept  making our entire world hideous.

We maintain the  “barbarous abstraction of nationalism” while creating institutions of suspicion.

We are being “saved” from work, then for what?  It is the discipline, not the desire, which is the common ground.

Our kingdom of abstraction, including specialists turning partners into “objects.” Seeing people as “spare parts.”

The hypocrisy of “freedom” at the hands of government which surveils us and tells us what to do.

The present problems of the world are the result not of human stupidity but of human intelligence without adequate cultural controls.

Few stick around long enough to see the effects of their work, including their bad work. What is the impact on our neighbors and on our place in the world from what we do?  The standard of land use is fertility which preserves the interests of the future.

Seeing the land as merchandise and ourselves as its traveling salesmen. For our destruction of paradise there will be hell to pay.

The only genuine morality is concern for the life and health of the world. Such morality is long-term practicality.

There is no benefit without obligation.

Dear All,

This is the latest installment in my romp back through writings which, for better or worse, had an outsized influence on my own thinking and practice, including the way I engage the policy world for better or worse.

As a reminder, the point of this exercise is not only to highlight a path that had been laid out for me and that I did not do enough to cherish, but rather to point out the ways in which our deep contemporary challenges have precedents to which we have paid insufficient attention and which have only grown more challenging as a result.

In other words, what we now experience – the conflicts, the atrocity crimes, the corruption, the environmental degradation, the indifference and misinformation of governments,  the self-deception and willful ignorance of constituents, etc. – have characterized our  collective passage for some time.  This current moment has context-specific elements  which may appear to be unique but they have been predictable, in whole or in part, by thinkers focused on misguided elements of personhood, faith, agriculture and institutional life to which we have too-often offered unreflective and undeserved allegiance and thus are often more resistant to change.

Into this matrix of misery and potential stepped the Kentucky farmer, poet, strip mining critic, and social commentator Wendell Berry, someone who I have so far failed to meet but someone who has had an outsized influence on how I write and, in many instances, how I think about how I write.

While many are attracted to his poetry, many others have been moved by his essays and, more specifically, the place-based rural perspectives he embodies in a genre increasingly dominated, in this and many other societies, by urban voices.  His perspective is about the importance of place but it is even more about belonging – belonging to a community, but also to the rhythms of the natural order beyond domicile walls.  With all due regard for the predilections of the human condition, his view of a life worth living is an important antidote to the abstract and economically-oriented modalities of much of our urban life.  He laments the all-consuming consumerist orientation of much of our societies, consuming goods we do not produce or know how to produce, food we do not grow or know how to grow, preferring to own a neighbor’s farm than have a neighbor, resigning ourselves to predatory economic competition rather than to communion with those of greater and lesser means.

What we know how to do even less well , as Berry laments, is confront our addiction to waste, the incessant compulsion to consume without consequence and discard without concern.  He speaks of a society which continues to, even now, denude mountain tops for coal to light our Christmas trees, a society with many who aspire to heaven while leaving a world more “hideous” in certain aspects s than when they entered, seeing the world (including the land we rely on) as “merchandise” and ourselves as one form or another as “traveling salesmen,” belonging less to a place and a people than to an economic imperative. 

Berry is clear that, in environmental terms, all have “sinned and fallen short”  We have “erred and strayed” from our responsibility to future generations,  and it will be those generation, not mine, who will surely pay for the hell we continue to inflict on our communities, our oceans, our atmosphere. We are all culpable.  I am culpable.  And my culpability is indefensible given my professional choices such that I should know better at this point in life.  And I should also know better how to incarnate what I have come to know in practices which reflect the values I too-cavalierly espouse.

What I am also at this point in life is someone who is committed to simpler living, who acknowledges the almost overwhelming magnetic pull of technology and its promises, including the promise to eventually “free” us from work, one which also implies freedom from the meaning and discipline which are, in my humble view at least, essential to a life of value and purpose. I continue, perhaps  naively, to advocate for lives committed to self-improvement as we enjoin institutions and officials to improve their own practice and encourage our fellow citizens to renounce the “barbarous abstraction of nationalism” which threatened Berry’s earlier years, and which now consumes much of our present political discourse.

It is unreasonable, as Berry himself recognizes, to merely transpose lifestyles across increasingly complex societies.  Not everyone can farm a land.  Not everyone can write for audiences in moving and compelling ways.  Not everyone can critique societies seemingly determined to make “spare parts” out of potential-bearing humans and convince at least some to rethink that depersonalized, abstracted agenda. Berry has made much of his context while encouraging others to make the most of theirs.  He knows where he belongs. He’s not sure that enough of the rest of us do.

