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Hack Attack: Meeting this Cyber-Insecure Moment, Dr. Robert Zuber

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The good we secure for ourselves is precarious and uncertain until it is secured for all of us and incorporated into our common life. Jane Addams

In the underworld, reality itself has elastic properties and is capable of being stretched into different definitions of the truth. Roderick Vincent

It must be, I thought, one of the race’s most persistent and comforting hallucinations to trust that “it can’t happen here” — that one’s own time and place is beyond cataclysm. John Wyndham

And you all know, security is mortals’ chiefest enemy. William Shakespeare

It takes 20 years to build a reputation and few minutes of cyber-incident to ruin it. Stephane Nappo

Hackers find more success with organizations where employees are under appreciated, over worked and under paid. James Scott

Sometimes children do not realize by how fragile a thread their security hangs. Mary Balogh

We are now well into six months of a pandemic that continues to evolve in both its biological and social impacts. Scientists continue to learn more about transmission modalities, treatment options and the short and long-term health consequences of infection. Moreover, their investigations have revealed the mental health effects associated with our COVID-necessitated social isolation, from physically-distanced partners to children who stare at computer screens much of the day, pausing only to eat their lunch at an all-too-familiar kitchen table devoid of the happy noises of their friends and other classmates.

For many people I know the novelty of endless zoom meetings and other internet-tethered communications necessitated by this pandemic has long worn off. We recognize the huge advantage that some of us in this world enjoy in the form of an ability to hold most of our own world together thanks to an abundance of digital access. But there is fatigue and frustration as well, fatigue that some of the temporary accommodations we have made seem destined to become permanent; frustration that the inequalities and injustices now plaguing our societies seem destined to grow wider as our digital divides persist and our digital vulnerabilities grow.

Such vulnerabilities are related in part to the nature of our security-challenged digital playing field but more to our own “nature” as human beings, specifically our uncanny ability to “repurpose” resources that can enhance human possibility to ends which are self-interested at best and nefarious at worst.

Indeed, internet-based social media in our time has become something of a gold standard for such perversely repurposed resources. The same platforms that allow us to stay connected to loved ones in the far-flung corners of the world; the same platforms that allow us to conduct “business” that we can’t now conduct over coffee or lunch; the same platforms that allow us to weigh in on political and social issues in ways we could not otherwise; such platforms have also become portals for the economic exploitation of disenfranchised persons and the virtual obliteration of personal privacy, as well as for the often-anonymous expression of every conceivable social grievance, conspiracy theory, bullying and character assassination, and incitement to hatred and violence.

I can’t speak for others, but there is no other place in my twittered life where I am exposed to nearly as much vile rhetoric, unchained egos and ideas which have more in common with propaganda than an honest (and dare we say humble) search for truth. The fact that we have “made up our minds” about so many things frequently translates online into seductive sales pitches and threats against those whose minds are made up in a different direction. We are all so smart, it seems, so full of righteous indignation, so willing to jump on any opinion that confirms our ill-conceived prejudices rather than explore ideas which might help us find a richer path. And in a time which longs for those who can sift through the debris enabled by ideological bubbles filled with people willing to ask the first question but never the next one, what we have encouraged instead are people too comfortable with partisan security, anxious to use the internet to hurl critiques and condemnation but not to reflect and discern, not to strategize about ways to narrow the many chasms that we too have had a role in creating.

As most competent cyber security experts would surely confirm, there is digital danger in this moment for all of us, a moment when hacking and other online manipulations are directed at a wider range of personal and physical targets, and where we as a people seem often to be burying our collective heads in the sand while suppressing our will to “seek the good for all,” to address with conviction common and interconnected threats and not only the ones that challenge our tribe.

One of the positive developments at the UN in recent years has been its attention to such common security threats and related abuses associated with online portals. In many parts of the UN system – from the General Assembly’s First Committee and Group of Governmental Experts to the Office of Counter-Terrorism (OCT) and the Counter-Terrorism Executive Directorate (CTED), the UN has for some time been seized of the many security challenges associated with these portals, from disruptions to medical facilities and other civilian infrastructure to the luring of vulnerable young people into extremist movements and soliciting the resources needed to perpetuate their activities.

These concerns have recently found their way into Security Council deliberations with leadership from cyber-sophisticated Estonia and current Council president Indonesia. States are coming to realize that weapons and other physical manifestations of our violent inclinations are only one piece of the international security puzzle we are still not doing enough to solve. After all, medical facilities can be disabled by hackers as well as by air strikes. Power and water infrastructure can be rendered inoperative by cyber criminals as well as by missile launches. Weapons can be neutralized (or even launched) through cyber manipulations as through direct military commands.

This week, officials from the International Committee of the Red Cross, the UN Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs and the UN’s Institute for Disarmament Research briefed the Security Council on the “diverse and devastating destructive effects from cyber operations” on infrastructure and other public goods ranging from health care and other “vital services” to finance and (of particular concern in the US at the moment) elections. And as the European Union warned, the “malicious intent” behind cyber-attacks does more than damage targets – it raises general levels of hostility and mistrust in what St. Vincent and the Grenadines reminded is our increasingly globalized world. And given the times we are in and what the Netherlands rightly maintained is our “unprecedented dependence” on the internet, there is no reason for any of us to assume that a digital “cataclysm” will somehow, if by magic, bypass us.

We need to make sure that we are addressing the threat in full not in part. To do so, we would do well to hold together what appear to be three pillars of cyber-concern. The UN and its many partners know that we can bring more resources and expertise to bear in fighting malicious infrastructure hacking; but also to the task of mediating a social media environment which has fast become a swamp of narcissism, bigotry, conspiracy theory, extremist ideology, and “trollers” ruining reputations just for the fun of it.

But there is another piece to this puzzle, another responsibility raised by Russia and other states in the Council this week but communicated quite succinctly by Costa Rica – that while we are increasing cyber-space security we must also close a digital divide that robs so many of their potential: robbing community farmers and medical practitioners of the information they need to grow more and heal better; robbing children of the ability to maintain some vestige of educational progress and social connection without exposing themselves, their teachers and their families to a potentially deadly virus.

I was particularly moved this week by the image of two young children, sitting on the curb of a fast-food restaurant, trying desperately to secure enough band-width to log in to instruction that other classmates could easily access from home. This is but one small instance of a digital divide that is expanding not shrinking and that (even as I write) is relegating perhaps millions of children to abandon the schooling their communities fought so hard to provide, the schooling these children will need in order to hold their own in this uncertain, unequal and threat-saturated world.

The social and security consequences of this persistent divide constitute a digital threat as grave as any other. We have more than enough expertise at hand to both responsibly secure and fully enable access to digital spaces. There is no time like the present to put that expertise to work.

Tags: cyber bulllying, Cyber Security, digital divide, hacking

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Playing Taps: Honoring Beleaguered Humanitarian Responders, Dr. Robert Zuber

23 Aug

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A ship is safe in harbor, but that’s not what ships are for. John A. Shedd

I have gone ahead despite the pounding in the heart that says: turn back. Erica Jong

Ultimately, thickened skin leaves you numb, incapable of feeling the highs and lows of life. It leaves you rough like a rock and just as inanimate. Michael Soll

If you want relief from pain just strive to touch more of every part of life. Bryant McGill

The Doctor knew exactly what to do when he heard horrible screaming – run towards it and help. A.L. Kennedy

May we always be burdened with thinking of the suffering of others, for that is what it means to be human. Kamand Kojouri

He presented justice as a psychological relief. Jill Leovy

This past Wednesday was World Humanitarian Day as declared by the UN, a time to reflect on those who, unlike most of the rest of us, run towards the screams of the distressed and unfolding emergencies rather than away from them; who bring skills and determination to often-complex crises that make the survival of persons in grave need more likely even as they make their own survival less so.

For persons, like myself, who now spend too much of our lives “tapping” on a keyboard and too little time immersed in the multi-dimensional struggles of real persons in real time, we can experience bits of lingering sadness that are hard to shake. My social media accounts are filled with stories of misery that humans insist on inflicting on each other, lives sacrificed to the pursuit and maintenance of power, victims of a wide range of causes including and especially armed conflict but also what the Dominican Republic (and other Security Council members) referred to this week as a “triple threat,” (to Somalia in this instance, but applicable to other peoples and places as well) — COVID infections, climate-induced flooding/drought and locust plagues.

