An Updated Agenda for Rights and Security, Dr Robert Zuber

17 Sep

Editor’s Note: Over the summer, I was asked by NGO colleagues to pen a contribution on this 75th anniversary of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, one which links two of the UN’s three pillars – that of peace and security and that of human rights. The project seems to have, for now at least, gone “radio silent,” so I decided to post it here so it could be read and scrutinized as desired. Thanks to Jess Gilbert this is now more readable than the initial version. It is also considerably longer than usual . If you decide to give it a read you have my steadfast admiration.

While the UN’s human rights pillar remains in some ways the most unstable of the three – with challenges related to a rapidly expanding mandate with rapporteurs to match, limited enforcement options and sometimes severe push-back on women’s and other erstwhile “indivisible” rights, all referenced in more detail below – tenets of a  still- uneasy security-rights policy relationship which is my task to examine are “not news” to most of the diplomats and NGOs populating UN conference rooms.

Indeed, most all recognize the immense value of the (non-binding) Universal Declaration over many years in promoting the economic, social and cultural rights “indispensable” for dignity and the “free development of personality.” Moreover, the Universal Declaration also explicitly recognizes the importance of maintaining “a social and international order” in which the rights and freedoms it sets forth can be fully realized. And, perhaps most germane to my assignment, the Declaration Preamble makes plain that to ignore the protection of these rights is in essence to invite “rebellion against tyranny and oppression,” a clear sign that even 75 years ago, the human rights – security nexus had direct policy relevance.   

Thankfully, my “not news” task” was energized  a bit by the release of “A New Agenda for Peace” (https://www.un.org/sites/un2.un.org/files/our-common-agenda-policy-brief-new-agenda-for-peace-en.pdf), the ninth policy brief shared by SG Antonio Guterres under the broader rubric of “Our Common Agenda,” an agenda which in several key respects is a worthy successor to the Universal Declaration.

Many in our sector at least to some extent have already scrutinized this New Agenda and I won’t diminish their contributions through my own replication. I do agree with a former-diplomat friend that the Agenda is a “polite” offering, highlighting the dire straits we now find ourselves in (a strength of this SG) while outlining policy priorities which the UN for the most part is already addressing, albeit with uneven energy and success.

This SG has been increasingly vocal about the threats which many constituents still refuse to fully acknowledge. His is not quite a “chicken-little” approach to global threats, but such threats certainly loom large and have been growing in impact for some time. Still the body over which he presides has long been characterized by issuing clarion calls on a range of issues and concerns while diplomatic responses extend too-infrequently  beyond convening opportunities for performative statement making. For instance, this past July’s High Level Political Forum, ably presided over by Bulgarian Ambassador Stoeva, was a beehive of events and reflections on our current, common plight, and on our insufficient responses to sustainable development promises made in 2015 which span the UN’s agenda across its three policy pillars. But still a familiar pattern persisted of shedding more light than heat on our current malaise, more in the way of highlighting our seemingly declining options across these three policy pillars than concrete measures to help honor promises made 8 years ago to resolutely and tangibly deliver the SDG goods. 

For those of you who have not yet had time or interest in doing so, the New Agenda for Peace is worth a read. Some of the proposals have clear and urgent merit including on the need both to ban autonomous weapons (p.27) and to negotiate and adopt tenets of responsible governance over potentially “weaponized” AI and related ICT before those often-“lawless” horses (p.26) finally and forever flee the barn. Thankfully, the New Agenda does not skirt the issue of our grotesque military spending (p.4) which sucks trillions of US dollars out of the global system on an annual basis leaving the UN’s human rights mechanisms overly dependent on what is in essence volunteer labor and, over and over, leaving conflict-affected populations begging for the assistance we have given them reason to believe would be forthcoming.

Also welcome, the New Agenda urges states, yet again, to “look beyond narrow security interests” and embrace multilateral solutions to challenges associated with our “more fragmented geopolitical landscape.” (p.3) Indeed, as this Agenda makes clear, we may well have reached the limits of our capacity to heal the deep scars of war and armed conflict without putting an end to armed conflict altogether. We may have also approached the limits of our ability as currently organized to rebuild damaged infrastructure, revitalize economies and the agriculture damaged by bombs and warming temperatures, restore public trust or ensure that the discrimination, arbitrary detention, child recruitment, online harassment, sexual violence and other abuses now virtually synonymous with conflict in both cause and effect do not thereby lay the foundation for a return to the violence which virtually none on this planet can any longer endure. 

Gratefully, the core of the New Agenda for Peace lies in a commitment to prevention (p.11), easier said than done to be sure, but perhaps our only remaining opportunity  as a species to reset our financial architecture, revise our dangerous habits of consumption and suspicion, and heal our social relations; to create enough breathing room in our societies and their governance structures to ensure that biodiversity can be restored, climate risks can be mitigated and solidarity and other indicators of personal and collective responsibility can be ratcheted up. These and other global obligations would help ensure that barriers to the “universal” rights compliance advocated by the SG (such as the elimination of patriarchal structures as explicitly noted on page 7) can be duly removed, thus helping to ensure that policy promises made are more likely to be kept. 

All who spend time in and around the UN recognize that such “breathing room” is in fact is a high aspiration given the low levels of trust which are manifest in many UN policy spaces and the core values attached therein to sovereign interests which keep the UN largely confined to norm-creation. This norm-creation mode, as important as it can be, generally comes attached to little stomach for holding states accountable to commitments which in too-many instances they have scant intent on fulfilling while pushing off accountability for failures away from themselves and on to other states and entities.  It is commonplace to note this, but worth doing so in this context – among the words you will almost never hear in UN conference rooms are apologies for policy misadventures nor clear acknowledgement of national deficiencies in implementing UN norms prior to engaging in the more common practice of trying to “pin the tail on other donkeys.” 

Indeed, the UN often finds itself hamstrung insofar as it must walk a series of lines which recognize that, at the end of the day, even Charter-offending states are going to have the UN they want. They pay the bills. They set the agendas. Their sovereign interests remain paramount no matter how much they might claim otherwise. In the name of preserving universal membership, states permit discouraging violations of core UN Charter principles often with functional impunity. They often tend to talk a better game than play one given how easy it is to “spin” national performance on the assumption that few if any of the major policy players want their UNHQ representatives to make diplomatic trouble or shut off options for dialogue by “exposing” flaws in their own or others’ national narratives.  The value of diplomats lies, in part, as a function of their considerable ability to keep the policy windows open but this skill is regularly discharged despite the stale air which is too often allowed to settle into deliberative and negotiation spaces.

From my own vantage point in regards to reports such as the New Agenda I often find myself hoping to see an examination of the structural impediments facing what is actually an intensely political UN policy space, from resolutions divorced from viable implementation to “consensus” which too often constitutes a de-facto veto and results in language which, again, is more adept at identifying problems than addressing them with the urgency that the times require. The “lip service” (p.11) which the New Agenda identifies has a wider UN application than merely on prevention, though prevention remains a relatively easy matter to “service” in UN spaces. Regrettably, the prevention agenda can easily become a vehicle by which officials are encouraged and enabled to paint more pleasing national portraits of human rights compliance, development assistance, good governance and arms transfer restraint than the available data could ever support.

What I continue to yearn for, virtually always in vain, is a formal accounting of the gaps and limitations of a state-centric, multilateral system wherein the states make pretty much all the rules, including on levels of engagement on key policy relationships which many in our own NGO sector believe must remain more actively seized, such as those linking the human rights and security pillars. The SG does note the “failure to deliver” (p.2) in his New Agenda, but also refers to the UN as “vital” for harmonizing the actions of states to “attain common goals” (p.30).  Unpacking these challenging-to-reconcile claims could well lead to a stronger, more effective system on both security and human rights. We need to remain seized of what the UN is doing with regard to its security-rights nexus, but also what more is needed to succeed, what skills and human capacities are still lacking, how amenable we are to filling gaps (including at local level) rather than allowing them to fester?

Thankfully, in large measure due to the relentless scrutiny and mandate expansion of the Human Rights Council and its Human Rights Committee our understanding of the human rights/peace and security “nexus” is clearly finding expression in multiple diplomatic settings.  No longer is it necessary to explain how discrimination under law and in access to services, prison conditions which enable the practice of torture or other coercive means of extracting “confessions” (a focus of our good partner FIACAT), arbitrary arrests and disappearances and much more contribute to instability within and between states and thereby foment conflict.  And it certainly no unique insight to point to the numerous instances where armed conflict – from Ukraine to Yemen and from Myanmar to Burkina Faso – creates veritable engines of abuse, complicating peace processes and opening doors to conflict recidivism with xenophobia, hate speech and sexual violence to match, abuses which were likely among the causes of the conflict in its first instance.

However, those of us who still choose to hang out in multilateral conference rooms know the gaps that continue to separate acknowledgment of right violations and threats to peace and security across the human spectrum. Indeed, not every agent and agency of global policy is on board with the notion that human rights should be a central theme both informing and defining peace and security deliberations.