And he knows some of what must now be done. Everyone can plant a tree.  Everyone can commit to making private and public green spaces more congenial to butterflies and bees than to litter and waste.  Everyone can make lifestyle changes which increase their connectivity to neighbors, communities and the earth.  Everyone can overcome the worst of their material addictions while calling their more aggressive ideological addictions to fuller scrutiny.  Everyone can ensure that their benefits – privileges and entitlements – are tied to obligations to neighbors, community and the planet.

The benefits to me of this piece is that they are tied to an obligation to confess what I have learned from my long-term engagements with the work of Wendell Berry.  Learning about the importance of considering the consequences of my actions, especially to future generations.  Learning about the importance of incarnating the values and practices in my own life that I look to inspire in other persons and institutions.  Learning that care for the land is a common obligation to our future, one which we can discharge in our own neighborhoods as well as better support in larger contexts for those who care for the land that supplies our food and those who seek to improve what is left of the health of oceans and forests. Learning how to modulate our economic preoccupations in part by refusing to see others as “spare parts” to a larger project to which they are often not invited. Learning that a full life requires discipline as well as leisure, discipline as well as desire.  Learning that humility and reverence are not quaint relics of a bygone time but traits of character which can enrich our own life and all the lives we touch.

These can be hard things, harder than some of us imagine.  But if we don’t make good faith efforts in the direction of the changes we need to make, the messaging and behaviors we need to discard, there will indeed be “hell to pay,” if not by ourselves than by those younger folks who still believe we have their best interests at heart.

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More Reflections from the UN High Level Political Forum (HLPF): A Next-Gen Voice from Peru.

14 Jul

Editor’s Note: This is the second piece we have run from Andrea Viviana Araujo Muñoa who is now with us at the HLPF in New York. As we know and as Andrea has learned, many affiliated events are taking place outside of UN headquarters. Our July 9 event was also a hybrid event outside the UN building, designed in part to hear Andrea’s remarks: From Ayacucho to the United Nations A First-Generation Perspective on Identity, Resilience, and Youth-Led Community Transformation. But it was also to bring together a talented and professionally diverse group to relaunch the New York chapter of Women in International Security (WIIS) which had been run out of the Global Action office for several years pre-Covid. The hope is that events like this one and contributions like Andrea’s will help us maintain commitments to young women in all facets of the security sector.

The High-Level Political Forum (HLPF) is far more than just another United Nations event. It is a meeting point where changemakers come together, bringing their experiences, hopes, and shared aspirations. In an increasingly interconnected world, partnerships and collaboration are more essential than ever, because what affects one country ultimately affects us all. International cooperation must place greater focus on young people from marginalized and underserved communities—those who continue to transform their neighborhoods through resilience and self-organization despite persistent inequalities. They deserve not only to be heard, but also to serve as representatives in global decision-making spaces within the United Nations.

  1. Roots and Resilience: The Journey from Ayacucho
    Sometimes, people forget where they come from and where they are going. For me, family history is essential because it shapes the way first-generation young people take action and create change. My parents are Quechua speakers from Ayacucho, the region where terrorism began in my country. As children, they were among the thousands who were forced to leave their homes and migrate to the capital. They never finished high school, had to learn Spanish at a very young age, and grew up facing systemic discrimination.
  2. The First-Generation Responsibility
    I am now 27 years old. Although my parents had very limited educational opportunities, my two triplet sisters and I all graduated from a public university. Being a first-generation university graduate has given me a deep sense of responsibility to give back to my community and create opportunities for others who face similar barriers. For me, taking action is not simply a choice—it is a responsibility. It is not easy to face uncertainty or to defend diverse voices and cultural diversity, but these are precisely the values that make us human. My story is my starting point because I believe that everyone has a purpose in life. In times of uncertainty, that purpose provides clarity and direction. “Taking action is not simply a choice—it is a responsibility. It is not easy to face uncertainty or to defend diverse voices and cultural diversity, but these are precisely
    the values that make us human.”
  3. Voices from the Margins: Youth-Led Action in Lima
    Through a youth-led organization born in the outskirts of Lima—the often-overlooked side of a deeply unequal capital—you can witness how young people from vulnerable communities promote and defend meaningful civic participation within their own neighborhoods. You can see that they do care about politics, not as partisan competition, but as a way to improve their communities. Despite having very limited financial resources, they design and implement free social initiatives for those around them. Self-management keeps these initiatives alive, but it also comes at a cost. I do not want to romanticize resilience or suggest that community organizing alone can overcome structural challenges. Young people need resources, opportunities, and institutional support so that their commitment is not what limits their future. Many volunteer despite lacking formal employment or financial stability. Each of them carries a unique story, yet they all share a remarkable determination to build stronger and more inclusive communities.
  4. A Call for Global Partnerships & the HLPF
    The High-Level Political Forum (HLPF) is far more than just another United Nations event. It is a meeting point where changemakers come together, bringing their experiences, hopes, and shared aspirations. In an increasingly interconnected world, partnerships and collaboration are more essential than ever, because what affects one country ultimately affects us all.
    International cooperation must place greater focus on young people from marginalized and underserved communities—those who continue to transform their neighborhoods through resilience and self-organization despite persistent inequalities. They deserve not only to be heard, but also to serve as representatives in global decision-making spaces within the United Nations.
  5. Reimagining Trust and Governance
    Today, there is growing discussion about the perceived decline of the United Nations, the urgent need for reform, and the frustration felt by many around the world. In this context, one question becomes unavoidable: isn’t this precisely the time to place our trust in those who continue to create real impact in their own communities? The High-Level Political Forum offers a unique opportunity for young people to move beyond simply being heard and to become active partners in shaping concrete, genuine, and transformative action.