From Cameroon to Yemen and from Afghanistan to Syria, the carnage that fills my various feeds and those of other “keyboard tappers” can be hard to process. Moreover, the institutions we have collectively entrusted to manage conflict threats have succeeded in little more than “baby steps” towards measures that can ease humanitarian burdens for both those who provide relief and especially for those who require it. We often fail to prevent conflict or stem it in its earliest stages. We often fail to heed the climate-related warnings that make it harder and harder for subsistence farmers to subsist and coastal islands to survive. We often fail to protect children from violent extremism and abuse with no effective plan for how to manage the trauma that will impact their decisionmaking long after their surface wounds have healed. We often fail to swap out militarized responses to community unrest with more nuanced approaches to policing that better balance community mediation, conflict prevention, last-resort coercion and a commitment to the justice which is its own “psychological relief.”

These diverse and persistent ills represent cries of pain, injustice and deprivation that cause some to close their hearts and others to leap forward in support. In this latter category are those providing provisions for those displaced by storms or violence and now confined to makeshift shelter; the bomb squads carefully defusing explosives placed in public squares; the medical care provided in facilities shaking from bomb blasts; the drivers of convoys running a gauntlet of roadside threats including well-disguised explosive devices; the peacekeepers attempting to keep the peace even when there is clearly no peace to keep; the police effecting emergency rescue of persons trapped in cars involved in horrific crashes or sinking quickly to the bottom of lakes; the military units sent in to free victims from the control of terrorists; the NGOs risking their own lives to ensure that persons traumatized under rubble are freed or that persons with disabilities can escape harm once the warning sirens sound.

We do not do enough to honor this work even if we don’t always approve of every tactic deployed, even as we feel compelled to echo sentiments of the UN’s Counter-Terrorism Executive Directorate this past week that all efforts to address terror threats and even provide support for victims must be more cognizant of obligations to respect and uphold human rights. Those who run towards people in crisis have a special place in our hearts, especially as some of us “tappers” are no longer equipped to respond to crisis-related need in the way that we once might have done.

And yet in this time of unresolved violence, insufficiently addressed climate threats and a pandemic that shows little sign of vanishing, we fear that too many have allowed ourselves to become “rough like a rock,” blaming our legitimately-frustrating personal circumstances for the decision to touch less of life, not more, to listen a bit too much to the “pounding” in our hearts rather than to the cries of those whose rights and aspirations have been steamrolled by power-obsessed governments, their overly-muscular security forces, and the economic, social and health-related unrest that are keeping all of us on razor’s edge.

It would take more than an annual day to sufficiently appreciate the motives of those who respond first and best to the crises that beset so many in our human family. At the same time, we must acknowledge that such crises seem to be expanding, not shrinking; that the numbers and needs of people in distress are growing, not diminishing. For all the remarkably courageous work being done by those who care more when too many of the rest of us could care less, there seems to be no end in sight to the burdens that global circumstances place on these responders. We create food insecurity faster than we can deliver provisions. We create war victims faster than we can provide physical and psychological healing. We traumatize children faster than we can guarantee their safety (or their education for that matter). For all the metaphorical babies we pull from the river, more and more are being thrown in at its source.

One gets the clear sense in these times that our hero/heroine responders are waging a struggle destined to be forever exasperating, doing what they can to rescue populations from oblivion while policymakers and those of us who “play taps” around them largely fail to stem the deadly tide, to remediate the injustice, to care sufficiently for those enduring what UN Special Envoy Pedersen this week referred to as “mass indignities” inflicted too often in large measure through our own collective negligence.

At its most appropriate, the courage of humanitarian responders should facilitate the plugging of temporary gaps until those with power and influence establish and implement the norms and laws that can ensure longer-term relief. However, such responders and their clients have largely been consigned to a Godot-like wait for policies to take effect which can ensure that our current emergencies have an actual end point.

As such there is still work for those of us who perhaps “tap” too much and respond too timidly. For it is clear, to me at least, that honoring humanitarian and other first responders is in large measure about reducing the burdens which often overwhelm their craft. From mask wearing and other counter-COVID measures to mitigate the strain on overwhelmed hospital workers to more women-led mediation efforts to transform community conflict before it graduates into armed violence, there are many burden-reduction strategies we can help to identify that offer hope to besieged persons and their care-givers. But we must also insist on more from political leadership, including more urgency on conflict and climate, on poverty and biodiversity, threats that already strain humanitarian and peacebuilding responses to their breaking point.

We “tappers” in our mostly safe harbors indeed have an important role here, albeit a subordinate one: to insist that governments and policymakers cease misappropriating humanitarian assistance as an excuse to ignore their urgent peace and climate responsibilities, urging leaders to do much more to keep all those metaphorical babies from being thrown the river in the first place. After all, doctors working in makeshift clinics cannot make the bombing cease. Convoy drivers cannot heal the climate that now steals crops and livelihoods. Peacekeepers and aid workers cannot force governments and non-state actors to fairly and expeditiously honor peace agreements.

We are probably getting all we can expect from our first responders and humanitarian workers. However, we still have a right to expect more from our political leadership at national and multilateral levels. Security Council members this past week discussed in the context of Syria whether cross-border closures or sanctions were the primary cause of the misery of Syrians. The true answer of course is a decade of horrific armed violence which neither sanctions nor cross-border relief has the capacity to resolve.

Thus we “tappers” must play our role in ensuring that expectations for sustainable peace take the form of tangible policies to bring relief for besieged peoples, offering communities both a safer and more prosperous path forward and granting some well-deserved respite for the humanitarians who have put so much on the line to give communities that chance.

Tags: armed conflict, climate, first responders, Humanitarian Response, United Nations

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Mail Merge: Electoral Integrity as Peacebuilding Responsibility, Dr. Robert Zuber

16 Aug

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Strange as it may seem, I still hope for the best, even though the best, like an interesting piece of mail, so rarely arrives, and even when it does it can be lost so easily. Lemony Snicket

If it takes the entire army and navy to deliver a postal card in Chicago, that card will be delivered. Grover Cleveland

But as soon as it is in back of this partition, or in a mail box, a magical transformation occurs; and anybody who now should willfully purloin it, or obstruct its trip in any way, will find prison doors awaiting him. Ernest Vincent Wright

I do not follow politicians on Twitter; if they want to lie to me, it will cost them a stamp. Carmine Savastano

I’ve always felt there is something sacred in a piece of paper that travels the earth from hand to hand, head to head, heart to heart. Robert Michael Pyle

You got to stick to the bridge that carries you across. Marjorie Kinnan Rawlings

It was a relatively quiet week at the UN though not within some UN member states where an increasingly anxious global public could be seen on the streets in large numbers demanding leadership change in Belarus, political reform in Thailand, and upcoming elections in the US and other countries that can pass basic tenets of fairness and integrity.

Life inside the UN bubble this week was punctuated by a preventable controversy over a potential extension by the UN Security Council of the arms embargo against Iran. A resolution circulated by the US, which received little support from other Council members during a Friday afternoon vote, was essentially an energy-wasting effort to manipulate the terms of an agreement (JCPOA) with Iran which most Council members sought to preserve and which the US had already renounced.

There was also an important Security Council discussion, hosted by Indonesia’s Minister of Foreign Affairs, on the various ways in which the COVID-19 pandemic has impacted peacebuilding efforts by the UN and a range of other actors, people who are active at all stages of the conflict cycle, who are concerned both to prevent conflict and minimize its often-devastating consequences, and whose multiple activities — including efforts to preserve electoral integrity — have been complicated by a pandemic which has added layers of response complexity, extended the miseries of the most vulnerable, and provided cover for governments which would roll-back social progress and civil rights or (in the case of certain non-state actors) step up assaults on communities and authorities.

For those unfamiliar with (or put-off by) UN nomenclature, it is important to state why we have long encouraged holistic conflict responses under a peacebuilding banner. Part of this commitment has been purely practical. As the Security Council has been unable to adequately address conflict threats or sufficiently broaden the range of its attentions to the many causes and consequences of global violence, it has been the UN’s peacebuilding apparatus – primarily the Peacebuilding Commission – which has steadily left the post-conflict “ghetto” to which it had once been confined to now provide important and meaningful counsel to the Security Council itself but also to UN member states facing security threats of a complexity they simply cannot resolve alone.

But beyond the ability to improve the UN’s lagging capacity for meaningful conflict response, the UN’s peacebuilding architecture has broadened our understanding of the many causes and manifestations of conflict threat; but also of the diverse actors — including so many persons in our communities and civil society organizations — who have a clear and direct stake in policies and practices that can both silence the guns and ensure conditions conducive to sustainable peace such that communities will have no compelling rationale for resorting to weapons in the future.

