Tag Archives: armed conflict

Preface to a Volume of African Reflections on the Future of Climate and Security Threats, Dr. Robert Zuber

30 Oct

Editor’s Note: While contemplating my next post, I was asked to write a preface for a volume on climate and security in African contexts written by diversely-situated African scholars. Without revealing the name of the book, which is yet to be published, I thought that some of you might be interested in our collective “take” on these pressing security concerns. We’ll advertise the book in this space once it is available to the public.

In the policy spaces which we cover, many of which are at UN Headquarters in New York, we see fresh evidence, if not sufficient implementation, of what we here refer to as the “climate-conflict nexus,” or what the authors of this volume refer to more explicitly and broadly as intersected “insecurity in the age of the Anthropocene.” 

Without minimizing any of the challenges facing African countries, the African authors of this compendium stress both internal issues of governance, terrorism and control of natural resources and of colonial legacies which have transformed but not abated, legacies which are perhaps more subtle but which nevertheless continue to keep an oversized foot securely planted on the neck of so many African aspirations.

Movement within global policy often crawls when running is called for, including on addressing climate threats, and yet there are signs that major institutions and their powerful patrons are beginning to take at least some responsibility for crises which they have enabled more than abated, crises related to (in my own country at least) growing economic inequities, concentrations of consumption and attendant waste for which the term “conspicuous” barely suffices, and levels of military spending which drain global coffers of funds which could be used to build more caring and collaborative societies and fund all of our sustainable development commitments.

The moniker inside the UN Security Council and beyond routinely stresses “African solutions to African problems.”  But this can only happen as the voices of African scholars and policy advocates, of civil society leaders and others living and working on the front lines of conflict and our ever-widening climate emergency, are respected and, above all, heeded. Some of this is happening at the level of international policy. Some demands have taken shape, albeit unevenly, and are now eliciting some positive global responses. There is more talk of a permanent African seat on the UN Security Council.  There are discussions about the importance of predictable funding for African peace operations.  There are reflections, including by UN Human Rights mandate holders, of the human rights dimensions of climate challenges, including the racially-charged implications of climate response which marginalizes those voices – including African voices — which suffer most from and contributed least to our climate emergency. There is even some remorse shed for failures both to ensure fair and adequate distribution of Covid vaccines and to support Africa’s own vaccine production capacities more actively.

But much more is needed to which this volume clearly and resolutely attests.  More self-reflection, sovereign respect and urgent climate action (including climate finance) on the part of major economic and political powers.  More efforts to eliminate corrupt practices and ensure that the abundance of natural resources across Africa yields greater blessings and fewer curses to African peoples.  More on the part of the major arms merchants to end the scourge of widely available, trafficked weapons to groups which terrorize and humiliate, and which impede even African states’ best efforts to roll back climate risks, ensure higher levels of food security, preserve and expand livelihoods, and restore the trust of diverse communities.  More efforts by African governments to ensure that a continent of active and often anxious young people can have confidence in state motives and plot a sustainable future which can be realized on African soil. 

As the authors note from their various contexts, if we are to effectively reverse what Gabon’s Minister of Foreign Affairs referred to recently in the Security Council as our current, “slow death,” this will require more from each of us: including higher levels of people-centered solidarity, more effective, collaborative policy energies, and sustained attention to the essential needs and aspirations of our brothers and sisters across a vast, diverse, multiply challenged and equally abundant continent. The authors of this volume are showing us the dimensions of a a more peaceful, sustainable path.  We need to walk alongside them.

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

23 Aug

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

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

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

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

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

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

He presented justice as a psychological relief.  Jill Leovy

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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Storm Center: The Bookend Messes Defining Modern Armed Conflict, Dr. Robert Zuber

21 Oct

Storm

 

What we are doing to the forests of the world is but a mirror reflection of what we are doing to ourselves and to one another.  Chris Maser

What is the use of a house if you haven’t got a tolerable planet to put it on?  Henry David Thoreau

We’re in a giant car heading towards a brick wall and everyone’s arguing over where they’re going to sit. David Suzuki

Who would want to live in a world which is just-not-quite fatal?  Rachel Carson

Why do they never tell us that you are poor devils like us, that your mothers are just as anxious as ours, and that we have the same fear of death, and the same dying and the same agony–Forgive me; how could you be my enemy?  Erich Maria Remarque

One of the welcome aspects of our work is watching the peace and security agenda expand beyond specific weapons systems and country-specific conflict configurations to examine the spectrum of causes and consequences that bracket the horrors of armed violence.

