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Island Innovation Holds its 2021 Summit, by Jessali Zarazua

17 Sep

Editor’s Note: Jessali is our fall 2021 intern sent to us by our good friend and colleague Dr. Simone Lucatello at the Instituto Mora in Mexico City. While here, Jessali will explore every possible facet of UN policy, including time with one or more diplomatic missions, as she pursues research interests for her thesis. Jessali took an immediate interest in the Island Innovation “Virtual Island Summit” which highlighted an extraordinary array of isses relevant to sustainable devevelopment, especially in the world’s many small island states. Her summary of what she saw and heard is below.

Between the 6th and the 12th of September, the Virtual Island Summit (VIS2021) was held with world-class speakers and more than 10,000 attendees from over 100 island communities including from the Arctic, Caribbean, Europe, Indian Ocean, Pacific Islands, South America and beyond. This conference included input from policymakers, entrepreneurs, academics, and NGO leaders who for one week shared their expertise regarding the unique threats and circumstances of island communities, sharing recommendations and examples of good practices from around the world.

One of the most noteworthy aspects of the conference is that it was a zero-carbon event thanks to the use of modern technology that facilitated participation and minimized harmful greenhouse gas emissions. Also, through a cross-section of collaborative perspectives, the Summit emphasized the need for input and partnerships from across private, public, academic and NGO sectors. Furthermore, during the sessions there was discussion of all 17 of the United Nations Sustainable Development Goals in addition to other topics pertinent to island communities, such as the blue economy, education, renewable energy, climate change and how to finance sustainability projects. The following is an abstract of some of the sessions we followed, their core ideas and themes.

On day 1, the session “Renewable Microgrids: An Economic, Reliable and Sustainable Energy Transition for Islands” featured discussions on how renewable energy, implemented through microgrids such as islands, can guide sustainable development resulting in a substantial reduction in both CO2 emissions and fuel imports.

On day 2, during the “Save it from the Shore – A Circular Economy for Islands” session, it was brought-up that island beaches increasingly suffer from marine plastic pollution, revealing the fact that what is carelessly thrown away in one place inevitably turns up somewhere else, adding to the pressure on island communities to find sustainable ways of dealing with others’ waste as well as their own. The objective of this session was to give an opportunity for knowledge sharing. For example, sargassum might actually be one potential solution to climate change when used as a bio stimulant or in building materials.

During day 3, the session “Forging the Future of Food: Building Security and Resilience in Agriculture,” analyzed how best to implement sustainable agricultural practices and food systems that can contribute to more resilient communities for the benefit of current and future generations. In this context, food security and food sovereignty are two important pillars of the agricultural sector where science is crucial to informing policy, ensuring that resources are used sustainably for future generations, including sustainable uses of extractive economies such as fisheries. One of the conclusions was that while islands are currently overly dependent on food imports, small countries can grow a lot of food; it is simply a matter of using land more efficiently.

The same day, the session “Climate and Environmental Justice: Island Perspectives” highlighted the importance of justice as both a core tenet of societies and a core principle of sustainability. Within the context of the climate crisis and while taking action to mitigate it, justice becomes even more important. Climate and environmental justice is supporting a global shift towards sustainability by providing equitable and inclusive solutions for all those affected by the climate crisis.

On day 4, there was a session “Innovation and the Future of Tourism” with case studies highlighting innovative and green tourism initiatives. The main pourpose was to show that sustainable tourism is a key component to achieve the Sustainable Development Goals and  is also needed to help the tourism industry to recover from the global pandemic. On that same day, the “Why are the UN High Seas Treaty Negotiations important to the Caribbean?” sesion highlighted this first global negotiations to address sustainable ocean policy in over 30 years, one which provides a once-in-a-generation (and perhaps final) opportunity to conserve ocean biodiversity. One of the conclusions was that if island states are to be able to continue to rely on the ocean, then we need to think about how we govern, preserve and protect the high seas. Rather than belonging to anyone, ocean areas beyond national jurisdiction should be seen as belonging to everyone. This session also provided an overview of negotiations to date, as well as highlighted the Caribbean’s role in the negotiations by leading stakeholders in the region.