Implementing commitments to examine the diverse causes and consequences of conflict as well as to promote inclusive participation by all with the skills to contribute to sustainable peace represents a tall task under the best of circumstances. The “accompaniment” of states under a conflict cloud urged on Wednesday by SG Guterres is not a simple matter nor is it one (as Germany noted) that is currently being guided by thorough and honest assessments of our responses to the current pandemic and related challenges. The Council has not yet, as underscored by the Dominican Republic, enabled a peacebuilding architecture fully inclusive of the skills and aspirations of women, youth and cultural minorities. The Council has not yet, as noted by Vietnam, extended accompaniment sufficiently to persons with disabilities or to refugees displaced by famine, climate change, political disenfranchisement or armed conflict. The Council has not yet, as was noted at this session by former SG Ban ki-Moon, done enough to resolve our massive digital divide or promote a global cease fire that could make our pandemic and peacebuilding responses more effective.

We are not, as warned by Saint Vincent and the Grenadines, keeping a sufficiently “watchful eye” on how global challenges in this time are both interconnected and often accelerating. And while numerous Council members rightfully expressed concerns that terrorist and criminal elements are taking advantage of our current pandemic-stoked confusion to incite violence and sow hatred, there was little discussion of how otherwise “legitimate” governments are using what Belgium referred to as the “soaring” personal and institutional consequences of COVID as cover for security measures and policy changes that are anti-democratic at best and outright authoritarian at worst.

We certainly are feeling that negative energy here in the “host state.” Threats to our enfranchisement as citizens – including the basic integrity of our elections – are well underway as the domestic iteration of our global pandemic shows no signs of slowing or even embracing the best, if evolving, scientific and medical expertise. In a few short days this week, we have been more efficient in hauling away postal boxes and disabling mail sorting machines than in ensuring timely COVID test results or civil rights for protesters, “efficient” moves intended to manipulate election results in broad daylight.

Much has been written recently about the dismantling of a once-proud service that is particularly essential for rural residents and those dependent on the mail for medicines and other essential supplies; a service which also has long been symbolic of a government that knew it had to earn public trust. Part of that “earning” took the form of what has become “old school” reliability, the insistence that what was entrusted to agencies such as the postal service represented an almost sacred commitment duly upheld by those tasked with delivery (including by me in two earlier years) and which was not ever to be misrepresented as the province of any singular political interest.

These days, it seems, everything in our lives has been claimed –and often defaced — by one political interest or another. Thus it seemed a bit ironic that as the post office is being cut off at the knees, it has issued a stamp (see above) to commemorate 100 years of US women’s suffrage, a reminder of what has been a long and often painful journey to enfranchise women not only as voters but as leaders and policymakers, and not only in the US but in too many other UN member states. As the postal infrastructure of this country continues to unravel and even as more women (and women of color) struggle to grasp their rightful places in public policy, it remains crystal clear that the struggle for enfranchisement has not ended, that we remain buffeted by threats to civic dignity and civil peace perhaps even more grotesque than the pandemic itself.

It is a small symbol in the grand scheme of things, to be sure, but after a good conversation yesterday with our colleague, Lisa Berkeley, I think we can use the suffrage stamp to help reinforce a peacebuilding-relevant linkage between electoral protection and women’s enfranchisement. As such I would urge anyone who can do so to visit your Post Office, buy as many of these particular stamps as you are able, and then use them liberally on post office services, including letters and bills, that you still feel comfortable entrusting to our nefariously-disabled and reliability-impeded postal infrastructure.

In addition, having once engaged that culture first hand, I can thankfully attest that the US postal service remains a responsibility of government filled with people committed to crossing bridges of reliability, people who still believe in the sacredness of the documents that travel the world and bind its inhabitants; people who understand (even viscerally) that a pandemic (or other crisis) must never become an excuse for disenfranchised citizens, politicized public services and abuses of fundamental rights. Until our leaders get this message, clearly and unequivocally, we would do well to exercise all remedial measures — symbolic, legal and legislative –still remaining at our common disposal.

Tags: COVID-19, enfranchisement, Security Council, voting

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Generation C: Minding the Catastrophes Encircling our Children’s Lives, Dr. Robert Zuber

9 Aug

the-sky-is-falling.jpg (463×308)

It was like we had known all along that the sky was going to fall and then it fell and we pretended to be surprised. Elin Hilderbrand

Sometimes catastrophes split you in half and even if all the pieces are there, they might not ever fit back together. Julie Murphy

Sooner or later the world comes to its senses, but oh the damage that has been done. John Kramer

Some days punch us in the gut so hard it seems we can feel the whole universe gasp with despair. Curtis Tyrone Jones

It’s a catastrophe to be without a voice. E.B. White

The mind couldn’t think about the End of the World all the time. It needed the occasional break, a romp through the trivial. Neal Stephenson

One of the pitfalls of this policy business is that we are now drowning in the “crises” that we are tasked to identify. Everywhere you turn, there is one more manifestation of our lack of solidarity with each other, another blow to the views maintained by some (us included) that human beings are still capable of choosing life over death, growth over destruction, cooperation over nationalism and unchecked narcissism. And yet there are those times when we simply do not treat our crises with sufficient urgency, seemingly more worried about our talking points or funding streams than actually solving the problems most directly relevant to our roles and mandates.

Regardless, it was difficult for any of us to miss the urgency embedded in this week of many catastrophes just ended. For the past few days, we have been beset by some stark and painful images, some a clear consequence of human neglect but also a harbinger of a future that we are collectively not approaching well at present, one that cannot offer much comfort either to children or to those tasked with guiding and educating them.

In case you were taking a vacation this week from the news to concentrate on family or “romp through the trivial,” allow me to remind you of some of what we have done to ourselves in this most recent time. We have now reached an ominous threshold of 20 million known COVID infections worldwide – 5 million in the US alone – with most medical experts fearing that the number of actual cases (and spreaders) is considerably larger than reported. At the same time, a large oil tanker leak off the coast of Mauritius continues to directly threaten both the complex biodiversity of the country and the livelihoods of its people. In addition, many of you have surely seen images of the Beirut port blast that brought devastation to an entire city, worsening an already tenuous economic situation and calling thousands into the streets to both mourn their losses and seek explanation and accountability from and for those whose negligence allowed this to happen. There was also some sad reporting about the collapse of the ice shelf on Canada’s Ellesmere Island, a collapse larger in area than the island of Manhattan and yet another blow to, among other things, the stability of the Arctic and its multiple inhabitants. And then there were the ubiquitous images of nuclear fireballs both from the testing we now seem determined to resume and from the highly-dubious uses of these weapons75 years ago on residents of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, weapons which our currently (and foolishly) modernizing arsenals dwarf by comparison.

The lessons that we can take from this week’s gallery of disturbing images are ones we have mostly learned already and then blithely discarded. That our sky in some sense is falling is not news to most. That we continue to accept these “punches in the gut,” that we continue to allow crises to break us apart with little or no strategy for putting the pieces back together again, this is symptomatic of something insidious inside ourselves. This goes beyond a failure of technique to a failure of stewardship; the courage to ensure that, at a most fundamental level, we are determined to bequeath to our children a planet that can sustain life, ensure equitable access to water and other essential resources, and provide opportunity for creative livelihoods that are less about destroying competitors and more about contributing as we are able to the well-being of the global commons.

Even before COVID, we have collectively been losing ground on sustainable development goals from food security to climate health. But COVID has pushed even our development successes to the margins, including our goals for education. Indeed, one of the more disquieting statements of the week was issued by UN Secretary-General Guterres, who noted that 90% of the world’s school-aged children have had their education disrupted by COVID, a catastrophe for a generation that will need all their wits about them if they are to manage, let alone thrive, in the (needlessly) melting, food insecure, hostile environment we are in danger of leaving to them.

In his statement (click here) the SG makes an urgent plea for governments to do what they can and all that they can to get children back in school and to properly fund their educational infrastructure. But he also recognizes, as do many in the US (such as my longtime friend and colleague Dr. John Thompson) now weighing in on how to reopen schools in the midst of a pandemic, that to some considerable degree the still-potent virus — and what Thompson describes as our struggle to put “public health over ideology” — are now dictating educational outcomes for many millions of children. A frightening percentage of such children now run the risk of permanent exclusion from formal schooling and other educational opportunity. Such exclusion will only increase inequalities and ensure that the skills and voices of millions needed to bring this stubbornly self-destructive world to heel will remain missing in action.

If this is not a catastrophe in early formation, I don’t know what is.

There are so many dimensions to this educational threat that require attention now: parents desperate to find work and who cannot adequately attend to their jobs and the safety of children marooned from classrooms; curricula which increasingly exposes both infrastructure disparities and the still-large swaths of our digital divide; children who we are learning now can both spread COVID and become victim to some of its most serious health consequences; teachers who (much like our front-line health care workers) are somehow expected to “take one for the team” as ideological divides harden and classrooms (like most every other public space) become petri dishes for evolving manifestations of pandemic threat; students who desperately need in-person peer interaction as they begin the long, complex psychological separation from their parents; children whose shelter-in-place attentions are now directed largely towards the screens that already play an outsized role in value and worldview formation.

