Tag Archives: agency

Service Station: A Pledge Worthy of a New Year, Dr. Robert Zuber

1 Jan

I cannot do all the good that the world needs. But the world needs all the good that I can do.  Jana Stanfield

It is never too late to be what you might have been. George Eliot

In three words I can sum up everything I’ve learned about life: it goes on. Robert Frost

It is better to be hated for what you are than to be loved for what you are not. Andre Gide

I slept and dreamt that life was joy. I awoke and saw that life was service. I acted and behold, service was joy.  Tagore

I don’t know what your destiny will be, but one thing I know: the only ones among you who will be really happy are those who have sought and found how to serve. Albert Schweitzer

Service is the rent we pay for being. It is the very purpose of life, and not something you do in your spare time. Marian Wright Edelman

Understanding the true meaning of accountability makes us strong and enables us to learn. Sameh Elsayed

For more years than I am comfortable counting, we have posted our own version of the “year in review” on the front page of our website. That site has been essentially non-functioning for a year now and so we will offer this brief reflection here on what has been a difficult year for our values and infrastructure, but evermore so for the millions of people who have found no relief from armed violence and climate impacts, from displacement and discrimination affecting both the enjoyment of “guaranteed” rights and access to essential services.  On a daily basis we see images and hear testimony of torture and other horrific abuses often perpetrated by people more inclined to celebrate their violent “achievements” than to question the fundamentals of their own humanity.

As most of you know, since our founding in1999 we have been little more than a small operation.  Covid made us smaller still, though we still manage to make our modest contributions on a regular basis – to interns, to UN security policy, to scholars and advocates in many global regions looking for a UN foothold or a larger circle of concern, to people who maintain the hope that their faith can serve to bind people rather than divide them, to people with good ideas and good energy who need a push to ensure an audience for their contributions. Despite our small size and the oversized crises we attempt to influence, we are honored every day by the quality and richness of our collaborators.  In every corner of the world, advocates put their livelihoods and even their very lives on the line to help ensure a more just and sustainable future for their families, their neighbors, their societies.  We find much of what comes to our attention from these advocates inspiring beyond measure, a reminder that our “easy duty” at UN Headquarters also demands risk taking from us, risks commensurate with the front row seat we have enjoyed for a generation in UN spaces, a seat we didn’t necessarily earn but one which we can necessarily share with others.

In assessing the year now past and plotting out a strategy for the year to come, it is evident in ways which have not been this clear in some time that all of us who share this space are swimming against some powerful currents including authoritarian shifts in traditional democracies, donor fatigue among those who could normally be counted on to help address humanitarian needs, armed and at times genocidal violence bringing entire populations to the brink of complete collapse, shifts in weather patterns, ocean temperatures and related factors leading to alternate flooding and drought as our climate sends warning after warning we mostly refuse to heed. These are powerful, even life-threatening currents indeed, demanding more attention and remedial energy from us than we can easily muster. 

But muster we must. It is important that we recognize our debt to those who have been accountable to their times, their deficits, their crises, as we must be accountable to ours.  We have no illusions about our ability as an organization to move even the smallest of malevolent hills, but we can give all that we can give, share in a wealth of helpful ideas and strategies, open doors to the participation of others with more energy, wisdom and insight than we possess ourselves, and link issues and concerns in ways that challenge those in authority who seek to keep issues in some kind of abstracted isolation, those who want you to believe that all the problems of the world are someone else’s fault, those on a seemingly endless quest to find the specks in the eyes of others without dislodging the logs impeding their own. 

As the world gets harsher for so many, we and others like us have clearly not made the case that we need to make, in part because we have espoused values more vigorously than we have put them into practice, values of democracy and equity, values of respect and dignity, values of service and compassion.  We have too often forgotten that we are what we do, not what we claim to do, not what our “brand” attributes to us.  We have also forgotten that there is sanity in agency, that failures acknowledged ultimately take less of a toll on our spirits than isolation or indifference.

We have another year of service before us, another year of pushing the UN community (including ourselves) to uphold standards and fulfill promises to weary constituents, weary from a world which has too often forsaken them, has too often over-promised and under-delivered, has too often offered excuses for malfunctions  that we are insufficiently committed to fixing.  In the end, 2025 will be much as its chronological predecessors were – about us, and the quantities of compassion, service, courage and receptivity to growth and learning needed to help this too-often mean and myopic world turn a corner before the path we have been blithely traveling comes to an abrupt end.

As this new year unfolds, we give thanks for all that you contribute to keeping us on that safer, saner, healthier path.  We appreciate it more than you know.

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

8 Aug

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

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

A quietly mad population is a tractable one.  Naomi Wolf

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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A Distant Dawn: Sustaining Agency in Disconsolate Times, Dr. Robert Zuber

21 May

Deep Web 2

But there is nothing more beautiful than being desperate.  And there is nothing more risky than pretending not to care.  Rachel C. Lewis

So the darkness shall be the light, and the stillness the dancing. T. S. Eliot

As far as we can discern, the sole purpose of human existence is to kindle a light in the darkness of mere being. Carl Jung

One of the blessings of this small office – indeed perhaps the only real reason to keep it open – is the extraordinary range of people who regularly grace it.  Scholars and diplomats, policymakers and activists, people from all over the world come for a bit of conversation, advice on how to navigate the UN system, or to share ideas for projects or publications that can open more space for productive policy engagement in the global community.

