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COP Out: Rebalancing a Fractured Harmony, Dr. Robert Zuber

23 May
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The goal of life is to make your heartbeat match the beat of the universe, to match your nature with Nature.  Joseph Campbell

Food and the human spirit have become estranged.  Masanobu Fukuoka

You must answer the call and pick your way. And there is no reverse.  J.R. Ward

We are the witnesses through which the universe becomes conscious of its glory, of its magnificence.  Alan Watts

In the end we shall have had enough of cynicism, skepticism and humbug, and we shall want to live more musically.  Vincent Van Gogh

If nature were not beautiful it would not be worth knowing, and life would not be worth living.  Henri Poincaré

It is one of the ironies of our time that, while concentrating on the defense of our country against enemies from without, we should be so heedless of those who would destroy it from within. Rachel Carson

As most of you know, a week of violence in the Middle East ended with yet another cease fire, an agreement that stopped (for now) the aerial assaults from Israeli bombers and Hamas missiles but which had little immediate impact on the bitter fruits of occupation, the settlements and demolitions, the ethnic cleansing which proceeded apace in areas of Jerusalem on which, apparently at least, the cease fire agreement was presumed to have no palliative impact.

And then there is the wreckage across Gaza, a postage-sized land already suffering from human deprivation and environmental degradation which now lies once again in ruins, a testament to the diverse and damaging consequences of armed conflict that a cease fire exposes but hardly cures. In Palestine as in so much of the rest of the world, there is a misleading quiet now, one bearing little prospect of harmony with our adversaries or with the planet we share.

I know that this lack of harmony, this willingness to cast aside cynicism and “humbug” and live more “musically,” is not unique to this moment. Certainly since the beginning of the industrial age, and likely much longer, we have demonstrated an almost genetic predisposition to unharmonious relations with our world and with each other, exploiting resources for personal gain, defending even when defense wasn’t necessary, justifying aggression in the name of religion or nation, taking more than we need and sharing less than we should.

But this time feels different. The warning sirens blare more loudly now, especially on climate change and species extinction. The bombs we use to punish adversaries are are both more explosive and more technologically clever now. The policy promises we make to each other are increasingly subject to caveats and political expediency. The institutions we have established to protect us from ourselves are proving incapable in many aspects of adjusting to evolving threats, including from extremist groups, climate risks and community-killing drought.

Our world seems often like a band that is not only out of tune but where the musicians seem committed more to compete for attention than to share in the “glory and magnificence” that our music can generate, that our world can generate as well if only we would commit to being its reliable and sensitive agents. Indeed, there is a concern in many quarters that the shrill notes emanating from our competitive and self-serving actions are drowning out the sirens that continue to blare their unsettling omens, blasting messages of urgent appeal to those who are still able to listen and heed the warnings, messages indicating that our time is limited to bring more harmony to our fractured world, to finally and sustainably make our own heartbeats “match the beat of the universe.”

Needless to say, this is no easy task. Many who used the opportunity of pandemic lockdown to establish a better work-life balance or shift their personal priorities know a bit of how difficult it can be to reset ourselves, to practice and then maintain vigilance regarding those things about each of us that threaten “destruction from within.” And once we move from our domiciles to the wider society, harmony becomes a far greater challenge. Indeed much of our personal “resetting” has as one of its objectives increasing our ability to manage the demands and stresses of a human world often spinning out of control, often failing to fulfill even the most fundamental of its values and commitments.

And yet the desire and demand for this greater, global harmony has not entirely disappeared, does not entirely verge on the edge of the extinction that now threatens so many of our fellow-species. Even in the hyper-political environment of the United Nations, a place where we routinely confuse resolution with commitment, consensus with harmony, there are growing community concern about the consequences of human “estrangement,” from our food to be sure, but also from the complexities of the natural world and even, perhaps especially, from each other.

The UN Secretary-General Antonio Guterres and the president of the Economic and Social Council, Pakistan’s Ambassador Akram, seem determined to convince the UN community of the “war on nature” that we insist on conducting, a “war” we are ultimately waging on ourselves, a “war” that too-easily spills over into active armed conflict and enables future pandemics, a “war” we are simply incapable of winning. And yet, amidst the week’s policy oxygen consumed by the violence in the Middle East, UN events also took place that reminded us of the ticking clock signifying our current, potentially-irreversible course as various human practices damage biodiversity across the spectrum, not only the large species we tend to identify with but a large food chain of both enormous complexity and increasing susceptibility to the onslaughts of our current, unsustainable levels of production and consumption.

One of those was the annual event sponsored by the Mission of Slovenia to honor “World Bee Day,” a session that could easily seem trivial alongside a week of coups and famines, missile launches and crimes against humanity. But as my friends who keep bees and raise plants that attract their numbers recognize, bees and other pollinators are both endangered and crucial to life on earth. Indeed as this event noted, perhaps 80% of what nourishment humans consume requires essential input from bees. Moreover, the concept note crafted by Slovenia links endangered bees to a range of other biodiversity and ecosystem threats, noting that “current negative trends are projected to undermine progress towards a high number of the assessed targets of the Sustainable Development Goals related to poverty, hunger, health, sustainable consumption and production, water, cities, climate, oceans and land.” As we continue to pave over wetlands, degrade farmland, plant non-native species and denude forests, the damage we inflict on the smallest of our life forms exacerbates conditions which directly threaten the largest and most clever among us.

The other event of note on this theme was a preparatory meeting, hosted by the Mission of China, to encourage enthusiasm for the “COP15” meeting on biodiversity protection to be held next October in Kunming. China’s Minister of Foreign Affairs along with senior UN officials lent an air of gravitas to this session which was thankfully less about advertising and branding and more about our urgent biodiversity decline and the immediate need, as expressed at this session by the president of the General Assembly, to both enhance local ownership of biodiversity protection and factor in the importance and value (writ large) of nature into all our policymaking.  Too often, he noted, a tree is only ascribed value in this world once it has been felled.

And many trees continue to be felled in all global regions. In a discouraging report released this week by Forest Trends, it appears that trees have incredibly been brought down faster in the years since companies and governments promised to stop cutting them down. And another report recently released by a consortium of European researchers put the spotlight on one of the underlying drivers of biodiversity loss, namely our willfully and habitually “unsound” management of chemicals and waste, once again despite formal promises to the contrary.

It is reports such as these than temper the enthusiasm of myself and others for these large COP events, which tend to create environmental footprints far deeper than their policy impacts and promise far more than they ultimately deliver. Yes, we need immediate, tangible progress on biodiversity as we do on climate change and ocean health. But are the upcoming COP events any more likely than previous ones to shift policy dynamics in discernable ways? Are they at all likely, to paraphrase the GA president, to enable more robust action at local level, to help local activists, in the recent words of one, build bridges wide enough for everyone to cross over our current abyss and reach another side characterized more by harmony than chaos? Are they likely to sustain the buzzing of bees and other insects that still manage to overcome our collective assaults and fill our markets with produce? Are they sufficient to reset our notions of value such that we understand more than we apparently do now that a beautiful, harmonious and balanced world is ultimately essential to current and future lives worth living?

With full regard for activists struggling to maintain their voices and their sanity in this “kill the messenger” time, we in our sector must do more, will do more, to insist that these COP events serve interests beyond the branding of host states, that their ecological expense is calculated in more than mere dollars and cents, that their deliberations are as urgent as the problems which have merely multiplied on our watch, that their outcomes don’t simply add to the long list of promises misplaced or incompletely kept. We need more than political declarations from our leadership, more than grand sessions leading to perfunctory outcomes. If indeed, as Ambassador Akram noted on Friday, this war on nature is actually a war on ourselves, then we have no excuses for postponing a truce, ending our deep estrangement from nature, and reversing the biodiversity loss we are running out of time to address.

This band of ours needs to be brought back in tune without delay. Our farewell tour as a species may be closer than we think.

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Smoldering Embers: The Fire of Violence we Fail to Extinguish, Dr. Robert Zuber

16 May
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Every day the community faces the possibility of breakdown — not from the forces of nature but from sheer human unpredictability.  Robert Heilbroner

The fundamental idea is not that of removing disturbing elements and letting things settle down, but that of introducing a peace-power among the disputants.  Vilhelm Grønbech

Endless numbers of speeches, publications, political debates do not have the function of getting at the root of important questions of life but of drowning them in verbiage.  Wilhelm Reich

A late justice is a lame justice.  Amit Kalantri

We protect ourselves to excess because we learned abruptly and painfully that no one else would.  Sarah Olson

There are innumerable ways to murder a person, but the most subtle and pernicious of these is to mutilate the soul of the innocent by denying or downgrading their uniqueness and their beauty.  Gerry Spence

Is not most talking a crazed defense of a crumbling fort?  Hafiz

Like others of my ilk, I am poised in front of a computer screen early on a Sunday morning waiting for the start of the Security Council emergency session following another long week of deadly violence in a conflict between Israel and Palestine that is as old as the UN itself.

The images from this recent, relentless exchange of hostilities have been heaped on top of so many others over many years, the fires we have addressed when they rage but which we never bother to completely extinguish, the embers of incitement and occupation, of intimidation and brutality that are one brisk wind away from igniting yet again, forcing the Council and other UN member states to public affirm their client interests or shrink into the background hoping that the red glow beneath the ashes from the last rounds of hatred and violence will somehow spare us all from what has almost become inevitable — more misery for the people, more trauma for the children, more narrow, nationalist justifications for occupation, more incitement to violence, more talking unattached to remedial response.