On day 5, the “Pioneers of the Caribbean in Renewable Energy” session highlighted how Curaçao set the objectives and priorities for the development of an effective and sustainable energy system so as to reduce dependence on petroleum imports. Efforts are also being taken to modernize the electricity distribution structure, optimize mobility and replace the use of crude oil-based products with natural gas to facilitate the transition to a fully sustainable society. All of this answers one or more problems faced by small islands regading their high electricity costs. There is no doubt that combining tourism with renewable energy is a very important sustainability step.

During day 6, the “Breaking Echo Chambers: Innovating Inter-island Knowledge Sharing” session featured a panel discussion focused on bottlenecks in communicating information to bring about effective action. Island nations face many shared struggles against the impacts of climate change such as vulnerable coastlines, damaged ecosystems, and people on the receiving end of the impacts of global inaction. In this context, webinars provide a really good opportunity for people to break silos, abandon their echo-chambers and meet people outside their usual spaces to share knowledge and best practices.

Finally on day 7, the session “Unite Behind The SC1.5NCE – an Intergenerational Dialogue on the Future of Islands” was held. Here the SC.15NCE NOT SILENCE campaign was analyzed, including its call for governments to publicly support the IPCC 1.5C Special Report and urgently align their climate goals accordingly. This session was very fruitfull because of its  intergenerational dialogue about the future of islands amidst a bevy of climate and ocean threats.

The Island Summit also included interactive sessions in various formats that imitated a traditional in-person event with digital opportunities to interact with speakers and other attendees towards creating an online community and network. Discussions of a global nature were held about climate action, the blue economy, clean energy transitions, post-pandemic recovery, island sustainability, migration, and cultural preservation. There were also “Supporting and financing climate and clean energy projects” sessions focused on specific regions, such as the Indian Ocean, the Caribbean, and Lusophone states. Potential investors were given guidance on how to invest in climate adaptation and clean energy projects in these and other regions.

In addition to the content sessions, stories were shared from the islands, such as by “Chagossian Voices”, a grassroots organization of Chagos Islanders who depicted the decades of trauma and injustice suffered by the forcibly displaced Chagossian community. During that session, Louis Elyse, a member of “Voices”, asked the international community to recognize Chagos as an independent nation. Participants also were treated to a collection of previously unseen pictures of everyday life in the 1960s and 70s taken on the Isle of Berneray in the Outer Hebrides of Scotland during the session “Fàgail Bheàrnaraigh | Leaving Berneray”.

Along with this, plenary sessions were organized at regional level and dedicated to discussions with industry leaders about how their islands are implementing the Sustainable Development Goals to meet the needs of future generations. The most common priority noted was the need for urgent action from governments and all segments of the global community to reverse the global climate crisis. Demonstrated unity was evident regarding the reality that vulnerable small island states face storms and other extreme weather events with limited capacity. “It is not a matter of money, but a matter of the continuity of our existence,” noted Ambassador Walton Aubrey Webson from Antigua & Barbuda. In a similar vein, Philip J. Pierce, Prime Minister of Saint Lucia reminded participants that “small nations like Saint-Lucia contribute little to problems like pandemics and the climate crisis but pay the highest price.”

This Summit as a whole provided an incredibly opportunity to gain insight into tackling sustainability issues faced by island communities and how we all can help build a better future for island residents. Islands offer opportunities to locally contextualize strategies for recovery and renewal, and it was uplifting to hear how much is already being done. Small Island States are on the frontline of the climate crisis through no fault of their own. They contribute just 1% of global emissions but they face rising sea levels, more extreme weather events, and devastation to local industries and livelihoods. We need to act now in solidarity with small islands states to secure our common future.

