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

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

Never confuse movement with action. Ernest Hemingway

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Tags: Afghanistan, Security Council, stock-taking, Tigray

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

22 Aug

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Tags: connection, disarmament, healing, surivors, Terrorism, UN

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

17 Aug

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

When signing up for an opportunity with GAPW at the end of May, I was very anxious at first, as I had no idea what I was getting myself into. I expected a lot of dialogue on subjects that I knew very little about, people talking too fast for me to understand – as New York has a reputation for being all hustle and bustle, and meetings consisting of solely legal or technical jargon that I would not know how to digest.
For the first few days, I was lost and thought everyone was repeating each other. So much was going on with the High-Level Political Forum — my very first UN engagement — that it was hard to keep all of the countries and their agendas straight, especially for someone who has no prior experiences with these countries. However, once I began to look in on more meetings and learned about some of the counties’ histories, the subtleties made more sense, and I could then fully digest what the delegations were discussing.
Of the meetings I attended, my favorite ones discussed climate change, hunger, and the crisis in Myanmar. While these topics are interesting to me in general, I feel like these were the best presentations: not only because of the material, but because of the speakers themselves. They rallied their respective audiences by talking with us instead of to us. For the food security sessions, Mr. David Beasley was by far the most compelling speaker. He was able to rally the room behind what he said because of his level of enthusiasm which most other speakers did not seem to have. Another speaker I enjoyed was a diplomat from Colombia who talked about her experiences with the cartels there. She brought in very personal details and accounts of how her life changed due to the violence from the drug trade. By being vulnerable like that, she was able to form an emotional connection with people in the meeting, which made what she had to say so much more impactful. In my opinion, finding speakers like this is singlehandedly the most important thing the UN can do to garner support from people in the wider world.
While there have been many things that I thought the UN did well, there are a few things I thought could have been improved upon. One of which is the UN’s stated goal for youth involvement. While the UN encourages youth involvement, they seem to talk more about this than acting on it. Sure, there were two days during my internship when youth leaders held meetings, but besides that, there was not much evidence of youth participation. Additionally, these meetings simply highlighted the work already done by young adults rather than a discussion with young adults about what they want to see done now, what they are eager to do now. So, to the UN, include more young adults in your discussions instead of just highlighting how we have been trying to change the world. This is our future at stake, so it would be proper if we had a more substantial influence on what happens to it going forward, the priorities that will shape the future.
To close, I want to talk about one more concern I have witnessed from the meetings. Delegations are, to put it frankly, moving too slowly. While I understand treaties and resolutions take time to complete, action must occur rapidly when our future is at risk. Climate change won’t slow because delegations need time to talk about the wording of resolutions. Rising hunger rates won’t slow because delegations need time to talk about wording. Terrorist organizations won’t slow their advances because delegations need time to talk about wording. If we want our future to be peaceful and equitable for all, we must demand that delegations work more swiftly to actively and practically address looming crises. Because on matters such as climate change we will soon pass a tipping point, and then no resolution will be able to stop what is now well in motion.

Tags: United Nations, youth

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

15 Aug

Magazine.Columbia.Edu

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Tags: climate change, harmony, servant leadership, youth

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

8 Aug

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

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

A quietly mad population is a tractable one. Naomi Wolf

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Tags: agency, sanity

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Waiting Room: Ending the Global Frustration on Small Arms, Dr. Robert Zuber

1 Aug

I aimed at the public’s heart, and by accident I hit it in the stomach. Upton Sinclair

I guess that’s what disappointment is- a sense of loss for something you never had. Deb Caletti

To make someone wait: the constant prerogative of all power. Roland Barthes

Life is a long preparation for something that never happens. W.B. Yeats

He had the look of one who had drunk the cup of life and found a dead beetle at the bottom. P.G. Wodehouse

Disappointment’ s cousin is Frustration, the second storm. Chetan Bhagat

Deep under our feet the Earth holds its molten breath, while the bones of countless generations watch us and wait. Isaac Marion

I have a (bad) habit of indulging in what is known in the radio business as “sports-talk,” a phenomenon characterized by mostly men calling in to show hosts – also mostly men – and airing mostly grievances about things which, in the grand scheme of things mostly don’t matter. In this media format, people lose their minds over such important things as how far someone can throw an American football, whether or not so-and-so has the “clutch gene,” or how some player can possibly “earn” a salary which might be, literally speaking, 1000 times larger than those of the callers.

But for all its stunning banality, sports-talk is also a window on culture, a culture which seems increasingly unhinged, where external grievance has almost completely obliterated internal gratitude; where we engage the outside world mostly to satisfy our rooting interests rather than to root out the fear and suspicion causing many of us to build walls rather than open doors, indulge emotions that might otherwise be considered unseemly, and utterly confuse the petty and the profound.

Some of this was on display this week regarding a decision by gymnast Simone Biles to forgo Olympic events she was expected to win due to concerns over her own mental stability and thus her ability to participate in jumps and twists and twirls with high potential for injury if your mind “isn’t right.” While some radio callers were sympathetic, many others were in the “throw some dirt on it” and get back to business crowd, based on some underlying sense that Biles “owes” the rest of us a performance regardless of her mental state, regardless of the threats her high-wire acts actually pose to herself, and regardless of how many times she has honored her talents – and her audience – in the past.

