Tag Archives: UN

Kicking the Can: A Plea for More Tangible Urgency, Dr. Robert Zuber

27 Jul

From this instant on, vow to stop disappointing yourself. ― Epictetus

Only put off until tomorrow what you are willing to die having left undone. Pablo Picasso

A year from now you may wish you had started today. Karen Lamb

Some of us keep missing the breakthrough because we don’t want to cross the bridges of growth that look like weakness, solitude, loneliness, and delay. Andrena Sawyer

If you choose not to deal with an issue, then you give up your right of control over the issue
and it will select the path of least resistance.  Susan Del Gatto

That glorious vision of doing good is so often the sanguine mirage of so many good minds. Charles Dickens

We tremble with the violence of the conflict within us — of the definite with the indefinite — of the substance with the shadow. Edgar Allan Poe

You may think twice about beginning to build your ark once it has already started raining. Max Brooks

The comfort zone is a region where great dreams go to get murdered, buried and forgotten.  Michael Bassey Johnson

The truth which has been spoken too late is more damaging than a lie. Amit Kalantri

The High-Level Political Forum has concluded for yet another year.  Under the leadership of Ambassador Bob Rae of Canada, Ministers, other diplomats and NGOs convened at UN Headquarters to assess both global and national efforts to fulfill a multitude of promises made in 2015 on sustainable development and good governance, including getting the 2030 Development Agenda back on some reasonable facsimile of a right track.

The HLPF consists of plenary sessions, side events (often the most interesting aspects) and what are known as Voluntary National Reviews where governments present efforts and outcomes on sustainable development priorities and receive input on how they can expand/improve such efforts.  One major culmination of all these efforts is the adoption of a Ministerial Declaration which will be presented in the General Assembly in September at the opening of its 80th session in the hope of achieving some sort of consensus adoption by those a bit higher up the political food chain than most of those who attended the HLPF.

The Declaration (https://docs.un.org/en/E/HLPF/2025/L.1) is a difficult read in at least two senses.  The 21-page, single-spaced document is a litany of issues which the global community acknowledges require urgent attention, especially in the five key focus areas of this HLPF – ensuring health lives, promoting gender equality, decent work for all, sustainable use of oceans and marine resources, and revitalizing global partnerships with a special focus on finance for development.  Moreover, side events attempted to incarnate some of the urgency suggested by these priorities, through topics such as access to housing and workforce empowerment, localizing social development and how AI is reshaping government operations.

he HLPF represented some of what is best about the UN, even amidst its current financial limitations, as issue after issue which weighs heavily on both our global agenda and on future prospects for younger staff and interns are given significant attention. There is perhaps no place on earth where so many global problems –problems which cannot be managed by any one country alone – are put on the table for consideration by diplomats and other stakeholders.  In this “see no evil” moment in our collective history, the willingness to acknowledge and specify the gravity of these times is most welcome.

But acknowledgment has its own caveats which our younger colleagues are often quick to point out. Negotiators at the UN are rarely key decisionmakers in their own governments, nor are they responsible for implementing the resolutions they pass – the “promises” which they make but have by professional design little or no role in honoring. 

Moreover, there is a growing disconnect between the loftiness of our aspirations and the current malaise (at best) of our human condition, our propensity to tell only the truth which suits our purposes, to accept cruelty and abusive governance as signposts of a corrupted reality we have not done enough to challenge, to cheer on technological advances without asking ourselves if human beings now seemingly resigned to a “race to the bottom” can do any better than exploiting such technology for private gain. If we collectively fail the test of a fairer and more compassionate humanity, and even the recent “Mandela Day” events suggested that we might well be on our way to doing so, is there any chance that we can rescue technological advance from being a shiny new toy to increase our already draconian levels of inequality?  Some young people are dubious.  I am compelled to join that sentiment.

But there is a second, related theme in the Declaration which comes up over the over at the UN and certainly at this HLPF – the virtual obsession by the UN and its member states with large conference events on topics from climate change and finance for development to ocean health and the status of the Least Developed States.  You often hear at the UN statements such as “the upcoming conference on (name a topic) provides an important opportunity” to push forward on commitments which, in the main, were made at previous major conferences and which largely remain as un-ripened fruit on the vine.