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Two Truths: A 9/11 Reflection, Dr. Robert Zuber

12 Sep
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The hole that swallowed so much of ourselves.

Those who do not weep, do not see.  Victor Hugo

Chase away sorrow by living. Melissa Marr

Twenty years ago we were credulous and blundering. Now we’re sour, suspicious and lacking in discernible ideals. Michelle Goldberg

Half the night I waste in sighs. Alfred Tennyson

Every angel is terrifying.  Rainer Maria Rilke

Are we to spend the rest of our lives in this state of high alert with guns pointed at each other’s heads and fingers trembling on the trigger?  Arundhati Roy

Terror had them all for a moment, and it ravaged them, and when it was finished, shock had its way with them, and left them cold and helpless.  Dean Wilson

As these years of weekly posts begin to wind down towards a culmination of sorts later this year in Advent, the question of what is left to say looms large for me.  Our global community is literally drowning now in opinion and commentary of all stripes and conclusions, opinions more or less attentive to circumstances around their owners, more or less grounded in reality, more or less helpful in moving the needle towards healthier, more peaceful futures.

Commentary for us has never been a competition.  We don’t make money from it.  We don’t brand it.  We also don’t believe that ours is the only way for the policy community to proceed.  Instead, we’ve looked for fertile entry points for ideas that are surely not always our own but that deserve to be considered as policy is crafted and implemented.   Amidst a cacophony of “interested” opinions, we have never had an interest beyond creating cultures of policy more conducive to honoring promises to those who have felt the blunt end of armed conflict and other ills for far too long.

As this interest unfolds, it is sometimes valuable to find a platform a bit outside the fray.   We have ideas to promote, but we are not salespeople engaged in zero sum activities – my product or yours in the basket on its way to checkout.  The point of sharing ideas in policy settings is to make better ideas, more responsive ideas, more accountable ideas.  The exercise is – or should be – complementary not predatory.  We don’t “win” in this business.  The only question of relevance in this work is whether or not our constituencies win.

Apologies for the digression, but it is important as background to what will be attempted here – a modest contribution to a seemingly endless stream of commentary on the 20th anniversary of the 9/11 attacks.  I’ve been reading quite a bit of other people’s ideas this week – mostly emanating from a grief in some ways larger than the twin towers, a grief motivated by the reality that, 20 years on, the bombs are still falling, the ethnic violence persists, the famines rage, the vaccines are yet to be distributed, the conspiracies and stiff-necked perspectives continue to multiply, the children still search for comfort in a world which, in some key ways, is simply not fit for them.

My own grief is only one grief among millions and perhaps among the more self-indulgent of them.  Like many of you, I have my own 9/11 stories, but these pale among the stories of that “first truth,” those whose loved ones went to work that day and never returned; the firefighters and police ascending stairs in the towers that were about to collapse around them; their colleagues sifting through rubble that would jeopardize their mental and physical well-being for the rest of their earthly lives; the passengers struggling with kidnappers to divert a deadly flight over Pennsylvania knowing that their own fates were largely sealed; the people from a distance who watched helplessly as the last vestiges of their “national security” came unraveled, a security which, whatever its merits, would never feel quite the same as the towers fell and victims jumped to their deaths.

This is the always the first truth of armed conflict, whether conducted by gunships or commercial aircraft, whether taking place in Lower Manhattan or in central Kabul.  The human toll of conflict is as ubiquitous as it is persistent.  We pause to remember, even to shed tears, because a generation later there are still many holes to fill, holes as large as those at the center of the 9/11 Memorial; places at the family table still being held for those who will never again occupy them, but also the struggles of responders and others whose lungs have still not expelled the toxins in the rubble, have still not fully come to terms with what they saw and heard as they sifted through a gnarly aftermath that produced numerous corpses and poisonous exposures.