The Security Council (our primary UN cover) is one place where consensus on this relationship has been elusive given recent claims bu at least a couple of members (permanent and elected) that a focus on human rights disturbs what is maintained to be a traditional “division of labor” in the UN; that because the UN has a human rights mechanism – albeit overworked and improperly funded – such matters should essentially be left to their devices. Moreover, there is also a concern among a few members past and present that too much human rights scrutiny can easily become a sovereignty-threatening club that some states use to batter the actions and reputations of other states.

These concerns are not entirely without merit; however, they tend to overlook what we know about the place of human rights abuse in triggering conflict as well as the rights-related consequences of violence unresolved. This view also fails to acknowledge the differing levels of authority with which these diverse entities operate. The Security Council’s permanent members are well aware of the privileges of their membership – not only the vetoes which they occasionally threaten and cast, but the additional  ways in which they can manipulate policy outcomes, protect their allies and overstate with impunity the significance of resolutions which are claimed to be “binding” in the main but which were often negotiated and tabled with a clear (if cynical)  understanding of the client state interests to be protected. Without question and for good or ill, the Council’s vested authority is unmatched across the UN system (including by the International Court of Justice), a system which provides Charter-based options for coercive responses to many (not all) threats to the peace which are simply not options for other agencies and pillars.

Of course, anyone who is still engaged with this piece will likely know all this already.  But perhaps the following implications of this authority imbalance will pique interest. Those in the Council (often from among the 10 elected members) who wish to see the Council’s Programme of Work expanded to more regularly embrace contemporary themes and conflict triggers (such as climate change or as it is now known around the UN, “global boiling”) and areas of overlap (such as human rights enablers and consequences of armed conflict) thankfully have various means to do so including hosting Arria Formula meetings and taking advantage of modest presidential prerogatives when their month to occupy that seat comes around.

But these options remain insufficient to a full vetting of the rights-security nexus.  We have long advocated for a Security Council that is more representative, but also which is more in sync with the goals and expectations of the UN system on the whole.  A case can be made, and we would wish to make it, that the Council should embrace more of an enabling (in the positive sense) role relative to the system of which it is a part. Yes, there is a Human Rights Council. Yes, there are talented rapporteurs galore and human rights review procedures applicable to member states. But human rights performance seems a bit too optional and subject to sovereign interests, especially given that such performance is, if the New Agenda is to be believed, central to any sustainable peace.  At the very least, the Security Council could use its authority to encourage greater political and financial attention to a human rights system which strives for universal application across a “full spectrum” of rights obligations now ranging from ending torture to ensuring the right to a healthy environment.  The Council does not necessarily need to add direct discussions about these rights obligations to its already complex and often-frustrated agenda, but it can and should do more to indicate that the successful work of human rights and other UN mechanisms has a direct bearing on the success of its own peace and security agenda. 

It seems obvious perhaps, but bears repeating: none of us engaged at any level in international policy, neither the Security Council nor any of the rest of us, should ever divert our gaze from the painful reminders of just how many people remain under threat in this world and how much further we need to travel in order to make a world that is more equal, more inclusive, more respectful of each other and our surroundings, certainly even more mindful of our own, privileged lifestyle  “contributions” to a world we say, over and over, is actually not the world we want.  As difficult as it might be to contemplate, we in policy spaces are not always the “good ones.” Indeed, when states and other stakeholders refuse to own up to their own foibles and limitations, especially in areas of rights and security, their/our critiques of others, regardless of their conceptual legitimacy, are more likely to ring hollow.

One area of ownership in these times is related to elements of  the “human rights backlash” which we continue to experience in many countries, in many communities and their institutions, even in multilateral settings, as evidenced by an unwillingness to address the core funding needs of the human rights “pillar,” member state inattentiveness to legitimate requests for investigations by special rapporteurs and others, even attempts by a shocking number of state officials to link the activities of human rights advocates (and even of professional journalists) to those of the “terrorists.”

Clearly, the world we inhabit needs a full reset beyond truces, beyond grudging or even self-interested suspensions of hostilities. Such may well be helpful preconditions for the pursuit of security which simply cannot be obtained at the point of a gun. But the security that so many in this world seek remains too-often elusive despite these often-unstable agreements, including people whose farmlands have dried out or flooded, people forced into poverty, displacement and despair by armed violence and abusive forms of governance, people made vulnerable to the lies and allures of armed groups and traffickers, people who find that they can no longer trust their neighbors or inspire trust from them, people betrayed by officials whose hearts have long-since hardened to their pleas for help. These are just some of the people in our fragmented world whose rights deficits are tied in part to our weapons and power-related addictions but more to our failures as people to soften our hearts and raise our voices to the challenges it is still within our capacity to meet.

The Universal Declaration does not, as many readers know well, dwell on weapons or other security concerns.  But it does define the tenets of a sustainable human dignity, the rights that give people the best chance to pursue lives in keeping with their aspirations beyond their mere survival.  It reminds us, as does the New Agenda more explicitly (p.3) that “war is a choice;” indeed is a series of choices by states and communities to invest in the carnage of ever more sophisticated weaponry and the coercive humiliation which flows from the deployment of such weaponry rather than in ensuring a sustainable future for all our people. Those many rights activists and policy advocates who put their own lives on the line to protect the rights of others know how much of our current security policy and architecture threatens to lead us down paths of ruin.  If the New Agenda is truly to be “new,” it must inspire commitment to find the inner resources needed to pursue more sustainable outer actions that, as with the Universal Declaration, keep dignity at the very top of our conflict prevention and human rights menu.

Tags: , ,

The (In)Decencies of Work: A Labor Day Reflection, Dr. Robert Zuber

4 Sep

Courtesy of Hope Hanafin

Without a constant livelihood, there will be no constant heart.  Ueda Akinari

There are things that keep us alive, there are things we stay alive for.  Abhijit Naskar

Poverty is terror. Having your Social Security threatened is terror. Having your livelihood as an elderly person slowly disappearing with no replenishment is terror. Harry Belafonte

All across this world, especially within the African diaspora, we feel like there is a constant devaluing of our culture and our livelihood. Jidenna

Inequality is a poison that is destroying livelihoods, stripping families of dignity, and splitting communities. Sharan Burrow

The curse of our time, perhaps soon a fatal one, is not idleness, but work not worth doing, done by people who hate it, who do it only because they fear that if they do not they will have no ‘job’, no livelihood, and worse than that, no sense of being useful or needed or worthy.  John Holt

Do your work and I shall know you; do your work and you shall reinforce yourself.   Ralph Waldo Emerson

This is Labor Day Weekend in the US, a time for some at least to honor and assess the conditions of those among us who keep us fed and clothed, who respond to us during health or other crises, who keep our infrastructure repaired and transportation safe allowing some of us at least to experience one final weekend delicacy of these summer months.

But even those of us who are reasonably well maintained in this world, who have enough to eat, dependable shelter, a viable social network and work that has at least some meaning attached to it know that things are not well with labor. In our time.  As social inequalities rise, the gap between those who “work for a living” and those who decide the too-often dehumanizing conditions under which that work happens continues to expand.  More and more people, especially agricultural workers and others in the so-called “service industry,” work at jobs over which they have little or no control and which ensure that workers and their families do no better than “scrape by” from one minimum-wage paycheck to the next, many wondering if their children will be able to break the cycle of what are essentially “fixed income” jobs with little input, limited satisfaction, and with few or no clear pathways to progress.

The UN speaks much of “decent work,” which rightly attempts to identify impediments to labor which is “dignified” in all aspects – dignified in the sense that the conditions under which that labor occurs are safety and participation-oriented, that exploitation of those seeking opportunities including as migrants (forced or voluntary) is duly highlighted and eliminated, that child labor on and off the streets is replaced by educational and health care access, that those who toil in mines and fields have access to the fruits of their own labor, and that dependents are able to reap at least some benefit from the absence (and often bone-weariness as well) of their working parents. 

“Decent” by UN standards is intended as a floor not a ceiling, as well it should.   

As the UN itself is well aware, impediments to decent work are not limited to gaps in our labor laws and immigration policies, as unforgiving as these often can be.  Across the world, more and more people have been forced to abandon homes and local livelihoods, victims of one or more of armed violence, persecution and other human rights abuses, and climate change impacts running the gamut of drought, severe flooding and biodiversity loss. This is “terror” of a sort that most of us who can read and digest posts such as this one can scarcely imagine, the terror of poverty compounded by the loss of livelihoods and community, the loss of much of what keeps people sustained in body and spirit, the loss of that which keeps us alive and that we “stay alive for.”