Guterres sees within the confines of this pandemic an opportunity to “reimagine education” and we welcome that call so long as the fruits of reimagining don’t themselves widen gaps between children with access options and children without. If indeed education is to remain viable as a “great equalizer,” we do need to reach more children with formal and informal opportunity, including access to digital resources. We do need to prioritize educational funding as we consider how best to mitigate an otherwise crisis-riddled future. And we do need to take better care of our educators, primarily but not exclusively in the formal sector, remembering that it is not the task of teachers to solve in any isolation the vast social problems which they confront daily but did not themselves create. It is their task, at least in our view, to do what they can to instill hope in the future and to impart and nurture the skills that have the best chance of making that hope sustainable.

And while we are at this reimagining business, we should take a hard look at what we teach not only how we teach. In this aggrieved and distracted time, when kids are increasingly more comfortable in cyber realities than out in the crisis-driven mess we have made for ourselves, it is important that teachers take a stand against both stifling cynicism and blinding ideology. The world is still worth knowing; is still receptive to possibility and positive change; still harbors hope of greater fairness and solidarity between cultures and among diverse life forms, still has beauty to convey around nearly every bend. We need the eyes of children to remain open to wonder and possibility especially at times like these when both seem to be at a premium.

And we need to help students cultivate what the psychologist Erich Fromm called a “scientific attitude,” not so much a reverence for the “techniques” of science but a mindset that refuses to accept on faith conclusions for which there is clear conflicting evidence; a mindset that prioritizes a larger role for objectivity and realism; one that requires us to see the world as it is as the precondition for any life-enhancing modifications; one that cultivates what Fromm saw as the healthiest formula going forward – humility towards the facts of the world and a renunciation of “all hopes of omnipotence and omniscience.”

As hard as it sometimes is to imagine, our damage-ravaged societies will eventually come to their senses. The question is how much catastrophic damage we are willing to inflict on the aspirations of and prospects for “Generation C” until that blessed day finally arrives?

Tags: catastrophe, children, education

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Traffic Alert: Countering our Dystopian Gridlock, Dr. Robert Zuber

2 Aug

Gradually our ideals have sunk to square with our practice. Alfred North Whitehead

We dismantle the predator by countering its diatribes with our own nurturant truths. Clarissa Estés

The life where nothing was ever unexpected. Or inconvenient. Or unusual. The life without color, pain or past. Lois Lowry

There is no feasible excuse for what we are, for what we have made of ourselves. Iain Banks

In the year 2025, the best don’t run for president, they run for their lives. Stephen King

Only the sweetest of the sweet would bring brownies to the apocalypse. Shelly Crane

Quietly and complacently, humanity was sinking into decadence, and progress had come to mean the progress of the Machine. E. M. Forster

Yesterday on the radio, a New York Yankees baseball commentator was sharing a warning issued by the weather service for the arrival of a tropical storm – perhaps something even stronger – set to make its way up the East Coast of the US this week and thus create havoc for more than just baseball. After the warning, another commentator reflected, “Of course a huge storm is coming. It’s 2020.”

Yes its 2020, a year that once upon a time held a great symbolic hope of clean cities and transparent politics, a time when we might have overcome at least some of the burdens of poverty and predation that we as human beings have inflicted on ourselves and the rest of the natural order, a time when our education and our technology would allow more of us the opportunity to pursue lives of meaning that hold the public interest in as high a regard as the personal.

Whatever that vision might have looked like, what we have “made of ourselves” in the run-up to this stormy year lies in stark contrast. Despite some remarkable, heroic stories coming from our hospital wards and the determination for justice seen on the streets of our protests, we have collectively (to use a baseball analogy) lost a few miles-per-hour off our fastball. We have allowed ourselves to be defined more by our grievances than our generosity. We have indulged what one political commentator this week referred to as a “cult of selfishness” that permits too many of us to obsess on what we have lost during this pandemic with little regard for those who never had it in the first place; indeed those for whom every day is a struggle to hold on to something –- or someone – to help navigate life circumstances more akin to apocalypse than quarantine.

We have in many instances misplaced faith in institutions, in governments, in science. We have also lost a good deal of faith in each other, defending more and more a dystopian worldview dominated by predators, rapists and thieves, people seemingly bent on taking from us what we love and inflicting violence that our security sector seems powerless to stop. And this worldview is being reinforced through a good chunk of media brimming with images of cruelty and violence, scenes where the next betrayal is right around the corner, media products where everyone seems to have a gun, where no one can be trusted, and where the screen carnage often exceeds the grisly toll from COVID emanating from our overstretched and under-resourced hospitals.

This current incarnation of our dystopia is hardly the first and it draws on and perpetuates a deep legacy of (often unaddressed) anger, fear and frustration. Like many others I speak with, especially those in the business of attending to global crises, I know how much “darker” my own dream life has become in recent times, full of danger and rejection, images of free-fall and betrayal. There is this sense – in many of us – that circumstances have simply gotten out of control, that our “nurturant truths” have been buried under the current avalanche of pandemic-generated, personal and economic anxiety, that the best we can do is to protect what is ours, if we can, from threats that seem to be lurking around every corner and for which much of our leadership seems to have no solution that doesn’t revolve around incitement, arrests and tear gas.

Indeed, “our ideals have sunk to square with our practice,” and our practice at this moment is not one in which we should be taking particular pride. Our multi-lateral institutions are delivering less than promised on sustainable development (see climate change and food security), on peace and security (see Syria and Yemen), and on the protection of children from violence and abuse. Our religious institutions have largely misplaced their responsibility to reconciliation and thus have too often become one more partisan influence in a bitterly divided social landscape. Our schools continue to be put in the untenable position of solving social problems which should be resolved elsewhere while attempting to counter the current mood which elevates opinion over science and conspiracy over evidence. And our security institutions have to face the brunt of our collective anger while generally refusing accountability for acts which inflame that anger still.

In such a climate, truth-telling is punished and competency is suspect. While we may not have lowered our guard, we have certainly lowered our standards such that the “best” are more likely to be found “running for their lives” than seeking roles in social and institutional leadership.

In my experience, it is the issue of trafficking in persons where our current emotional and policy fault lines are often most clearly exposed. This past Thursday was World Day Against Trafficking in Persons and, at the UN, a bevy of speakers – first responders, victims, diplomats and others – shared testimony on why this particular type of trafficking, this particular manifestation of human predation, simply must receive greater policy attention. Perhaps the most animated of the speakers was the actress (and UN Goodwill Ambassador) Mira Sorvino who noted that the 2020 pandemic has merely slowed down the already much-too-modest efforts to break up trafficking networks and prosecute offenders. She urged, among other things, better training for judges and law enforcement such that they can become “more than paper tigers” in efforts to counter human trafficking and related predatory acts in all their manifestations, traffickers who have routinely demonstrated more flexibility during this pandemic than those seeking to put them out of business.

That same day, one of our partners, WIIS-New York, moderated in an online event focused on the growing threat of (domestic) trafficking as well as kidnapping and other threats lodged against our youth, especially girls. The focus here was less on policy responses and more on “awareness raising” about the prevalence of predators in and around their homes, schools and shops, as well as the grave difficulties parents face in trying to keep their children, especially their girl children, safe.

One can only sympathize with parents who must assume this protective burden within a social fabric that seems to be fraying more and more, a fabric of public institutions less trustworthy and responsive than they might be, with images streaming through their devices in their current “shelter at home” reality of a world that is badly divided and amply frustrated, where leadership often seems more interested in stoking fires than extinguishing them, and where capacities to apprehend predators and rehabilitate their victims are generally inadequate, sometimes shockingly so.

And yet, part of our current dystopian mind-set involves perceiving threats in all sorts of dark corners where they might not actually exist and simultaneously under-stating our ability to contribute to remediation beyond the boundaries of our personal space. Parents must protect, full stop. And yet so much seems out of their control, not only with respect to trafficking, but regarding the larger economic, health and ecological threats that might well impact children far beyond this stressful year. How do parents protect without paranoia or without imposing a life for children devoid of “color or pain?” How do parents nurture children to be savvy about threats and not overwhelmed by them, to rely on their wits but also to seek help when those wits are unsure? How do they protect children from danger without protecting them from life?

There are no firm answers but many helpful stories. Indeed, one of the most hopeful presentations of the UN’s week was made by a former trafficking victim from Colombia, a woman who suffered, as a girl, grave abuses from which her family was unable to offer adequate protection. But she and her family persevered and, quite remarkably, she is now director of a trafficking-focused NGO in her country, making protective and healing services available to victims that were not available in her own time of need. “We have come a long way,” she proclaimed. Indeed, the same could surely be said about her, a stunning modeling of human resilience and healing that we need more of in these times.