This is the first and most important truth of 9/11 but it is not the only one.  For the misery we experience is tied inextricably, in this instance and others, to the misery we inflict in turn.  9/11 was not the alpha moment of global conflict, but was one point in a long chain of violence, retribution, righteous indignation, nationalistic fervor and self-justifying aggression that, in the case of the US and other major powers, had long taken a consequential toll greater than the conflicts to which it was pegged, violence  which was often alleged to be “preventive” in nature but which we have come to realize has bred more of the threat our sophisticated weaponry was allegedly intended to mitigate.

This second truth is the truth about us, about what we did in response to 9/11, what we have justified in the name of those collapsed buildings, and what that justification has uncovered and unleashed in ourselves.  We remain grateful to those who have helped ensure that, over 20 years, it has been safe to fly in airplanes and take long elevator rides to the top of our ever-larger office towers. We should also be grateful for those at the UN who pursue elements of counter-terror policy – promoting border controls and aviation safety, ensuring accountability for terror crimes and addressing the uneasy status of Foreign Terror Fighters – all with the understanding that basic human rights must always be protected, that we cannot remove a blight on the global commons by adding to the volume of abuse ourselves.

At the same time, we have become a people, certainly often in the US, who more and more seem intent on “eating its young,” a people suspicious to the core of everything but our own motives, a people whose movements are constantly scrutinized in the name of “security” but whose freedom “red line” is not the powers that manipulate our tastes and violate our privacy but those who insist on basic hygiene to ward off a deadly pandemic; a people who routinely tolerate deadly violence undertaken in their name so long as it doesn’t screw up Sunday church or karaoke night; a people at war with ourselves in a manner that can be every bit as vicious and self-serving as the force we inflict –and mis-inflict on those of other nations.

This second truth of 9/11 is wrapped around a reminder that we have not gotten over this, have not gotten over the need to lash out in retributive and even ethno-centric violence, have not yet shed the tears that actually promise some relief and closure, that allow us to move forward and release the better of our “terrifying” angels rather than those mostly ready to lash out in anger and revenge in response to the “shock” of circumstances we share in common with others more than we allow ourselves to realize.

The justifiable tears we have collectively shed during this 20th anniversary of the 9/11 attacks have not, it would appear, made us see more clearly, feel better about ourselves, or risk more closeness with others. They have not cleared our hearts of malice, our lungs of toxins, or our brains of conspiracy.  They have not made us rethink our role in the world as a superpower fading in too many aspects save for our technology and military hardware. They have not made us less sour in our affluence and entitlements, less suspicious of everything and everyone but ourselves, less confused about our role and responsibilities in the world, less able to own up to our mistakes as a nation as a way of rebuilding trust and becoming what we still have it within ourselves – somewhere, somehow – to become.

The legacy of 9/11 is in large part about the losses we’ve suffered, but perhaps more about the impacts of those losses we’ve ingested and then tolerated for too long, losses that much too often, we have then chosen to inflict on others.  It is about what we have allowed an attack to do to ourselves, the spread of our self-justifying and reality-challenged views about our own people let alone about those in the world around us, views which continue to stunt our emotional growth, impair the pursuit of our ideals, widen our divides, keep us sighing and fretting at night rather than sleeping, and too often leave us feeling “cold and helpless.”

Much as we ask of individual clients in counselling, how long do we want the events of the past to maintain control of our current lives, to impede our zest for living and our capacity for closeness and care? This is a question for us all, one that holds the key to lives who can never forget, who will always need spaces for mourning and tears, but who can also refuse to renounce their responsibility to families and communities across this country and around this troubled world, including duties of solidarity towards those many millions who barely know a single day free from hunger, disease and “fingers trembling on the trigger” of guns that may well have originated in our own factories.  

The two realms of 9/11 truth are not mutually-exclusive; we can honor them both if only we would.

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Why Care? A Reflection by Brady Sanders

10 Sep

Editor’s Note: This second and last (for now) post from Brady Sanders seeks to answer a question that we pose to all interns. What should people in your professional or academic circle know about the world? And why should they care? Answers to questions like this are fundamental for us as we try in our own small way to grow the minds, hearts, hands and skills available to contribute to peace in multiple contexts. In such work, knowing and caring are obvious prerequisites.