For all its good efforts towards “decent work” for all, what the UN cannot do, cannot ensure, is labor which is honored and respected by others. The UN (or any other institution of its ilk) cannot ensure that we who are “well off” are willing to recognize in ways concrete the degree to which our own affluence is a product of the labor of others, those often toiling under conditions that might well break most of the rest of us. The UN cannot ensure that we have the courage to look into the eyes of children flooding the streets and markets, children often left to wonder if the grueling uncertainty of lives as vendors or cleaners will ever end.  And in turn, wondering if the worry and fatigue in the eyes of the parents of these children will ever be allowed to transition into lives characterized by more security, more dignity, even more time away from labor to pursue other ends.

I can almost hear the voices chanting that “this is capitalism,” that people have a right to get what they can get for themselves, that people who “made it” are under no obligation to embrace even the most modest principles of fairness and equity.  I’ve heard this many times, often accompanied by expletives which I myself use but would never subject you to in this space.  But let’s also be clear: capitalism does not require disrespect of those who harvest our crops, deliver food or packages in the midst of a pandemic, or leave their warm beds at 3AM to fix problems with water, power or transportation which they did not cause.   It does not require our indifference to those who teach otherwise ignored children or care for the frail and elderly as they approach their own worldly ends.  It does not require us to centralize money as the sole measure of “success” to the exclusion of identity, community and self-worth.  It does not require our ignorance of the needs of people involuntarily on the move, often with children who cannot fathom why parents decided  to leave the “security” of home for the hardship which is now their constant companion.  It does not require the invalidation of the “constant heart” which beats in response to what once was and could still be our “constant livelihoods.”

And as the anxiety around artificial intelligence reaches a fever pitch in our time, including some urgent norm development through the UN, we would do well on this day to consider the degree to which we have dehumanized so much of our labor force aside from the wealthy decisionmakers who have, creatively or nefariously, pushed their way to the top. We are currently in the midst of an avalanche of technological advance, much of it unrequested at community level and most all of it to the benefit of a few. It is disconcerting to me, rightly or otherwise, that we are on the verge of magnifying the impact of non-human intelligence as our own capacity for sound and attentive judgment continues to wane, as more and more of us, as noted recently by Jared Holt, choose to “glue our eyelids shut.”  Equally disconcerting to me is that we threaten livelihoods with technology with only scant effort to accommodate the “terror” of livelihood loss, the consequences from which cannot be alleviated through money alone.

Of my many oft-quotations of Wendell Berry, the one I utilize most often is that we have become cultures full of people “who would rather own a neighbor’s farm than have a neighbor.”  This fools errand lies at the heart of why we need to take this day more seriously, why the reconciliation of our peoples which is more and more up for grabs requires us to better validate both the labor and the laborer. This day and every day, we can and must do more to ensure that our still-serially disrespected workers have options for decency and dignity that they, like the rest of us, need in order to feel “useful and worthy,” including options of greater honor accorded to the work they do that the rest of us, at least in this time, simply cannot do without.

Tags: , ,

African Security in the Anthropocene: Book Discussion and Follow-up Interview, Dr. Robert Zuber

3 Jul

Dear Folks,

The following link takes you to an interview I did over the weekend with a South African investigative journalist, Chris Steyn. The interview followed a successful UN visit and book discussion led by Dr. Hussein Solomon of South Africa and Dr. Jude Cocodia of Nigeria. Their fine book, “African Security in the Anthropocene,” is one to which they graciously allowed me to contribute, albeit modestly.

The interview, which was very well handled by Chris and which includes a couple of “commercial interruptions,” was my attempt to link current events, including with regard to latest Wagner Group drama, to broader security interests which the book highlights and to which our New York-based work has long sought to contribute. It was an early-morning interview for which there was probably not enough coffee in my zip code, but I think there is some value here. I hope you will find it so. Bob

Tags: , , ,

Sticking the Landing:  A Father’s Day Reflection, Dr. Robert Zuber

18 Jun

People protect what they love. Jacques Yves Cousteau

Power is no blessing in itself, except when it is used to protect the innocent. Jonathan Swift

Desperation, weakness, vulnerability – these things will always be exploited. You need to protect the weak, ring-fence them, with something far stronger than empathy. Zadie Smith

Idealism, alas, does not protect one from ignorance, dogmatism, and foolishness. Sidney Hook

If we do not step forward, then we step back. Paul Martin

Attend me, hold me in your muscular flowering arms, protect me from throwing any part of myself away. Audre Lorde

There can be no lasting prosperity for our people, if we do not protect our planet. Rishi Sunak

Some of you who follow these posts have commented on their recent, relative infrequency.  This should not be interpreted as a sign of a reduced engagement but rather of circumstance as we continue to adjust in many ways – programmatically, logistically, financially to the changes brought about in some measure due to the long pandemic.  The passion persists; the urgency even more so.  But there is so much in our world generating urgency now, so many threats from which we need to offer protection, both in our own present and for the sake of our often-anxious progeny.  It is harder now to keep track, harder to prioritize, even harder to fashion cogent arguments for public consumption that don’t merely ply familiar personal and policy terrain.  

But this is Fathers Day weekend which for some reason I have long associated with protection.  Not because women don’t protect as well, but because our patriarchal worldviews have long assumed that the men would do the bulk of the protecting, occasionally through keen awareness, negotiation and compromise, but, quite unfortunately, often navigating protection at the end of clenched fists, the barrel of a gun, or worldly investments which accrue benefit only to a few.

The notion of protection seems quite straightforward at first glance, but for many of the best fathers I know it is anything but, a combination of attentiveness to matters of the moment with a lively sense of what the future may well hold for their progeny and what can be done to minimize the challenge and maximize the tools (financial, educational, personal) needed to meet the challenge or at least to give children a fighting chance to do so.

For even those fathers particularly skilled in the nuances of protection’s complexities, the words “messy and fraught” used this Saturday by the Washington Post, seem appropriate.  We can ensure that children are fed and hugged, educated and housed; that they are properly “ring-fenced with something stronger than empathy.” Moreover, we can also do much to ensure that they experience the personal skills they will need to practice over the course of their lives, the attentive understanding, generosity and compassion that they would wish for others to bestow upon them. 

But most of the fathers I know understand well that their ability to protect is limited even if bound within the domains of family and community.  To be sure, they cannot always protect from disappointment and failure, from humiliation and bullying, from anxiety and heartbreak.   They cannot always ensure that their children will embrace a calling appropriate to these difficult and dangerous times or (to quote that beautiful phrase of Audre Lorde) that they can keep girls and boys “from throwing any part of myself away.”

Beyond this, many of the fathers I know often lament that they cannot better protect children from the larger threats to their future — the new technologies and their weapons that we can create but barely control, the climate change and related biodiversity loss and ocean warming that portends more violent weather patterns and evermore silent springs, the pandemics which poise like wolves outside our seemingly-secure dwellings, waiting to blow away the plans and dreams of the unprepared and unsuspecting,

On top of all, we live in a time when fatherhood itself is contested space, when “men” are judged more and more by their most problematic examples, when even those who try to be the best fathers that they are capable of being find themselves too -often frustrated; struggling with life-partners living out a “different page,” displaced by the allures and influences of social media platforms and celebrity culture, worried that the financial and lifestyle sacrifices made to raise and educate their progeny will prove to be bets no safer than those made in Las Vegas casinos – close your eyes, cross your fingers, take your chances, and hope for the best. 

Never having had to raise children myself, I am always a bit hesitant to write about something I have never experienced, those hour-to-hour duties and worries that I can only participate in vicariously.  But I also know many fathers, some mostly satisfied, some also regretful, some eminently grateful for their blessings, some occasionally despondent at the lack of understanding and forgiveness from children who are likely to get over that difficult hump, if they ever do, only when they have children of their own.  It is indeed a “messy and fraught” business this fatherhood thing, implementing uneasy promises of protection in relatively small spaces as the bees struggle to pollinate, the fish migrate far from their biological homes in search of properly oxygenated waters, the air turns orange as the far-away forests go up in flames, the weapons continue to discharge in classrooms, and those who would deign to govern have seemingly thrown more of themselves away than any of the rest of us could possibly imagine doing ourselves.

I myself am no “father,” neither in biological nor religious terms.  But in our own “messy and fraught” manner, I and my colleagues have been consumed over many years with the responsibility to “make the world fit for children,” to enable and inspire care, to privilege equity and access across the global community, to help ensure that institutions like the UN not only assess threats to the future but act on them and do so collaboratively and decisively.  We and many others have tried despite a bevy of external and self-inflicted limitations to ensure that fathers and mothers can do their level best with children with some semblance of expectation that the world they are preparing for their children to inherit is worthy of that effort, a world that is greener, more equitable, more inclusive, more peaceful, more respectful than we have often been led to believe is possible.

This is all within the realm of the rhetorical, of course, and time spent (as we do routinely) within international organizations paints an uncomfortable picture of compromised policy urgency, endless half-truths emanating from officialdom, and processes content to examine and assess problems without a corresponding responsibility to urgently remediate the worst of their influences.  If fathers and mothers are ultimately to continue to “stick the landing” on parenthood, again to quote the Washington Post this weekend, they will need more, much more, from we erstwhile global policymakers:  more clarity and honesty about the messes we have collectively made for ourselves, more courage to move beyond petty politics and trust-related “excuses,” more determination to overcome our own follies and better translate idealistic words on a page to an embrace and support for the growing complexities and challenges associated with transitioning from one generation to another.