Why do we need conference after conference, pact after pact, outcome document after outcome document as though the major, often carbon-sucking events from which all this emanates will ever justify the expense of energy and money they require?  And why do we need so many of these events when the UN exists on a daily basis to promote those sorts of collaborations?  And dare we ask: Has the Paris agreement actually resulted in lowered global emissions?  Do we really need more climate-focused COPs (now on number 30) hosted by governments often hostile to significant aspects of climate activism, whose policies in more than a few instances promote deforestation and fossil fuel use which has gotten us into this mess from which we are now struggling to extricate ourselves?

Why is it considered to be some incarnation of multilateral heresy – mild or severe — to raise these conerns?

And while we’re at it, what of the failures of the Security Council on peace and security and its blatantly obvious impacts on our ability to meet our sustainable development obligations?  Peace and security were not a major focus on this HLPF but in the Council chamber where we spend much time implications for sustainable development were disturbingly and stubbornly clear. How do conflicts in Gaza and Ukraine impact our sustainability scorecard?  What about Sudan and Myanmar which have largely fallen off the diplomatic radar?  What of the tensions in South Sudan, Libya and elsewhere which threaten to unravel some very hard-won political and protection gains?  And why did the HLPF and the Council, as in years past, choose to keep each other at arm’s length?

The point here is really not to bash the UN so much as to call attention to some of its structural and procedural flaws as it enters a period of profound budgetary uncertainties in a world which stands in desperate need of sanity and healing.  Why do we continue to hold large international meetings with little regard for whether the outcomes actually justify the event? Why does the president of ECOSOC leave office upon the conclusion of the HLPF rather than continuing to use the office to push harder for outcomes and consequences that truly matter?  Why, given all that we know about the state of the world and its current trajectories, do we continue to kick the proverbial can down the road, pointing longingly towards the next major event which is as unlikely to break policy impasses as were previous ones?  Why do we act as though what we have been doing is good enough when the indicators of sustainability continue to point, often decisively, in the wrong direction?

For the sake of us all, especially for the young and those yet to come, this serial policy procrastination must end.  We need more truth-telling, more honest discernment, a greater capacity for compassion for those who have been waiting far too long for relief, a resolve to stop confounding constituents and, if we are able, to stop disappointing ourselves as well.

We are called now, more perhaps than in the past, to cross bridges of growth which have long beckoned, bridges for ourselves which can enable more tangible outcomes for our institutions and constituencies. The HLPF and its Declaration are heavy on sound analysis of our dire straits but short on breakthroughs.  We need breakthroughs and we need them soon.


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Two Faced: Healing the Ruins of a Broken Year, Dr. Robert Zuber

6 Oct

Let Ruin End Here.  Danez Smith

God hath given you one face, and you make yourself another. Shakespeare

The most common form of despair is not being who you are. Soren Kierkegaard

I have sometimes been wildly, despairingly, acutely miserable, racked with sorrow; but through it all I still know quite certainly that just to be alive is a grand thing.  Agatha Christie

It is a characteristic of wisdom not to do desperate things. Henry David Thoreau

I come into the peace of wild things who do not tax their lives with forethought of grief. I come into the presence of still water. And I feel above me the day-blind stars waiting with their light. For a time, I rest in the grace of the world and am free.  Wendell Berry              

Tricks and treachery are the practice of fools, that don’t have brains enough to be honest. Benjamin Franklin

When one with honeyed words but evil mind persuades the mob, great woes befall the state. Euripides

A year ago this week, as images of horrific violence by Hamas started a year-long recalibration of international relations, indeed of international law itself, people caught up in the wilfull malevolence of violence born of violence and begetting violence which continues to occur on a scale that we have not seen for some many years.

My response in the aftermath of the Hamas attack was to pen a (not particularly well received) piece entitled “Weighing in on Weighing in,” in which I tried to describe the short term, soon to become long term, impacts of old wounds revisited and new wounds inflicted, a Jewish people which had not –could not – assimilate one more of the many abuses perpetuated on them over centuries; and here faced off by another people, long occupied with serial miseries and indignities inflicted at the hands of an Israeli government which early on made it clear that any modicum of restraint – this October – was simply not in the cards.