But sadly, we have collectively not come such a long way as we might otherwise have hoped. Especially in this pandemic year we have seemingly given up too much ground to negativity and cynicism; we have allowed a dystopian worldview to take up residence in our souls, thus undermining so many of our common causes. If this year is to be known for anything other than acrimony and suspicion, of lives needlessly facing material ruin, languishing in makeshift morgues, or frozen in fear of any and all unknowns, we would do well to assess the impact of this violent, chaotic darkness on our most personal choices and then vow to contribute more to healing and reconciliation, more than merely “bringing brownies to the apocalypse.”

Even now, even in 2020 we have our “nurturant truths” to share, truths that can help restore institutions, dismantle predators, inspire children and fortify communities. There will never be a better time to share them.

Tags: dystopia, institutions, trafficking

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Dragnet: Climate’s Grip on the Security Sector, Dr. Robert Zuber

26 Jul

Poll: Riot gear for police at protests?

Life can only be understood backwards; but it must be lived forwards. Soren Kierkegaard

Ecological healing is all about the healing of relationships. Charles Eisenstein

History is humankind trying to get a grip. Kim Stanley Robinson

We must remember that this is not a fight we can win just by fighting. Charles Eisenstein

We cannot choose the times we live in, but we can choose the stories we tell and live by. Sally Gillespie

When we begin a deeper journey into earth care, sometimes we are struck by the breadth of ruin, even ugliness, that it is our challenge to recover and redeem. LL. Barkat

Birds start falling. Bees lie dying. Mary Flanagan

On Friday, as the excellent presidency of Germany nears its end, the Security Council took up the issue of “climate and security,” a thematic relationship which the Council is under more and more pressure to address, especially from its elected members. The manner in which it was addressed in this session, however, speaks volumes regarding both the policy strength of some delegations and the limitations of the Council in articulating a clear role for itself within our global system of response, one that encourages that all aspects of that system to function at maximum effectiveness.

The UN is, of course, primarily a negotiating platform, but as stated by Germany’s Foreign Minister Maas, some things are not negotiable and “we cannot negotiate with nature.” But while we cannot negotiate with our climate, we can clearly cause it damage and, by extension, cause grave damage to ourselves and other life forms. As Belgium made clear, this is no abstract matter but a crisis that both impacts and creates vulnerable people worldwide with “aggravated costs,” as Tunisia and Indonesia both noted, which will likely only increase at least in the near term.

There was broad recognition in this Council debate regarding what Belize referred to as the “indiscriminate consequences” of climate change, impacts (as underscored by Niger and others) that fall largely on regions, states and peoples already vulnerable to conflict and COVID-related threats. Such areas have generally contributed little to the climate crisis yet must live with the heat and the drought, the unpredictable rains and insect plagues that make an often- tenuous relationship to viability ever more so.

There were clear calls to action on Friday, especially from small island states who continue to watch nervously as their sea levels rise while large states continue their out-sized consumption and relentless production of greenhouse gases and other environmental pollutants. There were also calls for the Council to remain fully seized of the data on climate linkages and impacts, with many supporting the appointment of a special UN envoy on climate and conflict. But there is still concern in some quarters (including here) that the Council does not fully grasp the role it can play as an enabler of climate action underway in other parts of the UN system, not to mention in communities worldwide, keeping in mind the distinction between what the Council does itself and what actions it encourages in others. In our view, Council enabling – not controlling – effective climate action in diverse settings remains one key to our common survival.

But what of the specific climate-conflict nexus? There was consensus on this Friday that climate change does not “cause” violence per se, but rather “exposes existing vulnerabilities” to which we have not paid sufficient attention and, as noted by a Niger military official, places the often “tenuous balance” between regional groups under considerable strain. UN Assistant Secretary General Jenca, representing the Secretariat, underscored the degree to which climate threats expose “deep grievances” which often fester in societies and which can erupt in violence unless they are properly addressed.

While this debate added value in terms of basic nexus contours, it did not directly address (aside from comments on the role of peacekeepers) the impact of climate-related “grievances” on the security sector itself, those tasked with ground-level security functions in communities which, in a growing number of instances, are watching their livelihoods blown away by sandstorms or migrating to waters cool enough to sustain minimal oxygen levels. And where governments are either indifferent or lack a trusted presence, communities may well prefer to defend their interests and manage their difficult affairs on their own, interpreting government security as simply one more coercive element seeking to maintain “order” but not honor promises, adding another level of restriction to an already constrained existence, and this at the point of a gun.

In society after society, we have seen the impact of overly-stretched law enforcement, police which have been weaponized and politicized; police asked to perform security functions in tenuous situations far above their pay grade; police which have been encouraged by political leadership to focus on the coercive end of their mandate and not the conflict prevention and community-responsive elements; police who in many instances are barely required to grasp the letter of the law and even encouraged to ignore both the spirit of the law and abuses of that law committed by other officers.

And across the world those same police are now being sidelined and their reputations scarred by more coercive and unaccountable forces that have no interest in local communities aside from suppressing its dissent and misrepresenting the identity and intent of its protesters. From Cameroon to Portland, we have seen instances of unidentified agents who have increasingly become a tool of regimes seeking to maintain a repressive grip or impose one anew, forces asked to parachute into situations which may be antagonistic already but which their own coercive responses merely inflame.

Grievances at community level are deep now, as deep as I have ever seen them. Many people are angry, afraid, abused, finding themselves isolated in circumstances worse than anything previously conjured up in their nightmares. Those grievances in some instances apply as well to the security sector, to law enforcement tasked with maintaining “order” in situations where government officials have clearly not done their jobs, officials who are neither “getting a grip” on current threats nor interested in helping the rest of us to do so. In such a scenario, only authoritarians can possibly claim victory. The rest of us are left with a series of bad choices, including to arm ourselves to the teeth or hurl projectiles at “enemies” about whom we know little and care even less.

As St. Vincent and the Grenadines said Friday in the Security Council, “action is all that counts now.” But what is the action envisioned for often anti-democratic governments, edgy citizens and an over-stretched security sector? What “counts” now? One pathway is suggested by UN Police which is committed in principle to “the reform, restructuring and rebuilding of host-state police” and which measures this in more “representative, responsive and accountable policing that protect and serve the people.”

In this angry, authoritarian age these principles almost seem old school. But as we seek to “live forward” in treacherous times, it is important to reaffirm understandings shared from at least a segment of our past – that the “fight” we now seem so intent on waging cannot be resolved through fighting alone. It will be hard enough to restore some measure of trust in a security sector and its leaders that too often manufacture enemies in the public domain, that bury basic tenets of racial representation and accountability, and that allow under-trained, over-militarized forces to clutch state-of-the-art weapons they are much too willing to use. But we are compelled to try.

The climate healing that is so urgent now is directly related to equally-urgent healing in our communities, a healing premised on restoring the quality of our relationships to each other, but also to protecting the biodiversity struggling to survive, and to mitigating all of the social and personal “ugliness” which we have yet to “recover and redeem.” But we cannot do so, we may never do so, so long as these fissures exist between a public at its wits end and a security sector that cannot be certain, especially now, who or what it is protecting, whose interests it is actually serving.

We need to restore faith in each other and we need to do so without delay. For while we hurl tear gas and insults across artificial barriers, while we brandish heavy weapons that merely reinforce the resolve of other weapons-bearers, the social stresses inflamed by our sick climate continue to mount. Birds are falling; bees are dying; fish are abandoning their traditional habitats; islands are drowning; crops are failing.

At this painful time, when the stories we write and tell are much too dystopian and too little hopeful, we would do well to restore an UNPOL version of policing which many in the security sector thankfully still affirm: inclusive, accountable, responsive. But the bar of our collective inaction is too high, at least short term; and as Council members noted in passing and as confirmed at last week’s High Level Political Forum, frustrations and vulnerabilities stemming from our habitual climate negligence are likely to get worse.

This is the conflict-climate nexus that the Council needs to address: a degraded climate leading to food insecurity, displacement and inequality, but also to a legitimate and largely unaddressed impatience for dignity and change that now seems destined to pit diversely distraught communities against a security sector increasingly equipped for militarized responses and egged on by an aggressive breed of authoritarian leadership.

If we are ever to recover what we have ruined in our world and in ourselves, this is the time. If ever there was a “fight” that cannot be resolved through fighting, this is the one.