Happy Father’s Day, folks.  I can’t understand all that you go through, and surely do not wish to compete with the gifts some of you will get today in the form of thank-you cards, neckties and power drills, but know that we will continue to do what we we are able to help ensure that your complex and loving investments in our common future have the best possible chance of bearing good fruit.

Tags:

The Folly of Mediating Peace in Sudan, by Professor Hussein Solomon

8 Jun

Editor’s Note: For some time now, Dr. Solomon has held our attention on the swhifting situations facing Sudan from atrocity crimes in Darfur to the current, coup-influenced violence. We have been grateful for his probing commentary which has exposed conflict prevention and resolution flaws across the African continent and beyond. We are pleased that Dr. Solomon (along with Professor Jude Cocodia of Nigeria) will soon be in New York to launch their new book, “African Security in the Anthropocene.” Please contact me (zuber@globalactonpw.org) for more information about their New York events.

The carnage of war is evident in Sudan as the conflict between the Sudanese Armed Forces (SAF) led by General Abdel Fattah al Burhan and the paramilitary Rapid Support Forces (RSF) under the command of Burhan’s deputy – Mohamed Hamdan `Hemedti’ Daglo continues to escalate. The fighting is most intense around the three adjoining cities that make up the country’s greater capital – Khartoum, Omdurman and Khartoum North. However, it is also occurring in other parts of this blighted country.  After six weeks of fighting, 25 million require aid and protection according to the United Nations. Moreover, 1,1 million people are internally displaced whilst 350,000 fled across borders seeking refuge in neighbouring states.

Tensions between the SAF and RSF came to the fore in January 2023 during the discussions around the integration of the RSF into the regular armed forces. By April the tensions escalated into full-scale conflict. Ironically, the Sudanese Armed Forces assisted in the creation of the RSF from Janjaweed militias which it used to fight the anti-Khartoum insurgency in Darfur.

The RSF was estimated to be 5,000 strong in 2014. They grew stronger and by 2016, it sent 40,000 of its members to fight in the civil war in Yemen. By 2023 it was estimated to consist of 100,000 fighters – many battle-tested veterans of the Yemeni civil war. Its growing military strength also lay in its growing economic footprint – especially in gold mining. Consider here the case of the Jebel Amer mines in Darfur which stretch for more than 10 kilometres. Following the RSF wresting control over it, Hemedti was transformed into the most important player in Sudan’s gold industry.  Gold gave the RSF the ability the be financially self-sufficient and exist outside the military’s chain of command. This, of course, Burhan would not countenance. At the same time, it needs to be acknowledged that the SAF are also major players in Sudan’s economy and contribute to the military’s reluctance to hand power over to civilian authorities.

 From this perspective, the current conflict in Sudan should not be seen as beginning this year but relates to the problem of civil-military relations and the military’s penchant of getting itself immersed into the economy. Consider the following fact: Sudan has only had three short-lived attempts at civilian democracies – 1956-1958, 1964-1969 and 1985-1989. Following the ouster of Sudanese strong man Field Marshal Omar al-Bashir on 11 April 2019, there was a serious attempt on the part of Sudanese civil society to establish a civilian government. This, however, was prevented by the military coup in which both Burhan and Hemedti cooperated to thwart the democratic aspirations of the Sudanese people. Both Burhan and Hemedti are the problem together with the ongoing penchant of the military to involve themselves directly in the political and economic spheres.

From this perspective the Jeddah talks which Saudi Arabia and the United States were mediating was bound to fail. It simply did not go far enough to seek a lasting solution beyond the current crisis. The talks were also bound to fail since not enough attention was given by the mediators to the role of outside actors who may be stoking the conflict. For instance, it is alleged that the RSF gets support from the likes of a Libyan National Army strongman – Khalifa Haftar — as well as from Russia’s Wagner Group.

The talks were also bound to fail given the low-level delegations sent by these two Sudanese combatants to Jeddah. Both were attempting to use the Jeddah talks as a public relations exercise as well as to win brownie points in Washington and Riyadh. Embarrassingly for both Saudi Arabia and the United States, they have declared 6 times since the 6th of May when the mediation effort began that a humanitarian cessation of hostilities had been reached, only to have it violated each and every time. Burhan’s commitment to the peace talks was already in doubt when he wrote to the UN Secretary General seeking the removal of Volker Perthes, the UN’s Special Representative for Sudan. This followed Perthes criticizing both Burhan and Hemedti and warning of the “growing ethnicization of the conflict”. Burhan also formally removed Hemedti from his post as deputy and has brought in further army reinforcements in his fight against the RSF.

All these developments point to a further escalation of the conflict. These rivalries, meanwhile, are hastening the disintegration of Sudan. Given the fact that the armed forces are distracted by the RSF, there is a real danger that the banner of insurrection will once again be raised in the Darfur region as well as in Blue Nile and South Kordofan states.

Tags: , ,

Trust Busters: Interrogating the “Blossoms” of Distrust, Dr. Robert Zuber

7 May

You may be deceived if you trust too much, but you will live in torment if you don’t trust enough. Frank Crane

Trust dies but mistrust blossoms. Sophocles

When trust improves, the mood improves. Fernando Flores

How can people trust the harvest, unless they see it sown? Mary Renault

As you enter positions of trust and power, dream a little before you think. Toni Morrison

Trust, even when your heart begs you not to. Alysha Speer

To borrow against the trust someone has placed in you costs nothing at first. You get away with it, you take a little more and a little more until there is no more to draw on. Jeanette Winterson

Trust starts with truth and ends with truth.  Santosh Kalwar

This past week, under the Swiss presidency, the Security Council held a general debate on the topic, “Futureproofing trust for sustaining peace.”  This “debate,” chaired by the Swiss Minister of Foreign Affairs, gave delegations the chance to both assign blame for the current, largely dismal, state of multilateral affairs, but also to be more thoughtful than is often encouraged about how trust-building is a more essential element in the success of such affairs than has often been recognized.

Amidst the cold winds blowing through the UN since the height of the pandemic, specifically with regard to NGO and civil society access, we have noticed more and more delegations taking up – in rhetoric if not always  in practice – the normative elements that we and others have been promoting for some time.  More and more it is recognized that the comfort we share within our UN bubbles is often not shared by constituencies at large; that our predispositions to craft language (especially on peace and security) watered down by a misreading of “consensus” and then foisted on a needy world with little or no interest in how such language is to be implemented does not appear to others to be quite the breakthrough that we imagine it to be in the realtive conform of UN conference rooms.  Indeed, there are, and likely shall remain, trust deficits which will inevitably occur in situations where the norm-makers have little or no responsibility to ensure that norms crafted can actually breathe hope and life into the communities ostensibly served, communities who generally have little or no say in their crafting.

As we know from our own training and investigations, and as this week’s Council debate reinforced, trust is no simple matter.  Indeed, like “love” and many other of our cherished normative categories, trust is far easier to invoke than to either define or maintain.  Indeed, in a world which seems at times to be spinning out of control, the tendency in policy is to focus too much on the criterion govering our own trust issues rather than on criterion for cultivating and enabling trust in others.  Moreover, in the context of multilateral relations, it is too easy to forget that the priority of trust-building has a history, one in part of colonial powers and other large states which has “borrowed against trust,” over and over again, throwing their weight around, imposing values that they do not always practice themselves, telling only the part of the truth which serves national interests, crafting agreements with abundant loopholes which preserve options for some and limit them for many others, insisting on ending impunity for smaller, offending states while dodging accountability for themselves, insisting on a “rules-based order” without a thorough vetting of who made those rules and the starkly uneven ways in which they are often enacted.

We should be clear here.  We have sat in UN conference rooms with laptops open and mouths closed for a generation now.  Despite the aforementioned “cold winds” which we experience on a daily basis, we continue to believe that the flaws in this system, flaws which impede the full-flowering of what is still a rather remarkable experiment, can and must be fixed.  Despite the extraordinary diplomatic and learning opportunities occurring routinely within its walls, we have long since moved past honoring the resolutions which are dead on arrival, the endless COPs and other of what Kenya referred to this week as our “ceremonial meetings” which too –often deliver even less than half a loaf, those diplomats who insist that the UN is solely for its member states without reminding the small but attentive audiences that the decisions which hopefully bind are made mostly in national capitals not in UN conference rooms, the often-fruitful discussions which are now more frequently webcast but which are more likely to raise constituent expectations than satisfy them. 