Amidst the disturbing images of buildings reduced to rubble with little warning for the civilians and media professionals who occupied them, the “iron dome” patterns in the night sky in response to missile attacks emanating from Gaza, the brutal measures adopted by Israeli defense forces on worshippers in Al-Aqsa Mosque at the end of Ramadan, the ecstatic jumping for joy of a group of Israelis as that same mosque was seen engulfed in flames, the young boy rushing to the head of a funeral line to say a final goodbye to his muirdered father. There is no shortage of heartbreak in these images of conflict allowed to rage, allowed to recur over and over. There never is.

Perhaps the most heart-tugging image of all was courtesy of a video widely circulated of a young girl surveying the wreckage from one of many air attacks on Gaza this week. As she held back tears, she remarked while pointing at the rubble “You see this? What am I supposed to do? Fix it? I’m only 10.”

She’s only 10, living in what some have called an “open air prison,” wanting to “help my people” but for now having to live with rubble both physical and psychological as she awaits her turn to serve and to lead, a turn which unless we cease this recurring cycle of misery might never come.

Sadly, as we know, hers is not the only story of childhood-denying misery, misery that will likely require herculean efforts to heal, misery which will turn a few children into heroic adults while leaving many others angry and despondent over years of having their beauty and potential denigrated, leaving scars that won’t easily disappear. Such scars represent a future in grave jeopardy for us all, a future for which we all bear some responsibility but certainly for the nations and institutions which continue to cover up abuses and other crimes, which continue to advocate for client states, simultaneously selling them weapons and undermining any timely prospect of accountability.

The UN earlier in the week gave good attention to another tragedy not as long on its watch, the genocidal violence committed beginning in 2014 by ISIL terrorists against the Yazidi people of northern Iraq, including mass executions of men and young women forced into conditions of sexual slavery.

There are differences between the situation facing the Yazidi and that now faces Gaza. While it may turn out to be the case that some UN member states have enabled ISIL violence through some nefarious back-channel means, ISIL itself has no visible state protectors. The violence which was inflicted against the Yazidi has been widely encouraged by the international community to be thoroughly investigated by UNITAD though this has so far not resulted in tangible prosecutions seven years after the occurrence of these abuses. Such investigations have only recently enabled the conditions for Nadia Murad and many other Yazidi to properly bury their murdered loved ones amidst a cloud of revisited sorrow, one piece of a relatively uncomplicated (if deferred) promise of some genuine closure, some eventual justice for perpetrators, some final resting place for the unimaginable pain inflicted over many months. Gaza currently experiences few such tangible promises.

And yet, there are several lessons from Iraq that could be applied to the violence in and around Gaza which as of this writing shows little prospect of abating: the importance of thorough investigation of abuses and competent justice mechanisms; the need for transparency regarding the political alliances and backroom deals that undermine the peace and justice we claim to want; the firm resolve to cease all arms sales and transfers into conflict zones; the importance of investigating and then sharing not only the specific consequences of armed violence but exposing the reticence of those tasked with ending violence to uphold their full responsibility to ensure that violence once constrained is not allowed to recur. In addition there is the lesson, largely unheeded, to put an end to a Council practice which enables the major powers to shield clients (Israel, Syria, Myanmar and more) from the legal consequences of the most horrific of their actions.

As the emergency Security Council meeting on the Israel-Gaza violence earlier this morning draws to a close, it is not at all apparent that we have learned the lessons which are now required of us. Despite some passionate and eloquent statements by Palestine’s Minister of Foreign Affairs and his counterparts from Ireland, Jordan and Norway, it is unclear that the US will loosen the most toxic connections to its support for Israel; it is unclear that the “back channel” efforts to resolve the violence claimed by some states will ever see the light of public scrutiny; it is unclear that arms trade restraint will soon become the norm rather than the exception; it is unclear that states are uniformly willing to help the International Criminal Court and other legal entities apply the lens of justice now becoming operational in Iraq to bring closure to so many Gaza children and others in the region terrorized and victimized over so many years by a range of violent acts; it is unclear if states understand beyond their own rhetoric that putting out the Gaza fire is not the same thing as suppressing the immediate flames, but requires more attention, more hands-on action, more responsibility to address all aspects of our current cycles of violence.

And part of this responsibility requires a commitment to discernment that is often hard to come by in diplomatic settings, discernment regarding our failure, metaphorically speaking, to ensure that the “campfire” of violence is completely snuffed out, that those embers of future destruction which continue to smolder long after we have damped down the most damaging and obvious flames are no longer allowed to flare up again and engulf entities and citizens with what in our current circumstance seems like an otherwise inevitable renewal of their searing heat.

We have the capacity to turn current political impediments into peace power, a “power” that demands of us a determination to ensure that the fire of mass conflict has been fully and utterly extinguished. So long as the embers of our once-raging violence continue to glow, so long as they continue to threaten, we in the peace and security community simply cannot claim to have done our proper jobs.

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Care Package: A Mother’s Day Reflection, Dr. Robert Zuber

9 May

Please don’t judge me too much until you are older and know more things. Ann Brashares

She gave me everything before she gave me nothing.  Rebecca Solnit

Motherwhelm isn’t a problem, it’s a rite of passage. Beth Berry

My daughter, my mother, her mother, her mother’s mother. It is as if they have left footprints in the snow. Try as I might to deviate, my feet fall gently but firmly into their well-worn grooves. Pippa Grace

For a woman to birth something other than children and then mother it with the same sense of purpose, attention, and care came as an astonishment, even to me.  Sue Monk Kidd

She caught herself working so hard at mothering that she forgot to enjoy her children. Susan Wiggs

I have seen him climbing a tree while she stood beneath him in unutterable anguish; she had to let him climb, for boys must be brave, but I am sure that, as she watched him, she fell from every branch.  J.M. Barrie

There is always the fantasy of maternal love, but it does not accommodate a mother’s fear of her children.  Stephanie Bishop

Earlier this week, I spent a few hours with a dying cousin, a wonderful younger man who was surrounded by extended family and health professionals offering all manner of caregiving. My role amidst this glorious frenzy of care was a relatively simple one, to help ease his transition from this life to whatever might come next.

Part of my intervention involved a series of familiar (to him) prayers and readings directed not only to him in his time of need but to those who are still ministering to him in various ways, who makes sure he eats what he can, takes what medicines are prescribed, and even ensures that stories, affections and even tears are shared while he is here to share them. Those who have cared for the sick and dying know how much can be required of them more than they imagined, more than they might even feel that they have in them.

In this time of COVID-19, many millions around the world, including so many mothers, have had their caregiving capacities pushed beyond their limits. In various global regions, in places wracked by a spreading and largely unvaccinated pandemic, in places often characterized by gross economic inequalities, empty schools, unproductive farmlands and threats to home life and health access from armed groups, mothers and other caregivers wonder how they can get their children back on track, how to summon the energy to guarantee sustenance in an environment that continues to pile challenge on top of challenge, all of which have at least one thing in common – they are not the fault of the caregivers themselves.

In this regard, I recall an image from yesterday of an Afghan man clearly doing all that he could do to hold it together as he stood alongside the bloody, lifeless body of his daughter, one of the victims of yet another senseless shooting spree in that country. Another child taken from the world much too soon. Another family having to cope with a murderous end to their season of caregiving. There are hardly words to express such sadness.

Such loss, albeit with less-tragic lines, is also a feature of more “developed” parts of the world, places where caregiving has also mutated under the pandemic cloud of these past 15 months. This week, many mothers have taken to social and mainstream media to reflect on a year of caregiving in an environment over which they have little control and have often lost much, including their careers, their self-esteem and their chunks of their mental health. One of these mothers noted the vast sums of her energy trying (and sometimes failing) to preserve her income and continue to “birth” things in the wider world; to keep her children focused on learning though games and digital screens; to show tangible support and concern over zoon as parents “distantly” age and even succumb to the virus; and to hold on to sanity amidst logistical challenges which were both unplanned and wholly unpredictable.

A second mother wrote about having to accept being “merely OK” in meeting these logistical challenges. A third noted the strains that come with spending more time together with nuclear family than they ever imagined would be the case. A fourth spoke of shrinking circles of concern as friends and family struggle to maintain connective tissue during this long season of fear, uncertainty and isolation. Still another, a mother who just recently gave birth, described herself as almost “invisible” at a time when friends and family members would normally be flocking to hold the baby and offer whatever practical assistance they were able. One particularly thoughtful writer, Sari Azout, described the challenges of keeping the many dimensions of her life afloat while “mothering humans who never sleep,” a situation which may or may not be adjustable in the short-term, but one which is certainly unsustainable.

If “motherwhelm” is indeed a rite of passage, it is a rite accompanied by levels of anxiety, fear and disappointment to at least rival any time in our past. Some mothers in this time of pandemic are so busy working at being mothers that they have forgotten how to enjoy their children. Other mothers, who may not have seen their children for months on end, struggle to maintain connection to lives in flux, lives that they fear might be slipping away from them, slipping into a mode more forgetful and inattentive.

While it might not seem automatically relevant, the fears and courage of caregivers have bear a direct message for those of us who ostensibly create policy norms for the global community. While there is surely much to discuss, we talk endlessly in UN spaces about women, but rarely about mothers. We talk endlessly about children, but rarely about those who struggle to provide that practical, tangible care that can be so tenuous but which is indispensable to keeping alive their physical, emotional and cognitive well being. And it is much too easy for many of us in policy settings, especially those of us not actively caring for children or aging parents, to ignore or forget about the vast gulf which often separate our resolutions (even with their sometimes considerable protection and humanitarian consequences) and the often-relentless logistics of caregiving at local level, especially care administered under a cloud of multiple stressors.

