Tag Archives: Community

Protection Expectations, A Memorial Day Reflection, Dr. Robert Zuber

25 May

Don’t let the rain drive you to the wrong shelter. Michael Bassey Johnson

The greatest protection any of us can have is faith in ourselves. Maya Angelou

Your silence will not protect you. Audre Lorde

If we want to embrace life, we also have to embrace chaos.  Susan Elizabeth Phillips

The best lightning rod for your protection is your own spine.  Ralph Waldo Emerson

 By allowing your mother to protect you, you gave her a gift. Kristin Cashore

So you don’t think three protection dogs, a room filled with weapons, a panic room and house that eats people isn’t just a little overkill? Christine Feehan

The measure of strength is how gently it can hold the fragile. Lawrence Nault

It’s easy to have ethics when what you love is not in danger. Mariana Enríquez

I realized protecting my children meant speaking truths I had buried for decades.  Denika Fercho

The phrase in the title of this post comes from the representative of Liechtenstein speaking at a Security Council debate on civilian protection.  Last week was “protection of civilians” week, an opportunity for the UN to examine generally mandated tasks to protect civilians endangered by armed conflict, but also to examine measures to, as was noted in a side event, “protect the protectors.” Liechtenstein has been among the most important UN members in calling attention to deficits in civilian protection but also in atrocity crime prevention and in upholding international law.

There are, indeed, expectations for protection, expectations of our military and police contingents, expectations of our UN peacekeeping forces and first responders, expectations of our political and community leaders, expectations of our families and neighbors, expectations that these and others are committed to a degree of protection from threats which so often seem to be beyond local capacity to respond, and which may indeed, at least in some instances, be beyond our capacity to grasp.

Like some of our readers, my relatives saw their military commitments largely as acts of protection of the places and people they loved.  They entered such service willingly but not vindictively, understanding the potential horrors of armed conflict while hoping and praying that horrors would end quickly and impact as few communities as possible.

While these sentiments may have been self-deluding in some measure, they derived from the idea that protection in itself had noble aspects, that threats were real and that, while all had a responsibility to protect, that burden was higher for some. They were prepared to respond to a crisis as it unfolds, to run towards danger rather than from it, to take on risks so that others could have their own risks reduced.  While protection is incumbent upon all who are capable of protecting, some in our dangerous world are certainly more fragile than others, as some are better equipped (in military hardware if not necessarily in temperament) to meet threats and challenges than others.

What emerged from the UN’s “protection of civilians” week was a tapestry defined by increasing state and non-state brutality, a willingness to disregard international law and the UN’s own Charter, and a liquidity crisis which has exacerbated the UN’s own reputational concerns. In the Security Council, delegation after delegation implored the Council to take their protective responsibilities more seriously and to do so in accordance with the values that led to the founding of the UN in the first instance.  These delegations understood (as did those of us witnessing the discussion) the degree to which our global economic and security systems have become partisan entities which benefit the few and increase pressures on the many.  They understood that the UN’s liquidity crisis impedes the ability of the UN system to properly fund protective operations, but that the need for protection is now more acute than in the past, not less.

Not all of the UN’s shrinking roster of peacekeeping operations have protection mandates.  But all have protection expectations of people living in countries where physical insecurity is as much a factor of daily life as economic, food and health insecurity.  These people need “blue helmets” to respond even as response is compromised by combinations of funding shortfalls, increasingly mistrustful host governments and troop contributing countries concerned about the ability of their troops to protect themselves in increasingly hostile contexts let alone to protect others.

During the Council debate, it was Panama who highlighted the irony that over a dozen civilians will have lost their lives “while we sit here and debate how to protect them.” Indeed, it is a failure to either manage or meet protection expectations which generates irony such as Panama’s, which in turn generates a sense that the UN’s protective architecture now falls well short of what is needed given our current laundry list of vulnerabilities.