The reasoning for that earlier piece was my early recognition that wounds had been ripped open in ways that left people little flexibility – perhaps even control – over their more and less intense emotional reactions.  Almost immediately after the attackas opinions hardened to an almost unprecedented degree, friendships frayed, organizational partnerships cooled.  “Who you stand with,” became the litmus test of continued conviviality, as though such “standing” often required something more than clicks on a social media page, or perhaps some street and campus“outrage” generated by high levels of anxiety about the state of the world alongside (as would be the case for me as well) an incomplete understanding of what might just be the most complex geo-political interactions on planet earth.

This hardening of opinions was often swift and unforgiving with implications far beyond individual friendships and organizational dynamics.  The UN also became entwined in it as well as US vetoes kept the Security Council (though not the General Assembly or the International Court of Justice) from issuing resolutions which at least promised some tangible respite from the horrific violence inflicted in reaction to October 7.  A few Council members refused to condemn the Hamas attacks or pay sufficient attention to hostage release.  On the other hand, the Council’s responsibilities to uphold their own resolutions and international law were reduced to mostly handwringing regarding the staggering number of UN personnel, humanitarian workers, journalists and health workers killed by Israeli bombs. But as Council members slowly sought to challenge IDF operations, the more Israel made clear that it will do what it needs to do, while claiming (not entirely without evidence) that any of the other countries around the Council oval would behave just as Israel was behaving if something similar to the Hamas attacks were to happen to them.  On several occasions, Israel’s diplomats even resorted to calling the UN and its Ambassadors “terrorists” for not recognizing and supporting the erstwhile righteousness of Israel’s cause. Even in these diplomatic halls, categorical opinions proved (and still prove, one year on) highly resistant to reconciliation.  Numerous calls for a cease fire and the restoration of respect for international law have been stubbornly rebuked, as were prior resolutions over many years calling for an end to occupation, terrorism, settlement expansion and settler-related violence.  Thankfully in UN forums outside the Security Council, clearer calls were made for an end to what can only be described as collective punishment, the destruction of entire neighborhoods, their infrastructure and inhabitants, justified by intelligence confirming wanted Hamas (and now Hezbollah in Lebanon) elements therein.

I have had something of a front-row seat to the diplomatic dimension of this multiplicity of carnage which has been characterized by reckless military incursions with little regard for civilian life, feckless resolutions with little or no enactment, the desperate measures taken by Gazans to find some basic nourishment and reasonably potable water only to find instead a sniper’s bullet, the “collateral damage” of child after child relegated to a life without limbs let alone any modicum of inner peace, the weapons gushing from multiple fronts into a widening conflict zone which only threatens to widen further, the hardening of “theocratic posturing” by those politicians and insurgents whose theology is anything but beyond reproach, the resurrection of “like it or leave it” governance reminiscent of the US during the Vietnam War, the dramatic rise in anti-Semitism and Islamophobia which seemingly fails every distinction suggested between the dubious actions of governments and insurgents on the one hand, and the deeper traditions struggling (and deserving) to maintain their full dignity and respect on the other.  There has also been a failure, including by some prominent western media outlets, to properly account for the millions across the Middle East and beyond, including in Israel itself, who refuse to swallow the bait, who see in the current carnage a path to ruin which will only grow in intensity and sorrow, which will only catch more and more innocents in its snares.

As with so many other examples nowadays, this is a horrific mess of our own making, a failure to uphold our own creeds while endlessly and obliviously pointing fingers at others all the while claiming some perverted notion of “divine sanction.”  This failure has left so many on the edge of despair and pushed so many others over the edge.  I have an easy life relatively speaking, as there are no bombs exploding outside my apartment window. There are no children in my back room suffering from health-related traumas while wondering if they will survive the next aerial assault.  I am not spending my days preparing funerals of hostages, journalists, children, aid workers, these and more killed during a year-long cycle of violence which has been two-parts predictable and three-parts contemptable. 

And yet throughout this horror and the emotional “dodge ball” that we have all been required to play, I have worried deeply and daily about our capacity to turn back from this newest of brinks, to become “who we are” with the caveat that we are now demonstrating only a portion of that capacity, certainly the portion that revels in destruction and righteous hate, certainly the portion that is willing to swap out our God-given face for a more grotesque version of our own making, certainly the portion that prefers tricks and treachery to honest engagement, including being honest with ourselves.  The Middle East is not the only global venue for horrific violence and abuse, for displacement and collective punishment.  It is not the only place on earth where authoritarians pursue authoritarian goals – including the goal of keeping themselves out of jail once they no longer enjoy unchecked power with which to insulate themselves from accountability. Israel has often reminded UN diplomats over years of occupation critique that Israel is the sole functioning, “moral” democracy in the region without completing the sentence – that democracy is more than voting and that morality transcends – often considerably – ascriptions of national or ethnic interests.