At the conclusion of my summer internship with GAPW, Dr. Zuber asked me to construct a blog post answering these – seemingly – simple questions, “what should people in my professional circle know about the wider world and the people who inhabit it?  Why should they care about things beyond what their families and professions require them to know?”   On the surface, these seem like straightforward questions, with the answer being, without knowledge of what is going on in the world, one cannot attempt to make it a better place. However, upon delving deeper into this topic, its layers are revealed: specifically, why do individuals not know about global events? In this post, I plan to address not only what I think my peers and colleagues should know, but the overarching issues as to why they don’t know about these topics.

In my life, I have witnessed many people not knowing what is going on in the news, especially globally. Why is this the case? Many argue that people do not care – especially Americans – due to our stereotyped nationalism. However, I must disagree. I think people do care about what is happening, but they feel helpless. Many think that since they cannot do anything about the issue, they are better off just glossing over crises and not using their energy to understand those problems. The second, and the more alarming, reason is that there is so much sorrow in the news today that people have become desensitized to atrocities. The number of times I have heard people say, “I don’t listen to the news, it’s too sad,” is disheartening. This is a complex issue to tackle because the news has to get reported, particularly the sad news, so people can help stop these atrocities. But then when these difficult situations are covered, people say that it is too just too hard to process and stop watching. In my opinion, this is one of the most difficult bits of feedback to fix, and I will be honest, I genuinely have no idea how to break this cycle without a societal change that currently lies beyond my scope.  

Another question that people ask all the time is, “why should I care about something that is happening halfway around the world?” This is a completely valid question. Why should I, someone who lives in the middle of a privileged country, need to worry about what is happening in the middle of a more exploited country, as it has no direct effect on me? For one, if human rights are violated anywhere, it is something everyone should care about. Secondly, while these global events may not seem impactful to you now, they one day will be. For example, people living in Europe should care about the United States and our environmental laws, or honestly, our lack of environmental laws. Why is this? The impact of our emissions is not localized to where we live. Our CO2 levels will impact the global CO2 levels and increase the rate and severity of global warming’s consequences for everyone.

Another may ask, “why should I worry about conflicts if they don’t affect me?” Well, they do. The money spent by governments to pursue and address these conflicts is almost unimaginable; if such conflicts could be rooted out, this money could go towards more human security priorities and lead to a better world for us all. This money could feed the 820 million people around the world who are food insecure. This money could help provide drinking water to the 2.2 billion people who need access to safe, potable water. This money could help the 82.4 million forcibly displaced persons during 2020 alone start a new life. It seems evident that the money spent on conducting these conflicts could be used in much better ways, but the only way to solve conflicts peacefully is through diplomacy, and for this to work, we need to make sure the whole world knows what is going on.

This starts with you. And with me. Watch the news. Find and read a newspaper focused on global affairs because the news we consume in the US is often missing a wider, global picture. But more importantly, find ways to get involved. While your efforts may seem fruitless at times, don’t get discouraged; any help, any start, any means is better than inaction and indifference.

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Where the UN & Business Should Intersect, by Madelyne Hamblett.

8 Sep

Editor’s Note: Madelyne is the latest intern from the Scheller College of Business at the Georgia Institute of Technology to lend us her skills and insights during the summer months. As many readers of this space know, we value the opportunity to familiarize people beyond our “peace and security” bubble with the important issues and processes which are likely to greatly impact future prospects, livelihoods and much more. We need more “champions” of multilateral cooperation and we need them in all those still-underserved spaces, not only where people are denied a place at the policy table, but where people don’t see the value of having such a place. Madelyn sees the value and we are grateful for it.