It occurred to me that these are the kinds of comments we make when there is not enough of life washing over us, when the social isolation of the times breeds what we might expect it to – a suspicion of everything outside our bubbles save for the thing we do well to be most suspicious of in these precarious times – the bubbles in which we have immersed ourselves. Yes, some of us may well have gotten a bit too “soft” in these times, giving up and giving in, pulling the bed covers over our heads when it is time to get up and face the world to the best of our current capacity. But many of us have also lost a bit of speed on our metaphorical “fast balls,” a bit of confidence, a bit of judgment, a bit of energy, a bit of perspective, a bit of connection. Many of us are not even close to our mental-best now and, unlike Simone Biles, seem incapable of recognizing as much. Some would seemingly rather lose their proverbial lunches over mask wearing — the current societal equivalent of sports-talk grievances – as though a patch of blue material and two white strings constituted an existential threat to our well-being, as though our “freedom” to consume our metaphorical meals as we alone wish also includes the “freedom” to stick a fork in the stomachs of others.

As the United Nations also recognizes, we are collectively facing a mental health crisis which mirrors and is directly affected by our pandemic-related physical health threats. Over the past 18 months the losses have been both numerous and challenging to chronicle – people losing their homes and plunging into poverty; people facing grave food insecurity and social isolation; people having to make decisions they thought they would never have to make as incomes evaporate, schools close and threats from armed violence, traffickers, political instability and climate change leave millions in situations beyond precarious. For too many in our world, the pandemic has done more than merely interrupt our personal goals and aspirations but is more akin to “piling on,” heaping trauma on top of deprivation and fraying a social fabric which represents a mortal loss to people less and less able to meet their own basic needs.

It is hard even to imagine the mental strains associated with this confluence of grave challenges, but to some degree, this is the business of those of us who work in multilateral policy settings. We are mandated to identify at least some of the pain and to ensure that at least some of our policy work is germane to its easing, is at least adequate to those waiting for the relief and restoration that they are unable to effect for themselves. This week, the UN reflected on those languishing in COVID-infected prisons in Syria, those daring to take to the streets in Myanmar seeking to pry governance from the bloodied hands of the military junta, those in Tigray and Yemen waiting desperately and relentlessly for provisions which have become tactical elements in a larger conflict. These are just some of the people whom we have encouraged to assume that we have their back, that we have some of what is needed to free them from suffering and help restore them to health, including and especially mental health, health which they will need if they and their loved ones are to navigate a world with high threat levels beyond the immediate levers of misery.

But exposing mental health deficiencies and calling for more “services” is only part of the equation. At UN events this week focused on victims of food insecurity and human trafficking, speakers from the UN and from field-based NGOs noted the urgent need for victims to be “seen beyond their trauma,” to be regarded as agents of change and healing and not only recipients of assistance, to underscore the strong desire of many to be “the last victim” of exploitation and deprivation, and thus to be the forefront of efforts to move people to places of self-sufficiency and dignity, aspects long-denied people seeking (and sometimes failing) to outrun the “storms” that seem forever to form on the horizon.

The power of victim testimony was evident this week, insisting on a place at the policy table, noting how much easier it is to “walk strange roads” towards health and recovery alongside others who have walked them previously, affirming with actress Mira Sorvino that the ” bravery and lived experience” of survivors can be amplified and thus help to inspire the international community to do more to prevent and restore what Sorvino referred to as “decimated lives.” Others, including at the UN Food Systems pre-Summit underscored the urgency of the times, the “children who face starvation while we sit here and make speeches,” our half-measures that too-often reinforce the trauma from the long waiting we have, at some core level, pledged to reduce.

Such half-measures also punctuated what was one of the signature events of the UN week, the 7th Biennial Meeting of States on Small Arms and Light Weapons, a meeting intended to push forward implementation of the Programme of Action (PoA) to combat illicit weapons and prevent their diversion from authorized to unauthorized sectors.

Like other aspects of our collective work, this PoA while not legally binding nevertheless constitutes a promise to communities awash in weapons illicit and otherwise, weapons which intimidate and coerce, weapons which undermine development progress and effective parenting, weapons which in the hands of the stable and (increasingly) unstable cause deaths for some and enable other abuses much easier to commit at the point of a gun.

As I often do, I wondered while watching some of this PoA unfold, how this scene might appear to those in diverse communities begging for relief from armed violence threats, waiting and waiting some more for the solutions that they cannot effect by themselves, wondering if it is the lot of their children to spend their lives dodging bullets and the intimidation of armed bullies, wondering also if those seeming to place national interest before human interest will ever understand the relationship between the global saturations of weapons and the trauma those weapons engender and which are routinely experienced by millions.

There were some excellent proposals put forward by Costa Rica, South Africa, Colombia and others regarding the need to expand the scope of the PoA to include ammunition (the “bullets that kill”), to affirm closer synergies with the Arms Trade Treaty and other international instruments, to affirm that the PoA is related at its core to implementation of the Sustainable Development Goals, to fully integrate women’s participation and victim-centered perspectives into this work, and most importantly, to reinforce the view that reducing production of weapons is the most direct path to ending the diversion of weapons; that the more weapons in circulation the harder they are to manage.