Tags: climate change, conflict, policing, Security Council, security sector

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Midsummer Dream: Inspiring Honest Progress on Development and Peace, Dr. Robert Zuber

19 Jul

Imagine if we had no secrets, no respite from the truth. What if everything was laid bare the moment we introduced ourselves? Catherine Doyle

So it became the law of universe, to have the profoundest of the words cloaked in the darkest of the masks. Jasleen Kaur Gumber

We all become what we pretend to be. Patrick Rothfuss

Masked, I advance. Rene Descartes

How many of us want any of us to see us as we really are? Isn’t the mirror hostile enough? Jeanette Winterson

Done with hiding and weary of lying, we’ll reconcile without and within. John Mark Green

It is a sultry mid-summer morning in New York City, a Sunday following an intense and difficult week both for my country and for the United Nations system as a whole.

At the UN, the High Level Political Forum (HLPF) and its focus on implementing the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) came to a close; the Security Council held a discussion on the pervasive problem of “sexual violence in conflict” with briefers including UN Envoy Angelina Jolie; and the annual Nelson Mandela lecture was turned over by the Foundation bearing his name to UN Secretary-General Antonio Guterres who proceeded to outline what seemed to be an endless series of urgent global challenges from a podium in New York rather than in South Africa.

In the aggregate, these UN events highlighted the urgency of effective multilateral engagement while calling attention to the policy areas where such engagement has not yet produced sufficient results; has not brought justice for victims, has not overcome health disparities or digital divides, has not resolved conflict consistently or reversed most human-inflicted damage to our climate, has not ensured welcoming borders for displaced persons seeking refuge from armed conflict or grave rights abuses.

Indeed, one of the subtexts of the HLPF as it drew to a close is the number of sustainable development commitments which seem to be headed in the wrong direction – certainly on climate but also on food security, on the protection of civic space, on societies which are genuinely inclusive of cultural minorities, persons with disabilities, and other groups too often destined to remain on national margins. Thankfully, there was no attempt at the close – including by Deputy Secretary-General Amina Mohammed — to deflect attention from the reality of our current deficiencies, especially on development finance, but nor was there any lack of rhetorical support for the UN’s role at the center of fulfilling the promises on sustainable development made to global constituents.

As most UN watchers will recognize, at least in part, talk can be a bit cheap around the UN, perhaps even more so in the digital realms to which UN events have been confined over these past few months. An insight from Egypt this week, that this not the time to “make a point” but to “make a difference,” actually served to underscore a problem which has long plagued the UN – that “difference” is made at national level, that the power of implementation resides in national capitals, and that progressive-sounding words by UN diplomats are as likely to mask government intentions as to clarify them.

This rhetorical mask-making is often well-represented in UN policy engagements. Diplomats come to New York to represent national interests and to hopefully do so in a way that does not needlessly jeopardize the possibility of multilateral breakthroughs. But the job also involves creating impressions of countries more progressive in their outlook than is often the case, creating in effect the mask that hides realities at national level including, at times, realities which even directly contradict the policies advanced by national diplomats in multilateral settings.

Such policy mask-making affects many states far removed from Egypt. My own country, for instance, continues to posit itself as a beacon of justice and freedom in multilateral settings despite the many instances in which we have twisted our own values, let alone those of the UN Charter, to serve mostly partisan interests. This is not a phenomenon unique to this current administration, and yet we must be clear that authoritarian tendencies sweeping parts of the planet expose masks of progressive multilateralism that diplomats continue to wear and whose contours the UN is desperate to maintain.

In my own country, there are images in abundance of men in military garb (and with no identification) beating and tear-gassing lawful protesters. There are images of leadership deliberately suppressing COVID-19 information under the absurd guise that if you don’t count an infection, it never happened. In a country where so many have given so much of themselves to advance the values that we say we cherish, the refusal to wear masks to prevent viral spread has somehow been turned into a symbolic exercise of American “freedom,” a misleading and ultimately risky dimension of this expertise-denying, scapegoating and conspiracy-obsessed cultural moment where we all believe what we choose, and where much of what we “believe” is indulgent of the grievances of our tribe. We forget that cloth coverings are not the principle masks we routinely employ to confound others regarding who we really are and what we really care about.

All while distancing itself from the work of UN agencies and failing to fulfill core responsibilities as the “host state,” my country continues to do what many other countries at the UN do, exhibiting masks of progressive multilateralism with scant expectations that policies espoused in Turtle Bay will be reflected in policy commitments in capital. And since the UN is dependent on its funding from these very same states, its arsenal of coercion beyond expressions of normative intent is highly circumscribed.

But as conflicts resist resolution and some development goals threaten to recede into functional indifference, UN leadership seems to be reaching a point of considerable frustration, if not outright panic. SG Guterres has been a bit over-exposed of late, but he has also been increasingly strident in promoting the SDG “blueprint” for the world, rightly highlighting some of the many changes that we need to make now to ensure a greener, healthier planet with forms of governance that “deliver better,” and with divides digital, gendered and economic which are finally being narrowed.

Responses to Guterres’ agenda have often been borderline effusive. Diplomats seem to affirm the value of his pronouncements, agreeing (as with Morocco) that the world we are obligated to build is one which must be built together. But laying out our urgent circumstances is only part of the responsibility of leadership, leadership which the CEO of the Mandela Foundation noted yesterday is now more prone to consolidating power than inspiring people to contribute their best. We are now only rarely inspired to lower our masks and take up our practical duties to justice and sustainability, to move beyond rhetoric and help build that “new social contract” called for by the SG which can help guarantee that promises made by leadership are also promises kept.

One of the week’s most striking moments for me was in the Security Council where a civil society activist, Khin Ohmar, was describing the sexual violence that routinely occurs in Myanmar and which is grounded in “structural gender discrimination” which the Council has done relatively little to address. “I am not the first person to bring this issue to your attention,” Ms. Ohmar observed. “You’ve heard this all before.”

We have indeed heard it all before: on sexual violence, yes, but also on climate and hunger, on refugees and torture, on oceans and weapons. We’ve heard it over and over, more times than we can count and certainly more than we can psychologically process, descriptions of a world that is careening into an uncertain future where both human rights and development progress are under considerable strain and where all of the hand-wringing we do has not affected “root causes” nearly as much as it needs to.

Frankly, this narrative of dysfunction has begun to wear us down. We don’t need more recitations of our half-failures so much as we need inspiration to re-energize our most important commitments, including the task of ensuring that investments of our time and treasure are fully relevant to the problems we wish to address. And we must also find the means to inspire UN diplomats to direct more multilateral energies back home, to remind their own leaders that the real key to preserving multilateralism is not about the quality of our UN statements but about the willingness of states to put into more urgent practice the values that attracted them to multilateral frameworks in the first place.

Inspiration at this moment is one of the rarest of commodities, that Mandela-like combination of passion and honesty which believes in human potential even as it cuts through our masks of misleading rhetoric, our tendency to “hide” behind protocol and position, our feeble attempts to reconcile from a distance, our ability to hear only what we want to hear and then act on only a small portion of that. As the SG likes to say, “time is not on our side.” What we have to say in response is that higher levels of inspiration will be required if we are to make the best possible uses of the time we have left.

Tags: masks, sustainable development, United Nations

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Erdogan, Islamism and the Hagia Sophia Controversy, By Professor Hussein Solomon

15 Jul

Editor’s Note: Global Action’s interest in the protection of cultural heritage (specifically from destruction and misuse by terrorists) was awakened by an initiative introduced in 2015 by Italy and Jordan. A quote by then UNESCO Director-General, Irina Bokova, impressed us at the time and which this important reflection from Professor Solomon called to mind: “Culture is on the frontline of conflict – we must place it at the heart of peacebuilding,” she noted. As Solomon intimates here, the recent decision by Turkey’s president to shift the status of Hagia Sophia does not further peacebuilding interests or, for that matter, the religious interests of Turkish Islamists.

There is a wonderful story about Caliph Umar which I am particularly drawn to as a Muslim. Following the siege of Jerusalem between 636 and 638, the Patriarch Sophronius agreed to surrender the city only on condition that he surrendered to the Caliph personally. Caliph Umar duly traveled to the city, accepted the surrender and provided a guarantee of civil and religious liberty to all Christians residing there. Moreover, following almost half a millennium of oppressive Roman rule, the caliph allowed Jews to return to live inside the city. Caliph Umar’s ten-day sojourn in Jerusalem was important for another reason too, which has great relevance to contemporary times as we now struggle to reside in multi-faith communities. One day, during Muslim mid-day prayers, Patriarch Sophronius invited the caliph to pray in the Church of the Holy Sepulchre. Caliph Umar, however, politely declined the invitation fearing that it might endanger the Church as a place of Christian worship. In other words, he feared that Muslims might use his prayer in the Church as a reason to convert the church into a mosque.