As a business student from Georgia Tech, I really had no clue about the world I was coming into when signing up to do a summer internship with Global Action to Prevent War. Sometimes I felt out of my depth, and I knew I was lacking context to truly understand much of what I was seeing. But that is exactly why my boss, Dr. Zuber, hired me. He didn’t want me here to provide the same perspective as everyone else. He wanted to me to view things through a business lens, so that is exactly what I did. And when I did, I noticed something. I noticed that the world of business, and the world of the UN do not seem to intersect much. I learned a bit about the UN Global Compact and, of course, NGO’s and the role they should play are discussed a good bit. But during these summer months I heard few discussions of what role for-profit businesses should be playing to help the UN realize the Sustainable Development Goals. This is truly disappointing because, from my view, both have a lot to offer the other.

In the world of business, it has become trendy to “care”. To show they care, corporations will create value statements or claim support for a certain social movement, but too often these are just words, not actionable commitments. As I learned in my Servant Leadership course taught by Dr. Robert Thomas at Georgia Tech, this can actually hurt a business. “Empty values statements create cynical and dispirited employees, alienate customers, and undermine managerial credibility,” (“Make Your Values Mean Something” by Patrick M. Lencioni). Rather than making empty statements that can actually hurt your business, businesses need to start creating shared value. Shared Value, as I learned in my Business Decisions and Creating Shared Value course taught by Dr. Ravi Subramanian at Georgia Tech, is “policies and operating practices that enhance the competitiveness of a company while simultaneously advancing economic and social conditions in the communities in which it operates. Shared value creation focuses on identifying and expanding the connections between societal and economic progress” (“Creating Shared Value” by Michael E. Porter & Mark R. Kramer). So, shared value is about creating a win-win for your business and the world. Just as “caring” is meant to create goodwill among your customers, shared value takes it a step further by giving a business incentive to “care,” taking action that creates a more sustainable business model and creates goodwill among your customers. But how does a business create shared value? That is where the UN could come in.

The UN has a global public network, an understanding of the most pressing issues of the world, and opportunities to get involved, all of which businesses lack. So, the UN could use their global network to help businesses expand their connections beyond the private sector and to the public sector which would be a great first step towards creating shared value. Then, the UN could help businesses identify the issues going on in the world that are most detrimental to their supply chain and provide them with ideas on how to get involved to tackle those issues. This would be the next step toward helping businesses create shared value because it provides a direct way for companies to get involved and improve their communities while also giving them an incentive to stay involved because it is improving their supply chain and business operations. For example, COVID-19 has been a major disruptor to businesses’ supply chains, and it has also been a very important matter at the UN. For-profit businesses could have done more to help the UN to raise funds for and distribute vaccines across the world which would help the global community while also limiting variability and stabilizing demand for these businesses around the world.

Just as many businesses utilize too many words and not enough action, this same issue can be seen at the UN. A lot is discussed, but not enough is done. From my time here at the UN, I have come to believe this is because many people holding positions inside the UN are figureheads with insufficient authority given to them by their country. I am not saying they do not want to do more. They may even hold the same ideals as I do when it comes to what the UN could truly be if the countries of the world just bought in, but, unfortunately, some member countries have not bought in sufficiently. So, the UN remains a symbol more than a tool because it does not always have the power needed to take action. This is where businesses could come in.

Corporations have large private networks, deep pockets of funds, and relatively unrestrained authority over their actions. The UN currently relies on sometimes finicky governments for resources which then may choose to withhold these resources at any time. Businesses could become a new supplier of these resources to the UN, and they would be willing to be that supplier for the aforementioned reasons regarding how the UN would also benefit them. In addition to being a new resource for the UN, their work with businesses could also instigate governments to work closer with and provide more authority to the UN due to public criticism. If for-profit businesses did begin to provide these resources to the UN, the UN would have considerably more power and ability to implement their assistance around the world. For example, COVID-19 has been a major crisis that the UN has been trying to address for over a year now, and, as previously mentioned, it has been a major problem for businesses’ as well. Had the UN approached for-profit businesses and incentivized them to fund and distribute vaccines around the world, then the UN could have possibly finished responding to this pandemic by now and even made headway on creating preventative procedures for future global pandemics.