All of these proposals seemed worthwhile to us, in fact seemed indispensable to fully meeting the promises embedded in the PoA. And yet resistance to each was considerable, at times fierce, perhaps even borderline irrational from the perspective of those who seek to honor those waiting and waiting for evidence of a reawakened sanity on arms proliferation. Demands to uphold “consensus” rained down on the PoA conference room, claims often made by states with only tepid interest in abiding by the actions which the prevailing BMS consensus had already advocated. This was hardly the “right signal” to the world which Mexico hoped to send, certainly not to those frustrated hearts we are trying to convince regarding our commitment to understand and scale back the growing small arms threat.

Perhaps no reaction to this resistance was as poignant as that of the PoA Chair, Ambassador Kimani of Kenya. In his closing remarks, he vetted his “learning” from this often-contentious week challenging the value and viability of prevailing notions of consensus and coming to a fresh if disquieting understanding of the frustration of global communities regarding the UN’s alleged ability to “solve their problems.”

He could also have wondered, if he dared, if our global institutions were now destined to magnify trauma and other threats to mental and physical health rather than mitigate them, if we have become hard-wired to use the power at our disposal to force other people to wait – even unto death — until we get our act together, until we recover our full policy sanity, until we recognize who we actually work for and what they now require of us. The victims of gun violence – like those of trafficking, famine and a deadly pandemic –need us to heed their voices and honor their efficacy, need us to walk with them down unfamiliar paths and refuse to contribute to yet more disappointment or loss; but also to do the jobs we’ve been entrusted with, to restore credibility jeopardized or even lost among those who find themselves in situations where there is simply no more time to wait.

Our still-declining mental health requires increased services and the policy participation of the traumatized; but it also requires safer and more predictable environments in which to feed, educate and raise our children. A world awash in weapons simply cannot ensure such settings. We who profess to care about those persons waiting for weapons-related relief simply must find the means to provide it.

Tags: mental health, trafficking, Trauma, weapons proliferation

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Honor Code: Heroism Fit for the Times, Dr. Robert Zuber

25 Jul

Heroes are made by the paths they choose, not the powers they are graced with. Brodi Ashton

We are all ordinary. We are all boring. We are all spectacular. We are all shy. We are all bold. We are all heroes. We are all helpless. It just depends on the day. Brad Meltzer

We find not much in ourselves to admire; we are always privately wanting to be like somebody else. Mark Twain

She preferred imaginary heroes to real ones, because when tired of them, the former could be shut up in the tin kitchen till called for, and the latter were less manageable. Louisa May Alcott

Dead people can be our heroes because they can’t disappoint us later; they only improve over time, as we forget more and more about them. Veronica Roth

Who are these so-called heroes and where do they come from? Are their origins in obscurity or in plain sight? Fyodor Dostoevsky

I like my heroes complicated and brooding. Barbara Crooker

This week, the UN honored the life and legacy of Nelson Mandela in what has become an annual event for a system that is doing better and better at honoring in general, especially important as direct threats to UN personnel – peacekeepers, humanitarian workers, mine removal experts and other service providers — have risen dramatically in recent years. Keeping people safe in the field, providing life-extending provisions of food and medical care, helping people recover from catastrophes of short and long duration, these activities are both noble and dangerous – the stuff of genuine heroism in our time.

Mandela certainly chose his own, difficult path. When I met him briefly in South Africa he was well on his way from resistance to governance, bringing along with him values which are mirrored in the UN Charter and which are essential to both state-building and the promotion of lives of dignity. These values were not for him, as they are so often for so many of us, attributes of adornment that we profess but don’t necessarily engage, but rather were embedded deeply in his person, a person who as noted during this event by UN Deputy Secretary Amina Mohammed, was grounded in a “stubborn optimism” which allowed him to carry on when others would have given up and allowed him as the DSG also noted to give to others in small and large ways with little regard for what he might receive in return. He committed to ply his seminal gift, as described by South Africa’s Minister of Foreign Affairs, that ability he possessed to “see the indivisibility of the human condition in ways which were not always visible to others.” As a result, as Gambia’s Ambassador offered, Mandela left a footprint that continues to help the rest of us and our perhaps more “obscure” heroism to leave our mark on “the sands of time.”

The Mandela ceremony and other events that defined this UN week reminded me of a long-ago incident in an Episcopal church where I was assigned in an attempt to learn how to do ministry and where I had just finished preaching about some social justice topic or other. One of the parishioners on the way out of the service commented to me “I’m glad that someone is out there doing these things, doing the good work.”

Her comment, which I appreciated at the time more than I probably should have, was based on at least two assumptions which I later came to question. The first of these is that because I am concerned about these issues, I am somehow contributing to their resolution – that “caring” has efficacy in its own right even when untethered to any viable, visible change strategy. And the other, related assumption is that what I was allegedly “doing” was somehow sufficient unto itself, that is, that I magically possessed what it takes to move the pile independently of others – including her by the way – pushing and moving as well.

These are some of the lessons that I largely failed to learn at earlier stages but which have become harder to miss over time. I have more recently embraced the importance of practicing all that we espouse and of engaging issues in a way that balances representation (which I have not always done well) and recommendation (in which I have been a bit too invested). But I also learned of the ways in which heroism becomes a conduit for what is often a messy – borderline imaginary — brand of vicariousness, people who have (often romantic) expectations that they place upon designated heroes and that none could fulfill. If Mandela were alive now, his life would surely be picked apart by journalists and critics; his complications would disappoint as well as inspire; but he would also likely demonstrate more than the rest of us might be prepared to accept, that heroism is often situational and that those situations call out to all of us from time to time in our lives, call us to run towards the light rather than hide from it.