In trying to make sense of this past year and my own generally inept contributions to a peace which passes understanding (to quote my prayer book), a few images and memories have reverberated. I recall several of my Jewish friends who I feel may have been pushed into taking a harder Zionist line than otherwise might have been the case had the violence on October 7 not been immediately followed by more intense, anti-Semitic recrimination on October 8, rekindling fears of discrimination lurking below every human surface.  In addition, my social media feeds over the year have been filled with images from the Auschwitz Memorial archives (@AuschwitzMuseum), images of so many children and their families led to a collective slaughter once more in their collective history for no reason other than being Jewish. At the same time, I have kept a lengthy file from over 20 years of covering the major UN bodies which include multiple files chronicling abuses by an occupying power against an occupied people, abuses which are now being committed on a much larger scale, albeit a scale consistent with a past characterized by episodic bombings, settler violence, home demolitions and more. These allegedly “Godly” policy excesses are accompanied by an almost complete disregard of UN resolutions and other efforts to keep alive a “two-state solution” which is currently, at the very most, on life support.

One wonders if ending the occupation would have prevented an October 7, would have done more to end the toxicity of hatred now directed against Jews and Arabs. I cannot say.  This option is not given to us now. What is given is more saber-rattling by regional states, more bombs falling in civilian areas, more journalists and aid workers under direct attack, more acts of terror and retribution, and certainly more children facing lives without limbs, schools and hope, children who bear no responsibility for the carnage we continue to witness no matter how many officials claim otherwise, no matter how many snipers blithly use the children of Gaza as target practice.

The quotations above, especially from Wendell Berry and Agatha Christie, are there not for your benefit but for mine, this person of privilege and relative access who has not been able to move the pile of violent intent a single millimeter over many years of trying, who has no defensible solution for the acrimony  which has swept over friendships and partnerships like a dense fog, a person who can only incompletely process the profound moral backsliding which people across the world, including in my own country, have succeeded in recent times to normalize.

In some ways I seem to have been broken by all of this seemingly intentional reverting to a dark place from which we thought we might finally have escaped. But if this ruin is to end, and if I and others are to contribute something positive to its ending, then I must – we must reject the darkness, the hatred, the creeping dystopia. Much better is to renew as best we can our full embrace of that “grand thing” which is life itself.  For a time, those of us who have been granted this blessing must learn to “rest in the grace of the world,” if only long enough to be able to return to the practice of discernment, the practice of healing, the practice of peace.  There is, in the end, a way to convert our own blessings into pathways of healing and reconciliation for those who have so long been “racked with sorrow.” May we find and choose that path.

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Picking up the Pieces: Our Cautious Return to UN Spaces, Dr. Robert Zuber

16 Nov

Editor’s Note: This is a lightly edited version of a talk which I prepared as a contribution to the Fifth CoNGO Global Thematic Webinar organized by CoNGO president Levi Bautista and his colleagues. For several reasons, including being situated at the end of a long Webinar filled with interesting voices that did not always respect time, the session had to be concluded before I could share. Thus, I am posting here in case anyone is interested.

“Picking up the Pieces” is a reflection which tries to answer the questions, Why are you (GAPW) still here at the UN?  Why did you come back?

Indeed, after a year and a half of Covid exile, many of our closest colleagues decided to move on from the UN to other and perhaps “greener” pastures. 

We faced a similar set of choices, having lost funders, our office and much of our structure of associates and interns.  But unlike some, the decision we made was to find a way to put Humpty Dumpty “back together again,” or at least to create a facsimile of a program which looked enough like the previous iteration to reassure those who had come to expect a certain level of policy engagement from us.

And so, albeit tentatively, we wandered back inside a UN headquarters which had a very different “feel” to it than the place we left.  It was clear immediately that many of our favorite security officers and support staff had already taken their leave, to be replaced by people who often didn’t distinguish us from the tourists (or particularly care). It was also clear early on that many if not most of the diplomats were quite OK with our absence.  Indeed, the general indifference to our return (perhaps to others as well) seemed to be part of a larger “project” by some diplomats to return control of UN processes to their “rightful owners,” which is deemed to be the states themselves. Perhaps also to get out from under the “critique” that they once tolerated but no longer particularly needed or wanted. 

