Tag Archives: consequences

Mess Halls: Curbing the Spread of our Current Chaos, Dr. Robert Zuber

15 Nov
Your Messy Room is Keeping You Unhealthy - Dr. Peggy Malone

Messes are made by people who want but don’t know what they want, let alone how to get it.  Joyce Carol Oates

There are more dishes to come, more flavors to try, and this time I will not spill or spit or drop or splash. Jay Rayner

We don’t have to wait for someone to make messes of our lives. We do a good enough job, ourselves.  Jodi Picoult

I’m shaken and I’m stirred.  Anthony Hamilton

You don’t know how much it is tiring to stay here, since Chaos is all I know. Mess is all I see; And noise is all I hear. Samiha Totanji

Like a button on a shirt buttoned wrong, every attempt to correct things led to yet another fine –not to say elegant– mess.  Haruki Murakami

Clean up your room!  Many Mothers

I spent some of my childhood sharing a bedroom with three younger brothers, a situation that was challenging both in terms of privacy and especially in terms of maintaining some semblance of fairness and order.

My mother, who had more children to care for than she needed and likely wanted, was constantly demanding that those of us responsible for turning that small room into a preview of Armageddon (mostly me) invested some of our life force in cleaning up the mess that was, as are so many messes in this world, so much easier to make than to repair.

The only blessing in this scenario was that there was a door to close, a way to keep the chaos of that room from spreading like a virus into unsuspecting corners of that small house.  But even inside the room itself, there were good reasons to restore some baseline of order, a baseline more likely to foster respect for the rights and feelings of other inhabitants, a baseline that allowed us to keep our toys and other belongings as “shared property” only when we chose to share them; not giving in to the chaos which enabled bullies like me to grab whatever they wanted over the squeals of disapproval from the other children. 

Needless to say, my mother had a different standard of cleanliness and “order” than her children did, and she struggled to get us to buy in to her standard without having to impose it through her own labor.   And people do, indeed, have sometimes wildly divergent levels of comfort around issues of order and cleanliness, as many in long-term relationships discover.  That said, there are lessons around “mess” that we would do well to consider, specifically the lesson that messes are more easily made than undone, and that the easiest way to clean up after ourselves is to resist the temptation to make a mess in the first instance.

I know that it is frustrating for some readers to endure these weekly attempts to analogize lessons from family life to civic life, from modest bedrooms to large conference rooms filled with important people ostensibly doing important things.   But let’s go there anyway.    For the world we now inhabit is surely characterized by one “mess” after another, many of which we could have seen coming if we were not so intent on averting our gaze; many of which have also given those of us in places of privilege an excuse to disregard the rights and needs of others, to grab more than our share of the metaphorical toys and stuffed animals, to get around to cleaning up after ourselves when it is convenient for us to do so and not when it is most urgent.

Unlike the chaos of my childhood resting space, for us in this larger world there is no door to close, no way to confine the consequences of the mess to the authors of the mess.  The chaos that we willingly tolerate for ourselves is also most often chaos exported, becoming yet another imposition on people who, in some instances at least, have their own issues with disorder and turmoil to resolve; people and communities whose messes are already challenging enough without additional external consequences from the discord which they neither caused nor can reasonably assimilate.

Those of you who read this weekly post and/or other (likely better) alternatives don’t need me to remind you about our currently over-heated mess threshold.   From a hyperactive pandemic to a conflict in Yemen that promises environmental ruin in the long term and starving children in the short term; from climate risks that have likely passed their tipping point to the growing numbers of displaced persons exchanging hopelessness at home for road-weary misery; from ocean creatures ingesting more plastic than prey to landscapes more prone to wildfires than wild flowers; the chaos that we have sown has deep roots and broad consequences, most of which inspire responses that are not as carefully crafted and boldly implemented as they should be, responses that seem to enable messes of longer-duration as often as they offer tangible improvement.

Even our democracies now seem in peril as more and more people worldwide seem to have abandoned the responsibility to push through the “messiness” of democratic consultation and consensus-building in favor of iron-like authoritarian voices telling them what they should want, what they should value and how they should go about getting what they have convinced themselves they are entitled to have.   Sadly, these are often the voices that justify their own mess-making at the expense of others, an entitlement to sow substantial short-term chaos secure in the belief that its consequences can be successfully exported as needed — that we can keep our own rooms reasonably in order in part by shipping messes off to the dwellings and communities of of others, largely against their will.

The UN which we engage relentlessly is a place at its best where nations and peoples can come together to assess and resolve common threats, to own the messes we have made and reverse the consequences we have largely ignored; and then together authorize and enact multilateral strategies to better ensure that there is less clutter and chaos on our planet, dampening down verbal excuses and political impediments preventing us from doing more to resolve the messes that perpetually beckon.