Despite calls by the African Union and several other delegations speaking at the “Futureproofing” event to bring multilateralism closer to the people, gaps of trust remain, gaps which cannot be written off as the fruits of vaccine inequity or the painful Russian aggression against Ukraine.  These are gaps of “good faith” as noted by Mexico this week, of the absence of justice as Ireland insisted, of promises made and then broken as suggested by China, including the promise to break down “the high walls over small spaces” that more and more states seem desperate to maintain.  For its part, Brazil warned of the rapid spread of resentment (and we would add “grievance”) which is toxic to trust-building as is (well-put by the Swiss Minister of Foreign Affairs) our current climate of unpredictability which causes some states to retreat into an unhelpful “nostalgia” and others to dig in their heels and refuse to budge on policy until their own (largely un-named) trust issues are duly addressed.

It is not so difficult for each of us to grasp the complexities of trust; we only have to examine our own relationships, our own mishandling of the truth including the truth about ourselves, the unexamined hurts we carry around in our hearts which impede both the risks of trust but also a clear-eyed examination of the hurts we have inflicted on others.  Trust is no simple matter, neither for institutions like the UN nor in our own domestic contexts.  Whether local or global we continue to “borrow against trust” in ways that only serve to shrink our personal circles and policy worldviews, narrrowing options for both promise keeping and service provision.  

During the Council meeting on “Futureproofing Trust,” The UN High Commissioner for Human Rights, Volker Türk (who doesn’t pull many punches) cited what he called “atrocious ruptures in the social fabric” which make trust in governing institutions a high hill to climb.  Unfortunately, this “high hill” also applies to our personal and domestic contexts as well.  Study after study has chronicled a growing sense of loneliness and isolation amongst many of our populations, people whose primary companions have become cell phones and social media outlets, people who tend to place more trust in apps than in neighbors, people who wouldn’t dream of talking to a stranger but will bare their all in front of a camera to be consumed by thousands of perfect strangers. 

The “atrocious ruptures” chronicled by the High Commissioner thus have implications both within and beyond multilateral structures, pushing peoples and their representative into harder positions and more well-defended spaces from which stems too-little hope, too-little confidence, too-little trust, too-little courage.  The “torment” which verily comes from living in a world characterized by staggering levels of mistrust now constitutes a metaphorical “superbloom,” one which coveys little beautfy but rather continues to narrow personal and policy options and perspectives. This torment is simply something we must choose to live without.

If we are to scale the peaks on which are very lives likely now depend, we will need to replace the interminable “code red” warnings of our hearts with heart-friendly investments, refusing to be lonely and isolated, refusing to make promises we have no intention of keeping, refusing to pay lip service to the trust that we desperately require at the core of our souls and institutions, the trust that can “improve our collective mood” and bridge divides of truth and action that threaten to turn gaps into the ruptures which we all would do well to fear.

Switzerland opened a door this week in an eminent policy space to reflect on a topic both exceedingly complex and largely neglected.  The takeaway is that we are running short of time to adjust our ways and means such that we might trust with greater courage and improve prospects for maintaining the trust of others. Trust in the end is the glue which can hold together our increaingly unglued societies and their increasingly bewildered citizens. We must continue to make spaces conducive to exploring and examinuing ways to build and share the trust on which our collective future likely hinges.

Tags: ,

Getting Us:  A Holy Season Reflection, Dr. Robert Zuber

7 Apr

Beautiful people do not just happen. Elisabeth Kübler-Ross

 In love there is no because, no reason, no explanation, no solutions. Anaïs Nin

The truly terrible thing is that everybody has their reasons. Jean Renoir

We are each other’s harvest; we are each other’s business; we are each other’s magnitude and bond.  Gwendolyn Brooks

Leave people better than you found them. Marvin J. Ashton

The opposite pole to narcissism is objectivity; it is the faculty to see other people and things as they are, objectively, and to be able to separate this objective picture from a picture which is formed by one’s desires and fears.  Erich Fromm

If you understood everything I said, you’d be me. Miles Davis

As soon as we start putting our thoughts into words and sentences everything gets distorted. Marcel Duchamp

If we are to love our neighbors, before doing anything else we must see our neighbors. Frederick Buechner

You do not really understand something unless you can explain it to your grandmother. Albert Einstein

I do not want the peace which passes understanding, I want the understanding which brings peace. Helen Keller

I sat with my anger long enough until she told me her real name was grief. C.S. Lewis

To most Christians, the Bible is like a software license. Nobody actually reads it. They just scroll to the bottom and click ‘I agree’. Bill Maher

In this week of many expressions of faith across many cultures, one of the few television commercials that has piqued my interest is the one suggesting that “Jesus Gets Us;” that the one whom at least some of us reverently acknowledge was, on this day, unceremoniously nailed to a cross, really understands who and what we are, notwithstanding perhaps also being a murdered victim of some profound misconceptions about who HE was, what he represented, the challenge of what he expected of us and what many of his followers in real time also expected of him.

If any of you identify in whatever way as Christians and want to find out more about this movement, you are encouraged to check out https://hegetsus.com/en. In fairness, there are things here to warrant a look, especially the reminder that Jesus seemed to reach out to those who experienced rejection from the society into which he was born as well as those facing great pain or need, people longing for a more dignified existence which the dominant social conventions of that time (as in our own) largely denied them.

So at one level, good for them. Good for not trying to turn Jesus’ ministry into version II of the vengeance-prone deity which so many of his contemporary followers seem to prefer, a deity whose central concern during the earliest expressions of the Jewish faith seemed to be more about punitively keeping people in line – especially with regard to matters of sexuality and procreation – than in keeping people on the path to a higher compassion and a deeper understanding of faith which incorporated but was not confined to the utterances of religious leadership.

I want to get to the issue of what it means to “get us,” but as way of confessional background it has been clear to me, or at least as clear as anything can be with regard to the “mysteries of faith,” that the main concern of Jesus’ ministry was less with “sinners” per se and more with the hypocrisy and self-referential nature of religious authorities. Time after time, together with his band of misfit disciples, Jesus reminded others that the ones who had strayed the furthest from the faith were the ones who deigned to represent it, those who largely failed to heal or inspire, those who were more concerned with keeping Rome out of “their” business than with attending to God’s business.

The scriptures – which I would remind you we only know as translation and also know primarily (and rightly in my view) as an aid to liturgy more than as a stand-alone book of hard rules – put the notion of “getting us” in a particular light.  I don’t wish to force an interpretation on the reader, though I do agree with Bill Maher when he joked about the bible akin to “software license” which we merely scroll to the bottom to then give the most superfifical of assents.  But it is also clear to me that there are at least two kinds of “getting” embedded in Gospel narratives which were intended for diverse communities in part by rearranging and then communicating different pieces of the oral and written testimony about Jesus available at that time.

This testimony surely gives some credence to the notion of “getting” from healing the apparently unhealable and feeding multitudes to acknowledging the humanity of criminals as he hung from the cross. That Jesus had made a ministry out of “getting” those whom the religious leadership of the time had largely forsaken, those who should never be brushed aside by houses of faith but should instead constitute the core of ministry for all who imagine ourselves to be following in his sacred footsteps. 

But scripture equally chronicles a “getting” which is less about him “getting” us than the other side of the relationship. We must resist the temptation to brush aside from the bibilical narrative the degree to which few during the earthly sojourn of Jesus seemed to grasp what exactly was going on in that here-and-now and why it mattered.  From the wedding at Cana to the capture of Jesus by soldiers prior to his crucifixion, even the people closest to Jesus (his mother, Peter, etc.) apparently missed large portions of the point of the mystery and ministry which he embodied. 

I would humbly suggest that in this time when faith is becoming more aggressive and tribal than thoughtful or compassionate, we would do well to contemplate less on how Jesus “gets” us and more on whether we actually “get” Jesus, actually “get” who and what he prioritized, how he left people better than how he found them, where and how he dispensed both his compassion and his challenge, what he most fervently wished for those who flocked to hear his message but who surely were left to guess (and probably guessed erroneously) where this preacher and healer came from and what he had ultimately come to accomplish.

At the same time, we would do well to reflect on how this notion of “getting” has punctuated our contemporary discourse, suggesting relationships which seek to blend understanding of “where we’re coming from” with a degree of acceptance which largely assumes that change and growth are unlikely to occur and should hardly even be encouraged.  Such “getting” may well be key to the maintenance of domestic harmony, but I’m not convinced that it is entirely what Jesus had in mind. Of course, as Miles Davis suggested above, if we understood everything Jesus said, we would be Jesus. That was not happening then.  That is not happening now.

But what can happen is forging a closer synergy regarding the healing, caring, inspirational ministry which Jesus embodied and what he seemed to encourage in others – a ministry of our own defined by compassionate understanding and a stronger commitment  to change and growth.  We are complex beings to which the quotes above and thousands of others attest, and part of this complexity which has been uprooted through modern psychology and medicine has underscored the power of habit, our almost genetic stubbornness with regard to the sometimes unhelpful values and practices which tend to govern our lives – many of which we can ably rationalize or passionately defend but not sufficiently explain, even to ourselves.