Many of these visitors are young people, young not only by my standards (which more or less includes everyone now in existence) but young in the sense of being on the cusp of challenges and responses that will be “momentous” for their own lives at least and quite possibly also for the planet as a whole.

Thankfully, if tentatively, most of our visitors seek a larger version of momentousness; they have bills to pay and obligations to family to meet, but they also want their lives to matter in a broader sense.   They come to offices like ours (and to the United Nations) in part to test their skills, in part to assess the state of the world, in part to see if and how they can best direct their energies so they can sustain both their livelihoods and the health of the planet on which those livelihoods ultimately depend.

So they walk through UN security, passes in hand, and they sit and they listen.  Some of what they hear is interesting; some is hopeful. Some makes them wonder if the (mostly older) people who manage the global community and dominate policy discourse inside and outside the UN are committed enough – perhaps even desperate enough — to change what needs to be changed, fix what needs to be fixed, such that peoples and cultures worldwide can survive the current gloom and even thrive once a fuller light finally returns.

The verdict on all of this is mixed. This week alone, our current group of young people participated in UN events as hopeful as the redesign of cities and the promise of new technology for sustainable development and as troubling as the acidification of our oceans, sexual violence in conflict zones, the abuse of children in detention facilities, and the implications of diminished funding for Palestinian and other Middle East refugees.

Perhaps most disturbing of all was a Security Council Counter-Terror Directorate (CTED) briefing on ways to prevent terrorists from acquiring deadly weapons.   The event focused in part on the so-called “dark web,” a largely invisible part of the internet devoted to promoting clandestine access to all kinds of illegally trafficking goods, including of course weaponry.   This excellent event (as are virtually all CTED briefings) was almost a metaphor for our times:  helpful strategies to combat access to weapons and funding by terrorists and other “spoilers” while failing to note other hard (and relevant) questions – including those related to the quality and potency of our governance structures and the reckless enormity of our collective weapons production. In the end, there was for our interns a lingering sense that the dark and ominous forces seeking to undermine what remains of our social order seem to be moving more nimbly than those seeking to stop them.

Though this is clearly belaboring the obvious, current global circumstances are more than a little overwhelming.  There are so many needs to be met, so many issues to interrogate, so many tensions to resolve, so many “fires” to manage.   There seems to be darkness of one sort or another lurking in every corner, layers below layers,  making it both difficult to trust the light but also one’s own ability to help shine light on those dark places (in the world and in ourselves) that threaten even the best of our treaties, resolutions and other policy responses to global threats.

One of the challenges of befriending and mentoring younger people in this space is how to modulate the input, pointing out hopeful signs without over-selling them, sharing the occasional dis-ingenuousness of our multi-lateral system without reinforcing cynicism, introducing them to the full “truth” about our current unsettled circumstances without motivating them to “abandon ship,” to retreat into narrower career and personal interests that are more “bite-sized” and then convincing themselves that “bite size” is all they can handle.

Sometimes the UN does the little things to help us make this “sale.”   Other times not so much.

This past Friday, the UN hosted an event on “Investing in African Youth” that offered some promise that the aspirations, skills and frustrations of some of the young people from this largest-ever generation on our youngest global continent would help inform our policy direction.   The event focused on the African Union Roadmap on Harnessing the Demographic Dividend, based on the contention that “a peaceful and secure Africa requires an empowered generation of youth.”

While voices of such “empowered” youth did eventually take the stage – one in particular was particularly “put off” by the proceedings – the opening panel had already drained the room of much of its energy.  One after another, older persons (mostly male dignitaries) had ignored the call for brevity to such a degree that this panel alone set the schedule back by a full 80 minutes!

When it was finally time for younger voices, they were all on yet another tight leash, having now to share their views in an “august” UN setting while also compensating for older people who, quite frankly, had abused both their positions and the protocols of their “pulpits” in ways that are simply too common in UN conference rooms.   As a result, we were honoring youth by stifling their voices; we were collectively admonishing ourselves to listen to younger people while dominating their space, stealing their time, blunting their opportunity to make their case and not simply air their impatience.

Watching with us this past week was Lin Evola, the founder of the Peace Angels Project which (among other things) has mastered the art of reuse – in this case transforming the metal from used weaponry into compelling and hopeful images.   While she was with us, Lin took copious notes which she turned into drawings that represented the vast disturbances of the week, the crises we have yet to resolve.

The central focus of the drawing Lin contributed to Global Action was of people – including young people — standing mostly emotionless behind barbed wire, surrounded by warnings of famine, violence, forced migration and abuse.  For me, and for the current and past interns with whom I have already shared the drawing, the irony was apparent.  People bearing the brunt of crises, but lacking agency; people whose legitimate voices have been isolated, even barricaded; people who can barely adjust to the storms that surround them, let alone contribute to minimizing global shocks.

Such all-too-common constraints on human agency are, for me, more frightening than the dark web, more disturbing than any Security Council briefing.   When we overwhelm instead of support; when we allow others to slip blithely into complacency or cynicism; when we stifle the energies and voices that can help us reach the dawn, we are merely extending the reach of our own collective darkness.  If they are to locate and sustain their own agency in these difficult times, the many talented people — young and not-so-young — who pass through offices like ours need and deserve better from the rest of us.

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