But at its worst, the UN is a place of inertia and obstruction, halls of policy where mostly privileged national lenses fuss over resolution and/or treaty language that guarantees (at best) tepid responses to our major messes, responses that are often not nearly as timely and robust as they need to be from an institution and its Assembly that are not yet as prescient, reliable and determined as we need them to be.

I am not naïve regarding the considerable value of a UN institution in which I (and my colleagues) have spent many long years. But the lessons that seemed clear to me when I first entered still apply. The longer we fail to acknowledge and respond to the messes that impact so much of our planet, the harder they are to resolve. And the less we are willing to control the consequential spread of our own chaos and disorder, the more mistrust and enmity we are likely to provoke in others.

My sense is that no amount of institutional self-referencing, no amount of speeches lofty or obstructionist in the General Assembly Hall or other multilateral settings should ever blind us to the degree to which the chaos, the mess, the “noise” of our world (including the cries of those whose lives are characterized by flying bombs, grave food insecurity and polluted waterways) have raised expectations for our policy. The world is crying out for new “dishes and flavors” to try, innovative solutions to threats and messes that have festered for much too long, fresh commitments from the most privileged that they will clean up their own spaces without off-loading the worst of their clutter on to spaces where it simply doesn’t belong.

Do we as a policy community have what it takes to make such a commitment? Are we willing to swallow some of the mistrust and downright orneriness that lead to sometimes bitter deliberations, such as was the case this week regarding a proposed e-voting procedure to allow the core work of the General Assembly to continue during a pandemic or other crisis? Are we willing to follow the trail of our own messes to ensure that our “solutions” don’t inadvertently create more discord, thereby impeding even more than is already the case the rights, development and stability of those we purport to help?

In my view (and hardly mine alone) a fair bit of what we in places of privilege and influence have wrought upon the world should shake us to our very core. But it should also stir a fresh passion in us, a passion to reverse our messy trajectories while we still can, to create more fairness and accountability within our institutional halls, to shut the door on the spread of our chaos of excess and indifference better than we are doing so far, chaos now firmly embedded in pandemics and armed conflicts, in climate shocks and social inequalities.

My mother knew little of such things. But she recognized a mess when she saw one, and she would likely recognize that we, too, have many messes still to acknowledge and confine within the spaces where we work and live.

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Cliff Dwelling: Keeping the International Community off the Ledge, Dr. Robert Zuber

23 Feb

Men riding on motorbikes pass the trucks that carry belongings of displaced Syrians

We all make choices, but in the end our choices make us. Ken Levine

When you desire a consequence you had damned well better take the action that would create it. Lois McMaster Bujold

Perhaps we’d be better off training our youth to be highly observant.  Richelle Goodrich

Good and evil both increase at compound interest.   C.S. Lewis

And I felt a sudden whirl in my head, knowing this leap was inevitable, that I wasn’t just standing on the cliff, toes poking over, but already in mid-air.   Sarah Dessen

This was a whirlwind week inside UN headquarters, but also in regions beyond.  Delegates were simultaneously outlining what they hope will be a fruitful future for the UN system and assessing the consequences of policy decisions that in some instances should never have been allowed to happen.

Specifically, the situations in Northwest Syria and Eastern Ukraine took up much of the bandwidth of both the Security Council and the General Assembly this week, sesssions in which the Russian Federation took abundant heat from numerous other delegations – both for its enabling of separatists in the East of Ukraine and for its decision (with Syria) to double-down on violent “counter-terror operations” in and around Idlib. The horrific consequences of the Idlib violence, as most recognize, have largely been at the expense of civilian populations, hundreds of thousands of whom are now displaced and facing winter deprivations on an almost unimaginable scale with numerous reports of children dying of exposure and entire families trying to stay alive under plastic “blankets.”

This is not all about Russia, of course.  The Russians have made their policy choices, the consequences of which could easily have been (and often were) predicted, and for which they will likely continue to face considerable backlash if sadly little justice.  But let’s be clear:  the UN’s (still flawed) peace and security architecture also lends itself to pious responses that have limited practical impact on victims, statements that routinely blame others for the cliff on which we are all perilously perched but which fail to acknowledge failures more common, including  those related to our willingness to see mostly what conforms to our national policies and worldviews, or to settle for what seems “good enough” for others when we know that it would never be “good enough” for us.

This tendency to verbally-defer actions that might create the consequences we say we desire was manifest in diverse policy settings this week.  A Security Council Arria Formula discussion focused on the plight of persons (especially women) who agree to cooperate with the UN on promoting human rights advocated new focal points for the UN secretariat but little in the way of concrete state commitments to act more resolutely regarding the risks which such persons take to provide testimony to UN agencies, often with little to show for it afterwards beyond fresh threats of retribution back home.