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More Reflections from the UN High Level Political Forum: Liberato Bautista on “Communities of Hope.”

12 Jul


Editor’s Note: Our Good friend and colleague, Rev. Dr. Liberato Bautista, made this excellent presentation at a recent HLPF side event on “Communities of Hope: Advancing Human Dignity and Development for Sustainable Futures.” “Levi” as he is known, is of Filipino ancestry and has long served in New York as Assistant General Secretary for United Nations and International Affairs, General Board of Church and Society of The United Methodist Church. He is also immediate past president of the Committee on NGOs. Levi is a familiar figure around the UN and this fine talk is what we have come to expect from him.


Excellencies, distinguished colleagues, friends, partners in civil society and faith communities: Thank you to the organizers for convening this timely parallel event to this year’s High-Level Political Forum, titled “Communities of Hope: Advancing Human Dignity and Development for Sustainable Futures.”

At a time when much of our public discourse seems saturated with anxiety, uncertainty, and division, I am grateful that you have chosen to organize a conversation about hope. Some may even accuse us of being hopeless romantics for injecting hope into an anxious world. I confess that I am happy to join that company. So, allow me to invite you, for the next few minutes, to imagine with me a future in the present tense. That may sound like a contradiction. Yet much of our work in the United Nations, in civil
society, and in communities of faith depends precisely on this capacity.

We live amid the present tensions of our time—war and displacement, widening inequalities, lingering historical injustices, ecological degradation, technological uncertainty, and growing fragmentation. Yet we are called at the same time to orient our vision toward futures that are both visible and viable—futures shaped by human dignity, sustainable development, and shared flourishing.

I am especially drawn to the title of this event and its use of the word futures in the plural. Not future, but futures. That choice matters. Because no individual, no nation, no institution, and no tradition possesses a monopoly on what the future should look like. None has a franchise on hope. The future is not something handed down by the powerful. It is something imagined, negotiated, and built together. The language of hope and the language of futures, therefore, share a common invitation. They call us into a collective exercise of moral imagination about what makes for a more just, peaceable, and sustainable world.


Communities of hope help us hold these realities together. The timing of this event is especially meaningful. In just two days, on July 12, the international community will observe the International Day of Hope. By establishing this observance, the United Nations reminds us that hope is not merely a private sentiment but a force that advances dignity, peace, social stability, and sustainable development. Indeed, the United Nations has described itself as “the product of hope.” Hope, therefore, is not peripheral to the multilateral project. It lies close to its heart. The United Nations emerged from humanity’s determination that war, devastation, and fear should not define the future. Hope is among its animating purposes.

And it is in that spirit that I would like to begin with a lesson I continue to learn from people experiencing forced migration. Part of my work has involved creating platforms for migrants, refugees, displaced persons, and communities uprooted by conflict, persecution, environmental degradation, and economic necessity to speak about their own fears and hopes. One quickly discovers that hope, for people in forced movement, is rarely an abstraction. Hope does not recover the passport left behind. Hope does not reunite a parent with a child separated by war. Hope does not erase trauma. Hope does not instantly provide protection, livelihood, housing, or belonging.

And yet they continue to hope. What amazes me is not simply their resilience. What amazes me is their moral orientation. It is their determination to anchor their breath, their being, and their future to hope even when circumstances seem determined to deny their dignity. One of the lessons forced migration teaches us is that human dignity often survives long before development arrives. People continue to imagine futures for themselves and their children even when the path ahead remains uncertain. They continue to seek community amid displacement, dispersal, and dislocation. For some, the hope is a return. For others, it is the possibility of rebuilding life in countries of transit and destination. Development worthy of the name begins there. It begins with the recognition and protection of human dignity.

Communities of hope emerge wherever people refuse to surrender their dignity to conditions that deny it. That experience has led me to a conviction: Hope cannot merely be the ceiling we seek to reach. Hope must also be the floor from which we begin. Too often, we speak of hope as a distant horizon. But when hope is permanently deferred, its very unreachability can become a source of fear. Hope must be accessible. Hope must be tangible. Hope must be lived.