This “project” has actually intensified in more recent times as a group of influential states is resisting efforts by the UN secretary-general to create “multi-stakeholder” policy processes which, to their minds, threaten to undermine the state-centrism of the UN.  These states worry that “multi-stakeholderism” (as Harris Gleckman has referred to it) seeks to make too much space for both corporate entities (which in some of the largest instances pack a larger fiscal clout than a good portion of the UN membership) as well as to NGOs of various sizes, even including tiny groups like ours who value independence more than size and serving more than branding.  We recognize that we don’t “represent” a vast constituency nor are we likely to be held accountable for policy failures for which we haqve previously advocated.  We also recognize that we represent a demographic which is white and western, one which definitely needs to shift to younger and more diverse representation. We don’t have thin skin when we are rebuffed or ignored, but we also recognize that in some key aspects the policy world has moved on to a different phase if arguably not a better one. 

But back to the question at hand.  Why come back to the UN without either a salary or a welcome mat?  What can be said regarding our motivation here?

For one thing, being at the UN helps satisfy a deep need to contribute in hopefully distinctive ways, to engage a world of policy in a more personal and holistic way as we have advocated over many years. When you have the opportunity and ability to contribute to the alleviation of global threats, however modestly, you should find the ways and means to do so. When you have the opportunity to contribute to important matters across sectors and issues you should definitely find ways to make those contributions as well.

But beyond this, a UN-based option for discernment and service also has the tangible benefit of helping to preserve my own sanity. Whatever level of agency we are able to muster regarding a range of often-frustrating, globally challenging issues preserves more mental health than merely stewing over endlessly discouraging headlines from a newspaper or online feed. Agency is catharsis. This is true for us who are fortunate to experience some of that direct benefit, but it is equally true for the many who still lack their fair portion of impact and influence, a portion which must swiftly be made available to them. 

I am grateful to the UN for the places wherein we have been privileged to engage over many years. But the seats we occupy do not belong to us and we want them to be filled now by people who are younger, multilingual, more culturally and politically diverse.  With our institutional memory and general level of policy attentiveness, there is possibly always some way that we can help turn a tide or help someone get situated such that they might turn a tide instead. There might well be some chance that a young person who was thinking about a career in finance might decide to take their talents into the policy or even humanitarian domains.  There might also be a chance that a suggestion we have formed about a policy or institutional structure might be adopted by a state looking for new ideas or a new way to frame older ones.  

For us, inside the UN, there is always that chance, a chance to inspire someone to act beyond their mandate, a chance to put ideas in the ears of diplomats who can then send them up the policy food-chain to some tangible benefit, a chance that change can be facilitated in part through the simple acts of witnessing and providing feedback. And a chance to insist that the UN do all that it can to be one of those places that governments trust to help lead all of us out of our self-imposed wilderness. 

But it is the turn of others now, the turn of younger perspectives and energies to help save all of us from ourselves. I could die tomorrow and there certainly are some besides my landlord who would gladly welcome that outcome.  But there is so much to be done now through younger agency as our planet burns and explodes, so much bureaucracy and (dare it be mentioned) corruption to overcome, so much distrust among delegations under cover of diplomatic niceties, so much pro-forma honoring and thanking that needs to become both more genuine and action-oriented.

This system that we have resided in for a generation needs to breathe fresher air and we can hopefully still do our small part to help keep the windows open to new ideas, new aspirations and especially new solutions to our many threats and challenges.  We can also help provide  a bit of extra motivation, in the words of former-General Assembly president Csaba Kőrösi, for diplomats to craft resolutions that we can all be proud of, resolutions which not only sound good and achieve the consensus of member states but which bear within them prospects for implementation which any genuine promise requires.  When we announce a resolution, people expect that something important in the world will change – and so it should. And so it must. 

Yes, it would have been easy to throw in the towel after over a year in exile and the loss of an office, staff, funders and more.  And yet we were able to rebuild most of our modest contributions to global governance while also increasing the self-reflection that helps us be more honest and leads to more satisfying and inspiring relationships with global colleagues. Part of that self-reflection centers on what we who operate at UN headquarters owe civil society partners in other parts of the world, people struggling with a range of problems not of their own making, people who are not listened to nearly enough, people who have little input into resolutions which in turn represent promises with too little impact on the lives of the residents of their communities. 