And the gap is likely to increase as threats from a world increasingly indifferent to international law or climate change, a world in which the US and others are turning their backs on (and closing their wallets to)  multilateral solutions, a world (to cite the ICRC this week) which is  literally drowning in language used  to justify our own brutality, language which includes what Somalia referred to as the “exceptionalism” which justifies any and all IHL violations, language easier employed when we simply choose to stop seeing adversaries as human beings.

It is, indeed, harder to uphold ethics when the things you love are under threat. But threat is a common factor not a partisan one and those commonalities are becoming more severe not less (as Pakistan, Denmark and others noted last week) due to the disinformation and misinformation increasingly generated by artificial intelligence tools. Indeed, one of the major threats now to UN protection measures is the AI-generated lies which seek to pit communities against each other and undermine confidence in authorities and their protective responses.  We now see the results of that mistrust play out in communities worldwide, people who have given up on any assistance from outside and have turned that mistrust into emotional and physical barricades which, of course, cannot viably protect themselves and their loved ones from the crossfire of either weapons or weaponized “information.”

Thankfully, mistrust of authorities and their entities does not automatically remand into privatized “overkill.”  One of the takeaways of “protection of civilians” week is the role that communities can and must play in their own protection rather than simply huddling together in expectation of an external force which might never arrive, which might make matters worse, or which otherwise might be insufficient to task if it does arrive. 

As with many other issues, the discourse at UN headquarters struggles to properly acknowledge local expertise and capacity to address a range of threats which have defied multilateral solution. But the event on “protecting the protectors,” dominated by civil society voices, had no such struggle. Nonviolent Peace Force is perhaps the most notable of a global movement which invests in the community dimensions of protection, helping to build bonds of trust and active good neighborliness which can help create protective agency when and where external protective forces are delayed or absent.

While this approach does, as was noted at the session, transfer some risk from external protectors to frontline actors, it also acknowledges the skill that frontline actors have to protect themselves and the communities with which they are aligned.  At a time when the UN admits to “unprecedented” numbers of victims, often at the hands of state actors with full impunity, the UN’s ability to provide external protection to civilians on a wide scale is clearly compromised.  More and more, such peacekeepers are the targets of violence as they also seek to be a prompt and trusted response to violence.

So this is where we are now.  Peacekeepers facing threat from drones and other state and non-state weapons which also threaten those they seek to protect.  Government forces applying their own protective measures selectively, more consistent with political rather than humanitarian objectives. Peacekeepers lacking dependable funding and host country respect for status-of-forces agreements, including an increasing willingness to suspend adherence to international law for often poorly defined national interests. Communities also are facing increased protection-related risks without the skills or training in too many instances to build local trust and cultivate local protection expertise.

As with so much else in our world, we have done this to ourselves. We have created this moment with corruption embedded in virtually every economic transaction, with abuse normalized and agreements purely instrumentalized, with nations doing more or less what they please because there are fewer and fewer persons and institutions committed to diverting their more nefarious intentions. 

Until we can get these circumstances turned around, the need for protection remains acute – from families and neighbors, from properly trained soldiers, officers and agents, from people of many backgrounds who recognize the absolute imperative of meeting the protection expectation and doing so in ways which honor and uphold the law, not trample on it.

On this day and all days, may those who protect teach the rest of us how to choose or even build more effective shelters from the storms which so often surround us. And may they all survive the gauntlet they have so bravely chosen to traverse.

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How can an effective democracy truly survive? The key role played by the margins in decentralization, By Andrea Viviana Araujo Muñoa

12 Apr

Editor’s Note: The lengthy excursion below is also an excellent introduction to the work of a young Peruvian woman who has become an important colleague for us. Andrea was introduced to us by our longtime friend Dr. Toh Swee-Hin, and we had quickly become enamored of her community activities and her energetic spirit that we wanted to both support that work and draw her more into our international orbit. Andrea recently was issued a visa by the US government and we expect to have her at the UN this summer for the High Level Political Forum and related activities. Hopefully she will make abundant contacts which will help shape her future community work in Peru. We, on the other hand, stand to learn much from her presence here. The text below will help explain why we are so pleased to welcome her.