I believe the UN and the business world have much to offer each other. Businesses could enable the UN to take more initiative and bring about legitimate change in the world while the UN could enable businesses to create shared value and thus a more sustainable business model. “Capitalism is an unparalleled vehicle for meeting human needs, improving efficiency, creating jobs, and building wealth. But a narrow conception of capitalism has prevented business from harnessing its full potential to meet society’s broader challenges,” (“Creating Shared Value” by Michael E. Porter & Mark R. Kramer). Avoiding this narrow conception is why businesses and the UN should intersect in even greater measure to help spur the change we all want to see in the world.

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Weekend Escape: A Labor Day Reflection, Dr. Robert Zuber

5 Sep
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They are closing the mine in two weeks, they say. Six days a week bumping down in the gondola, pecking out the rocks and hauling them back up, doing it again the next day for twenty-seven years, one cave-in, three thin raises, and a failed strike. Where am I going to go every day, what am I going to do with all that sunshine?  Lou Beach

Ramona felt sad and somehow lonely, as if she were left out of something important, because her family was in trouble and there was nothing she could do. Beverly Cleary

There is tons of work to be done, and lots of people who would like to do the work. It’s just that the economic system is such a grotesque catastrophe that it can’t even put together idle hands and needed work, which would be satisfying to the people and which would be beneficial to all of us. Noam Chomsky

As long as there are ways we can serve, then we have a job to do.  Marianne Williamson

That paper–it sits there, open at the employment section. It sits there like a war, and each small advertisement is another trench for a person to dive into. Markus Zusak

Once we attain self-awareness, we stop becoming the victims of worthless comparisons, identity clashes and, of course, idle mindsets that make further progress impossible.  Dr Prem Jagyasi

The soul is made for action, and cannot rest till it be employed. Idleness is its rust. Unless it will up and think and taste and see, all is in vain.  Thomas Traherne

As most of you who read these posts recognize, this is Labor Day weekend in the US, a last gasp of the northern summer, but also a time to reflect on those who labor in a society increasingly without a culture that values labor, without a culture that grants and sustains the dignity of those many persons who we largely ignore but without whom are lives would be immeasurably impoverished.

In a time of pandemic, when so many children are forced into horrific working conditions or, in places like Afghanistan where women are losing the little income they managed to secure, it may seem a bit tone deaf to focus on US labor issues.  But we have plenty of them, some due to restrictive immigration policies, some due to the lack of a sustaining culture of respect for labor itself, and some due to a culture shift, in part motivated by pandemic isolation, regarding what we want in return from the investment of our skills and energies, how we seize current opportunities to create better synergies between what we do for money and what we do with life.

I won’t dwell on the immigration issue, except to say that we remain in the midst of vast migrations of peoples due in large measure to armed conflict and climate change.  As now with Afghanistan, these are not only people on the move; these are people with skills seeking a new home, a new outlet, a new chance, but they are met with growing skepticism and even hostility within destination states.  Some of this hostility is overt as in “we don’t want you here.”  But some is more subtle, a message of tentative welcome so long as they consent to do the work that we don’t want to do, indeed won’t do ourselves.  On this weekend, I am reminded of all the soul-sucking, dangerous jobs that exist in this world, from the slaughterhouses to the coal mines and –in the media this week – from picking fruit in 100 degree weather under an unrelenting sun to delivering food on a bicycle in New York City while the winds of Ida howled and over 7 inches of rain came thundering to the ground – and this for the $5 which that delivery worker earned for his trouble.

Many of us have done these sorts of jobs at an earlier stage of life.  I have my stories also.  But I also was given a pass to “escape” the mind-numbing danger, the back-breaking labor that never gets workers and families off the treadmill of “barely making it” of having to deal with endless health, education and housing issues without anything like a safety net, without anything like the perks of employment for people with degrees and the privileges to match.  I remember some of what that felt like.  I can’t forget it.  None of us should.