These are the people who need to be able to represent themselves, to plot and pursue their own aspirations, to care for the people and places they love.  These are the people who need to sit with us, reflect with us, teach us, respond with us. With whatever time we have left, with whatever agency we are able to sustain now, we want to contribute to a system where this representation is both impactful and commonplace. I can’t promise that our species will make it until and unless this happens. 

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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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Bait Shop: Messaging Which Narrowly Compels, Dr. Robert Zuber

2 Oct
The Middelgrunden Off Shore Windturbines located in the Øresund Straight separating Denmark and Sweden. UN Photo
From UN.org

There are no rules of architecture for a castle in the clouds.  G.K. Chesterton

It might be a good idea if, like the White Queen, we practiced believing six impossible things every morning before breakfast.  Madeleine L’Engle

We are what we pretend to be, so we must be careful about what we pretend to be. Kurt Vonnegut

Children see magic because they look for it.  Christopher Moore

The tree which moves some to tears of joy is in the eyes of others only a green thing that stands in the way. William Blake

Lovers and madmen have such seething brains; Such shaping fantasies, that apprehend; More than cool reason ever comprehends. William Shakespeare

We don’t create a fantasy world to escape reality, we create it to be able to stay. Lynda Barry

It’s been a quiet few weeks from a writing standpoint, though a busy one in terms of fathoming what the next phase of our service is to be, service to causes larger than ourselves, service to those seeking more kind, inspirational and imaginative responses to our bevy of global threats than folks in my generation are currently able to generate.  

I am also reminded on this International Day of Older Persons that I am one of those, and that the task for us generically (If not gerontologically) is to share rather than control, to coach rather than compete, and to remind younger folks that –wrinkles and brain fog notwithstanding – longer years do not have to mean shrinking options.  Indeed, this has so far been a more productive and satisfying period of life than I had imagined it would be, than was the case for me in previous times, a season to invest in multiple issues and multiple actors at this moment of excess conspiracies and wanton policy foolishness. 

We have continued to engage UN spaces during its High-Level segment, despite the fact that, for us at least, the UN is in danger of becoming, as metaphor, smaller-sized bait on an increasingly exposed hook.  Despite all the pomp and circumstance, interventions by officials have largely lacked imagination, have largely deflected attention from the responsibility which in a state-driven system becoming more so, not less, is clearly theirs to assume.  Despite some valuable events on capital punishment (we will contribute to an event organized for mid-October on this very topic by our longtime colleagues at FIACAT), on nuclear disarmament in the midst of fresh threats of use by Russia, and on “transforming education” which was an important discussion if too schools-focused for our taste, the High-Level segment largely tread familiar ground.  It was left to officials such as Prime Minister Mia Mottley of Barbados and the new President of Colombia, Gustavo Petro, to remind the global community of our receding sustainable development promises and counter-productive policies such as those which seek to expand the “war on drugs” while neglecting the “first-world” loneliness, isolation and other mental health problems which generate the relentless demand for the narcotics which our “war” has utterly failed to extinguish.

We also did our own small event during the High-Level segment, a roundtable with Soka Gakkai International and the Lawyers Committee on Nuclear Policy to launch the latest report by the Digital Economist, “Meeting the Climate Challenge” (https://docsend.com/view/d2d8aptxejxdiedy).  The somewhat overused title did not obscure some important insights including what Senior Fellow Satya Das referred to as our “Duty of Care.”  For us, this was a reassuring insight – that despite all of the attention on major international events which make more carbon than change, despite the “bait” of getting to hang out at Davos or UN “COP” events and discuss ideas (such as the DEs “global carbon levy”) with people who have the resources and access to implement them if not nearly sufficient will to do so, the planet is unlikely to pull back from the furnace to come without broader-based and more local commitments to care.  Care for our soils, for our trees, for our water, certainly for our children’s future.  We know, first-hand over many years, the limitations of policy to shift mindsets, to light a fire of change that can overcome the ashes of indifference.  Indeed, it is our view that our policy bubbles have largely done more or less all that policy bubbles can do.  It is past time to put our “duty to care” front and center in our climate response, and to do so in all the places where we matter. 