No one told me that founding a youth organization engaged in community volunteer work on democracy and citizen participation while belonging to a vulnerable population (a young woman, premature seven-month triplet, first-generation university student, and coming from an emerging district) would be highly complex; but no one told me either that I would lead with such passion, even on the most uncertain days.

I GREW UP ON THE PERIPHERY OF DEMOCRACY: I BECAME NATIONAL NEWS WHEN I WAS BORN ALONGSIDE MY SISTERS.

Who could have imagined that the girl whose birth was exposed as a media event in the era before social networks — at a time when digital platforms did not exist to communicate and public visibility depended almost entirely on traditional media — would later be instrumentalized within a phenomenon that drew in a political candidate willing to extract political capital from family vulnerability, would end up leading her community. Yes, a politician came to promise help, posed for the photo as part of his unfulfilled social assistance, and never returned. That is how I was named Andrea, in honor of an authority of the time who promised support to my family in front of cameras and whose name I ended up carrying in its feminine version.

My parents settled in an emerging district — the other face of Lima — where many people build their lives from scratch in search of the opportunities their hometown, 18 hours from the capital, could not offer them: education, healthcare, and stability. They were uprooted from their families at ages 11 and 14 respectively and arrived in a city marked by discrimination, structural racism, and stigmatization. In those years, coming from Ayacucho — a region deeply affected by the internal armed conflict — meant bearing prejudice, suspicion, and exclusion. I am the daughter of those migrants who fled not only from precariousness, but also from the weight of stigmatization and lack of opportunity.

Both arrived while still almost children. They had no formal education or role models along the way, yet guided by their Catholic faith, they leaned on one another and on work to provide their daughters with basic goods and services. I grew up with faith and dignity. Perhaps it was there that I understood how each act shaped who I am. I chose to study Political Science as an act of “rebellion”: to understand power in order to transform it, because politics shapes our lives from birth.

In my veins, in my Indigenous Ayacuchan roots, runs the blood of generations who did not have the privilege of education, of understanding, or of acting to alter that reality. It is a struggle that is not easy to embody, yet it became my life’s passion: to assume collective challenges from the periphery.

I, too, would have liked to be born into a cradle of opportunity, but the cradle of resilience into which I was born shaped me from my very first minute of life. Here I am, here I remain, and I endure, because I firmly believe, as Mujica once said, that my strength lies precisely in having been born where opportunities are scarce but dignity abounds. We do not choose the cradle into which we are born, but we do choose what we do with the life we are given. In the trench of scarcity also lives the courage of struggle and rebellion transformed into love for others. For that reason, politics is an instrument of service, even when the path becomes more arduous for those who remain faithful to their ethical principles. What gives strength is not what is lacking, but what overflows in conviction, because the cause is always to live with meaning.

I ENTERED THE MOST PRESTIGIOUS PUBLIC UNIVERSITY IN MY COUNTRY, ON SCHOLARSHIP, AND SINCE THEN I HAVE WORKED TO TRAIN WITH EXCELLENCE

I have always pursued challenging goals. I understood early on that living means precisely that: moving forward even when uncertainty weighs more than certainty.

I never imagined entering the “Dean of the Americas.” Not because I doubted my abilities — I was always disciplined and deeply committed to my studies in my community’s public school, where I ranked second overall throughout all my school years (first place was achieved by my triplet sister) — but because I often heard that such a path “was not designed for someone like me.” The narrative was familiar: accept reality, resign yourself to economic limitations, study only if my parents could afford a few months of preparatory academy; otherwise, give up the dream.

But I earned admission. I won a national scholarship. I graduated with excellent grades. I participated in an international exchange, also on scholarship. Later, I went through months of unemployment until an opportunity arrived that transformed my trajectory: a paid internship at USAID, an institution that believed in my potential, revitalized my vocation, and allowed me to work alongside highly qualified professionals, engage in technical dialogue, and operate in a language other than my own. It was not that I romanticized the agency. It was that every second of the experience was difficult to describe. I learned enormously and deeply valued having been selected among thousands of applicants. I did not only learn from my office, but from all of them. Absorbing knowledge was, without exaggeration, one of the most enriching professional experiences of my life.