Amidst all of the policy concerns at the UN this week, including not-unproblematic elections for senior leadership, eliminating the still-vast disparities of global digital access, and the horrific, unresolved violence affecting people in Tigray, on the streets of Myanmar and in the mosques of East Jerusalem, Estonia hosted a Security Council Arria Formula meeting to asses the impact of COVID-19 on children and communities already under strain from armed violence, climate change and a lack of health, protection and other government services.

We were grateful for the discussion as we are for the diverse UN capacities in the field seeking to end child recruitment by armed groups, restore educational options, address chronic food insecurity and much more. While conflict prevention remains an elusive goal in the Council and other UN chambers, the organization has done much to provide lifesaving assistance and advocate state responsibilities for children too often under siege.

That said, and as we noted at the time, talking about children in distress is low-hanging fruit for all of us in policy settings. There may be no other space in which we can easily appear so sincere while under-playing the specific policy changes that we need to both enable and enforce, part of which involves accompanying mothers and other caregivers whose interactions with children and community are so intensely practical, who continue to find ways to “make do” when the logistics of “making” are so fraught with difficulty.

Yes, as noted by Canada (Group of Friends) during this Arria session, we need more child protection advisors in the field alongside UN peacekeepers and experts. Yes, as noted by Saint Vincent and the Grenadines, we need better verification and monitoring mechanisms to track and address abuses against children. Yes, as noted by the US we must prioritize services to support children with disabilities whose prospects in conflict and pandemic zones are even more dire. Yes, as noted by Tunisia, we must do more to ensure that children under “suspicion” of being part of armed groups are freed from prisons where they routinely “languish in unsafe and unsanitary conditions.” And yes, as noted by UNICEF’s Fontaine, we need more “sustained engagement” with armed groups on child protection and release and, despite the pandemic, we must also pledge to “stay close to where children need us.”

All good, but these are needs which are not news to us and as several states willingly acknowledged, have yet to receive sufficient capacity response either in personnel or in funding. Moreover, in the two hours which I was engaged in this meeting, I don’t recall a single reference to caregivers; not the valiant UN responders but the mothers and others who are doing the hard, practical work — and often making the hard decisions — regarding how to maintain some modicum of tangible progress in enhancing the best interests of the child.

These are the questions looming for us over this otherwise fine policy session. What is likely to change in the field in response to events such as these? Will there be more funding? More protection advisors? More international accountability for child-abusing states and armed groups? More determined effort to stem the violence which does more than anything else to limit options for children? But beyond this, how do we support caregivers, the mothers and others whose bag of remedial ideas might well have largely emptied, caregivers who can barely attend to children and others in their circle while their own mental and physical health is in demonstrable decline? How do we support the care that mothers often struggle to provide, care which is both indispensable for children and for which no UN agency can possibly be a reliable surrogate?

I wrote a piece a few years ago entitled “Other Mothers,” an ode to caregivers who share love and perform services normally (and not without reason) associated with biological mothers. As we recognize, there remain numerous, viable paths to caregiving, even in this time of pandemic limitation. But while many of those paths are now strewn with debris and explosive remnants of various sorts deposited by the more selfish, narcissistic and violent among us, these are paths that still merit risking the journey. Indeed these are the paths which bear the promise of a future less-affected by the emotional and physical scars of the present; a future that is healthier and safer for both children and caregivers; a future that can restore the promises embedded in the “well-worn grooves” of our snowy footprints; promises to children who may now never seem to sleep but who are also free to play and learn, to risk and dream; a future where caregivers need never again confront the blunt and unimaginable end of young lives snuffed out long before their time.

During this pandemic, many mothers worldwide have felt obliged to take a step back in lives which were already under considerable stress, some of whom might even be doubting if the children who now pack the spaces inside their multiple dwellings will ever have a chance to overcome sickness, trauma and disappointment, will ever again be able to enjoy lives of nutrition and education, of health access and economic opportunity. These are the caregivers who need more of our attention, those who hold the key to children who no longer need to hide from the assaults of a world which seems to be spinning out of orbit. We owe these caregivers more, on Mothers Day for sure, but everyday.

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Fighting Terrorism in the Sahel Requires Democratic Governance, by Dr. Hussein Solomon

4 May

Editor’s Note: As those of you who frequent this blog recognize, Hussein Solomon has been our “go-to” for many years in helping us understand the implications of colonial rule on contemporary manifestations of African governance. The context for this piece is the recent killing of Chad’s president Deby Itno, a man who served several presidential terms and maintained the support of numerous foreign governments for his “anti-terror” contributions despite some very sketchy governance priorities. Clearly, as Solomon implies, we in the west need to think harder about our support for governments, in Africa and elsewhere, that maintain colonial legacies under the guise of rejecting them.

In 1905, John Ainsworth, a British colonial official based in Kenya wrote how the British administration governed their dominions first by finding a strong local personality who was also loyal to the Crown. They would then do everything possible to increase this person’s power relative to other “natives” and finally conspire to make this person’s continued rule totally dependent on the colonial power. This process was euphemistically termed “indirect rule”. This same pattern could be seen as colonial powers carved out other parts of Africa into their fold. The legacy of this colonial plan then was a type of local authoritarianism in which incumbent post-colonial elites were dependent on foreign powers in order to maintain the levers of their own power.

I reflected on this legacy as I recently watched tragic developments in Chad unfold. On the 19th April 2021, Chad’s president – Idriss Deby Itno – was killed while fighting rebels alongside his troops. His death was immediately lamented within the region as well as in some Western capitals as a major set-back for counter-terrorism efforts in the Sahel. Chad, after all, is an integral contributor to the 5,000 strong Sahel G-5 force closely allied with French Operation Barkhane troops aiming to robustly engage and defeat Islamists in the region.

Unfortunately, the reaction in several quarters to the Chadian President’s death explains in part why counter-terrorism is failing across the Sahel despite the training and equipping of armed forces, the expenditure of hundreds of millions of dollars and the stationing of Western troops across the vast expanses of this desert region.

Despite being lauded for his counter-terrorism stance against radical Islamism, the late Chadian president, by his actions, actually served to fuel some of the fire of extremism in his country. Here it is instructive to recall that Deby had just begun his sixth term as Chad’s president. He originally came to power via a coup against the brutal dictatorship of Hissene Habre whom he served as Commander-in-Chief of the Armed Forces. Following his ascent to power in December 1990, Deby promised democratic reforms and for a short period of time he was treated as a savior. Despite Deby and his Patriotic Salvation Front winning six presidential election and four parliamentary elections, all of these were subsequently alleged to be marred by fraud.

And the fraud alleged for this government went beyond the political sphere. Despite Chad having the tenth largest oil reserves in Africa, it is one of the world’s poorest countries, ranking a measly 187 out of 189 countries on the Human Development Index. Much of the oil revenues were redirected towards Deby’s own pockets and those of his family and the wider Zaghawa clan which constitutes only 4 percent of the population. Other funds were redirected towards dubious purchases of weaponry while many of Chad’s citizens languished in abject poverty. Despite all this Deby maintained the support of the former colonial power France as well as other Western allies.

His exclusionary, corrupt and authoritarian rule encouraged rebellion as ordinary Chadians lost faith in the power of (and results of) the ballot box. Deby crushed rebellions to his rule in 2006, 2008 and 2019. In the midst of this chaos, various Islamist groups spread their pernicious influence among Chad’s Muslims who constitute 55.3 percent of the total population. It remains clear that a close relationship exists between terrorist expansion and the persistence of deep mistrust and even conflict among citizens and groups. In 2019, for instance, 96 percent of all deaths resulting from terrorism occurred in countries already experiencing such turmoil.

We now know that an effective counter-terrorism strategy involves more than merely focusing security assets against the threat posed by a particular terrorist group itself, but also must reduce impacts from conflict dynamics in the country as a whole. Effective counter-terrorism entails not only counter-insurgency but also conflict resolution, economic development, political accommodation and social inclusion. Conflict de-escalation not only includes short-term measures like the demobilization, disarmament and reintegration of former combatants but also entails structural and governance improvements to sustain reforms in the medium to long-term.

Across the vast arid expanses of the Sahel, there are worrying trends that political violence is becoming acceptable practice as groups feel that there exists no reliable institutional means for redress of grievances. This is especially the case where group grievance exists – whether the Kanuri in Nigeria, the Tuareg in Mali or the Fulani – and then are allowed to spread across the region.  The sad truth is that terrorism is often a reaction to the historical violence and exclusion associated with the state and should be understood as such. Consequently, governance must become less elitist and more popular. It must become more responsive, tolerant and inclusive – politically, economically and culturally. The influential Global Terrorism Index is emphatic that “…governance is the most important factor that determines the size, longevity and success of a terrorist group”.

Good governance is a potent antidote for the likes of militant Islamist groups exploiting local grievances, whether based on social alienation, economic marginalization or political disenfranchisement, as they seek to gain a pernicious foothold amongst the local population growing tired of an uncaring and unaccountable government as we have witnessed time and again across the Sahel. Rather than honoring and supporting despots seeking to maintain their power, foreign countries who seek to defeat terrorism in this troubled region should utilize their leverage over incumbent elites to open up democratic space and otherwise challenge – rather than reinforce — the malevolent legacies of colonialism.