And I learned, in case there was any doubt in anyone’s mind, that I am no hero myself, that my own path has not been sufficiently transformative or radical, sufficiently determined or hopeful, sufficiently connected or willing to wrestle with critics in the public sphere.

But not rising to the level of the heroic does not – must not – obscure the contributions to a better world we are actually able to make. We may not leave a mark “on the sands of time,” but we do influence others; we can do more to shape and mold, to inspire and sustain, to help process the great questions of our age and within ourselves. We do have skills and energies which, alongside the skills and energies of others, can help to overcome longstanding challenges, including those of violence, environmental degradation and racial discrimination which were raised in various UN settings this week. And we can offer discernment, thinking through the ideas and policies that might not otherwise be sufficiently vetted and that threaten to lead us down unfruitful and even dangerous paths.

And perhaps most of all, to we can extend invitations to others to walk their paths and to share what they experience with the rest of us. In this context, I was heartened this week during an event to assess the UN International Decade for People of African Descent regarding how the contributions of youth were depicted and encouraged. As part of her keynote address, the Vice President of Costa Rica urged us to heed the voices of youth proclaiming that “enough is enough,” insisting that we must no longer accept any role as “accomplices” to the pain of injustice. At that same event, a youth leader urged all to commit to being a “conduit” of change regardless of our station in life. One action at a time, she claimed, powers change in the world.

At this particular UN event as well as another focused on “open science,” there was little talk of heroism in the conventional sense and more of the need to “co-create,” to blend skills, aspirations and ideas in the service of a less competitive, more equitable, more inclusive world. But it was also clear that the dual threats which these events exposed – racism on the one hand, climate change on the other – demanded action which is both urgent and thoughtful, both inclusive and impactful.

One of the best presentations I heard this week was from Professor Geoffrey Boulton of Edinburgh who reinforced at the “open science” event the importance of “acting early and acting hard” on climate change as well as acting in tandem. He lamented our collective failure to heed lessons on climate change shared by both scientists and community practitioners, their collective and consistent warnings of a slow, “angry” onset of warming. And he even wondered aloud if there is something wrong with us, if we are actually “hard-wired” for the short-term alone?

There may indeed be something wrong with us, but it is something we can still fix in ourselves, indeed that we must fix in ourselves if we are also to fix the threats now closing in around us. For all that we can gratefully learn from the paths chosen by Mandela and other heroes similarly situated, we remain today on a rather somber path, one largely unjust and unsustainable. If the times call for early and determined action, if the times call for us to co-create as “conduits of change,” it might be time for heroism that is less about superhuman and vicariously assessed contributions and more about building a roster of people committed to making and inspiring real change, keeping alive visions of a sustainable future that require many more hands and brains than are now engaged in hope-filled actions; inspiring others to overcome the fear and suspicion to which so many have succumbed and which seems to have maintained at least a good bit of its wide appeal.

If we learned anything during this time of pandemic, it is that heroism in our time takes many forms, wears many garbs, operates in many, often subtle contexts. As our activist youth remind us, the heroes we need now are the ones who make space for others, who support and guide without regard for compensation, who dare pay attention to the aspirations and needs embedded in the people and spaces around them, and who walk the uncertain path towards a collective future that can sustain both our dreams and the life which holds them close.

For those who prefer imaginary heroes to real ones; for those who prefer their heroes dead to alive; or for those who prefer only “complicated and brooding” versions, we must continue to offer up a brand of heroism that we can honor in real time, a heroism that is hopeful and future-oriented, a heroism that is defined not so much by vicarious acts of greatness but by promising paths that we can choose to walk each day, and that we can commit to walk with others.

Tags: climate change, General Assembly, Heroes, Mandela, Racism

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Time Lord: Heeding our Hourglass of Sustainability, Dr. Robert Zuber

18 Jul

Now the time has come. There’s no place to run. Chambers Brothers

They always say time changes things, but you actually have to change them yourself. Andy Warhol

Here we are, trapped in the amber of the moment. There is no why. Kurt Vonnegut

Yesterday is gone. Tomorrow has not yet come. We have only today. Let us begin. Mother Theresa

The future is uncertain but the end is always near. Jim Morrison

The future came and went in the mildly discouraging way that futures do. Neil Gaiman

Time moves slowly but passes quickly. Alice Walker

In an earlier phase of the work of our small organization, we were preoccupied with the development of an Emergency Peace Service (UNEPS), a rapid-response, gender-inclusive mechanism under UN auspices which could respond rapidly and effectively to threats of genocide and other mass atrocities. UNEPS was designed to combat abuses which our current system of conflict response is still unable to address at sufficiently early stages to prevent the long-term damage – to families and communities, to farms and civilian infrastructure – which remain as a horrific legacy of so much armed violence and gross rights violations in our current, famine-stricken, gun-saturated world.

Despite some of the large and unwieldy egos which congregated around this initiative, and despite some persistent disputes over the contingent size and funding mechanisms for such a force, the underlying premises of UNEPS remained sound. It recognized that where response to grave violence and other crises is concerned, time is always of the essence. Prevention is always preferable to resolution in the conflict sphere, and our collective record on matters of prevention is not yet particularly laudable. But once a looming crisis is recognized, there is – or should be – no time to waste. When dealing with threats of mass violence, delay means death and misery. Moreover, the longer a conflict is allowed to fester, the more elusive a negotiated peace or even an adopted cease fire tends to become.