I received significant recognition within the institution, yet everything ended. My stipend was rescinded in February due to the broader context. I carried with me learning, networks, and professional validation. Outside, however, another reality awaited me: that of my country. Months later came the enactment of Law No. 32301, modifying the framework of the Peruvian Agency for International Cooperation (APCI). One of the main criticisms points to its imprecise wording. By generically prohibiting projects that may imply “intervention in internal politics” or actions that “affect public order, citizen security, or national defense,” the regulation could inhibit virtually any form of citizen criticism. The potential impact on independent media and organizations reliant on international cooperation is particularly concerning, especially in fields such as human rights, governance, and the environment. An inevitable tension arises: How can the State validate investigations that may question it?

The Inter-American Commission on Human Rights (IACHR) expressed grave concern regarding these changes, warning that prior authorization requirements and new administrative obligations could create disproportionate obstacles to civic space and freedom of association. All of this unfolds amid a national context marked by organized crime, expanding extortion, and the proximity of general elections in a highly fragmented landscape with more than 36 political parties.

For a political scientist who refuses to normalize complacency toward corruption, navigating this reality is already complex. Doing so from unemployment is even more so. In contemporary Peru, engaging in advocacy or volunteer initiatives related to democracy and citizen participation can paradoxically become a professional risk factor — not due to lack of merit, but because certain institutional environments view such experiences with suspicion. In a climate where the current government maintains a restrictive posture toward various forms of collective action, the tension between ethical coherence and job stability ceases to be theoretical and becomes a daily decision.

FROM RESILIENCE TO COLLECTIVE ACTION: ORGANIZING FROM BELOW TO SUSTAIN DEMOCRACY

I founded Empodérate Vecino(a) in 2022. I did so while working as a junior research assistant at the National Police of Peru and simultaneously directing the research workshop “Ciudad Crítica” at my university. This initiative emerged after researching the territorial governance of the Lima 2019 Pan American Games, particularly in my district. For the first time, high-level sports infrastructure arrived in my community. This transformed not only the urban landscape, but also my understanding of territory, inequality, and citizenship.

I chose to lead the organization through a quiet yet close approach. I wanted to build a space that did not merely appear active, but truly executed; that did not only speak about participation, but practiced it effectively. Since then, Empodérate Vecino(a) has become my principal space and refuge for civic engagement. I deeply believe in self-organization and self-management as forms of democratic resilience. Grassroots movements like ours embody concrete practices of deliberative democracy: inclusion of diverse voices, public reasoning grounded in arguments and evidence, respect, active listening, and the search for shared foundations connecting deliberation with legitimacy.

However, the path is not easy. Structural barriers persist: distrust toward young women’s leadership, cohesion within community-based grassroots organizations, high criminality in historically excluded territories, and the constant fear of raising one’s voice in the face of social injustices. Added to this is the reduction of funding for democratic strengthening, which generates emotional exhaustion among those who sustain initiatives amid scarcity.

Young people who choose to speak up also face demotivation stemming from precarious conditions and, more recently, the threat hanging over their social and professional capital. In many cases, activism — far from being recognized as valuable civic experience — can become a source of vulnerability, stigmatization, or professional risk.

Despite this, the organization has consolidated itself as a space where young people from peripheral neighborhoods learn to lead, participate, and create change through everyday action. Not through rhetoric, but through practice: civic labs, civic games, workshops for young mothers, and creative participation methodologies. After my experience at the development agency within the U.S. Embassy, I decided to apply for international funding. We secured support from Global Changemakers, which allowed us to implement the project “Qhapaq Ñan Cívico.”

This electoral education and empowerment initiative was aimed at internally displaced migrant women from the other side of Lima — my community, emergent yet resilient. Many of them face triple exclusion based on gender, age, and migratory trajectory, along with limited access to safe spaces for participation.