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Mash Unit: Treating our Multiple Health Emergencies, Dr. Robert Zuber

2 May
Funeral homes struggle to keep up with rising deaths | Hindustan Times
Hindustan Times

What happens when people open their hearts? They get better.  Haruki Murakami

I think that little by little I’ll be able to solve my problems and survive.  Frida Kahlo

The question is not how to get cured, but how to live.  Joseph Conrad

As soon as healing takes place, go out and heal somebody else. Maya Angelou

I think I have served people perfectly with parts of myself I used to be ashamed of. Rachel Naomi Remen

And here you are living despite it all.  Rupi Kaur

Poetry heals the wounds inflicted by reason.  Novalis

Inside and outside the UN, health-related matters continue to occupy center stage in our collective consciousness.   Some good medical news related to infection levels in the US and remarkable progress reported from Oxford (UK) on a potential malaria vaccine was more than offset by news of devastating health emergencies in countries from Brazil to India – overwhelming existing health infrastructure and sending front-line health care workers in these and other countries to their emotional breaking point.  It was unnerving to read of doctors in India describing the “mental torture” they now experience from treating what even they depict as India’s “hopeless” COVID crisis.  

This “torture” is reminiscent of what medical personnel have experienced over this past year in community after community, country after country, places where political leaders have routinely bungled pandemic responses both within and across borders. Their not-infrequent politicizing of a public health menace has left medical workers with little option but to pick up the pieces from infected persons who, in many instances, refused to adhere to public health warnings and protocols. Such workers have been left to cope with waves of variants that are sure to multiply as cases explode in areas of the world largely (and sometimes willfully) excluded from adequate vaccine coverage, areas which in some instances are also coping with water shortages, limited sanitation and health access limitations which compromised local health outcomes long before the onset of COVID-19.

This pandemic isn’t over.  Through our science-suspicion, our short-sighted policy choices, and our lack of solidarity across borders and regions, we have seen to that.  And this is clearly not the only health-related threat to which we should now be paying attention.

The UN system has done some robust and cross-cutting policy work on matters of disease control, health access and the protection of health infrastructure.  This past week alone, the outlines of a comprehensive response to the current health crisis facing our planet once again came into focus.  For instance, in the Permanent Forum on Indigenous Issues, the outcome document referenced the grave health disparities which indigenous communities face worldwide, noting both the diminishing health infrastructure in more remote rural areas and the important work done by rural caretakers to protect the forests and other natural resources that remain under severe threat, protection which is indispensable to biodiversity preservation and might even help us avoid future pandemics.

And in the General Assembly, the GA president hosted a high-level dialogue on Antimicrobial Resistance, a challenge to what the PGA called “our over-dependence and over-use” of antibiotics which have in many instances compromised our ability to stem infections and prevent the evolution and spread of antibiotic-resistant bacteria.  As speakers noted from across the UN system, the combination of threats including substandard sanitation systems, lack of access to potable water, and high levels of antibiotics in the meat some of us routinely ingest are enabling preventable outcomes, including making people with under-treatable bacterial infections more susceptible to COVID-19 threats. 

What was particularly hopeful about this GA discussion is the degree to which it enabled an assessment of other health-related concerns to which states and the rest of us should be more mindful.  The GA president, for instance, used the opportunity to call once again for states to commit to “universal health access.”  The Deputy Secretary-General Amina Mohammed used her speaking time to call for “alternatives to antibiotics” and increased investment in health infrastructure as one means of “getting our commitments to sustainable development back on track.”  Dr. Tedros of WHO reminded delegations of the primary health-related responsibility of states to ensure fresh water and sanitation access, while the director of FAO noted the importance of ensuring food security and related measures we can and must take to improve public health instead of simply “waiting around for new medicines” to be developed. 

And in the Security Council, a session on the “protection of indispensable civilian objects” hosted by Vietnam’s president highlighted the extent to which, as Ireland’s Foreign Minister noted, “war is the enemy,” the enemy of trust and confidence, the enemy of person-centered funding priorities, the enemy of stable and effective health infrastructure, the enemy of brave doctors and nurses forced to “work from caves” in a herculean (and often futile) effort to heal wounds of war in settings far less conducive to caregiving than the now hollowed-out hospitals where they used to work. The makeshift mash units to which some transitioned have too often become targets of armed violence as well, causing many medical personnel to once again and quite literally flee for their lives.

And it isn’t just hospitals.  As noted by the Foreign Minister of St. Vincent and the Grenadines – a country now coping with health consequences from a major volcanic eruption — attacks on civilian objects by parties to conflict now directly target water and other infrastructure with growing frequency, leading inexorably to the spread of otherwise preventable diseases, including cholera.  Such infrastructure looting and outright destruction endangers both short and longer-term health care access, gravely imperils the growth and development of children, skews our funding priorities towards more military hardware and away from health facilities, and exacerbates displacement-related miseries that most of the rest of us can scarcely imagine.  War, indeed, is the enemy of healthy societies in multiple ways.

The question now for UN stakeholders is whether or not we have the collective will to hear and heed the advice from this week of policy discussions, to internalize and respond in kind to the mental burdens of front line workers and the misery and insecurity of those suffering under what one health aide this week referred to as a “genocide” of pandemic and other disease-related casualties. Such a “genocide” affects all sectors of society, but especially those persons with disabilities, the economically marginalized, the aged and those in relative rural isolation.  It is obviously that much harder to appreciate sunsets and spring flowers or the wonders of poetry and art while carrying around wounds that won’t heal or dealing with sickness that drains away energy while children cry out for a proper meal.

The remedial blueprint is clear but it will require much from us. Tangible commitments of persons, priorities and treasures are required if we are fix currently-grave health disparities given, as this pandemic has reminded us, that an out-of-control virus in one part of the world affects health outcomes in every corner of the world.  We must make forest protection (and its protectors) a priority.   We must demonstrate levels of solidarity required to distribute vaccines and health resources fairly and evenly across all areas of need.  We must do more to counter health disinformation and, while doing so, help to restore public confidence in both science and governance.  If we insist on eating meat, we must also insist on options for more humanely-treated and less antibiotic-infested animals.  We must invest more in community health with a focus on prevention, nutrition and alternatives to the medicines which once reliably saved lives (including twice my own) but which our overuses have made increasingly unreliable.  We must cease our relentless dismantling of health infrastructure, especially in rural areas, due in part to our skewed funding priorities and tax policies which have put money into dubious outcomes such as nuclear weapons modernization while also lining the pockets of those whose investment accounts are already filled to overflow.    

And we must protect the infrastructure we already have, ensuring that “indispensable civilian objects” and those brave souls determined to provide the essential services within them are spared the horrific impacts of armed conflict, impacts from indiscriminate air raids and explosive weapons which must be removed in practice as their legitimacy has long been “removed” under international law.  War, indeed, “has rules” as many noted this week in various UN digital “conference rooms,” but those rules are increasingly disregarded.  The Security Council must do more to enforce them.  And war as an alleged enabler of anything remotely constructive for civilians in either the short or long term must be thoroughly debunked.

We are now facing a health crisis with multiple dimensions and causes highlighted and exacerbated by the current pandemic.  As someone who is serially blessed by vaccinations and adequate health care access, I fear for those increasingly desperate for the portion of health care that should rightly be theirs, persons perpetually shouting (or praying) away the wolves of disease and violence baying outside their dwellings on a daily basis. 

Unless we take the recommendations from this week seriously, unless we step up regarding practical manifestations of genuine solidarity, my fear is that their desperation will eventually become our common franchise, their misery will spread as quickly and defiantly as our own self-interestedness. Then, the stench from so many burning bodies will fill our nasal cavities as thoroughly as those who manage the fires of India’s now-overloaded funeral pyres. I was stunned this week by a 1961 photo of a Russian doctor preforming a self-appendectomy while stranded on a base in Antarctica.  How many in this world are forced into similarly desperate measures to treat personal and family health emergencies without access to any of the technical skills and training possessed by that doctor? 

For their sake, for our own as well, we simply cannot allow this desperation to persist any longer. Our hearts need to open wider, our blessings shared more liberally. We know what needs to be done to enable healthier outcomes for all. We are collectively, undoubtedly, urgently on the clock.

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Wobble World: Calming our Personal and Planetary Shaking, Dr. Robert Zuber

25 Apr
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Wake up. If your eyes are sleeping then wipe them gently. You need to be awake for this. It is a matter of life and death.  Kamand Kojouri

Longer than an earthquake, a pandemic shakes your life and living. P.S. Jagadeesh Kumar

There is nothing stable in the world; uproar’s your only music.  John Keats

On what slender threads do life and fortune hang!  Alexandre Dumas

As anywhere else, political instability provided an opportunity for local scores to be settled, for personal grievances to be aired, for heroes to be acclaimed and discarded.  Charles Emmerson

Instead of a stable truth, I choose unstable possibilities. Haruki Murakami

Humans can’t be strong because of the comfort & can’t be comfortable because of instability.  Sonal Takalkar

April is my favorite month of the year.  The gentle rains.  The longer sunlit days. The moderating temperatures.  The lightening of human moods, even in the midst of a pandemic that has lasted longer than most could have predicted or imagined, at least the moods of those of us privileged by health care access and vaccinations in a world still waiting – and waiting some more – for its fair turn.