Islamists such as Turkish strongman President Erdogan revere the Rashidun or rightly guided caliphs such as Umar and seek to emulate them. Sadly, with his decision to convert Istanbul’s iconic Hagia Sophia into a mosque again, Erdogan is moving in the opposite direction of Caliph Umar. Originally, built by Emperor Justinian I in 537, it lies at the spiritual heart of Orthodox Christianity. Following the Ottoman conquest of then Constantinople in 1453, it was converted into a mosque. Under the staunchly secular leadership of Mustafa Kemal Ataturk, Hagia Sophia was converted into a museum that transcends different faiths and cultures with its minarets on the perimeter and Byzantine Christian mosaics adorning it. Orhan Pamuk, Turkey’s most famous novelist opined, “To convert it back into a mosque is to say to the rest of the world unfortunately we are not secular anymore. There are millions of secular Turks like me who are crying against this but their voices are not heard”.

So what is driving Ankara’s desire to open the Hagia Sophia to prayers once more. For some, it is a cynical political act. With an economy in free fall, with growing repression and corruption, Erdogan is trying to once again appeal to his devout Muslim base. For others, the conversion of Hagia Sophia back to a mosque is in keeping with Erdogan’s 2012 declaration that his aim is to raise devout generations of Muslims. If one accepts the former explanation, the Hagia Sophia controversy, will only result in a short-term bump in Erdogan’s flagging popularity. It will do nothing for the structural reforms urgently required for the economy. It will not reverse the corruption and nepotism which has characterized his rule nor assist in creating a freer society.

If one accepts the latter argument that Hagia Sophia’s conversion into a mosque is all about Islamizing Turkish society, the most interesting aspect of Erdogan and his Justice and Development Party’s (AKP) political dominance is actually how effectively they have contributed to secularizing Turkish society. An April 2017 report discussed at the Turkish Ministry of Education noted that more and more youth at the state sponsored “Imam Hatip” schools were turning to deism – a belief in God but not religion – whilst others were increasingly turning to atheism. It would seem that Turkey’s Muslim youth has found the AKP’s “archaic interpretations of Islam” unappealing. Whilst Ankara was angered by the report, disputing its findings, Mustafa Ozturk, a progressive Islamic theologian, agreed with the contents of the report arguing that a younger generation of Turks have grown disillusioned with the Islamist worldview. The findings of the report were also echoed by an exhaustive Pew Survey of the Muslim world which found that a paltry 12 percent of Turks actually desire shari’a to be the official law in their country. A 2019 poll of Turkish youth found that they were less religiously conservative, less likely to fast, pray or, if female, cover their hair. A 2020 poll found that only 12 percent of Turks indicate trust in Islamic clerics suggesting that Erdogan and the AKP is increasingly out of step with their own society. Perhaps most tellingly, another recent survey of youth who support Erdogan’s AKP found that almost half want to emigrate from Turkey. Their country of preference is Switzerland – not Saudi Arabia.

This trend has prompted renowned Turkish author Mustafa Akyol to opine that despite, or perhaps because of, its attempts to re-Islamize Turkey, the AKP has only served to accelerate its secularization. This would suggest that the Hagia Sophia may well become a museum again in the not so distant future.

Tags: Culture, Islam, Secularization

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Blood Lines: Binding our Multilateral Wounds, Dr. Robert Zuber

12 Jul

Srebrenica

Our wounds can so easily turn us into people we don’t want to be, and we hardly see it happening. Sue Fitzmaurice

What we allow the mark of our suffering to become is in our own hands. bell hooks

What’s left of kisses? Wounds, however, leave scars. Bertolt Brecht

“Let it go, David. It will only stir up old wounds.” Who cares about old ones? It’s the new ones that bleed. Christopher Pike

There’s no antibiotic for the ridding of distress, and no alleviation of these intervals of pain we must encounter. Crystal Woods

Just because his own wings were burnt, it didn’t mean he had to burn others’. Dean Wilson

Grant us wisdom, grant us courage for the living of these days. From the Christian Hymn, “God of Grace and God of Glory”

This was a week on UN video screens full of irony and rhetoric at times both emptier and less convincing than most of those who “took the floor” probably imagined.

It was a week when the UN’s Economic and Social Council took formal stock of our still-uneven “progress” in fulfilling our sustainable development responsibilities; when the Security Council labored well into the weekend to adopt a measure that will provide only partial relief for the millions of Syrians caught in a decade-long conflict that the Council has been unable to end; and when we commemorated the horrific crimes committed 25 years ago in Srebrenica, crimes which have not yet been fully prosecuted, crimes which still require families to search painfully for both the remains of loved ones and a full accounting of what took place, who was involved, who turned a blind eye to a looming massacre that ripped the worlds of so many apart.

The scar tissue from this UN week was both prevalent and hard to miss.

On Syria, it was not until the dinner hour yesterday when the Council came to an agreement that preserved some measure of the “cross-border mechanism” that has been enabling humanitarian assistance to millions of Syrians, many of whom have suffered multiple displacements and now live beyond the reach of government authority. Belgium and Germany, the co-penholders on the Council’s humanitarian file, sought to re-authorize multiple crossing points to address the dire needs in the northern regions of the country. Russia and China, on the other hand, sought to ensure that humanitarian actors work more closely and cooperatively with the Syrian authorities, seeking to replace much cross-border access with options for Syria-controlled “cross-line” assistance. The deadlock of vetoed resolutions was broken with considerable acrimony and with final agreement on only one border crossing point.

Belgium and the Dominican Republic were especially vocal in marking yet another “sad day” for the Council. Such bitterness as was brought out in these negotiations leaves scars in the Council that will likely test even seasoned diplomats. But the deep sadness for Syrians has been a decade in the making, wounds deeper than most of the rest of us can imagine. If we mange to help keep these people alive until some sort of permanent cease fire and peace agreement are in place –especially those children who have known little but explosions and displacement in their lives — we will surely discover that, as in other parts of the world, many wounds remain, some emanating from years of deep fear and daily uncertainty, but also from the bitter disappointment that those tasked with silencing the guns and stopping the bleeding have largely failed in their duty to do so.

The wounds of Srebrenica are of a somewhat similar order, violence a generation old which completely upended families and communities, violence which has resisted a full measure of justice or closure, crimes which are still being honored in some quarters of the western Balkans and denied altogether in other quarters; reactions which merely grow the scar tissue, pry open the festering wounds and deepen the distrust of authorities at national and international levels. As the Germany Foreign Minister noted during Friday’s event, people are still finding ways to “play with the narratives” of what happened in Srebrenica, who was responsible both for the killing itself and for creating the political and security contexts in which such butchery could occur.

For all the “never again” rhetoric dispensed on this day, it was the Croatian Ambassador (former UN official) who asserted that such crimes can, indeed, happen again; that the scars of mass violence and discrimination are widely evident (including in places like Cameroon and Myanmar), and that this is largely due to our collective resistance to creating a strong and reliable “preventive network” which can allow us to learn lessons from past wounds more quickly, apply diplomatic and other remedies more effectively, and thereby uphold what the Bosnian president claimed are UN Charter values that have been systematically undermined through a collective “conspiracy of silence.”

There is no such conspiracy in evidence at the High Level Political Forum (HLPF), a core, annual, ECOSOC commitment taking place this week to assess our collective progress towards fulfilling obligations to sustainable development. Instead, spoken words from diplomats and “experts” have flowed in abundance, some in the form of (for me) unfathomable clichés like “building back better” and “leaving no one behind.” While many NGOs have used this HLPF opportunity to sell their various “products,” others have rightly called attention to the preponderance of mere reporting taking place; verbiage signifying some multilateral version of “show and tell” during which states and civil society highlight “what we’re doing” while neglecting to reflect sufficiently on the fact that we simply are not yet doing enough to heal wounds of deprivation and injustice that continue to proliferate, to stop the bleeding better than we have done so far.

Closer to home, my younger office colleagues remain painfully aware that our planet’s vital functions are increasingly on “life support.” They recognize that the current pandemic, while a massive complicating factor for sustainable development acknowledged by virtually all at this HLPF, is no excuse for failing to act on SDGs with urgency and courage. They know that we are losing ground on food security and abuses committed against children. They know about the fires blazing in an overheated Arctic, the biodiversity under siege, the corrupt authoritarianism governing more and more UN member states, the deep roots of our propensity to “burn the wings of others.” They see our collective failures to prevent armed violence and mass atrocities and the scars suggestive of deep wounds courtesy of poverty, disease and what outgoing UN Rapporteur Philip Alston recently referred to as our blatant “disregard for human life.”