With UNEPS, we often used the analogy of firefighting in our outreach, as firefighters are acutely aware of the need to arrive at fire scenes rapidly and with capacity adequate to the blaze. Any delay in response merely intensifies the threat to both citizens and firefighters, and often ensures that a fire that might have easily been contained turns into a blaze that scorches thousands of acres and uproots life both human and animal. The same logic applies during injury car crashes or when a mother recognizes that her child’s illness is more than a garden-variety cold. In these or other circumstance, emergency response is not a luxury but a priority, one which gives the sick and injured the best chance of a full recovery.

While there is no UNEPS incarnate in the world , the UN system and several of its regional partners have taken on board the importance of rapid reaction, including in both peacekeeping operations (where late arrival endangers civilians and complicates peace prospects) and disaster risk response (where early warning combined with even earlier preparations gives communities the best chance of surviving more frequent, violent storms and other climate shocks). But the UN is also hampered by fungible timelines largely dependent on the will of member states: the will to agree on resolution language with measurable impact; the will to fund the structures and personnel needed to make prevention viable; the will to honor multilateral commitments through dedicated national implementation strategies; the will to ensure an end to impunity for abuses as the best means for preventing their recurrence.

To spend as much time as we do in UN discussions and processes is to participate in a twilight zone of urgency and delay, a place where crises are recognized but invariably subject to the vicissitudes of extended and often intense negotiation, wherein states have the space, if they choose to use it, to both join the consensus on crisis language and impede the consensus on crisis response. We see elements of this “zone” evident in our pandemic response where practical (and funded) responses to the urgent need for “vaccine equity” still fall well-short of our rhetoric. We also see elements of this in the willingness of states to pat themselves on the back for their virtuous commitments to the alleviation of famine and other global threats, commitments which are often not honored in full (and at times not even in part) and which, in any event, represent only small percentages of what we liberally allocate for mass casualty weapons, fossil fuel exploration and other civilization-threatening investments.

What we don’t see nearly as often as we would wish is sufficient progress towards what Kenya’s Minister of Foreign Affairs in the Security Council this past Friday called “an architecture of shared burdens,” a multilateral system made up of what she called “capable states” that both protect their own citizens and contribute more of their national skills and capacities to the global commons.

What else might be implied by this notion of “capable?” In part it refers to states which understand, as DSG Amina Mohammed noted in several venues this week, that the success of our world depends on our ability to localize key commitments, to promote public involvement rather than more state control, to invest in the skills and capacities needed to make our responses to conflict and other global crises more than token, more than piecemeal. “Capable” states recognize when their policies are actually “pushing” people further behind, as noted this week by a Bangladesh professor. Capable states acknowledge, as Niger recently confessed, that our humanitarian responsibilities are often invoked to “remedy the shortcomings” of our human community, that so much of the “need” we seek to address is the product of conflict and climate threats we could do much more to prevent. Capable states also recognize that what the president of ECOSOC referred to as our current “prefect storm” of economic, heath and environmental challenges cannot be resolved in isolation or half-heartedly, nor can we delude ourselves that time alone will heal what we must commit much more to heal ourselves. Capable states know that they must model the norms and behaviors that they seek to promote in others, that an architecture of shared burdens cannot be built on the backs of states which themselves decline to share or which insist on talking more than listening or, for that matter, acting.

And capable states know that our collective clock is ticking, our global hourglass is quickly draining its sand, the metaphorical wolves we have ourselves brought into being are making ample progress in bringing our very house down. Despite some stunning technologies and many hopeful local initiatives, we have allowed threats to our present to flare largely out of control and we can hardly miss their effects in the form of flooding and fires, unprecedented levels of heat and intensity of storms, and a global community that seems often to be in meltdown mode, eager to attack and reluctant to share, eager to exploit and reluctant to respect, eager to withdraw and reluctant to protect.

Pakistan’s Ambassador Akram was right this week to point to a “emerging global consensus” on debt relief, universal vaccination, women’s participation, climate mitigation and adaptation, and ending the digital divide, elements of a consensus that he did much to promote during his ECOSOC presidency and his stewardship of this year’s High Level Political Forum (HLPF). And yet the Ministerial Declaration from the recently adjourned HLPF is a testament as much to the politics of the UN as to an active consensus that can reassure communities in need or distress that their trust in multilateralism remains well-founded.

The representative of Slovenia, speaking on behalf of the European Union, acknowledged as much. Despite helping to beat back amendments to the declaration (proposed mostly by Russia) that would have stymied references to matters as fundamental (to us) as human rights, gender equality and biodiversity protection, the EU statement lamented the absence of a more “action-oriented” document which takes ample responsibility for “building back greener” and vigorously preparing our global society to prevent and address the “future shocks” which are virtually certain to come our way.

And perhaps also to reference in clear and unambiguous terms that the future envisioned in 2015 at the adoption of the Sustainable Development Goals is a long way from realization; and that as a result there is now literally “nowhere to run” from the ubiquitous drought and pandemic variants; from the heatwaves that now stretch to the Arctic and the deadly flooding which impacts communities across the so-called developed world; from the food insecurity that is quickly becoming a discouraging global norm and the violent outbursts from people with malevolent intent or who simply, if mistakenly, see no other pathway to express themselves.