Jesus surely “got” that some of those who sought his forgiveness would likely return to behaviors which prompted the search for forgiveness in the first place. But for others, the encounters were life-changing in the most complete sense of that term – a turning point for people whose aspirations had been buried under social convention, foreign occupation and religious authorities more concerned about their own piety than about the well-being of those who legitimately felt abandoned by them.  For these, the testimony of Jesus, the touch of his garment, the meals he shared, the removal of afflictions which had turned sons and daughters into social outcasts, these were both manifestations of his ministry and invitations to grow and change, invitations as well to take up ministry ourselves, to “leave people better than we found them” in whatever ways we are able.

Jesus “gets” us enough to offer us pathways to companionship through this sometimes challenging life, but also “gets” the habits of our hearts, habits from which stem many outcomes including compassion, courage and caring but also violence and indifference, discrimination and self-deception. This Jesus who we claim to “get” but mostly don’t, this Jesus who constantly chided those nearest to him who understood his person and ministry largely through the lens of their own assumptions and expectations, this Jesus urges all — especially in these holy times — to see with greater clarity that we might truly become “each other’s harvest.”

Tags: , , ,

Earth Year: A Call to Clarity of Hands and Hearts, Dr. Robert Zuber

2 Apr
Florida, the Bahamas and Cuba as seen by the International Space Station.

From NASA

The holy men say we are entering a period of clarity. Rigoberta Menchu

The greatest privilege is to live well in flourishing lands. Hamza Yusuf

Virtue can only flourish among equals.  Mary Wollstonecraft

For millions of years, this world has been a great gift to nearly everything living on it. Rebecca Solnit

If beautiful lilies bloom in ugly waters, you too can blossom in ugly situations. Matshona Dhliwayo

Peace is the creation of an environment where all can flourish regardless of race, color, creed, religion, gender, class, caste or any other social markers of difference. Nelson Mandela

Around the globe, people from all walks of life are holding their breath in the hope that a flurry of activity at all levels of policy and human community will be sufficient to reverse what is commonly known at the UN as the “triple” planetary threats from climate change, biodiversity loss and pollution (especially plastics pollution).  

The UN has seen its own frenetic activity as leaderships tries to both make up for precious lost time while encouraging member states to take more political risks and step-up ambitions to find more robust and cooperative measures to address threats which clearly are not inclined to wait for us to make the change we need to make in order to secure a future for our children, especially those children residing in the most climate-vulnerable regions.

The UN has certainly created numerous spaces for member state deliberations on virtually all aspects and dimensions related to the “triple threat,” including implications for human health (mental, physical and nutritional), for international peace and security, and for more inclusive processes which not only heed the voices of women, youth and indigenous people but which actually seek to incorporate their learning and insights into policy decision making.    

Some of these processes, as many of you recognize, take the form of large, carbon-intensive events which create some consensus-driven movement but generally lacking in practical implementation of pledges which fully mirror their rhetorical origins.   Case in point is the fund for “loss and damage” agreed to at COP 27 in Egypt, an important step which has yet to generate the remedial funding which the most climate affected states had anticipated (and still anticipate).  Diplomats also agreed recently on elements of a treaty to impose structures of governance on ocean areas beyond national jurisdiction (BBNJ), a theoretically important framework to mitigate at least some of the “wild west” mentality which has encouraged massive ocean dumping and deep-sea mining and has also precipitated a decline in ocean species as waters warm and the remains of our collective overconsumption now reach the furthest ocean depths. The recently concluded UN Water Conference resulted in over 600 pledges (albeit voluntary) to strengthen “trans-boundary water cooperation, promote universal sanitation and explore security and other implications of severe access challenges regarding this most precious of resources.  The General Assembly for its part passed a unanimous resolution (sponsored by Vanuatu and others) seeking clarity from the International Court of Justice regarding the legal obligations of states whose production and consumption patterns, as noted during the week by UNEP director Inger Andersen, now serve to threaten the very existence of other states.   Even the Security Council got into the act recently as Mozambique chaired an Arria Formula discussion on protecting water-related infrastructure.  But despite what (to us at least) seems like an obvious linkage between a dangerously warming climate and prospects for armed conflict, several Council members past and present remain unconvinced that climate concerns should be folded into the Council’s peace and security mandate.

This bevy of activity (we didn’t even mention the biodiversity conference in Montreal or the Forum on Forests) is welcome but can also obscure the fact that most of these commitments are voluntary, are unenforceable or constitute some subtle form of “greenwashing” which leads people beyond UN confines to think that more is happening to forestall disaster than is actually the case. Having been around the UN for what seems like forever, we understand well that in large multi-lateral spaces facilitated by the UN, spaces filled with diplomats representing national positions and increasingly insisting on elusive consensus, progress is likely to be slow, perhaps too slow given crises weighing down human community like a bad case of COPD.  It certainly seems as such to the growing number of youth environmental activists who, despite their energies and practical commitments across the globe, still struggle for their place at the policy table to help ensure progress that is more than textual and rhetorical.  Indeed, as one youth activist noted during the days of the UN Water Conference, holding these large eco-events in expensive UN cities literally ensures that many of the people who wish to present testimony regarding the effects of and responses to climate change, pollution and biodiversity loss in their communities – testimony unmediated by diplomats and NGOs like me – will continue to experience great difficulty in doing so.

While some turn red at the suggestion that the UN isn’t doing enough on a range of environmental challenges, the troubling consensus of senior UN leadership (and many of the rest of us) reveals a serious disconnect between what is needed, what is being proposed in response, and the risks that member states – including some of the world’s largest polluters – are willing to take in order to preserve healthy options for succeeding generations.  And because states in the main are not doing enough despite some claims to the contrary in UN conference rooms, the rest of us are thereby encouraged to not do enough also.  Indeed, to our minds at least, the mass of discouragement experienced about the state of the world by many is another unfortunate consequence of rhetoric that is not matched by concrete policy support for the actions at community level, actions which ultimately have the most to do with whether or not the current “triple threat” becomes what Costa Rica referred to recently as a full-on “death sentence.”

Thankfully, there are many communities and individuals from all walks of life who have refused to have the potential for abundant living by their families and communities sidetracked by misleading policy utterances including those from senior officials which are insufficiently hopeful or mindful  of the vast and increasing web of environmentally healing measures proliferating worldwide.  From habitat restoration and community composting to organic agriculture, bee-keeping and tree planting on a massive scale in countries like Pakistan and across the Sahel, people of all ages and cultures are seeking a new clarity, refusing to be distracted by either doom and gloom or passive indifference.  They have not given up on prospects for a world which can genuinely flourish for many more people, a world which remains plausible despite the circulating metrics from competent researchers associated with insects decline, plastics inundation and sea level rise.  

The UN, for all its contributions and deliberations, is not really in the “flourishing business;” indeed it is at its best a place which provides a policy platform to support and enable work which needs to take place elsewhere. But we know how easy it is to get distracted by the glamour of UN conferences or discouraged by the sometimes-dismal reports emanating from UN sources which such conferences often do too little to address.  We must remind ourselves that what both glamour and doom have in common is that they are poor recruiters for hopeful, virtuous, collaborative activity at community level which can do much to rebalance our world of sometimes gross inequalities, a world which we have been told much too often has reached or even exceeded survival “tipping points.”   

In this momentous year for the earth and our presence within it, we must not allow ourselves to be deterred by the eminence and capacity of our large institutional frameworks and spokespersons nor allow ourselves to retreat into smaller circles of life in an attempt to protect what is closest to us from the “ugly” storms looming over an uncertain horizon. We cannot survive the storms by ourselves, but the truth is that neither can they be survived without us.  In this Earth Year, we all need to urgently recalibrate the sustainability of our own lives; but perhaps even more importantly we need to help ensure that millions more people now situated firmly on the sidelines of climate action are encouraged and supported to lend hands and hearts to prospects for planetary abundance, such that more and more of us and other life forms might “live well in flourishing lands” on a planet we are running out of time to truly love. 

Tags: , , , ,

Innovation for a Sustainable Planet, Dr. Robert Zuber

28 Mar

Editor’s Note: This post is a lightly edited version of the second presentation I made to students at Georgia Tech University earlier this month. Delays in posting were attributable to several things, one of which is the relentless policy challenges in technology, in peace and security, and related matters which I am having to work harder and harder just to keep up. Still the opportunity to address younger audiences — to share and reflect and even to apologize — is one which I value highly and never take for granted.

I want to begin this afternoon by referencing an MIT study from 1972 which was updated in 2021.  There is much to fear regarding the conclusions of this study and its three proposed scenarios, primarily its contention that the global community is headed for a systemic collapse by 2040 if we cannot change our current course and, more specifically, the way in which we as a species choose to innovate in all its dimensions.  

Of the three scenarios outlined for 2040, two are relatively hopeful but the third is the one deemed most likely — the problematic “business as usual” scenario where the innovation we need to forestall disaster is still buried under an avalanche of AI and other tech “advances”  designed primarily to be monetized, benefitting some at the likely expense of the many.