In the Wesleyan understanding of grace, God’s action is not merely a destination awaiting humanity at the end of the journey. Grace is already at work, preparing the way and opening possibilities where none previously seemed to exist. Hope functions in much the same way. It is not only the horizon that beckons us forward. It is also the ground beneath our feet that enables us to move at all.

Perhaps this is one of the lessons we must learn again regarding sustainable development. The Sustainable Development Goals were never intended to be merely a collection of targets and indicators. They were intended to advance human dignity through development and thereby create the conditions for sustainable futures. This year, as the High-Level Political Forum reviews Sustainable Cities and Communities and Partnerships for the Goals, I am reminded that both are, at their heart, questions of hope.

Communities cannot be sustainable if people are denied dignity, participation, belonging, and opportunity. And partnerships cannot flourish where fear, fragmentation, and exclusion prevail. One reason implementation gaps persist is that we have learned to count the goals while becoming less adept at encountering the people they represent. When goals become detached from lived realities, they risk becoming fossilized. Sustainable development is ultimately about creating conditions in which human dignity can flourish. Yet dignity, while inherent in every human person, does not protect itself. It requires protection through institutions, laws, norms, and regimes of human rights.

Hope, therefore, is not sustained by aspiration alone. It also requires institutions capable of safeguarding dignity and advancing rights. It is precisely because the SDGs are ultimately about people that I have come to believe that we live in a world in deficit of hope and in excess of fear. Fear generated by poverty and inequality. Fear generated by conflict and displacement. Fear generated by lingering historical injustices of slavery, colonialism, and racism. Fear generated by ecological degradation. Fear generated by technological change whose ethical consequences remain uncertain.

Yet fear today is more than an emotion. It is increasingly becoming a governing narrative. But we must not allow the present tensions of our day to determine the future. Hope begins with a refusal to make that concession. Hope is humanity’s insistence that another future remains possible.


This is why I increasingly refer to Agenda 2030 and the Pact for the Future as elements of the United Nations’ agenda of hope. They express not only hope for a better world but also hope for a United Nations transformed and fit for purpose—faithful to its foundational responsibilities to advance human dignity and human rights, promote peace and security, and foster sustainable development for people and planet.

For many years, I have argued that civil society must have access to the United Nations’ premises, promises, and processes. Today, I would add a fourth imperative: Civil society must also have access to the agenda of hope. Because hope belongs not only to governments but to peoples. Yet aspirations do not advance themselves. Norms do not implement themselves. Hope does not
institutionalize itself. Every agenda of hope requires institutions capable of shepherding it. The multilateral infrastructure entrusted with this task—the United Nations—is under strain. Ultimately, humanity’s collective capacity to imagine and pursue a common future is under pressure.

This is why I continue to advocate for a people-centered, ethical, and transformative multilateralism. Ethical multilateralism is not merely cooperation among governments. It is the encounter between the community of nations and the community of peoples. Human beings flourish not in isolation but through mutual responsibility, solidarity, compassion, and participation in the common good. As Minjung theologians in South Korea reminded us, ordinary people are not objects of history but its makers. When people become subjects rather than objects, the horizon of hope becomes clearer, and the space for collaboration widens rather than shrinks.


My friend and colleague, Christian social ethicist Dr. Lester Edwin Ruiz, has challenged us to distinguish between what is fundamentally new and what is fundamentally better. This question is especially important in the age of artificial intelligence. The issue is not whether AI is fundamentally new. It clearly is. The deeper question is whether it fosters fundamentally better relationships. In this regard, I find resonance with Pope Leo XIV’s insistence that: People must come before technology. Human dignity must come before efficiency. Ethics must come before capability.

For many of us who work in and around the United Nations, no passage from sacred scripture has captured the moral imagination of the international community more profoundly than Prophet Isaiah’s vision that nations shall beat their swords into plowshares and their spears into pruning hooks. Yet eighty years later, we must acknowledge that the world has not yet beaten all its swords into plowshares. The answer, however, is not to abandon Isaiah’s vision. The answer is to deepen it. This is where I find Prophet Micah’s injunction indispensable. While Isaiah calls us to transform the implements of war, Micah calls us to transform ourselves: to do justice, to love kindness, and to walk humbly.


Here, I also hear an echo of John Wesley’s first general rule: Do no harm. Between the present tensions of our day and the future we aspire to build lies a profound moral responsibility. Do no harm. Do not compromise the future of generations to come with our own follies. Do not diminish tomorrow through the choices we make today. Do not sacrifice the dignity of others for immediate gain.