And yet we do forget, we do push the labor conditions of others to the very back of our minds, as though fruit and pork magically appear in our pantries, as though our houses heat themselves and forest fires simply end of their own volition, as though century-old transportation infrastructure somehow fixes itself and babies actually bring themselves into the world.  We do forget because we are privileged members of societies which have jettisoned their cultures of respect for labor, for the people who often do the dirty jobs that keep the rest of us afloat, for the people who struggle to provide basic necessities for families living on the edge of a society that has long ceased to honor their contributions.  We don’t “pull for each other” so much now, do we? Rather, we tend to be consumers first and foremost, little interested in how things are made (and by who), what it takes to make them or, for that matter, dispose of them when the items in question have outlived their usefulness.  Our posture is primarily competitive, suspicious of unions or anything else that might cause us to pay more so that our workers can have more.  Moreover, we have allowed ourselves to indulge in (as Philip Rieff once noted), “colonies of the violent.” devoid of any stable sense of communal purpose, left to “vacillate between deadly purposes and deadly devices,” all in an attempt to escape what has become our modern mindset’s signature pandemic – that of boredom.

But as some of the quotations at the beginning of this post maintain, there is plenty of work to be done in this world, plenty to care for and support, plenty of skills to blend and respect, plenty of ways to add value and meaning to our own and others’ lives.  In a world such as ours, boredom is surely a sign of desperation, if not a complete failure of imagination, a sign that our “strategy” of competition and autonomy, of using each other rather than working with each other, is not having its intended effect.  As a society, we are still chasing “wealth” that cannot be sustained rather than, as Vandana Shiva would put it, pursuing wealth based on “rejuvenating the bounty of the earth through care.”

Fortunately, culture and its impacts are not static; its permissions and controls are being modified as we speak, in some welcome instances to help people break through the discriminations and injustices that culture has too often served to hold in place. On this Labor Day we would do well to ask if there a pathway to restore intrinsic value and respect for the labor and contributions of others? Is there the means to counter our current, high levels of comfort with exploitative practices, our equally high levels of indulgence with the forms and tools of violence designed to distract ourselves from becoming the people we could be? Can we somehow identify and preserve the life that allows everyone time to serve our children and communities as well as our employers?

There are hopeful signs.  The “great resignation” chronicled in the press over these past few months suggests a growing discontent with how labor is organized and how employees are recognized.  Workers worldwide are demanding that the jobs for which they are compensated provide more than just a paycheck, provide more than just the material means to sustain what is too often a demanding and deadening life cycle.  Teachers are leaving voids in school systems as threats from parents and from a virus we are still not taking seriously enough push more and more educators out of the classroom.  Health care workers are also quitting in droves, many of whom have spent the last 18 months trying to keep people alive who dogmatically refuse to help themselves (or their communities) stay healthy.  Restaurant and other hospitality workers are leaving their positions as well, tired of the long hours, short customer tempers and small tips which constitute the bulk of their pay.

These are all essential workers, people we simply cannot do without. These are also not easy choices, the choice to walk away, the choice to say “enough.” But we would do well to support this transition.  Several articles this week suggested that the pandemic gave some of us at least the chance to readjust our hearts and minds, to recalibrate how our gifts of time and talent are shared, how the “human” aspects of our “being” might find a fuller expression.  We must find ways, in policy and practice, to make such a chance accessible to all. Our GDP and stock prices might take a hit, but the peace that could emanate from a rejuvenated world where children are in school, women are fully engaged, laborers have rest and respect, nature is cared for and boredom is vanquished would be, at least to my mind, well worth every effort.

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

29 Aug

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

Never confuse movement with action.  Ernest Hemingway

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

17 Aug

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

8 Aug

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

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

A quietly mad population is a tractable one.  Naomi Wolf

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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