We worked to change that reality through participatory workshops, intergenerational mentorship, and intercultural content. As part of the pedagogical design, I developed a mascot: an animated version of the Andean Cock-of-the-rock, Peru’s national bird. This character accompanies participants along the “civic pathway,” blending humor, warmth, and cultural symbolism.

In this way, the concept of Qhapaq Ñan — a Quechua term associated with the Inca road system — is reimagined as a metaphor of connection: civic pathways that cross territories where institutional democracy often arrives late or incompletely. Because it is precisely there — in the margins — where decentralized democracy must be strengthened: where the State, technology, academic opportunities, and international connection rarely converge.

This initiative is deeply personal. It represents a living expression of the principles that guide my work: that transformative education can build bridges between local realities and global aspirations for justice, sustainability, and inclusive democracy. And because, ultimately, change is driven by ordinary people, by the nobodies, the anonymous, those who rarely appear in the newspapers.

 DELIBERATIVE DEMOCRACY FROM THE MARGINS: GRASSROOTS ORGANIZATIONS MATTER MORE THAN EVER

Community-based youth organizations are not born from offices nor under paternalistic, assistentialist logics. They emerge from lived experience, from territorial urgency, and from the need to solve concrete problems where the State arrives late, precariously, or simply does not arrive. However, the ecosystem of social and financial support often privileges models more comfortable for traditional cooperation: initiatives aimed “at” vulnerable populations, but not necessarily built “with” them. Projects designed from above, framed by savior narratives, backed by secured resources and prior institutional validation.

This tension reveals a structural contradiction: while the importance of empowering underrepresented populations is proclaimed, their organizational autonomy, technical capacity, and political leadership are frequently met with distrust. Youth organized within their own territories are not assistentialist projects nor symbolic extensions of traditional activism. Yet they often face a silent delegitimization when they attempt to articulate networks, mobilize communities, or generate advocacy, as they are frequently not taken seriously.

A problematic logic persists within certain social support and funding ecosystems: narratives, representation, and even the “marketing of the cause” are expected to be led by external actors with greater economic capital. Collective action appears to require the mediation of a savior figure — someone with resources, status, or symbolic authority — who designs initiatives from a desk and speaks on behalf of those who experience inequality firsthand.

Grassroots youth organizations face a persistent paradox. They must demonstrate professionalism, impact, and sustainability while operating under conditions of high precariousness, constant self-management, and emotional exhaustion. Added to this is another challenge: the suspicion cast upon youth activism, especially when it addresses democracy, citizen participation, or institutional oversight. Today, in an international landscape where funding for democracy and civic strengthening is shrinking, the pressure is even greater. Defenders of democracy — particularly those who work within and belong to excluded territories — face not only budgetary constraints, but also symbolic and material risks.

In countries such as Peru, this tension acquires complex issues. Advocacy on democracy and electoral education, far from always being recognized as a contribution to democratic development, can become a source of professional vulnerability. For many young people, active engagement in these spaces entails real costs in employability, job stability, and even personal safety. All of this unfolds within a context marked by low electoral trust, party fragmentation, the expansion of organized crime in peripheral territories, the normalization of extortion in public spaces, and the weakening of civic space.

In the face of this panorama, grassroots organizations do not represent a romantic gesture nor a naïve wager. Rather, they constitute living democratic infrastructures: spaces where deliberation is practiced, citizenship is built, and social bonds essential to democratic stability are sustained. Transforming concerns into collective action is not easy — even less so when dealing with agendas that rarely appear “attractive” to funding mechanisms despite their structural urgency.

And yet, I remain convinced: Peru needs more than ever spaces for civic education, electoral literacy, and democratic leadership, particularly as the country moves toward general elections described by many analysts as among the most complex in its history, in a landscape with 38 political parties and a citizenry increasingly disconnected from institutional politics.

CONCLUSION: DEMOCRACY IS DEFENDED WHERE LEAST ATTENTION IS PAID — THE MARGINS.