And they know first hand that the discourse in the multilateral space we co-habit is generally more political than inspirational, is more about having the right credentials than the right mind-set, is focused more on controlling outcomes rather than ensuring those best possible, is as much about preserving our status, our protocols, our careers, our funders as it is about preserving a common, sustainable future.

There is no “antibiotic” for what distresses us as a species but we do have agency over what “the marks of our suffering will become.” We have it in our power, even now, to affect closure and healing for legacy wounds and stop the bleeding for fresh ones. We have it in our power to end the violence, to help victims find closure, to reverse our perilous course on climate change and economic inequalities, to restore hope to young people robbed of an education, indeed too-often denied their youth in full measure.

But this will require better from the rest of us than we are now showing, greater displays of wisdom and courage, more than language reduced to clichés or weaponized for the sake of national interests and narrow political concerns, more than pious statements of remorse disconnected from visionary policy change, more than the innumerable good works that don’t yet add up to a sustainable future.

We are wounded people living in a wounded world of our own making. And as such, we have allowed ourselves too often to become the people we say we don’t want to be, the people we swore we would never become, people who hide behind personal grievances and bureaucratic protocols, people who too easily give in to the “given-ness” of our time and who allow “responsibilities” to cloud our deeper duty to fix what’s broken and ensure that “intervals of pain” are as short as we can possibly make them.

And as we struggle to manage our own “intervals,” we would do well to scan the scars on the faces of so many others, scars symbolic of their survival from the trauma that has been needlessly inflicted on them, the bleeding that, even now, holds scant promise of coming to an end. If multilateralism is to have the future we wish for it, a future of trust and effectiveness, a future of more than political rhetoric, limited crossing points and families searching for the remains of long-murdered relations, that bleeding must stop.

We simply must see to it.

Tags: scars, SDGs, Srebrenica, Syria, United Nations

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Mind Meld: Independent Thought in an Age of Grievance, Dr. Robert Zuber

5 Jul

fireworks

My courage always rises at every attempt to intimidate me. Jane Austen

When I discover who I am, I’ll be free. Ralph Ellison

Thought looks into the pit of hell and is not afraid. Bertrand Russell

The country was in peril; he was jeopardizing his traditional rights of freedom and independence by daring to exercise them. Joseph Heller

When we stop doing things for ourselves and expect others to dance around us, we are not achieving greatness. We have made ourselves weak. Pandora Poikilos

There are other words for privacy and independence. They are isolation and loneliness. Megan Turner

It’s good to have a healthy fear of horror. Anne Quirk

As most of you know, yesterday was Independence Day in the US, a day ostensibly for us to count our many blessings and remember those in our past who, despite their often considerable personal flaws, helped make at least some of those blessings possible.

At a moment defined by deep social division, grave economic uncertainty and a stealth virus, I’m not sure how many blessings were counted yesterday. And yet, in my neighborhood, our verdant parks were filled with what seemed to be happy family gatherings, some in groups as large as 50, albeit with no masks to be seen or distances kept. The otherwise majestic Hudson River at the West Harlem Pier attracted its own crowd of families, even as the waters were mysteriously punctuated with the smell of dead fish while military aircraft roared overhead, a precursor to the endless booms from fireworks, legal and otherwise, that dominated the city skies until well past midnight.

The media conferred its own messaging for the day obsessing, as it so often does, on the ways and means of the US president and his enablers, specifically their apparent willingness to fashion a re-election campaign based on some alleged “white grievance” that they feel can be successfully exploited for political purposes.

There was so much of this “Independence Day” I simply could not relate to, though not necessarily to my credit. I felt dismayed by the unwillingness of so many people to protect themselves from a virus which has given every indication of its ability to double back on victims and mutate to further complicate treatment options. I felt dismayed that as our national debt balloons to unmanageable levels and people cling to what little remains of their economic viability that we somehow still think that military fly-overs and taxpayer-funded political rallies (and golfing outings) are more important than clean rivers and health care access. I felt dismayed that it is still possible for political candidates to run for office in this world based on the idea that “white people” represent some generic category of humans who have somehow or other been screwed over in the global commons, that “we” are endlessly entitled to more than our share and that it is appropriate that others “dance around us” while we delude ourselves about the sanctity and reliability of our commitment to all that is good and right in the world.

And I felt especially dismayed that notions of freedom and independence are exploited so shamelessly by those who often haven’t given a second thought to what that means or, more pointedly, what that requires of us in return. Thus many are left to believe that we are “free” merely when we get to do what we want; and this at a time when the well-worn truism that “freedom is for persons with incomes” has perhaps never been more relevant in our recent history. While too-many of us grind our teeth and take offense at the thought of wearing a mask or keeping physical distance, more and more face economic hardship and difficult choices between home care for children and showing up at low-wage jobs that barely meet the caring threshold. At the same time, more and more of us are having our consumer and political preferences manipulated and massaged in ways we refuse to acknowledge or, at times, even gleefully accept. More and more of us have misplaced useful distinctions between the aesthetic and the ethical, presuming that “what we like” is what is good for us and others, that our “tastes” in things remain our “guidestar” regarding how we behave and what behavior we are willing to tolerate in the rest of the human race.

Ironically, COVID-19 has exposed fashions and fault-lines in my country (and beyond) that have actually been trending for some time. We cultivated wariness and suspicion towards each other long before the virus compelled most of us to “keep our distance.” Millions of people were living on the economic edge long before COVID forced (and will continue to force) a shut-down of so many local businesses and economies. Inequalities in the political and economic realms have long been grotesque and have only increased under our current viral cloud. We have long struggled to minimize the scapegoating that has accompanied our dubious claims of “exceptionalism” long before so many of our current “leaders” turned responsibility-dodging into an art form. Many have suffered from sometimes debilitating levels of loneliness and social isolation that have only been made more acute through a series of lockdowns and quarantines that, in the short-term at least, promise only episodic periods of relief.

On top of this, our almost generic lack of thoughtfulness about the urgent needs of our planet and our responsibilities towards generations to come is perhaps the most tragic of this moment’s incarnations. On the whole, where the future of our planet is concerned, we are still taking away far too much and giving too little of ourselves in return.

In this difficult present, it is apparently fine for health care workers to risk their lives to save those reckless persons for whom mask wearing has become some sort of political litmus test. It is apparently fine for some people to attribute evil intent to others who want their country to honor promises to equal opportunity and social justice. It is also apparently OK for some people of elite up-bringing and education to denigrate and exploit the alleged “unwashed masses” whose purchases line their pockets and to whose aspirations for life they couldn’t possibly give a second thought.

I’m not sure where the “freedom” is in all of this, aside from the freedom to be mean. The current moment speaks more loudly of our emotional fragility and cultural isolation, our manifest unwillingness to escape the ideas and expectations of our tribes, our inability to see beyond our personal grievances – legitimate and not — to a broader grievance to which we have contributed in our own way and which blithely places millions of God’s children on the precipice of ruin and despair each and every day.

On this US Independence Day weekend, I’ve gone back to review a few of the many seminal thinkers and writers who would never endorse my feeble attempts at policy and cultural analysis but who have influenced me nonetheless. And one of their most important influences is the fierceness with which they set out to examine and overcome the impediments to genuine freedom which we routinely place in our own way. I so admire their fortitude to gaze upon a “pit of hell” largely of our own creation; their courage to face-down attempts to intimidate and silence; their wisdom to understand the relationship between freedom and self-discovery, its healthy and the unhealthy aspects, our hidden-truths and self-deceptions; the horror in the world for which they were able to cultivate both a “healthy fear” and a determination to make the world much less horrible –much less frightening — especially for those many vulnerable persons worldwide who know deprivation more intimately than they might ever know freedom.

There are certainly levels of loneliness and isolation that can accompany such an examination, even one that is liberally coated in kindness, empathy or appreciation. We live in an age which seems to have largely solved the territorial dynamics of self-governance but not the dynamics germane to governance of the self. Ours is a time when the “freedom” to believe what you will has little reference either to evidence or to social consequences beyond our own circles; when the numerous errors and even cowardice associated with national and global policy are mostly banal but at times rather vicious; when so many people are content to celebrate platitudes of freedom and independence, but recoil from any independent assessment of social and economic trends that they dare not exercise themselves and that they certainly do not recommend for others.

Thus there is the need, perhaps more acute than has been the case for some time, for independent minds that can challenge both social order and personal hypocrisy, that can expose the dark spaces that we seem intent on proliferating but also highlight the people and settings which are, even now, paving the way for greater freedom and justice, minds reminding us of a more connected calling and helping us sift through the debris which still impedes our progress towards a world we can all be proud to celebrate.

Tags: cowardice, freedom, injustice, leadership

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