In a world marked by conflict, displacement, dispersal, dislocation, ecological degradation, widening inequality, and technological disruption, this remains a profoundly relevant public ethic. The world does not need less imagination. It needs imagination disciplined by justice, tempered by mercy, and guided by humility. Perhaps this is what communities of hope are called to offer in our time: not merely a vision of a future without swords and spears, but the moral capacities to build and sustain it.

Finally, these traditions remind us that the future is not merely something we await, inherit, or discover; it is something we create. As the musical Rent reminds us, the opposite of war isn’t peace. It is creation. War destroys. Creation builds. War wounds. Creation heals. War closes horizons. Creation opens possibilities. Therefore, communities of hope become communities of creation. They participate in the ongoing work of creating a world where human dignity is protected, human rights are respected, communities flourish, and sustainable futures become possible. And because destruction is ultimately aligned with death, creation remains one of humanity’s deepest affirmations of life itself.

In a world in deficit of hope and in excess of fear, communities of hope remind us that hope must be more than a destination. It must become a lived reality. They remind us that human dignity is not a consequence of development but its foundation. They remind us that sustainable futures are built when peoples and nations work together to move our world from fear toward hope, from fragmentation toward solidarity, and from what is merely fundamentally new toward relationships that are fundamentally better.

That, I believe, is the promise and calling of communities of hope: advancing human dignity through development for sustainable futures. Thank you for your indulgence.

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Reflections from the UN High Level Political Forum: Rebecca Irby Highlights the Dignity Foundations of Development

11 Jul

Editor’s Note: Rebecca Irby’s investments related to her leadership of PEAC (www.peacinstitute.org), investments in sustainable development, youth and women’s engagement, nuclear disarmament and NGO-focused media are becoming legendary in UN spaces. Here she kicks off what will surely be a fruitful, longer-term engagement, one which has already attracted the attention of other parts of the UN system, including from the leadership of the UN mission of the Republic of Korea. Her comments in relation to the newly-formed NGO Committee for Dignity were very well received and I am pleased to be able to share them here.

Opening Statement + Introduction of the Committee for Dignity

Good morning, everyone.

Welcome, and thank you for joining us for Dignity and the SDG Implementation Gap: Structural Discrimination, Community Evidence, Nature, and Meaningful Participation.

It is an honor to gather here during HLPF, in this space so close to the United Nations, and in the company of civil society leaders, advocates, community partners, researchers, and people who continue to believe that sustainable development must be more than a promise on paper.

At the heart of today’s conversation is a simple but urgent idea:

Dignity is not an ornament added to development after the fact. Dignity is the measure of whether development is happening at all.

When a community lacks safe water, it is not only a service gap. It is a dignity gap.

When people are denied clean energy, housing, infrastructure, health, education, or safety because of who they are, their race, caste, gender, disability, migration status, Indigenous identity, poverty, or political exclusion, that is not only a policy failure. It is a dignity failure.

And when communities are studied, counted, consulted, and photographed, but not trusted to shape the decisions that affect their lives, that is not participation. That is performance.

The United Nations begins with the words “We the Peoples.” Those words matter. They remind us that the UN was not created only for states, systems, or institutions. It was created to serve humanity.

And at this particular moment, the role of civil society has never been more important. Around the world, too many people live under systems where their voices are restricted, dismissed, or unheard. NGOs, grassroots movements, Indigenous leaders, youth organizers, disability advocates, faith communities, women’s groups, peacebuilders, journalists, educators, and community institutions help ensure that the lived experiences of people remain part of the global conversation.

That is why the NGO Committee for Dignity exists.

This Committee was created to bring organizations together around a shared commitment to dignity, justice, inclusion, peace, and meaningful participation.

But I want to say something plainly: a committee is not meaningful simply because it exists. A coalition is not powerful simply because names appear on a list. An organization becomes meaningful when it becomes a place of commitment.

Commitment to one another.

Commitment to the communities whose lives are shaped by these decisions.

Commitment to the difficult, patient, disciplined work of moving from concern to action, from action to accountability, and from accountability to transformation.

Our purpose is not to speak for people.

Our purpose is to create spaces for people to speak for themselves, and to help make sure that when they do, institutions are prepared to listen, respond, and change.

We are here to help ensure that all peoples, including stateless peoples, Indigenous communities, vulnerable populations, marginalized groups, and communities facing structural discrimination, are not treated as afterthoughts in global policy conversations.

These communities are not footnotes.

They are not simply beneficiaries waiting at the end of a system.

They are the authors of evidence. They are the holders of wisdom. They are the builders of solutions.

Dignity is inseparable from the dignity of life itself: the dignity of nature, the dignity of water, the dignity of land, the dignity of future generations.

Protecting dignity and protecting the planet are not competing responsibilities. They are deeply connected.

As Wangari Maathai, a Kenyan social, environmental, and political activist who founded the Green Belt Movement, reminded us, when we help the Earth heal, we also help heal ourselves.