Democracy is not sustained solely by institutions, norms, or electoral processes. It rests above all on everyday practices, on social bonds, and on people’s capacity to organize, deliberate, and construct collective solutions. A truly living democracy is not merely administered from above: it is built from below. This demands an urgent ethical and political call: to recognize that democracy is also a territorial experience, one that must be lived, contested, and strengthened precisely where it has historically been most fragile — the margins.

It requires rethinking public policy through a territorial lens and listening to those who for decades have been considered social, political, or economic peripheries — not as a symbolic gesture, but as a structural condition for democratic legitimacy. Because citizen participation is not a complement to democracy. It is its invisible infrastructure.

Sometimes it rains. Sometimes exhaustion outweighs optimism. Yet even on those days, I wake up motivated when I see tangible results in Empodérate Vecino(a) — a space that has become my refuge for civic engagement and living proof that another way of practicing citizenship is possible. I continue applying. I continue studying. I continue preparing myself technically and professionally. And I aspire to find work where I can keep reimagining, from within, how the State, public policy, and democracy can better dialogue with people’s lived realities.

This article is not a success story. It is a story still under construction. Because I am still striving for stability, for professional growth, for new opportunities. But I also know I am not alone. There are thousands of us, across different territories, weaving another way of doing politics — grounded in collective purpose.

Democracy will survive if it learns to look where it has never truly looked. If it recognizes that its defense does not occur only in grand national debates, but also in neighborhoods and grassroots organizations that sustain the public sphere through fragility and hope.

Because, ultimately, democracy reinvents itself precisely where it is least observed.

.

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Community Foundation: The UN Slowly Localizes its Conflict Responses, Dr. Robert Zuber

23 Jun

Violence and

Any intelligent fool can make things bigger, more complex, and more violent. It takes a touch of genius- and a lot of courage – to move in the opposite direction. E.F. Schumacher

Extreme violence has a way of preventing us from seeing the interests it serves. Naomi Klein

Evil turned out not to be a grand thing…It was selfishness and carelessness and waste. It was bad luck, incompetence, and stupidity. It was violence divorced from conscience or consequence. It was high ideals and low methods.  Joe Abercrombie

Our age not only does not have a very sharp eye for the almost imperceptible intrusions of grace, it no longer has much feeling for the nature of the violences which precede and follow them. Flannery O’Connor

The tales of death were in their homes, their playgrounds, their schools; they were in the newspapers that they read; it was a part of the common frenzy — what was a life? It was nothing. It was the least sacred thing in existence and these boys were trained to this cruelty.  Clarence Darrow

During what seemed to be a particularly gloomy week in New York and a particularly hectic week inside the UN, I found myself reflecting on some of the logistical and personal complexities and distractions of life that have consumed so many of the people I know and know about: The people forced to confront their own mortality or caring for others forced to confront the same.  The family livelihoods hanging by a thread, drowning in paperwork and regulations that only the well-off can effectively manage.  The endless drone of advertisers and others attempting to seduce us into purchases and activities we’ve forgotten we can neither handle nor afford.

And these are just some of the problems and stresses facing those of us who are relatively “well-off” in this increasingly unequal world.

More and more, our brains seem victimized by a conspiracy of sorts, a conspiracy too often “divorced from conscience or consequence,” a conspiracy to make our economic and social contexts seem more powerful, more complex and more violent than they need to be. In the name of some combination of status, comfort, thrill-seeking and self-interest, we continue to burden our own lives and make it harder on those who will come after us. We create messes that that we have been resigned in the past to merely mopping up after the fact, but which now gush rather than trickle, “spills” that now threaten to overwhelm both our increasingly distracted brains and the standard institutional capacities we’ve authorized to mitigate unwanted impacts.