And of course the trees and flower beds bursting with color.  In the north, April is the month that reminds us city dwellers of nature’s capacity – assisted in many instances by some truly remarkable urban gardeners – to regenerate itself and thereby tweaking the human race regarding the need for its own regeneration, its own need to recalibrate its relationship to the rest of the natural world, to (as UN SG Guterres says) “stop our war on nature.”

All this “Earth Week,” amidst a bevy of UN meetings alternately hopeful and maddening, I have been taking multiple, daily walks through nearby daffodil hillsides and under cherry blossoms and tulip trees.  I’ve also been spending evenings binge watching (for me) the stunningly filmed BBC nature programs hosted by the indefatigable David Attenborough.  I can’t get enough of either, not this week, not this month.

But all the color and the natural drama, the beautifully manicured parks and other scenes of a natural world bursting with new life also come attached to a blinking warning light, a warning that the flowers and species that make our hearts race are now under siege.  The biological rhythms that keep life in balance, indeed that help keep potential pandemics in check and our agriculture functional, are increasingly out of whack.  As our lands dry and our seas warm, species from bees to whales must find alternate survival settings on a planet increasingly hostile to their interests.

This “uproar” in the natural order, largely a consequence of human activity, is increasingly hostile to our own survival as well.  Those of us who are trying to stay vigilant, trying to stay awake and focused on our increasingly wobbly planet, seem so often to possess in our persuasive arsenal more warnings than we have solutions.  We know that deforestation ruptures food chains, destroys biodiversity and increases the likelihood of future pandemics at a moment when we have barely regained any firm footing from the current one. We know that our collective food security is regularly undermined through conditions from drought and flooding to soil erosion and the absence of pollinators. We know that levels of ocean plastics threaten to contaminate sea harvests on which many of the world’s peoples depend.

And we know that a warming planet continues to release both abundant methane into our atmosphere and vast quantities of precious fresh water into our oceans, altering both temperature and pH. In addition, a recent article by Brian Kahn chronicles the growing evidence that a combination of ice cap melting and groundwater depletion is causing a “wobble” in the very stability of our planet, a shifting (subtle for now) in the movements of the “rotational poles,” shifts in gravitational pull related largely to rapidly rising sea levels.

As the world wobbles on in response to our carbon addictive warming, so too do many of our fellow humans.  As noted at the UN this week, the current pandemic has been a boon to garden-variety narcissism but also to criminality in diverse forms – trafficking in persons and weapons, violence against cultural minorities, even the consolidation and expansion of extremist movements.   As the representative of the Maldives reminded this week during a UN General Assembly event on “urban crime,” cultivating a “sense of belonging” remains key to effective crime prevention. In its absence, criminal elements can establish (and have established) an increasingly malevolent, destabilizing presence, widening social divides and increasing levels of insecurity and anxiety within and across populations.

Such a “sense of belonging” has certainly been hard for us to come by during this pandemic.  So many of us, even the vaccinated and otherwise privileged among us, even those of us who have not been victimized by crime or lost those we love to a creeping virus, even we are now less stable, more wobbly, than we might otherwise admit.  Many of us have retreated to places that offer more comfort than growth; many of us have recalibrated relationships and passions and made the decision to shrink our circles rather than pushing them outwards; many of us have abandoned the goals and gifts that once animated our lives and provided hope for others as we “ride out this storm” that never seems to run out of destructive consequences.  We have at times allowed the insecurities in our immediate spaces rob our attentiveness to the almost unimaginable insecurities of others bereft of health care, bereft of security from traffickers and other criminal elements; bereft of food security as once viable croplands turn into non-productive deserts. 

And yet, despite our efforts to protect ourselves and those closest to us, it is not at all clear that we have put the threat from wobbles to rest. As the pandemic evolves and as our long social isolation and chronic uncertainty slowly begin to lift, many of us find that some aspects of our competence, our confidence, even our essential sanity, have taken a hit. 

As the buds and flowers of April spring open, they communicate what should be a hopeful signal to the rest of us:  If they can open to the world, so can we.  If they can spread their color, sharing the best of what they have to offer to brighten our sometimes dismal, lonely spaces, we can do the same for others.  If they can honor their annual biological commitments despite the wobbles of pollution, temperature and pollination, we can overcome our own struggles; indeed we can address the anxiety and even depression that will otherwise continue to impede our engagement with a human-saturated world that needs our sustainable caregiving input as much as it ever has.

Perhaps the signature event of this past week available on UN Web TV was actually not a UN event at all, but a Climate Summit convened by the US White House, bringing a range of global leaders together (virtually) to strengthen commitments to stem the steady march of a warming, species-threatened, plastics-inundated planet.  Despite a stream of largely predictable statements long on concern and short on change; and despite the opening warnings of UN SG Guterres that we are now risking a “mountain of debt on a broken planet,” there were a few genuine bright spots.  US VP Harris opened the Summit with surprising references to the “indigenous insight” and “nature-based solutions” that offer a tangible path forward, much of which was reinforced this week at the UN’s Permanent Forum on Indigenous Issues. Later on, the president of the Marshall Islands, stressed the need for his oft-vulnerable people to find “safe harbor” amidst the current tempest, noting that the safest of all would be policies and actions to keep global temperature rise at or below 1.5 degrees C.  He also noted the importance, as did other leaders, of using this “rare chance” provided by pandemic recovery to “to reset our economies and societies.” Perhaps reset ourselves as well.

All of this was helpful and hopeful, but as German Chancellor Merkel intoned, we face a “herculean” task requiring a thorough revision of the ways in which we now do our business.  Indeed, her statement raised questions, for me at least, about the sufficiency of our institutions, the wisdom of our policies, but even more about the resilience of our collective psychology, our ability to shed our pandemic cocoons, to find ways to stop our shaking and steady our wobbling, to do our best to overcome the anxieties and insecurities which have taken root during our long hibernation, to lay aside grievances born of social isolation and chronic instability and remain awake to a world which has been waiting anxiously for us to take up, once again, our engaged and caring roles, providing inspiration for healing that other people need and that might not exist if we don’t find the courage and capacity to share such ourselves.

As our world wobbles on, as we struggle to recover our economic and emotional health, the tasks lying before us seem to be growing in intensity not shrinking.  Of all these current “herculean” matters, perhaps the most daunting relates to recovering our own strength to overcome the after-effects of a most difficult time and play our role in this “life or death” moment for our world, embracing possibilities that might appear uncertain on the surface while making space for a wider and healthier range of global constituents to enter the conversation and share their own revision strategies.

The clear, consistent messaging coming from this UN week is that “we are running out of time” to change the way we do our business, to ensure that there will be more flowers and buds in springtime, more species able to dodge extinction, more people freed from pandemic anxieties and access inequities that continue to take such a heavy toll. We are running out of time to stabilize our now-wobbly planet and we urgently need to enable and support more of us still-shaken humans to remain awake to that task.

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Revise and Consent: Enabling a World of Change, Dr. Robert Zuber

18 Apr
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We were revisionists; what we revised was ourselves.  Margaret Atwood

Not everything that can be counted counts, and not everything that counts can be counted. Albert Einstein

Improperly documented history, or more precisely, fraudulent versions of history not only deprive the victims of pasts injustices due recognition of their suffering, but also rob the living of a fair chance at a future free from the dangers of repeating past injustices.  A.E. Samaan

We have learned primarily by tinkering. Curt Gabrielson

In talking about the past we lie with every breath we draw. William Maxwell

If we don’t have real answers, it is because we still don’t know what questions to ask. Our instruments are useless, our methodology broken, our motivations selfish.  Jeff VanderMeer

It is in this childishly speculative state of mind, so different from common sense and its logic, that we know the world to be good. Vladimir Nabokov

Thanks to the confidence placed in me by a colleague, Barbara Adams, I recently published an article in a journal of development policy entitled “A Volatile Context: A Revisionist Lens on Good Governance.”

I’m not going to invite you to read the piece. It’s not dis-similar to the themes of this weekly post, but it is longer and surely more dense. It also reflects an assignment which I only accepted due to the editorial staff’s embrace of the “what if.” What would the world look like if our structures of governance were devoted to fostering care and equal access among constituents? What if governance were as competent and transparent as it often claims to be? What if governance were as concerned — in terms practical more than rhetorical — with the needs and aspirations of constituents as it is with its own protocols and power dynamics?

These and other, similar questions punctuated my piece, for better and worse. To be honest, I’m surprised it got published at all. In an age driven by data and branding, by professionals seeking control over smaller and smaller domains of human experience, speculative writing of the sort I indulge in has become a bit of a reach, and not an altogether welcome one. People in our governance and educational bureaucracies are rather preoccupied — and not without reason — with the accumulation and management of data, data that can establish trends and help ensure that, in the realm of policy and to the extent we are able, human and financial capital are directed towards the holes in security and justice that need to be filled and can be filled.

But it is clear in many places, including at the UN, that data of varying levels of sophistication and reliability does not always bring us closer to governance that is caring, responsive and trustworthy. Indeed, the pursuit of data can be its own endgame, accumulating “information” that in many instances is untethered to strategies to both unlock and incarnate its power to effect change; moreover, such data is often in flux as its gaps are only slowly recognized and fresh experiments are conducted that render the previous “truths” subject to a revised consent.