And that brings us to the core question of today:

What is the SDG implementation gap really telling us?

It tells us that promises are not enough when the structures that deliver them still exclude people.

It is telling us that technical solutions are not enough when the people closest to the problem are kept farthest from power.

It is telling us that participation without influence is not participation. It is choreography.

And it is telling us that the people closest to the harm must be central to defining the repair.

This week, as the United States reflects on 250 years since the Declaration of Independence, we are reminded that every nation, every institution, and every global framework is tested not by the beauty of its ideals, but by the honesty of its implementation.

The question is not only whether we can repeat our founding promises.

The question is: Who is still waiting to be included in them?

That is true for the American story. It is true for the United Nations. It is true for the Sustainable Development Goals.

Our task is not simply to celebrate the promise.

Our task is to close the distance between the promise and people’s lives.

So today, we gather not only to talk about dignity, but to ask what dignity requires of us.

Dignity requires memory, because communities know the histories that institutions often ‘forget’.

Dignity requires truth, because we cannot repair what we refuse to name.

Dignity requires evidence, because lived experience must be treated as knowledge, not anecdote.

Dignity requires humility, because institutions must be willing to learn from the people they were designed to serve.

And dignity requires communities at the center, not as symbols of inclusion, but as partners in shaping what comes next.

Most of all, dignity requires us to move from symbolic inclusion to meaningful participation. These are not abstract values. They are the conditions that determine whether communities are treated as partners in implementation or as evidence after the fact.

Thank you all for being here. I am so grateful for the wisdom in this room, and I look forward to the conversation we are about to build together.

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Sane Societies:  A Father’s Day Reflection, Dr. Robert Zuber

21 Jun

There exists no more difficult art than living.  Seneca

Our planet is the mental institution of the universe. Johann Wolfgang von Goethe

Insanity is relative. It depends on who has who locked in what cage. Ray Bradbury

Neither a man nor a crowd nor a nation can be trusted to act humanely or to think sanely under the influence of a great fear.  Bertrand Russell

Madness is something rare in individuals — but in groups, parties, peoples, and ages, it is the rule.  Friedrich Nietzsche

Where to look if you’ve lost your mind? Bernard Malamud

Was insanity just a matter of dropping the act?  Susanna Kaysen

Eventually you learn to exist on the precipice of insanity. R.F. Kuang

It is perhaps an oddity (even by my standards) to write about madness as a tribute to Fathers’ Day.  But madness now accompanies a broad swath of our personal, family, economic and governance domains and it is reasonable to ask if there are particular responsibilities that parents — that fathers — can exercise to help ensure that the music accompanying the sanity-deficient dance we now collectively perform, thereby giving expression to a range of social and personal pathologies, can be toned way down.  

The motivation for this post is a book which I recently read again and which had a good bit to do with my own social psychology awakening, “The Sane Society” by Erich Fromm.  The book is certainly dated in some aspects, still wrestling with outdated Freudian assumptions  and advocating mostly conventional therapeutic options. But it also makes an important contribution to the creeping anxiety and “great fear”  which characterize this moment, indeed has characterized many of our “civilized” societies and their institutions well before the inception of Fromm’s work (and my own earthly existence) back in the 1950s.

Most of us don’t need to be convinced about the collective insanity which punctuates our present.  We experience the carnage of epidemic levels of predation, sexual and economic.  We endure a system which stacks the deck against workers and in favor of oligarchs and corrupt officials, a system which has left many of us desperate for health care and other services all while we literally starve for connection beyond transaction.  We daily witness the unleashing of bias and violence against people, even citizens, whose skin color and language preference is exploited by out-of-control enforcement agents.  We recoil from seemingly endless armed conflict  and rumors of more, as well as from faith traditions which are now as likely to justify the madness as demand the repentance for our most  toxic actions and aspirations.

There is more, of course, both life affirming and life challenging.  What interests me is that, 70+ years on, none of our current levels of insanity would be news to Fromm.  Even then, he lamented the “lengthening shadows” over societies which have increasingly made human beings an alienated “appendix” to societies rather than being central to the creation of their meaning and value. Indeed, Fromm lamented traits of personality which made people “acceptable” in his time and ours – humans  who “fit” without friction, who obsess over recognition and affirmation, who refuse to “stick their necks out no matter the provocation, people who are “well adjusted” in a way that reminds of the robots and AI which, despite the benefits, now seem to be pushing us further towards “the precipice of insanity” and further away from the human agency which remains our primary antidote to alienated living. 