As we learned from our own, uneven UNEPS experience, sound policy is about more than saying the right things but is about ensuring timely and capable response to threats which, as we now see in this global moment, are only becoming harder to tame. Despite some good efforts at global level underscored by innovative technology and abundant data, we often seem “trapped in the amber of the moment.” Our hourglass has almost drained, and yet we continue to squander precious time to demonstrate the courage and cooperation needed to free ourselves and our constituents from our largely self-imposed constraints. Time may seem to move slowly, but our chance at a sustainable future is passing much too quickly. We cannot allow another moment to drain away. Let us begin in greater earnest to reverse current trends while the opportunity to do so still beckons.

Tags: capability, sustainable development, time

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Brave Heart: A Mindset for Sustainable Development, Dr. Robert Zuber

11 Jul

Solidarity isn’t merely a task, it is a pleasure and the best assurance of security. Erich Fromm

Sometimes it is nothing more than gritting your teeth through pain, and the work of every day, the slow walk toward a better life. Veronica Roth

For if they come for you in the morning, they will be coming for us that night. James Baldwin

It is curious that physical courage should be so common in the world and moral courage so rare. Mark Twain

Our minds must be as ready to move as capital is, to trace its paths and to imagine alternative destinations. Chandra Talpade Mohanty

The moment we begin to fear the opinions of others and hesitate to tell the truth that is in us, and from motives of policy are silent when we should speak, the divine floods of light and life no longer flow into our souls. Elizabeth Cady Stanton

Solidarity is not discovered by reflection but created. Richard Rorty

In a week that witnessed renewals of armed violence, assassination attempts and successes, and heat excesses oozing from virtually every pore of the earth’s membrane, the UN met in the context of the High Level Political Forum (HLPF) to consider a way forward on our lagging sustainable development (SDG) commitments.

In largely virtual formats, figures of global prominence from government, private investment houses, universities and a bevy of civil society organizations shared their sense of what was possible to achieve now given a world still struggling with COVID-19 variants and vaccine inequities. Despite the constraints imposed by time and (occasionally) technology, several plenary discussions and (especially) side events made substantial contributions to our search for a common, viable way forward on issues from poverty and governance to food security and climate change, reminding us of the struggles of the moment but also summoning us to take bolder steps, to embrace bolder measures, to build a healthier, more sustainable world while the opportunity to do so still presents itself.

As one might imagine, the pandemic occupied center-stage, with the Foreign Minister of Barbados reminding the opening session of the HLPF that vaccine access (the “what”) is key to allowing tourism-based economies in the Caribbean and elsewhere to at least begin to recover. But in a theme recurring throughout the week, the “how” of equitable vaccine distribution and access remained elusive. As that same session, the World Health Organization’s Dr. Tedros chimed in that in the absence of “local health security,” global health security and other SDG commitments will surely remain “off track.” But Tedros also highlighted “profound gaps of sharing” in our world and urged efforts towards a “pandemic treaty” to identify and address new pathogens before they are allowed to replicate the current levels of social and economic ruin to which many government officials this week consistently pointed.

As others also reminded the digital UN audience, the current pandemic might be the most recent, major impediment to SDG implementation, but it is hardly the only one. Indeed, as OXFAM’s director and others made clear, the tendency to “privilege private wealth over the public good” was in force well before the pandemic. COVID-19 did not create the food insecurity that ravages millions under threat from climate change and armed violence. It did not invent what was noted throughout the week as the “shrinking civic space” which endangers journalists and civil society leaders alike and allows disinformation to flourish. It did not create pervasive discriminations of race and culture which Costa Rica’s Ambassador Chan noted perpetuates the existence of “second class citizens” and impedes progress towards equality, let alone genuine “equity.” And it certainly did not invent the gross inequalities of power and income which have only grown more grotesque during the pandemic. As noted by the World Food Program’s David Beasley, as many as 41 million people in our world are now facing grave food insecurity which could be alleviated if we could only find the $6 billion dollars to do so, a mere 0.2% of the $28.7 trillion dollars in global wealth generated last year despite pandemic limitations.

The pandemic, as many have noted this week, has also become a “cover” of sorts for steps that we know we need to take but now have an “excuse” not to do so. Many during the HLPF, including VP of the Economic and Social Council, Mexico’s Ambassador Sandoval, called again for urgent action on matters from “decent work” to “full digital connectivity” which have long been on the UN agenda. Beyond the HLPF, a discussion this week, in the General Assembly on the UN’s global counter-terror strategy yielded insights from many, including from the Malaysian representative who advocated for the creation of “mental firewalls” against the growing (and equally well-known) ability of extremists to radicalize its youth. Terrorists have not taken time off during this pandemic, as many delegations noted, but our responses to these threats, as Afghanistan warned, have largely remained “static.”

So what do we do now? How do we move from the “what” that we well know to the “how” which continues to elude us in more than a few key areas of sustainable development and which is more urgent with each passing day, let alone with each passing HLPF? What is missing in our individual and collective approaches? To reiterate, we know that we have agendas of longstanding, some of which have become more severe during the pandemic, and which require urgent and practical attention. We know that we must do more to eliminate corruption and illicit financial flows. We also know that we must do more to open avenues of concessional finance and relieve the debt burdens of the small island and least developed states, to respond to the call of Seychelles president RamKalawan for assistance on problems that “everyone knows exist” and for which “we should not have to beg on our knees.” We know that we need to push back harder on violence against children and schools, on our stubborn digital divides, on disinformation by climate and COVID deniers, on threats to progress on rights for women, persons with disabilities and cultural minorities, on the seductive messaging of terror groups, on trade-related and other regulations that continue to privilege the privileged. And we know, as Italy’s Minister intoned, that we have an obligation to “rethink” governance and public institutions at all levels, ensuring that we can sustain peacebuilding in conflict and climate-affected states and create “people-centered justice systems” which have a real chance to ensure accountability for the grave crimes which we continue to perpetuate against one another.