So, let’s talk a bit about innovation today, something about which all of you are learning to be proficient in this place.  From my own limited vantage point, there are three basic types of innovation we need to consider:   Making new things, adapting existing things and adjusting our own priorities as a species.  I will return to the first of these towards the end. 

Regarding innovation as adaptation, the notion of dual use is built into our contemporary understandings, most prominently perhaps in areas of defense and weapons technology where much of that research and development has eventual implications for the consumer sector as well.  But such implications are only rarely adapted to context and are only occasionally designed to help real people in the real world live in a manner that protects their future as well as enriches their present.  The impetus driving these adaptations is too often what someone wants to sell rather than on some irresistible clamor from prospective consumers.  How many of you, for instance, stay awake at night pining for self-driving cars or cruise ships with an amusement park on the top deck?

We increasingly recognize the importance of reuse to sustainable lifestyles, resisting the temptation to merely toss things into landfills when we have finished with them.  As such the kind of innovation we need now is also about finding new uses for the things already in our midst, uses which can be both life-affirming and take us well beyond what the enclosed instructions of our consumption seem to encourage.

It is here that I want to introduce innovation in the form of a “hack,” that is, striving to adapt alternative uses for the things around us beyond conventional application and, in some instances, beyond wastefulness as well.   In preparing for this talk, I spent some time on YouTube researching some of the many hacks that the clever among us have come up with.  Some of the hundreds of examples include:

  • Making a broom out of plastic bottles
  • Opening beer bottles with an opener made of folded paper (my personal favorite)
  • Using a collapsed balloon to make a  cell phone case
  • Putting lemons in a microwave to get more of the juice when you squeeze
  • Making bibs for babies out of plastic bags (babies don’t mind)

These are simple transactions that don’t move the` needle much. But the mentality associated with  this type of innovation is important, cultivating the habit of seeing what we can do with things aside from merely turning them into rubbish.  I spent the last evening in the Georgia mountains with Dr. Thomas and decided to bring back all my recycling to deposit in the bins here at Tech. Granted, my action doesn’t do much for the world in and of itself but it does reinforce habits of both hands and heart, including mindfulness directed towards trying to give our world a few more hopeful options, about lending my support to something that all of you should soon be expert in – extending the life of the items that our mostly privileged lives routinely use.

Moving on to priorities adjustment, as the MIT study suggests, our behavior in the main is unfortunately not innovating sufficiently to avoid widespread systemic collapse by 2040. We are still too indifferent to the suffering of others, we start too many armed conflicts on too little evidence, we prioritize our own “needs” in competition with others, and we continue to destroy the carrying capacity of the environment beyond its ability to repair.  We talk about lofty things in places like the UN but with too-little confidence that the quality of our innovation will match the volume of our rhetoric.  At the same time, we permit ourselves to be deceived by credentials and claims of expertise – not only credentials that don’t often generate impact that is sustainable, but even those credentials-holders who manage to stifle as much hopeful innovation as they enable.

This begs the question which some of you in this room are actually in this room to try and answer.  How do we innovate for sustainability?  And how do we measure and communicate that impact?  The answer to these questions is not just about what we are “doing” or the impressiveness of our LinkedIn page, but what difference it makes, what difference we wish to make, and to whom we wish to make it.   

We live in a time when branding is a de facto substitute for impact. In this moment of our history, if you can convince others that you are on the right track, and they are willing to invest resources based on that judgment, it doesn’t really matter at one level whether you are on the right track or not. If you get more social media attention than the one sitting next to you, you can claim impact no matter how ephemeral such affirmation might be.  Indeed, the confusion over position or wealth and its alleged ability to move the pile on our collective survival  is compounded by our seemingly endless confusion over exactly who the influencers are and what precisely is being influenced.

It seems clearly dangerous to our prospects for 2040 to promote any further such linkages between position, money, brand and impact.  Branding and status often drive investment, but neither necessarily implies impact that is both sustainable and scalable. And sometimes when funders or investors insist on “outcomes,” they are insisting on something that is abstract or inappropriate to the needs of constituents, let alone to the current needs of our threatened world.

For me, there are two rules related to impact no matter how delusional and out-of-touch they might seem on the surface:  The first rule is that what we support or enable will always be greater than what we do ourselves.  And the second is that in this enormously complex, competitive and at times corrupt world, a healthy regard for the skills of others, skills to be honored but also cultivated, is key to ensuring that “business as usual” might soon not be so “usual.”. What we can do ourselves is but a tiny fraction of what needs to be done in this threatened world. What we enable in others based on a healthy regard for their own innovation potential can set off a chain reaction of sustainable progress that we desperately need.

This sounds more like a passion for ministry than a passion for acquisition, but it is really about ensuring your own personal values are integrated into what and how you innovate, ensuring as best you are able that what you help to create or recreate makes a healthier planet and not only – or even primarily — a healthier stock price.

So let’s return now to the issue of innovation as “making new things.” 

For those of us who work in tech-informed policy, whether through the UN or NGOs (we try to do both) there are issues that come up routinely for us, including in our work to examine impacts and opportunities of what has become a veritable “wild west” of technological development:

  • How does the direction of technological development get younger and more inclusive by gender, race and culture? 
  • How do we inspire innovation without increasing the economic and social gaps which already divide people and stoke conflict? Where are the pressure points related to innovation and access?
  • How can we regulate technology without killing innovation?  Is it even possible?  Given regulatory absence there is an ethical void which leads to the potential for corruption in the sector, corruption not so much related to bribery and other classic manifestations of misuse but about innovation which is intended only for the benefit of the few, innovation which mostly serves to magnify rather than shrink gaps of access and inclusion.
  • How do we ensure attention to “what can go wrong” in a time when  technology appears to be running significantly ahead of efforts to impose some ethical standards to guide its introductions?  In this context, I am reminded of a radio host who asked an AI expert about prospects for government control in the technology sector.  The expert paused, then laughed, and then said “I think that horse has already left the barn.”  If true, those of us in policy are left to work on a few identifiable excesses but have lost touch with the pace of what is now coming into view off and online, and coming with little regard for how the genies might be returned to their bottles, if needed, once they have been released.   

UN working groups do address access and inclusion questions, as well as what it calls “malicious uses” of the internet as it seeks to create voluntary norms for technological assessments. But it is still not clear whose job it is to assess the impacts of technology before it is unleashed on an unsuspecting public.  What are the effects of so much mediated reality and how do we call attention to the dangers without stifling the entrepreneurial creativity that our world also needs? We must all contribute more towards addressing these concerns and dilemmas while there is still time and room to do so.

Back to the MIT prediction now. Where are you likely to be if and when these computer-generated prophecies come to pass?

I will surely be dead in 2040.  You all will be middle-aged, also mid-career if you decide to go that route.  Many of you will have children of your own, children who may have some legitimate fears but perhaps also many questions about why we didn’t change course when it was clear that course correction was an urgent necessity. At the moment, we still have options going forward, but if the MIT folks are correct, business as usual is going to mean a good deal of unpleasantness for you and everyone you care about. And when that time comes, if that time comes, your response options will likely be severely constrained regardless of your academic degrees or financial resources.

Innovation has a key role to play in forestalling disaster, but innovation which exists beyond technology itself and certainly beyond its relentless and rapid monetization.  We need more innovation which is context specific, adaptable to scale, committed to new uses, and which does not obscure the importance of growth in the personal realm, of becoming more like the people we have the potential to be, people who can move beyond business as usual and embrace the tasks and responsibilities of business as unusual. There is a lot of talent in this room.   There is a lot of anxiety in this room as well. Time for all of us to get busy and stay busy to ensure that “business as usual” doesn’t back us into corners we will eventually find it almost possible to escape.   

The hard lesson in all of this is to be careful what you innovate.  Be mindful of what you innovate.  We in the educational and policy realms are barely staying connected to all that has come and all that is to come as technology now seems to be driving humanity, perhaps eventually off a cliff, if we cannot together find ways to retain control of the steering wheel. 

Tags: , ,

Servant Leadership, Systems Thinking and Sustainable Development: A Hopeful Trio, Dr. Robert Zuber

12 Mar

Editor’s Note: This past week, at the end of 2 months away from New York, I was honored once again to address students at the Scheller School of Business at Georgia Tech University. Courses offered by our close colleague, Dr. Robert Thomas, cover issues related to Servant Leadership and Social Entrepreneurship and have attracted a large following of students who seem to be seeking ways to utilize skills and privilege to expand their options in the service of a planet and its people under considerable strain. This is a lightly edited version of my Servant Leadership presentation. The Social Entrepreneurship piece will soon follow.

Today, this weary road-warrior will attempt to blend three objectives together.   First the beneficial implications of Servant Leadership which I value highly.

Second the objective of this week’s lessons which is the benefit of Systems Thinking which I also value highly, though not without caveats.

And the third to discern implications of all of this for fulfillment of the Sustainable Development Goals which, at least some of you may recognize, is a focal point for this week of activities here at Georgia Tech. It is certainly a focal point for much of our work in New York as well.