Fromm was explicit in his concern that, unless societies can transform material interests into respect for what he called “the fundamental facts of human existence,” such as our need for transcendence, relatedness and rootedness, that decay and barbarism were likely outcomes and that “blood and soil” concerns would crowd out solidarity and the quest for genuine security in a world which is literally ruled by (largely outmoded) economic indicators and priorities.  Even back then, Fromm lamented the gaps increasingly separating knowledge and reason (let alone wisdom), the willingness of too many to sit back and let the world simply take its course, to reinforce and amplify passivity as a lifestyle in which “taking care of your own” is the only care you are ever expected to take.

Many of the fathers I know see these recurring warning lights and understand the threats they pose to the children they are trying to raise.  They recognize that, quoting Fromm again, “ the aim of life is to live it, to be fully born, to be fully awake.” But these fathers also see the pressures emanating from an increasingly sanity-challenged society which deifies the economic, which reinforces the passive, which mocks the humble, and which sustains mighty divides of race and economic opportunity, religion and gender – divides which ultimately magnify insecurity rather than promote its resolution.

Fromm worried in his time about the idolatrous “blood and soil” concerns upheld by too many men,  concerns which have only served to make prescient his “decay and barbarism” warning in our own, more immediate contexts. But he  also worried about fathers who were seemingly, in his words, “along for the ride” of rearing children in this current time of creeping madness.  Thankfully, however, many of the  fathers I know largely recognize the need to model and promote a certain kind of courage and resilience in their children, helping them along the road to more effectively tolerating insecurity and to do so free of panic, free of  pretense , and free of the life-denying consequences of the “great fear” which currently grips much of our individual and institutional expressions.

In these times, such is the opening portal to a very high calling, one which models a life engaged robustly, a life which eschews the paralysis of boredom, which upholds the ethical even while sailing across seas of corruption, which allows us space to find rest without resignation, which insists on agency to help mold a world fit for more — much more — than our borderline-insane pursuits and distractions focused largely on human consumption.

Fromm urged all parents, especially all fathers, to commit to raising children able and willing to use their skills and commitments in the service of life  and not of destruction, alienation or even death. From my seat in the policy world, I believe that these contrasting ends remain fully relevant if we are ever to move our planet beyond its “mental institution of the universe” status. And from my even better seat in the human community, I deeply honor those fathers who help their children master “the difficult art of living” in all its aspects, in part by choosing life themselves.

In this sanity-challenged world of ours, this mastery might be the highest calling of all. Grateful to all the fathers who heed the call on this Father’s Day.

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Protection Expectations, A Memorial Day Reflection, Dr. Robert Zuber

25 May

Don’t let the rain drive you to the wrong shelter. Michael Bassey Johnson

The greatest protection any of us can have is faith in ourselves. Maya Angelou

Your silence will not protect you. Audre Lorde

If we want to embrace life, we also have to embrace chaos.  Susan Elizabeth Phillips

The best lightning rod for your protection is your own spine.  Ralph Waldo Emerson

 By allowing your mother to protect you, you gave her a gift. Kristin Cashore

So you don’t think three protection dogs, a room filled with weapons, a panic room and house that eats people isn’t just a little overkill? Christine Feehan

The measure of strength is how gently it can hold the fragile. Lawrence Nault

It’s easy to have ethics when what you love is not in danger. Mariana Enríquez

I realized protecting my children meant speaking truths I had buried for decades.  Denika Fercho

The phrase in the title of this post comes from the representative of Liechtenstein speaking at a Security Council debate on civilian protection.  Last week was “protection of civilians” week, an opportunity for the UN to examine generally mandated tasks to protect civilians endangered by armed conflict, but also to examine measures to, as was noted in a side event, “protect the protectors.” Liechtenstein has been among the most important UN members in calling attention to deficits in civilian protection but also in atrocity crime prevention and in upholding international law.

There are, indeed, expectations for protection, expectations of our military and police contingents, expectations of our UN peacekeeping forces and first responders, expectations of our political and community leaders, expectations of our families and neighbors, expectations that these and others are committed to a degree of protection from threats which so often seem to be beyond local capacity to respond, and which may indeed, at least in some instances, be beyond our capacity to grasp.

Like some of our readers, my relatives saw their military commitments largely as acts of protection of the places and people they loved.  They entered such service willingly but not vindictively, understanding the potential horrors of armed conflict while hoping and praying that horrors would end quickly and impact as few communities as possible.

While these sentiments may have been self-deluding in some measure, they derived from the idea that protection in itself had noble aspects, that threats were real and that, while all had a responsibility to protect, that burden was higher for some. They were prepared to respond to a crisis as it unfolds, to run towards danger rather than from it, to take on risks so that others could have their own risks reduced.  While protection is incumbent upon all who are capable of protecting, some in our dangerous world are certainly more fragile than others, as some are better equipped (in military hardware if not necessarily in temperament) to meet threats and challenges than others.