This is no mere academic exercise.  As we have noted often and colleagues of ours have more recently been emboldened to acknowledge, our task in this policy space is not manage armed conflict, not to soften its often horrific impacts, but ultimately to eliminate it.  This objective may well be the stuff of some fantasy-induced misinterpretation of the human condition – based on an assumption that human beings are actually capable of walking back from the brink of ruin, that we are capable of loving this planet as much as we love our aspirations and aggressions on it — but such is the lot we’ve chosen.

And this lot requires a lot – including a willingness to examine both causes and consequences, to assess and profess the things that we do collectively that compel (or excuse) people to pick up arms as well as the often-devastating consequences to people and planet in conflict’s aftermath.  Indeed, if armed violence and the evermore sophisticated weaponry with which it is conducted are ever to be put to rest, those causes and consequences must be burned into our consciousness in much the same way as the health of our own child towards whom we rightly invest much practical worry, hoping to sidestep illnesses with consequences that can run the gamut from inconvenient to heartbreaking.

The bad news here is that we seem more determined in these recent days to let our predatory nature run wild, eschewing legal and legislative restraints on our acquisitive and competitive dispositions and pushing concern about a possible day of reckoning to the furthest reaches of conscious life.

The good news, though, is that there are pockets of policy resistance to this trend, states and their representatives that both seek to grasp the full complement of causes of conflict and work to highlight the consequences to future generations of “looking away,” consequences both psychological and ecological as our capacity to humiliate and destroy continues to exceed our skill in healing traumatized children and restoring denuded landscapes.

The UN was the scene this week of good faith efforts to explore both causes and consequences of conflict, focusing in this instance on environmental dimensions that attracted considerable and welcome interest.  On Tuesday, Bolivia (current president) directed the UN Security Council on a discussion of how “the control, exploitation and access to natural resources have been a catalyst for the outbreak, escalation and continuation of armed conflicts.”  In a hard-hitting concept note, Bolivia acknowledged the “multidimensional and complex” roots of conflict but also noted the long history of conflict that has been fueled by disputes over the control, exploitation and access to natural resources, highlighting “foreign interests, multinational companies, elite actors and armed groups monopolizing control over resource revenues at the expense of local citizens.”

In fairness, there have been solid international efforts to curb state corruption (through the UN Office of Drugs and Crime and other entities) and apply human rights standards to the potential exploitation of natural resources including with regard to the diversion of profits to organized crime and terror groups, and the forced labor of people fueling the supply chain in ways that mostly serves to make life more comfortable and abundant in national capitals.  Australia and other states are promoting standards that address what have been for much too long abundant violations of rights in supply chains, standards that promise better governance, fairer labor standards, reduced incentives to conflict, an end to the human trafficking and even slavery that have long stoked hostility and frustration at local level.

At the other end of this spectrum are the environmental consequences of the conflict we fail to prevent, the ruined homes and farmlands, the denuded forests and polluted water supplies, the damaged infrastructure and wasted social capital that compromise any reasonable hope of healing and restoration.   The sometimes-devastating “ecological footprint” of military activity – from basing and training to illegal occupation and full scale military assault – has long been a concern of our policy community.  And, thanks in large measure to leadership from Finland and the International Law Commission, this linkage has remained acutely in our collective policy consciousness.

This matter includes but goes beyond remnants of war that include the ongoing impact of landmines and other explosive devices whose lurking presence deters persons displaced by conflict seeking to return home and “save what’s left.”  Indeed, as armed conflict becomes more resistant to legal restraint and more destructive in its creativity and technological flexibility, its environmental and other “human security” impacts are increasingly pushing us across the threshold of remediation in all its aspects.  The displaced have less and less to “save” at home, the traumas of conflict deepen and too-often remain untreated, and more people feel that they have little choice but to turn their backs on their now-contaminated fields and domiciles-in-rubble for uncertain futures elsewhere.