First up, why servant leadership?  I and a small group of colleagues are in the process of writing a book grounded in large measure on inights from the Inner Economy model lovingly developed by Dr. Lisa Berkley in California, a model which among other benefits assists us to explore the feelings, values, connections and inspirations that many of us in this world overlook but which make us who we are, help define who we might become and influence how we can better use our skills and talents to make a better future for the world.  At the UN, our phase for this is “better policy requires better people” people who see more deeply, hold the mirror up to themselves as well as others, and invest in the wellbeing of colleagues across the political spectrum as well as their own.  It’s about leadership which is committed to raising all the boats in the harbor not simply the largest and most expensive. It is also about the realization that none of the problems – some grave – that we now face are ultimately unsolvable without a commitment to deeper connection and a more comprehensive and supportive engagement with the skills and aspirations of others. As a general rule, we need to risk more closeness while committing to vigorous shaking of the asset tree in our diverse communities and then making better use of what falls from it.

What we seek here is not only about a more honest relationship with ourselves, but also about a more robust and open claim on connection with others, with those we know and those we don’t know yet.  One of the motivations for my own involvement in the aforementioned book project is the recognition by psychologists and neuro-biologists, and certainly but by folks in other walks of life, that we have collectively done grave damage to what is in fact our hard wiring for connection.  Despite a bevy of social media tools, we have become, on the whole, more cynical and suspicious than is either empirically-justified or generally good for us.  We have swapped out broad circles of connection and replaced it with performative and materially focused gestures.  People who wouldn’t dream of making eye ontact in a café willingly pose in front of camera possibly to be seen by thousands.  People increasingly would, to quote the great Wendell Berry, rather own a neighbor’s farm than have a neighbor.  The movements represented by Inner Economy and Servant Leadership remind us in part of the fundamental value of human connection, of not only having neighbors on farms and in offices but doing more to help their various contributions and labors have the impact that our stressed-out world needs them to have.

So now, what does “systems thinking” contribute to these ends?

Systems thinking is a way of making sense of the complexity of the world by looking at it in terms of wholes and relationships rather than by splitting it down into constituent and independent parts.  Systems thinking also involves a sensitivity to the circular nature of the world we live in; an awareness of the role of both local cultures and global structures in creating the conditions we experience; a recognition that there are powerful laws of nature and economy operating on us that we are largely unaware of; a realization that there are consequences to our actions that we are oblivious to. Systems thinking helps strike a better balance between how the various elements of life fit together and the small acts and insights that help define our contexts and ensure an improvement of the fit. 

Systems thinking is also an aid to increasing our sensitivity to how patterns shift over time, patterns that operate within us and outside us, most beyond the events of the moment.  I am trained a bit in counseling and there is a tendency here for the one being counseled to focus on the life events which both provoked their narrative and allegedly proved that narrative as well.  But any such narrative is inevitably more complex, more inter-connected than articulated.  And despite our desire at time to hold it in place, our narratives continue to evolve as we also continue to evolve.  As I reminded a successful friend of mine, “we were not always this way.”  You will not always be the way you are now.  Regardless of how hard you try not to change, how much you might want to maintain your habits, preferences and “explanations” for both, the constant drip of life ensures that our outer and inner economies will at least in some key ways be transformed, not only in wrinkles but in disappointments and loss, in satisfaction and success.  And all of that is integrated into a human system which in our cases has already experienced much and which is connected to far more than we generally recognize.  

Finally, systems thinking enhances our ability to examine skillfully what at the UN we call the “root causes” of events and issues, causes which are often considerably more complex than what we are able or willing to acknowledge.  Again with reference to counseling, we hear a lot of the “someone done me wrong narrative” that ostensibly forms the basis for the pain and drama that motivated the person to seek counseling in the first place.  But of course the story is always more complex.  Yes, we have been done wrong, sometimes gravely  But we have likely also done wrong.  We have enabled bad behavior.  We have held our tongue when speaking out was warranted.  We have stood by when intervention would have been the more virtuous path.  And we have accepted systems of education, business, politics and even religion that could be so much more than they are, so much more engaging and hopeful if only we would commit to make them so.

The problems we face in policy are most often chronic and systemic, rather than a one-off.  This is true as well in our personal lives.  But our problems also have a context that is evolving, one that is constantly incorporating new experiences and new reactions, one that includes habits forming but also habits dissolving, one which urges us to ask different questions, better questions, including of yourself, than you might have been willing to ask before.

Perhaps I am making too much of this, but this last point seems particularly important.  Most of us are terrible at asking questions.   When we ask, it is only rarely without agendas, rarely drawing people out, rarely open-ended.  Many of our questions take the form of accusations.  Someone is suspicious of something or other.  Someone is trying to “catch” us in something.  Back in the days of transactional analysis, there was this game which so many of us play and which was defined as “now I’ve got you, you son of a bitch.”  This is how we roll now.  Catching people in one half-truth or another is the goal rather than helping them to explore or grow.   

Given this, we collectively tend to recoil at being asked questions, seeing questions as a threat or an intrusion or a source of judgment – justified or not — rather than an opportunity to connect, to broaden our thoughts and other engagements with the world. Indeed, one could make the case (and I would make it here) is that the way we ask and respond to questions is a strong indicator of the state of our social world and, more specifically, the state of ourselves.

Finally we come to the Sustainable Development Goals which is more or less systems-thinking-on-steroids for sustainability.  This is SDG week here at Tech and the SDGs offer some important insights into how servant leadership and systems thinking interconnect.  On the plus side, we are reminded that Sustainable Development Goals and targets are interrelated, that progress on racial justice or women’s rights or green energy access has direct implications for food security, smarter cities, ocean health or the creation of more peaceful societies.  When we discriminate, when we fail to acknowledge the degree to which our prejudices keep too many on the sidelines as we attempt to solve the problems which will directly impact your future, problems which are related, which affect all and which must be solved by all. Our prejudices and other limitations jeopardize fulfillment of the SDG promises we have made and, more importantly, the promises that you who will soon come to full fruition in this crazy world will require.   We owe you this, we owe you all of it, including a strong and impactful role for each of you who desire it in helping the rest of us ensure that promises made are promises kept.

But as important as this is, it leaves out an important dimension, that of context and localization.  Yes, we want people in general to be guaranteed access to education, to fresh water, to cities that are healthy and functional, to governance and justice systems that at the very least attempts to be fair.  But like other people we also want to ensure water access for our own families and neighbors, we also want better transportation which serves our own neighborhoods, we also want education for our own children which prepares them to live in the world to come and not only the world that was.

All of these desires and aspirations have specific contexts and all of this requires energies and strategies which are tailored to meet the needs and aspirations of real people in real places. Rethinking transportation options takes a different form in Bangkok than in Atlanta.   Water access means something different in Miami than in the Sahel.   And contexts can shift, sometimes dramatically.   Los Angeles this winter had torrential rain and sleet storms with feet of snow on mountains visible from local beaches after years of drought.  Little stays the same except, unfortunately, the way in which we address changes, the levels of determination and fairness that we apply in the struggle to ensure more equitable access to sustainable resources. 

There is a lesson here for Servant Leadership as well.   Yes, we want leaders who are concerned about our well-being beyond our workplace functions.  And yes we appreciate policies that help make our labors more effective and humane.  But we need service provision that to some degree responds to context.  Persons with disabilities often need different forms and levels of service than so-called “normal” people.  Immigrants often need different forms of support than residents.  Children and the elderly often require sustained care beyond what those of us in this lecture room generally require.   It is the job of sustainable development policy to as we say “leave no-one behind.”  But the needs of aspirations of people are not a function of some computer-generated abstractions.   They all reside somewhere specific.  They all have a metaphorical address and we must do better at delivering to those addresses.

So this to me is the great challenge of servant leadership which embraces systems thinking and contributes to sustainable development.   We must better train ourselves to see the connections between projects and people, between issues and outcomes.  And we need to get better at being honest about the things that can go wrong when we attempt to lead or make policy based on sometimes-willfully incomplete assessments, such as when we release new technology to market before we have properly interrogated its potential for harm.   But we also need leadership which moves beyond algorithms and other abstractions to the system which exists around us and within us, a system which we both create and carry with us, a system which needs to remain humane and reassuring, a system which has inflicted pain and had pain inflicted on it, a system currently characterized by too many disconnects and half-fulfilled, decontextualized promises.

Because you are who are you and because you are in a place such as Georgia Tech, you will likely always have options in life.  But you will also face your cross-roads, some of your own making, where even the most provileged and self-directed of you will need a hand to help you out of some metaphorical ditch.  One key to the fulfillment of the SDGs is to integrate more of those hands into our institutions and policy chambers, to reflect over and over on the responsibilities of leadership to enable a world of sustainable connection and shared development. It is often said at the UN that we are running out of time to fix the world.  Servant leadership reminds us that we are also running out of time to fix ourselves.

Tags: , ,

← Older Entries
Newer Entries →