One of the smartest statements coming from youth climate activist Greta Thunberg was when she said, “don’t listen to me, listen to the science.” Yes, listen to the science, listen to those with data pertinent to the rendering of what are often dire predictions for our common future if we do not mange to revise our ways. But as Greta already knows, as any of us who ply our wares in the halls of global governance knows, such governance is as likely to render the power of science to something akin to a “petting zoo” as it is to unleash its full and furious influence over all our actions.

Simply put, we now know more than we do. Just this week, several good UN events underscored the degree to which having accurate data and incarnating relevant policy commitments are still at loose ends. We “know” that hording vaccines is ultimately detrimental to both the global economy and to the suppression of future variants — as noted this week in a special, high level event on “Vaccines for All” hosted by the president of the UN Economic and Social Council — and yet our commitment to equitable vaccine access remains well short of the need. We “know” as was stated often during an important UN event this week on “Financing for Development,” that a combination of debt burdens, limited investment access and illicit financial flows has made pandemic response and recovery a mere pipe dream, and yet our commitment to a revised, more inclusive financial system remains more the subject of speechmaking than practical application. We “know” as a civil society advocate from South Sudan testified in the Security Council this week that the wide availability of often-trafficked arms fuels so much of the violence and abuse in her country (and many others), and yet our addiction to the production and trade in deadly weapons shows little signs of abating. We “know” the many thousands in Yemen whose lives remain threatened after years of war by famine and economic collapse, and yet the Security Council remains largely impotent to end the violence let alone the impunity to which it has given rise. We “know” that we are unlikely given our current course to forestall the biology-altering consequences of a rapidly warming planet, but we continue to take more credit for our limited climate responses than to earnestly prepare to enact what the president of the UN General Assembly this week urged: “a greener and more equitable recovery that can keep our SDG commitments on track,” including and especially our lagging climate actions.

These disconnects between knowing and doing should not be laid at the feet of scientists, many of whom have no doubt had more than a few sleepless nights over these past months as emissions continue to rise and policymakers continue to defy reasonable, pandemic-related limitations in the name of disinformation or “freedom.” The same scientists who developed safe and effective COVID-19 vaccines in record time and implemented health protocols to keep many more virus victims alive than was the case last spring — including no doubt many COVID-deniers — know that such measures alone won’t end the pandemic if large segments of the public remain uncooperative and revision-phobic, and they certainly won’t help us prepare for the pandemics sure to come as we continue to wantonly disrupt the planet’s biological safeguards.

It may be the case, as suggested above by Curt Gabrielson, that we learn primarily by “tinkering,” through small-scale revisions to what is known and seen, small-sale adjustments in what is given. But for the policy community such revisions at small scale are no longer suitable, if they ever were, as they don’t sufficiently address the diversity of threats facing our current world. They don’t sufficiently address the barriers that keep so many human skills — of youth, of cultural minorities, of women, of persons with disabilities — on the sidelines of policy deliberations and decisions. And they don’t address the deficits of trust which are themselves a legacy of promises deferred or ignored, assistance barely rendered, entitlements and privileges not shared or even acknowledged.

If we are not careful, if we are not sufficiently vigilant, the “bubble” that institutions like the UN are accused of operating within will morph into an “island” to which we in the policy community might well be exiled. Such exile would complicate positive change as it would cut off large swaths of the global community from a UN system which still connects, still convenes, still calls attention to looming threats and policy options — and often with considerable skill. But the threat of exile looms, primarily from constituencies who feel that they can no longer believe in us or in the words we speak, who display an eroded confidence in our ability to distinguish between what can be counted and what counts, to prioritize those responses that truly matter to human and planetary well-being.

In this regard, I worry most about any potential erosion among the youth, this large and diverse generation trying to organize their lives and dream their dreams under clouds of pandemic, climate change, weapons proliferation, and massive debt. Despite all the outreach the UN does to young people, do they –will they — find the UN sufficiently responsive, sufficiently committed to their future, sufficiently savvy on matters from technology access to policy inclusion? Will they find value in our answers to compelling crises let alone consent to at least some of the questions we are actually willing to ask? Will they find in their interactions with us evidence that the world is good and beautiful, and will they continue to feel that it is worth their time and energy to preserve that beauty and extend that goodness?

On this the jury is out. Among the formal events on the UN’s calendar this week was a side discussion, organized by the Youth4Disarmament initiative of the UN’s Office for Disarmament Affairs, which brought together diverse young people — including several of our colleagues — to examine that elusive “what if,” their dreams of a world that is fit for the aspirations and well-being of both this large generation and those who will come after. What if nuclear weapons were abolished? What if emissions could be brought firmly under control? What if the discrimination and incitement to violence highlighted by France and others this week could finally be stricken from the human register? What if our grand institutions — so often stuck in the mud of their own cultures and working methods — could be made to truly breathe again, breathe the air enveloping a human race which finally understands that care for the planet and solidarity with each other are practices, not premises?

At this “what if” event, the invitations to youth were sincere: to share stories from diverse contexts that need to be heard even if those stories (like many of my own) wouldn’t always pass the muster of fact-checkers; to envision (as High Representative Nakamitsu invited) what the world might actually look like if we spent less on weapons and more on people; to imagine as well (as Costa Rica’s Ambassador Chan advocated) a world “where “people no longer felt compelled to take up weapons in the first place,” where we were able to educate every child, where climate change impacts could be mitigated and even reversed? Can we envisage and then build a world where (as Pakistan noted) “power rivalries are disavowed,” where impacts from human selfishness are not a foregone conclusion, where injustices and atrocity crimes are no longer in mortal danger of endless repetition?

As the older speakers at this event noted, the policy and legal groundwork has been laid for such aspirations, including at the UN. But many traps have already been set in the form of crises we should have seen coming, crises that we failed to prevent in the first instance or forthrightly addressed in the second. There is still much for us to revise in our institutions and in ourselves, much in our own, sometimes “fraudulent” versions of personal and cultural history to clarify and confess, much in the stories of young people — especially those compelling “what ifs” — that can guide and inspire their practice but that must be better honored by the rest of us if they are ever to achieve their full flowering.

For better and worse, prospects for a more caring, trustworthy and visionary governance are still in old and worn hands like my own. We who are attached to such hands must undertake the revisions that history and circumstances now demand of us, revisions to our institutions and to ourselves, as we seek to deposit data and dreams into the anxious, younger hands of others.

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Voice Lessons: Ceding Space for Those Waiting Their Turn, Dr. Robert Zuber

11 Apr
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I know you can’t live on hope alone; but without hope, life is not worth living. Harvey Milk

No voice is too soft when that voice speaks for others.  Janna Cachola

Obviously these are some exceptional young people, but what they have in common is that they were ordinary people who cared. Morgan Carroll

You cannot protect the environment unless you empower people, you inform them, and you help them understand that these resources are their own, that they MUST protect them. Wangari Maathai

The people who are trying to be on our side have reduced us to a mere calculation. Sarah Kurchak

I was always taught that when you’re lucky enough to learn something or have some advantage you should share it.  Areva Martin

It is not loving to impose our own grid onto others.  Matt Perman

There have been a series of articles lately by journalists and academics expressing concern about the long-term affects of a pandemic that seems “determined” not to release us fully from its grip.  

We know about the COVID “long haulers,” those unlucky individuals who have been unable to shake the effects of the virus months after their initial infections.   But there are other “long haul” effects that we have only begun to assess, the economic, educational and psychological consequences that we have done our best to hold in abeyance, hoping for conditions that will allow our children back in school before they’ve forgotten what they’ve learned or lost touch with their dreams; conditions that will allow our small businesses to survive a year of numerous adaptations and little income; conditions that will allow some healing for those whose psyches have been battered over this past year by social isolation, fear of the loss of loved ones and incomes, and now concern about whether or not we have what it takes to successfully engage with people who seek to become for us, once again, more than a screen presence.  

Clearly, we are not “out of the woods” and are unlikely to be so even after available vaccines have finally been evenly distributed and this particular pandemic has been finally brought under control.  The sun will indeed rise post-COVID, but it will shine on a world that in many key aspects has lost its way, if not altogether lost its mind.   Despite our own privilege and general good fortune, we wonder if some of those aspects don’t equally apply to ourselves. 

It has been over 13 months now since we have set foot inside UN headquarters which, as most of you realize, is the setting for most of our work, the primary space where we have been “lucky enough” to learn some important things and then “using our advantage” to share what we think we’ve learned with others.  Over these long months, we have missed the personal diplomatic interactions, the rapid movements between conference rooms and issues more connected than acknowledged, the endless coffee breaks to discuss what we’ve heard, what we’ve failed to hear, who impressed and failed to impress, what comes next (or should come next) for our advocacy and outreach, and even the surprise visitors to UN spaces who allow us to better direct our energies and modest assets in the service of interests those visitors help to refresh.

Throughout this long physical hiatus, one which shows no signs of abating, we have managed to keep track of UN processes almost exclusively through digital means.  This past week, for instance, the United Nations and its excellent technical team managed a remarkable set of digital engagements, including a sober ceremony to mark the anniversary of the Rwanda genocide, important discussions in the Security Council on threats from landmines and the current crisis unfolding in Myanmar, and events celebrating the restoration of diplomatic engagements by the US, specifically on Climate and Security and on addressing the care of Palestinians through the United Nations Relief and Works Agency. 