In an all-day seminar this past Thursday, the “protection of the environment in relation to armed conflict” kept a small group (including my interns) riveted for hours.  This event covered environmental impacts across the conflict cycle, including the issue of establishing “liability” for conflict-related environmental harm.  Highly-qualified speakers highlighted the tools at our disposal to monitor and assess environmental degradation related to armed conflict, as well as the degree to which increasingly scarce natural resources such as water and precious minerals – a major conflict trigger in our time – might actually increase the incentive for cooperative discussions on how to manage resources fairly and effectively prior to conflict such that the potential for such conflict is effectively minimized.  And while there were calls to the international community to prepare better for the environmental impacts of climate and conflict threats, there was also a sense in the room that viable, cross-border conflict-prevention measures together with normative principles and legal mechanisms of accountability for environmental damages — including often-grave damages inflicted by occupying forces — is likely to constitute our most productive way forward.

The point of which we must constantly remind ourselves is that the misery of warfare does not end once the guns finally go silent.  No matter how we might justify recourse to armed violence in political or strategic terms, the fact remains that once the missiles fly and the bombs drop, our capacity to address already-strained human and environmental challenges diminishes significantly.  The “mess” of armed conflict perists amidst even our best, good-faith efforts to restore what we have been quick to destroy.

If the UN can continue to shine a bright light on both the environmental causes and consequences of violence, highlighting the degree to which armed conflict is and remains a major inhibitor of sustainable development and human well-being, we will be further along in our quest to create a planet fit for children and other living beings, a planet filled with people who finally and firmly grasp their diverse “contributions” to armed conflict as well as the increasingly scant prospects for healing and wholeness that follow in modern conflict’s wake.

I sometimes worry that too many of us seem resigned now to live in a world that “is not quite fatal.” It is still possible to reverse this pessimistic course, but the brick wall towards which we have been blithely hurdling looms closer than ever. We must quickly slam on the brakes, recover our enthusiasm for what can still be an exciting and abundant journey, and find a safer route to our collective destination.

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No Time for Child’s Play: The UN Hones its Child Protection Responsibilities, Dr. Robert Zuber

26 Jul

This past Friday, the UN held a celebration of the 10th anniversary of UN Security Council resolution 1612 on Children and Armed Conflict (CAAC).

The most direct institutional consequences of resolution 1612 are the Working Group on CAAC originally chaired by France, later by Germany, Mexico and Luxembourg, and now by Malaysia.  In addition, an office for CAAC was established, headed first by Olara Otunnu and now by Leila Zerrougui.  This office has had its share of controversy over 10 years, in part due to its (at the time) groundbreaking relationship to the work of the Council, and in part because of its methods (including listings) to expose states’ willful tolerance or even direct mistreatment of the children under their jurisdiction.

Both the WG and Office for CAAC successfully expanded global interest in the security dimensions of the broader children’s rights outlined in the 1990 Convention on the Rights of the Child.  The Convention boasts record setting state ratifications. Moreover, virtually all other development, peace and security resolutions now highlight the special care and protection needs of the most vulnerable of persons.  The Convention itself was not without controversy, especially among those who feared the ability of children to assert rights in direct contradiction of parental wishes or who were concerned with an expansion of “compelling state interests” that ostensibly prioritized “the best interests of the child” over the wishes of family members or other guardians.  Nevertheless, the Convention and Resolution 1612 together have done much to address some of the residual “instrumentalizing” of children as mere extensions of adult expectations and needs that still exists within many societies.  In addition, as the UN’s responsibilities to protect civilians have evolved, the special protection needs of children have more readily been identified if not always addressed with sufficient urgency.