The UN this week took up a myriad of mostly-familiar, conflict-related messes from the Gaza and Afghanistan to Idlib (Syria) and the Central African Republic.  All of these conflicts have “spilled over” for some time and represent places where UN and regional efforts to quell the violence have so far been only minimally successful.  In sitting through these sessions and their seemingly endless “speechifying” (to quote the Dominican Republic), our thoughts extended to the people who have known little but conflict and violence in their lives, including the children who may not have experienced life on a consistent basis other than with homes, schools and medical facilities reduced to rubble, and with burials and explosions more prevalent than play dates.  How have all these conflict-related stresses affected their brains? How have they impeded their collective capacity to contribute one day to building that elusive “sustainable peace” that we talk about endlessly in UN settings?  How do we ramp up urgency to meet current security challenges given the diminished capacity that our violence, our distractions, our damaged politics and economics have inflicted on so many, young and old alike, worldwide?

Perhaps the best response to these problems in our recent hearing was articulated this week by the South Sudanese monitor and activist, Merekaje Lorna Nanjia, one of the speakers at an event on Security Sector Reform (SSR): Local Participation and Ownership of Reform Efforts, organized by South Africa on behalf of the Security Council Working Group on Conflict Prevention and Resolution in Africa.  Nanjia urged the designers of SSR programs to “learn from their mistakes,” including their frequent insistence that Reform is only focused on “hard” security matters involving combatants and not also about the skills and capacities that more directly impact that ability of communities to cope with the threats and consequences of violence.  She was one of several voices this week advocating for more attention to how violence diminishes human health and social possibility in myriad local settings.  She reminded the audience that in promoting security, the value of social “inclusiveness” can hardly be overemphasized.  And perhaps most important, she called for “demilitarization” that is in part about disarming those who create conditions of violence, but also in part about healing the minds of those for whom militarism has become the default standard for organizing daily life.

Slowly, thankfully, the UN is coming around to recognize that the damage inflicted on communities from armed violence is both pervasive and deep-rooted, and that effective SSR must accommodate the “mindset of citizens who have already had too much contact with militarized communities and instances of armed violence,” persons who have already had their capacities diminished and perhaps even their brains rewired through habitual trauma inflicted largely through the instruments of human conflict.

Ms. Nanjia was perhaps the most engaging speaker this week to raise the need for inclusive community involvement in security sector reform and conflict prevention initiatives.   But there were other recent clues that we are becoming more systemically successful at carving spaces in our own brains for more thoughtful and people-centered responses to our security-related responsibilities.  From the UN’s Rule of Law Unit urging both public dissemination of “basic information” about security and peace processes and more local agreements that can improve security in the shorter term, to the Former Ambassador of Fiji’s statement in the Treaty Body on the Law of the Sea advocating for greater attention to the “precautionary principle” in policy, there is a growing consensus regarding what one speaker noted at an African Refugees event this week, that we must learn to more effectively “tap into what makes us human.”

From discussions by force commanders on reshaping (and gender-mainstreaming) UN peacekeeping priorities to reflections on a Security Council resolution highlighting the needs of persons with disabilities in conflict situations, the UN this week demonstrated that it is slowly coming on board with the notion that the negative impacts of armed violence do not end when the guns are silenced; and that many of the assets to prevent violence, address its cerebral inflexibilities, and restore genuine hope for communities, are embedded in large measure within communities themselves.  As Poland explained in the session on the Council resolution which it co-sponsored, “persons with disabilities are often forgotten in times of peace and are even more likely to be ignored during times of conflict.” Given this resolution there is now a framework for change on a human scale, as Poland noted, change that local communities and stakeholders are generally best suited to make.

This represents an important insight and the pace of its acceptance must accelerate.  We simply cannot afford more security policy that ignores community, more security sector “reforms” that impede local participation, more violence that blocks out hope and possibility in local settings for the many who suffer its consequences.  In this “frenzied” moment of our collective history when human cruelty seems to be finding its new level,  we need the courage to take a collective deep breath, examine the “low methods” that too often accompany our high ideals, assess the interests that this current age largely services, and find new impetus for change within the communities that know best both their own people and what can most effectively heal their physical and emotional wounds.

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