And in another conference room this week, the full counter-terror apparatus of the United Nations was on display at a session devoted to a new initiative that links Central Asian states (the “Stans”) in a concerted effort to combat what was referred to at this meeting as “the terrorism-arms-crime nexus.”   The nexus, of course, is quite real as trafficking in small arms and light weapons continues to be a major contributing factor to both the violence inflicted by criminal and terror groups (often in harmony) and the financing that keeps these enterprises afloat.

What became clear from this meeting is that these diverse UN agencies and partner governments were clear and unified on the dire consequences of insufficiently checked terror and criminal elements enabled by porous national borders and trafficking in arms and other commodities. But what was also clear was the perpetuation of what in the UN is a routine lack of attentiveness to the production of armaments and ammunition, the staggering volume of manufactured weapons (supplemented by “craft” and restored weaponry) that continue to overwhelm efforts to control their movements and confine their use to erstwhile “licit” purposes as defined by governments themselves.

The failure to concretely address the consequences of “licit” weapons production with the same vigor that we address the consequences of the “illicit” trade remains, for us and others, a blot on our collective credibility.   Even in this state-driven system and despite the UN Charter’s endorsement of the right of states to defend themselves from threats, the massive volume of weapons produced and let loose on the world wrecks havoc on communities, soldiers and budgets beyond the illegal uses of terrorists and criminals.  Such linkages and their often-dire consequences should at least have been acknowledged during this otherwise helpful session.

And then there is the Peacebuilding Commission, now chaired by Canada, which is undergoing a review of its practices and procedures as requested by the Secretary-General and which convened a general meeting this past week to discuss the complex matter of “transitions,” especially those from conflict to what the UN refers to as “post-conflict” settings.   Transitions, as we know, are rarely easy in any context and the ones under discussion here are particularly complex as states confront often-grave damage to civilian infrastructure, the mistrust of opposition parties and cultural minorities, the past abuses in search of justice, the humanitarian needs of those who barely survived the conflict, and the youth and women clamoring for a place at the table to help ensure that states which have stepped back from the edge of the cliff do not subsequently fall off it.

The noteworthy “unity government” launched this week in South Sudan is simply the latest of a number of examples highlighting this transitional complexity.  As our South Sudanese colleague, Bol Aher, is now reminding us, welcome calls for “forgiveness” and “reconciliation” are insufficient unto themselves to undo a decade of political and military decisions largely divorced from any consideration of consequence.  As the guns begin to fall silent, Bol reminds us of the communities that now lie in ruins; the makeshift military units now confused about who and what it is their duty to protect; the limited state authority over many regions of the country including borders that remain inviting to traffickers in arms and other commodities; a new cabinet consisting of “familiar faces” who in some instances should be facing tribunals rather than making policy for others; children wondering if life is more than displacement and deprivation.

Here as elsewhere, the unforeseen or willfully neglected consequences of armed conflict create vast complexities that governments, no matter how enthusiastic they might be, are often ill-prepared to address.  It is indeed difficult to put Humpty Dumpty back together again once that egg has been duly cracked.

Returning to the Peacebuilding Commission (PBC), the title for this post was lifted from a recent presentation by Deputy-Secretary General Amina Mohammed to the PBC, a statement in which she highlighted the financial “cliffs” facing states transitioning in post-conflict situations, the hard decisions about whether to invest scarce resources in repairing the consequences of conflict or in meeting the development needs of populations, in the rebuilding of infrastructure or in health and educational services, in dialogue for national reconciliation or resilience to the effects of climate change.

The “cliffs” to which the DSG referred are not news; despite the “composure” evidenced by diplomats and others in this UN space, we mostly realize how close we are now to the fiscal and political ledge, how any more of the careless steps we too often take can easily send us into a rapid descent and crash landing.  Along with NGOs and others, the Peacebuilding Commission could play a greater role in making sure that we ask all of the questions that complex transitions and security threats pose, the ones that need to be asked not just the ones we are comfortable asking.  The PBC could also do more to alert the rest of the UN system to the potential consequences of decisions taken and not taken, the messes we have “manufactured” and are obligated to clean up – made in considerable measure through our own inattentiveness to consequence — messes that largely didn’t need to happen in the first place.

The UN is taking the global lead on a host of important peacebuilding concerns from food security to transitional justice.  But we still have a way to go to ensure a fuller accounting of potential consequences of our policy decisions and, more importantly, to promote actions which ensure that the consequences we desire most have the best chance of coming to pass. This is the path, uncertain though it might sometimes seem, that can keep the world — and ourselves — off the fiscal and security cliffs that threaten our transitions and perhaps even our very existence.

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