It is a large agenda, as large as the SDGs themselves, a test for the global community unlike any we have taken on in our history. And it will continue to require more from each of us, including the will to renounce what Pakistan’s Ambassador Akram (ECOSOC president) referred to as “wishful thinking,” the belief that these problems will somehow resolve themselves without deep and effective partnership-based policies. A similar theme was invoked by South African during the HLPF side event on racial discrimination, reminding us that laws “can only go so far” towards the eradication of racism in the absence of complementary, supportive social structures.

And complementary, supportive peoples. Those of you who still read these posts surely know where this is going – a plea for bravery and solidarity to embrace the challenges of the moment, challenges that will do us in unless we find in ourselves and each other the energies and capacities needed to reverse a bevy of current, worrying trends.

Fortunately, the HLPF seems to have embraced this need as well. This week, Under-Secretary Liu advocated a “global response plan” for the pandemic. UNICEF’s director Fore urged a “shared purpose” to enhance the welfare of children now suffering in multiple ways. The IMF’s Managing Director Georgieva invoked the need for “bravery to move towards the light” and stay focused in our pursuit of sustainable development. Dr. Tedros and many others called for a narrowing of our “sharing gaps.” Costa Rica’s Chan highlighted the benefits of pluralism, noting that “each new culture introduced, each new language spoken, makes us richer.” Tunisia expressed the hope that a recent Security Council agreement on Syria humanitarian assistance reflects a fresh and “common will” to resolve conflict and related political impasses. And Mexico’s Sandoval aptly summarized a trend across this HLPF, noting that there is “big hope for the world if human solidarity prevails!”

One could well ask, What is going on here? It seems that the mindset much conducive to multilateralism is coming out of a bit of hibernation in helpful and productive ways. Yes, there is hope for the world if solidarity prevails. Yes, there is hope for the world if we all take responsibility for fixing what we can, healing who we can, and doing both by reaching out to others for whom the “essential blocks of social protection” are blocks we largely have in common. Beyond resolutions and legal frameworks, beyond the stale rhetoric sometimes characteristic of UN spaces, virtual and otherwise, such hopeful solidarity requires a different type of bravery, a different breed of investment, a commitment to hearts and minds more open, honest and engaged than we have allowed them to be in quite some time; a commitment as well to pick up the pace of our often “slow walk” towards a better life, to address challenges at the speed and in the multiplicity of forms in which they now appear to us.

Let’s run with this one before we change our minds, before we return to that space where physical courage is abundant but moral courage is rare, before we frighten ourselves into inertia by the energy and “grit” needed to generate “alternative destinations,” create greater solidarity with the entire natural order, and dare speak the truths we know to speak. As Fromm suggests, solidarity may well be a pleasure, but it is also key to our security in a world where security for many millions is clearly at a premium. To grasp it, we must dare to grasp each other, to brave the holding of hands and affirm in practical terms the interconnectivity which lies at the heart of all life, including our own.

Tags: COVID-19, HLPF, SDGs, solidarity

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Internal Medicine: The Progress on Peace We Make and Need, Dr. Robert Zuber

4 Jul

Follow and improve the light before the darkness overtakes you. John Fox

Knowing is not enough; we must apply. Leonardo da Vinci

Your new life will be tinged with urgency, as though you’re digging out the victims of an avalanche. Douglas Coupland

Get it right today, for today will never come again. Seyi Ayoola

You cannot prove your worth by bylines and busyness. Katelyn S. Irons

Don’t forget that people are dying in hundreds every day, hurry up, don’t take time. Abraham Guesh

The last quote from Abraham Guesh was one of dozens of comments posted on our twitter feed to our reporting on Friday’s Security Council discussion on the complex situation which has long been unfolding in Tigray. At this meeting, called by the US and hosted by France, UN Secretariat briefers highlighted the multi-polar politics and dire, violence-inflamed humanitarian needs experienced by many people living in this northernmost part of Ethiopia. For us, but much more for our commenters, it was largely a discouraging session.

In the Chamber, sharp differences on how the Council should proceed on Tigray, indeed even if the Council should proceed at all, were major takeaways from this session. The Ambassadors of Russia and China were insistent that, with due recognition of the need for humanitarian assistance and “political dialogue, Tigray was essentially an “internal matter” for the government of Ethiopia and its self-selected African and global partners to work out. China specifically expressed the concern that a failure of the Council to carefully “calibrate” response would run the risk of “making matters worse” in a place where “worse” is, quite frankly, a bit challenging to fathom.

For others on the Council, the impacts on the people of Tigray from eight long months of violent clashes, climate change, locust plagues and other threats of existential proportions were of primary concern. Led by the delegations of Ireland and Kenya, a focus was on urgently addressing what is now a longstanding humanitarian catastrophe as well as on the “tools” both within and outside the African continent that can be utilized to promote an end to the conflict and then, once peace is restored, more effectively help that region “heal from violence and deprivation.”