What emerged from the UN’s “protection of civilians” week was a tapestry defined by increasing state and non-state brutality, a willingness to disregard international law and the UN’s own Charter, and a liquidity crisis which has exacerbated the UN’s own reputational concerns. In the Security Council, delegation after delegation implored the Council to take their protective responsibilities more seriously and to do so in accordance with the values that led to the founding of the UN in the first instance.  These delegations understood (as did those of us witnessing the discussion) the degree to which our global economic and security systems have become partisan entities which benefit the few and increase pressures on the many.  They understood that the UN’s liquidity crisis impedes the ability of the UN system to properly fund protective operations, but that the need for protection is now more acute than in the past, not less.

Not all of the UN’s shrinking roster of peacekeeping operations have protection mandates.  But all have protection expectations of people living in countries where physical insecurity is as much a factor of daily life as economic, food and health insecurity.  These people need “blue helmets” to respond even as response is compromised by combinations of funding shortfalls, increasingly mistrustful host governments and troop contributing countries concerned about the ability of their troops to protect themselves in increasingly hostile contexts let alone to protect others.

During the Council debate, it was Panama who highlighted the irony that over a dozen civilians will have lost their lives “while we sit here and debate how to protect them.” Indeed, it is a failure to either manage or meet protection expectations which generates irony such as Panama’s, which in turn generates a sense that the UN’s protective architecture now falls well short of what is needed given our current laundry list of vulnerabilities.

And the gap is likely to increase as threats from a world increasingly indifferent to international law or climate change, a world in which the US and others are turning their backs on (and closing their wallets to)  multilateral solutions, a world (to cite the ICRC this week) which is  literally drowning in language used  to justify our own brutality, language which includes what Somalia referred to as the “exceptionalism” which justifies any and all IHL violations, language easier employed when we simply choose to stop seeing adversaries as human beings.

It is, indeed, harder to uphold ethics when the things you love are under threat. But threat is a common factor not a partisan one and those commonalities are becoming more severe not less (as Pakistan, Denmark and others noted last week) due to the disinformation and misinformation increasingly generated by artificial intelligence tools. Indeed, one of the major threats now to UN protection measures is the AI-generated lies which seek to pit communities against each other and undermine confidence in authorities and their protective responses.  We now see the results of that mistrust play out in communities worldwide, people who have given up on any assistance from outside and have turned that mistrust into emotional and physical barricades which, of course, cannot viably protect themselves and their loved ones from the crossfire of either weapons or weaponized “information.”

Thankfully, mistrust of authorities and their entities does not automatically remand into privatized “overkill.”  One of the takeaways of “protection of civilians” week is the role that communities can and must play in their own protection rather than simply huddling together in expectation of an external force which might never arrive, which might make matters worse, or which otherwise might be insufficient to task if it does arrive. 

As with many other issues, the discourse at UN headquarters struggles to properly acknowledge local expertise and capacity to address a range of threats which have defied multilateral solution. But the event on “protecting the protectors,” dominated by civil society voices, had no such struggle. Nonviolent Peace Force is perhaps the most notable of a global movement which invests in the community dimensions of protection, helping to build bonds of trust and active good neighborliness which can help create protective agency when and where external protective forces are delayed or absent.

While this approach does, as was noted at the session, transfer some risk from external protectors to frontline actors, it also acknowledges the skill that frontline actors have to protect themselves and the communities with which they are aligned.  At a time when the UN admits to “unprecedented” numbers of victims, often at the hands of state actors with full impunity, the UN’s ability to provide external protection to civilians on a wide scale is clearly compromised.  More and more, such peacekeepers are the targets of violence as they also seek to be a prompt and trusted response to violence.

So this is where we are now.  Peacekeepers facing threat from drones and other state and non-state weapons which also threaten those they seek to protect.  Government forces applying their own protective measures selectively, more consistent with political rather than humanitarian objectives. Peacekeepers lacking dependable funding and host country respect for status-of-forces agreements, including an increasing willingness to suspend adherence to international law for often poorly defined national interests. Communities also are facing increased protection-related risks without the skills or training in too many instances to build local trust and cultivate local protection expertise.

As with so much else in our world, we have done this to ourselves. We have created this moment with corruption embedded in virtually every economic transaction, with abuse normalized and agreements purely instrumentalized, with nations doing more or less what they please because there are fewer and fewer persons and institutions committed to diverting their more nefarious intentions. 

Until we can get these circumstances turned around, the need for protection remains acute – from families and neighbors, from properly trained soldiers, officers and agents, from people of many backgrounds who recognize the absolute imperative of meeting the protection expectation and doing so in ways which honor and uphold the law, not trample on it.

On this day and all days, may those who protect teach the rest of us how to choose or even build more effective shelters from the storms which so often surround us. And may they all survive the gauntlet they have so bravely chosen to traverse.

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