All of these activities – and many others where these came from — are important markers of a global system alternately hopeful and discouraging, a system which, in the case of the UN, is often more political than thoughtful, whose “genius” lies in crafting consensus among states more than in creating urgent remedies for those decimated by armed violence or facing long-term food insecurity from what might be irreversible climate change impacts.  We who operate in UN contexts are sometimes surprised by something we should already know well:  that while the UN has a firm stake in many issues it has limited power to resolve them; indeed that the resolution engine of the UN is largely about persuasion rather than coercion; and that the many skilled and caring diplomats assigned to UN headquarters are as beholden to the aspirations of their foreign ministries, for good or ill, as they are to UN Charter obligations.

Through the use of twitter and other dubious means, we have been able to follow the ups and downs of multilateralism, at least in part, and we have continue to share views within and well beyond the UN community on what should happen, what is not happening, and how we might better integrate our ethical and caring impulses into our policymaking going forward.  I am quite sure that the UN doesn’t miss our physical presence, doesn’t miss our constant scrutiny of its promises and working methods, doesn’t miss our relentless concern that, especially in this time of COVID, branding has too often been allowed to crowd out substance and urgency in our policy deliberations.

The “zoomification” of policy has clearly been a boon to this sort of branding.  While we continue to encourage digital events by our younger colleagues to help them define generational issues and concerns within pandemic-imposed limitations, we are also mindful of how much easier it is to organize events in digital spaces than to ensure their follow-through.  While there is no shortage now of online images of diplomats and (mostly) large NGO leadership saying things which are perhaps meant to be profound but are often self-evident and self-referential, there is too little reason to believe that any of it matters as it should, to believe that the endless statements uttered by these leaders are actually tethered to real concerns in a broken world and reflect policy priorities they are fully determined to address.

This is the dilemma faced by our sector in this pandemic age.  How do we navigate the spaces between image and substance, between the rhetorical branding of global problems that concretely and painfully impact the lives of constituents and the brand-building that allows us to fund salaries and our endless publications, creating strands of expertise that rarely reach and connect beyond the borders of our mission statements?  And how do we ensure, in the name of constituency building, that we are not also constituency-gate keeping, that we are not also oblivious to the reality that people are much more than a “calculation” to substantiate our annual reports, that we recognize people who can only speak their truths to the extent that those of us with privilege and access speak in “soft voices,” and commit to sharing the microphone rather than endlessly grasping for it?

Our sector is fond of calling for change in the UN’s priorities and working methods, as well it should, but it often fails to address the need for reform within our own ranks.  Moreover, for reasons that are only tangentially related to our organizational missions, our collective tendency has become to suggest only the changes that won’t ruffle feathers or threaten funding sources, only the changes that can be incorporated into bureaucracies that it is surely not our principle job to placate.

The damage exacerbated by this pandemic and related crises is experienced broadly by the global community, including within our own offices.  More than a few of our colleagues are also depressed and hurting, are also burned out, are also angry and frustrated that the agencies and processes into which they have poured their live energy have been able to deliver only half a loaf when a full loaf was called for. And what of our colleagues with more direct engagement with the wounds and deprivations which characterize so many communities in this world? What do we in our relatively safe policy bubbles owe those journalists, mediators and humanitarian workers who have taken on the arduous and often dangerous task of reporting on our messes, cleaning up after our messes, or negotiating an end to messes that need not have occurred in the first place? What more do we need to do in our own spaces to bring hope to communities and those who serve them without “imposing our grid” on to lives where such impositions have historically been too frequent and where they simply don’t belong?

There is now a movement among some NGOs around UN headquarters, one which to our mind is not mindful enough of our complex debt to front-line advocates and constituents, a movement which has deployed the twitter hashtag #unmute through which it seeks to organize legitimate concerns regarding access and impact. To be sure, there are people around the world doing the work for real that we purport to be doing in principle, people under siege and threat, people doing their jobs while trying to protect their children and keep from languishing in prisons where guilt is largely fabricated and release is often serendipitous. To be sure as well, there are people around the world, some of whom we have been honored to meet over many years, who are literally models of resiliency and resourcefulness, extending hands of care and promises of empowerment well beyond the attention of UN conference rooms, beyond the reach of funding agencies and international NGOs, small and large.

Let’s be clear: We who function in and around UN spaces remain more privileged than muted. Our voices connect with policymakers beyond our size and volume, likely also beyond demonstrated impact. The doors to UN headquarters remain locked to us. The interactive life inside UN buildings is becoming something of a dim memory. But we are not muted. We have a say, we always have a say, even the smallest among us, even when we have nothing fresh to contribute, even through a flat screen in the middle of a stubborn pandemic which has otherwise exposed and compromised so much in us.

The key for us going forward in these treacherous times is not so much about branding but about sharing. How can we better help people affirm a hope that is based neither on wishful fantasy nor on some externally “imposed grid”, a hope which is grounded instead in a more generous reception for the truths they can convey, truths that can make our own work richer and more relevant to shifting circumstances? And how can we do our part to help “unmute” those whose voices truly demand more attention, those who have been hoping and waiting more patiently then perhaps they should for us to voluntarily mute ourselves, to make way for contributions we need and cannot replicate?

We have had the privilege to learn many things in this UN policy space. And we have enjoyed advantages of institutional access and respect, much of it unearned. As the pandemic continues its relentless eroding of our psychological health while enabling inequalities in so many forms, we will do what we can with what remains of our organizational capacity to help spread what others have come to know, the hopes they sustain and the skills they have accumulated, over our own policy deliberations. And to do so in their own voice.

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Spring Forward: Realizing Renewal Amidst the Gloom, Dr. Robert Zuber

4 Apr
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Things are always better in the morning.  Harper Lee

It is in this difference between returned and replaced that the price of renewal is paid.  And as it is for spring flowers, so it is for us.  Daniel Abraham

There is something infinitely healing in the repeated refrains of nature – the assurance that dawn comes after night, and spring after the winter.  Rachel Carson

When this ultimate crisis comes… when there is no way out – that is the very moment when we explode from within and the totally other emerges: the sudden surfacing of a strength, a security of unknown origin, welling up from beyond reason, rational expectation, and hope.  Émile Durkheim

It is by means of our own victories, if we are not regenerated, that the work of Nemesis is wrought: doom breaks from the shell of our very virtue.  Joseph Campbell

We become influencers, leaders and teachers in this world, by performing within ourselves the purging that we wish to see take place in others.  C. JoyBell C.

Let the whole world see and know that things which were cast down are being raised up, and things which had grown old are being made new. Anglican Book of Common Prayer

In the northern hemisphere, there are indications that, as obstinate and habituated as we have often demonstrated ourselves to be in both personal and institutional contexts, renewal is in the air.  Flowers adorn parks and gardens.  The songs of migrating birds enrich the spring cacophony.  And our religious communities once again determine to maintain their relevance as the world groans under burdens of hunger, violence and virus while public institutions in too many instances encourage the mistrust and misinformation we need them so desperately to counter.

On this Easter Sunday, we in the Christian community have a special obligation to look ourselves in the mirror, to ask (as we would of all our institutions) if we are actually being faithful to both our founding spirit and the specific, concrete needs of our constituents; indeed if our institutions are able to “get over themselves,” rendering the services and promoting the hope and conduct which are in large part the point of having such institutions in the first place. 

And when reforms are warranted (which they almost always are) such that our personal and institutional life can prevent more effectively and respond more efficiently, we must ask if we up to that task?  Or do we take the path that we see so very often during personal counseling, individual leaders and their institutions willing to consider only the changes they are prepared to make, not the changes they need to make?  

In addition, again with analogies to counseling settings, how many of us are actually willing to engage in the “purges” which we are quite certain are required for others?  How many are committed, paraphrasing Christian scripture, to removing the log in our own eyes such that we can better see the specks in the eyes of others?  How many of us are sufficiently committed to vigilance and renewal as doom threatens to break, yet again, “from the shell of our virtue?”

These are two of the impediments to a renewal that is more than rhetorical, that is more than a tepid commitment to close the gaps between expectation and performance, between the people we are capable of being and the people we have become too comfortable being. We are collectively too comfortable with acts of discrimination against the categorical other, too comfortable with lifestyles that imperil survival both current and prospective, too comfortable with institutions, even churches, that are wrapped so tightly within their bubbles, that continue to justify protocols and practices that have long lost their relevance, that have become as some of us used to sing during childhood, the “chewing gum which has lost its flavor on the bed post overnight.”

Part of renewal for our time must be about recovering those bursts of “flavor” when we metaphorically bite into a sacred or cherished pursuit; appreciating and sharing those bursts of color and fragrance as the blossoms of spring almost magically return to life and our sunrises signal yet another chance for us to grow and change; magnifying those acts of human courage and capacity which now sadly tend to manifest themselves mostly during times of crisis, when our backs are truly against the wall, when there is no more wiggle room for us, no more opportunity for a sane and rational dismissal of what our collective narcissism and indifference have literally brought to a boil.

We are in such a moment of boil now.  Our human community has backed ourselves into places where we no longer have the room to maneuver we once imagined ourselves to have; where our self-deceptions about who are the good ones and who are the evil doers serves only to magnify evil and suffering; where our institutions mostly play at renewal, moving some of the pieces around but not changing the game in any significant way, not sufficiently reassuring those crying out for assistance that help is on the way, a “help” that is more predictable and which leads to peace, health and self-sufficiency, well beyond the stasis of mere survival.