But as is the case with many sessions in this genre, it was not at all clear how or if the full Council was prepared to “hurry up” and do its part to open those pathways to healing. The US Ambassador, hosting a press briefing prior to the formal Council meeting, alleged value in letting conflict parties in Tigray know that “they are being watched.” Fair enough, but since when does “watching” in and of itself deter the violent abuses which are the precursor to humanitarian disaster? The Council is ostensibly “watching” abuses unfold in Syria, in Yemen, in Myanmar, in Palestine, in Libya, even in Cameroon. Is there reason to contend that Council “watchfulness” causes abusers to pull back, to reconsider, even to modulate their aggressions? And if not, are there other internal measures that we might be overlooking (or misusing) that can address violence at earlier stages without, as China noted, “making matters worse?”

Following this Council meeting on Tigray, our twitter account literally exploded with commentary from Africans that in some ways mirrored the Council discussion itself. Some were highly supportive of Ethiopian government actions and expressly thanked the Russians for having their back and affirming the “internal” nature of the conflict. Others pointed to what they (and not without reason) interpret as a full-on genocide to which the international community has, at best, been slow to respond. Still others focused attention on the access needed to more quickly and effectively alleviate humanitarian miseries which have festered and intensified over many weeks while also creating waves of human displacement, mostly into the Sudan. Some even raised the prospect of political independence for Tigray.

Amidst this cacophony of political and humanitarian concerns and remedial options, the common threads of response were on the need for peace and the urgency of global action. Even those touting the “internal” nature of this dispute understood that recovery and reconstruction will require assistance from beyond national borders. The politics of conflict may often be internal, but the consequences of conflict are not, including in the form of displaced lives and ruined infrastructure. Moreover, what does “urgency” mean to a conflict which is 8 months old and many more months in the making? If peace is the condition for effective humanitarian response, and speaker after speaker at this Council meeting (and on our twitter feed) affirmed as much, how can we better overcome the Council’s internal political divisions in order to respond more effectively and rapidly to escalating political conflicts within member states that continue to set off fires with deadly consequences across the world?

More and more, it seems, there are two factors at work which are in parallel creating unfathomable heartbreak for communities and credibility issues for the UN. One, as already noted, is the tendency to see conflicts as “internal matters” that Council decisions cannot resolve but can make worse. The other matter is related to existing levels of trust, trust that members of the Council are able and willing to put their own national political interests aside to do what is best for states on the verge (or in the midst) of conflict, that they are as committed to delivering on peace as they seem to be on ensuring humanitarian assistance when the peace, yet again and for a variety of reasons, fails to hold. It is also important to note in this context that Ethiopia is only one of many African states tiring of seemingly endless Council deliberations on African peace and security which to some smacks of a fresh and unwelcome iteration of colonial interference, despite claims by former colonial powers and other intervention-minded states that they are now “honest brokers” on peace which they surely have not always been in prior times.

Earlier on Friday, at the Integration Segment of the Economic and Social Council, the Vice-President of ECOSOC, Ambassador Sandoval of Mexico, delivered some kind and hopeful remarks seeking to remind his UN colleagues that our policy “must have a human face,” and that we must commit in practical terms to whatever changes we need to make in order to deliver on our promises to sustainable development, promises which are not only focused on poverty reduction, water access and food security, but on forms of governance (including at the UN) that can deliver on the protection of human rights, the provision of justice, and the promotion of peace, and to do so with proper levels of thoughtfulness and urgency, We are not always digging out bodies under avalanches, metaphorically-speaking, but there is much misery in our world, most all of it existing beyond our policy bubbles, and we must ensure that our delivery architecture at national and global levels remains ready and able to prevent crises or at least address them in the shortest possible time-frames, certainly shorter than the 8 months the people of Tigray have been crying for relief.

But the membership of ECOSOC knows, as indeed we all should recognize, the extent to which the silencing of guns is indispensable to the fulfilling of other commitments to sustainable development and successful humanitarian access. Members equally recognize that given current levels of armed threat, stoked in part by what appears to be growing levels of global distrust in the motives of our institutional system of security maintenance, it is no small matter to enable conflict hotspots to be allowed to cool, and to ensure that the coals of conflict are thoroughly raked such that a recurrence of armed violence is no longer an option. But this is our job. This is how we have chosen to earn our keep.

To my mind, such tasks are largely internal affairs, not in the jurisdictional sense but in the cultural one. As we push states (and offer them capacity support) to honor Charter commitments including to the protection of their citizens, our multilateral system and especially its Security Council must discern how to “prove its worth” to an increasingly incredulous global community, including to a growing number of states within the body of the UN. It must also discern how to engage states on their protection responsibilities in ways that do not undermine national and regional efforts nor pour flammable liquid on already raging fires. And it must be able to demonstrate, as a matter of its own internal growth, that the faces of conflict victims, the sounds of despair as lives and communities are ravaged, are essential to policy progress in ways that national politics and personal careers simply are not.

Indeed, as a matter of principle and accountability, we must all work in our various contexts to “improve the light” such that the darkness of violence afflicting too many in our world can finally be lifted. This is why we’re here. This is why we have made the choices we’re made. This is what we have given threatened constituencies a right to expect of us, that despite our own internal limitations we are determined to get peace “right” and that we are determined to get it right today, the only day that really matters to children and families, in Tigray and elsewhere, attempting to survive under a dark cloud of armed threat.

Tags: armed violence, service delivery, Tigray, trust

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