At Friday’s celebration, assessments of past practices and expectations regarding future objectives were mixed.   Many speakers representing a broad array of member states and UN agencies, including Ms. Zerrougui herself, highlighted the “architecture” that now exists to help promote CAAC objectives at country level, including national task forces and action plans, and what Luxembourg referred to as the “global horizontal note”. Along with child protection officers in peacekeeping missions and CAAC office efforts to identify and publicly list offending parties – a particular concern in this session for both Myanmar and Israel – this architecture represents elements of an evolving, system-wide commitment to end abuses committed against (and by) youth at the tip of a gun or edge of a blade.

In this instance as in others, child protection is impacted by some of the limitations characterizing our general “protection of civilians” assumptions and strategies.  We sometimes forget, as Morocco reminded event participants, that child soldiers must always be seen as victims (rather than as enemies) regardless of the crimes they were coerced to commit.   Sometimes, though thankfully in rare instances, those mandated to protect children are guilty of adding to their abuse.  Sometimes, efforts of child protection advisors to peacekeeping missions are compromised or overlooked by virtue of overstretched, under-resourced and increasingly coercive operations.  And our lack of a viable preventive strategy too often results in placing response capacities in the field long after such placement is optimal, with implications for the emotional and physical safety of children even more dire than for their guardians.

This lack of prevention goes beyond unhelpful limitations in UN capacity for early warning and mediation.  It also, as we have written previously, involves insufficient regard for effects of trauma of children in conflict zones for which the only viable remedial strategy is one that ensures their absence from such zones.   Calls during this Friday celebration from UNICEF’s Yoka Brandt, the Russian Ambassador and others for more rehabilitation services were welcome, with Brandt reminding the audience that the release of children from armed groups is only the first step in child reintegration and rehabilitation.  Children can be remarkably resilient, but for many of these abducted, brainwashed or otherwise abused children, attaining anything approaching mental health will require a long and treacherous climb.  The abuses inflicted on children will likely be visited upon their own children as well as the communities of which they are a part. There are only so many tools (and funds) at our disposal to redirect that dangerous course once it has been embarked.

On top of all this, we are often slow to adjust to a rapidly shifting security environment with active child recruiters such as ISIL and conflict-motivated migration patterns that blur lines of individual state responsibility.  The shifts to which we must respond are numerous. The representative of UNRWA highlighted the increasing uses of explosive weapons and the devastation these cause to civilian populations.  The representative of UNHCR highlighted the special monitoring and protection challenges that impact children moving across borders with our without their families.  And of course we are now regularly confronting what the French rightly noted as “shocking” instances in Syria and elsewhere where children are essentially being held hostage to conflicts that cannot even be convinced to pause in order to feed and bandage the desperate.

Despite these challenges, it appeared to be the will of most diplomats that child protection from armed violence, recruitment and related abuses become even more of a cross-cutting, systemic obligation of the UN system and its member states, an obligation assumed to bind permanent Council members as much as other UN stakeholders. Such insistences were part of what made the early work of Otunnu’s CAAC office such a breath of fresh air from the start.  That the consensus promise has yet to culminate in a consensus strategy for successfully ending abuses of children in conflict zones is a situation that many in the global public (including diplomats) can neither understand nor tolerate for much longer.

As Luxembourg noted, we need to do all we can to ensure that CAAC is much more than a “side event” to the core UN agenda, while avoiding what Belgium referred to as a “creeping cynicism” regarding our ability to fully implement the CAAC mandate. Indeed, a bit of cynicism-invoking sentimentality crept into the celebration in the form of one or two presenters saying things such as, “even if we save one child, our efforts were worth it.”  It was Canada who bluntly noted that ending CAAC violations completely and without reservation can and must be our objective.   To employ an over-used UN phrase, we fully align ourselves with Canada’s statement.

We simply must continue to set the bar high for children in armed conflict.  With all the global problems now tugging at our diplomatic shirt sleeves, it is worrying indeed that so many needlessly damaged children will become adults likely to be still reeling from the gaps between their own emotional capacity and the increasing logistical complexities of modern life.  We have full confidence that Malaysia will keep child protection issues in full view of the Security Council during its peacekeeping mandate renewals and related deliberations.  We urge other diplomats, NGOs and child advocates to keep CAAC issues in front of all relevant UN and government actors to whom they have access.

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