We know we can do better.  Even in protocol-saturated institutions such as the UN, we know that we can renew what is now holding us back.  We can demonstrate with our time and treasure that we are determined to honor the trust that other still place in us, fulfill the expectations that we have led constituents to anticipate from us.  We can pull some of the “weeds” that choke off some of what promised to be a verdant garden; eliminating more of the numerous unfulfilled financial pledges, both institutional and humanitarian; the misguided applications of consensus that constitute de-facto vetoes, the habit by some states of sponsoring resolutions that they have no intention of honoring; the actual vetoes and threats of veto by permanent Security Council members which have become tools of politics not of statecraft, tools which do not prevent mistakes in conflict response so much as inhibit conflict response itself. 

There are times when it seems as though numerous states don’t actually want the UN to honor its many promises, don’t actually want it to take the leadership we rhetorically bestow upon it to anticipate and then prevent the tragedies that take such a huge toll in blood and treasure in our world. SG Guterres noted this week in an interview that “multilateralism has no teeth.”  I won’t belabor the extent to which the SG has insufficiently pushed back against this longstanding reality, but I do know that metaphorical dental implants are at the ready if and when states and stakeholders decide to commence the procedure.

For those of us who delight in this Easter Sunday we should also acknowledge a responsibility beyond predictable family dinners, religious rituals, egg hunts and bonnets; a responsibility to incarnate the renewal which anchors the promise of this season, to manifest the hope in all our worldly undertakings, including in our institutions, that “things which were cast down are being raised up, and things which had grown old are being made new.” 

If Jesus were once again to emerge from the tomb to which his body was once confined, scanning the current terrain of our flailing human commitments, he might face temptation yet again, this time to head back inside the cave, fire up the Neflix, and just forget about this whole renewal thing.  Except that he knows us, knows the complexity of our hearts, knows what he had willingly gotten himself into from the dawn of time, knows as well what needs to happen in this current moment  — what can with grace happen — such that the promise of renewal, indeed the fate of our species to which renewal is now tethered, can stand a reasonable chance.

We are quickly running out of time and space to turn the promise of renewal into a discernable reality, to raise up those many people and species which have been cast down, to infuse those institutions which have lost their way with fresh energy and care, to revitalize a global public which has grown so weary of coups, displacements, discrimination and deprivation, a public increasingly gloomy regarding the prospect of institutions that can truly help restore communities beyond the edges of their own bubbles. We can’t wait for recognition of some “ultimate crisis” in order to release our better selves into a world starved for relief and reassurance. Indeed, that “crisis” is likely already at hand.

The bursting buds in our northern parks and gardens remind us that renewal is possible, that color and life can return to even the most barren of personal and institutional landscapes.  May this Easter serve up portions of energy and grace sufficient to keep on track the renewal our times so desperately require.

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Water Slide: Tackling our Freshwater Deficits, Dr. Robert Zuber

28 Mar
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I am haunted by waters.  Norman Maclean

If you can’t go through an obstacle, go around it. Water does.  Margaret Atwood

Human nature is like water. It takes the shape of its container.  Wallace Stevens

Dip him in the river who loves water.  William Blake

He liked the darkness, but this was oppressing. It almost flooded his being. Dean F. Wilson

Water, like love, is good at finding where it’s meant to be. Corinne Beenfield

By early light I am asleep in a nightmare about drowning in the Flood. Billy Collins

The UN had a good week in some key aspects, including an excellent Arria Formula event on threats to UN peacekeepers from improvised explosive devices (IEDs) and a political declaration adopted by the General Assembly affirming  the need for “Equitable Global Access to COVID-19 Vaccines” (click here) at a time when “vaccine nationalism” is only slowly giving way to a more generous – if also economically self-interested — disposition on vaccine distribution, including to those nations which have still to administer a single shot.

It was also a week when the UN assessed its commitment to ensuring freshwater access to the millions of people for whom such access is tenuous at best.  On World Water Day, many sectors within the UN system paused to weigh responsibilities to the water and sanitation goals which are key both to sustainable development and to addressing the “conflict multiplier” which water increasingly represents as, in too many communities across the globe, access to safe water has become a luxury increasingly elusive to secure though ultimately more precious than silver or gold.

As the president of the UN Economic and Social Council, Ambassador Akram of Pakistan warned this week, at our current rate half the world’s population will likely suffer from severe water stress by the year 2050.  This was perhaps our most cited comment (on Twitter) in the past week, a testament to the misery, displacement and potential conflict which diplomats and the larger policy community recognize is looming on our collective horizon if we cannot find the urgent means to ensure safe and equitable water access.  We are reminded every day of the many people worldwide for whom mere hand-washing in the midst of a pandemic creates harsh water use choices, others for whom the dignity of adequate sanitation remains a distant dream. And as noted with regularity by our colleague in El Salvador, Marta Benavides, our response at policy level is often to talk too much and change too little. Water, despite what we wish to believe, is no longer “finding where it needs to be,” and we are yet doing too little to help restore lifegiving pathways.

Most of those who would read weekly missives such as this one don’t need to be reminded of the central role water plays in our contemporary world as the largest repositories of fresh water on our planet – the polar ice caps – continue to melt into the sea at unheard of rates, and as climate change imposes alternating jolts of flooding and drought on many millions of people living in poverty, undermining their food security and setting many on uncertain journeys to find places where this most basic of needs can be procured, albeit in unfamiliar and even hostile contexts. 

In many of our so-called developed countries, water-related imagery often infuses our artistic and unconscious lives though, as a pragmatic resource, we have largely taken it for granted.  While we occasionally recognize that vast differences in water quality exist in communities across a country like the US, we nevertheless anticipate that what flows from our taps remains both reliable and relatively safe, an entitlement of sorts for which there is simply no equivalent in war-torn or economically stressed communities.  Indeed, we know here that the water we have available for our own sanitation purposes is generally (and often needlessly) higher in quality than any water available at all to families in communities habitually threatened by the twin killers of flooding and drought.

There are “solutions” of sort for countries and communities facing water scarcity but they are often complex.  Moving water from where it is abundant to where it is lacking is a herculean task as is funding and installing technologies to desalinate sea water for coastal communities.  But NGOs and state partners are making welcome progress in creating community-based solutions to elevate water abundance – including catchment capacity to ensure that water availability remains accessible.  Lamentably, such solutions face obstacles from the shifting modalities of climate change to unregulated industries in our broken economies that raise the stakes such that water “caught” is often dangerous for personal use. In too many places, the “slide” of water, both of access and quality, continues unabated. A “dip in the river” in too many places is less a refreshing interlude and more an invitation to deadly disease.

Still, there is much that we in the “water entitled” world can do to sharpen our attentiveness to water-related concerns while contributing to a safe water environment for others.  Part of this relates to, as already noted, our personal water uses: watering less, flushing less, fixing leaks, restricting uses of toxic fertilizer and other products that are likely to enter – and degrade – our water supply.  One could add to this measures to mitigate the diverse impacts of climate change on our farms and ice caps – walking rather than driving to errands, shifting to green energy sources, doing more to restore watersheds or eliminate the river toxins that lead to ocean pollution (and fund those who lead on this work).  Our water savings may not make a dent in other, drought-stricken areas of the world, but greater water-use consciousness can lead to support for policies and practices that offer some tangible hope for the drought-affected.

But another aspect of our responsibility is related to an issue that we are often loath to discuss in these parts – our patterns of consumption – specifically consumption related to water demand, the uses beyond our sight, beyond our attention, even beyond our comprehension.  For those of you who have the time and interest, I urges you to click here for the website of Water Calculator which, along with sites such Foodnorthwest.org provides hard data on water usage and wastewater which accompanies the production of some of our most common consumer items.  From automobiles and leather goods to beef production and avocados, the vast quantities of water needed to produce our personal transportation and the items we voraciously pull from the shelves of our local big-box stores, can be shocking. 

One wonders: Would we willingly adjust our consumption patters if we knew that the leather shoes we have been coveting required an average of 3,626 gallons of water to produce?  Would we be so quick to replace our bed sheets if we recognized that an average of 2,839 gallons of water were required to make them soft and attractive? Would we adjust our eating habits if we knew that it takes as much as 450 gallons of water to prepare one cow for the grilling of steaks or the sandwiches of “we have the meats” Arby’s? And would it matter if we were to grasp that so much of what we in the “developed” world now consume is produced in communities which themselves are often water insecure, products made by the hands of women and men who use more water at work than they and their communities might ever be able to access in their non-working hours? And, if they were able to access it, knowing that it might well have been made more toxic through runoff/effluence from the very facilities which pay their often-meager wages?

These loops represent ethical and even spiritual dilemmas both “haunting” and unsustainable. As many of you recognize, this is the season of Passover for Jews and Holy Week for Christians, a time to celebrate divine gifts but also to reclaim the responsibilities commensurate with those gifts.  As one of my good colleagues put it, “No Sunday is sacred until we all have access to safe water and sanitation.” This is not an uncomplicated aspiration, to be sure, but it is an important one, and could well be a sacred one. Those of us who can choose to over-water our plants, luxuriate in our showers, and indulge in water-saturated consumption with impunity could stand to learn some new habits, habits which acknowledge our collective, growing water scarcity with grave implications for human health and global tension.

In a time when what relatively little fresh water remains threatens to be commodified, when this “global public good” is in danger of becoming one more resource to be controlled by wealthy individuals and states, we need to reset our water priorities at policy and personal levels without delay.  If we fail to do so, our ability to prevent our conflicts, feed our populations and protect our people from pandemics and other diseases will become increasingly impaired.  We are at a critical moment now regarding this most fundamental of resources.  Any further slide in access and quality jeopardizes many and ultimately serves the interests of none.

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