Despite all the splashy events with effective branding to boot, there have been some cold winds blowing through the UN since the easing of the Covid-19 pandemic.  As we have written before, some UN states have taken the opportunity to double down on their resistance to NGO participation beyond who the states might choose to invite themselves.  Access to events has hardly been impossible but has been granted with increasing caprice and some attitudinal version of “if you don’t like it, don’t come.” One doesn’t know from one day to the next whether a sojourn to the UN will result in a seat at a meeting or a rebuff due to some unannounced access change, including shifting meetings from “open” to “not-so-open” without a whiff of explanation.

Given the current state of affairs in our world, I can well understand why some states would not want scrutiny-obsessed groups like ours in the room, reminding delegations of the promises yet to be fulfilled, of the conflicts yet to be resolved, of the financial pledges yet to be delivered.  It can’t be comfortable for diplomats who work hard albeit “under orders” to have others constantly reminding them of hills yet to climb.  And yet, a colleague from Cameroon stayed with me for two weeks during the High-Level segment, a man attempting to protect and feed his people amidst a conflict which has received little policy attention and which continues to result in death, displacement and the wholesale degradation of the environment. While with me, the news came that his family home was burned to the ground. In essence, this is why we show up in line at the UN, day after day, year after year, hoping for a chance to plead the causes of people in desperate need who deserve as much from us as they were led to expect might be the case, certainly more than they have often received.

The discouragement of all this UN business, the small pieces of bait extending from the end of long hooks, has led us more than a few times to seek inspiration and imagination elsewhere.  This past month, the search took us to an all-September event led in part by our board chair, Christina Madden through her work with Criterion Institute, a “Convergence” of participants – most all women – in pursuit of a “feminist financial imagination.”  Despite online limitations, the discussions were beautifully moderated, allowing the conversations to drift between investment essentials and the values which, if well-embodied, can help ensure a feminist strategy free from reinforcing the patriarchal excesses of the current investment system in the main, a system which channels billions into private accounts devoid of any and all social accountabilities. 

It is hard in these “convergence” settings to find language forms which avoid the pitfalls of essentialist stereotyping, and which can effectively steer us away from the temptation to use money as dangling bait to attract status and power and not also to make change in societies now teetering on “brinks” of their own authoring. As such, we need reminders that our relationship to money remains largely uninterrogated, that we don’t actually represent many who we pretend to “speak for,” that the “faith” which drives many of us to search for inspiration and imagination beyond the usual suspects remains both largely “unhoused” and battered by circumstance; and is thus in need of reliable partnership including the provision of some of the reassurance we seek to “gift” to others.  We often embrace the imagination we are comfortable with, not the imagination which the world now requires, those “six impossible things” before breakfast which will never become incarnate until we have the courage to imagine them into existence.

The many and diverse events around the UN largely remind me on a daily basis that the world we love, the world that sustains the best and worst of us, the world that will continue on long after we have irretrievably soiled its blessings, that human world  is running out of time. The international day of older persons reminds me that I, too, am running out of time, time to discern and share with that shrinking number of folks who still care, at least a little bit, what I think, time to pursue the “magic” of inspiration and imagination wherever it can now be found, and then communicate it clearly and humbly to those many among us who, for one reason or another, are no longer inclined to take the bait.

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Spare Change: Beyond Policy Convenience and Comfort, Dr. Robert Zuber

17 Oct

The world as we have created it is a process of our thinking. It cannot be changed without changing our thinking.  Albert Einstein

To know what people really think, pay regard to what they do, rather than what they say. René Descartes

Our ability to adapt is amazing. Our ability to change isn’t quite as spectacular.  Lisa Lutz

Nothing is so painful to the human mind as a great and sudden change.  Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley

The only crime is pride.  Sophocles

You can’t make them change if they don’t want to, just like when they do want to, you can’t stop them.  Andy Warhol

If you want to change the world, pick up your pen and write.  Martin Luther

When I was younger (no time recently) and cutting my teeth on nuclear and environmental activism, I was intrigued by notions being floated at that time to help complete the multilateral project through a significant reform of its infrastructure – practically and considerably modifying the statist assumptions of the UN and other institutions, assumptions which presumed that multilateralism was state business and only extended to others when states decided to invite their presence.

Those modifications were deemed necessary at that time by myself and many others not so much because of our demand for a “voice;” (after all, those of us working on nuclear and environmental issues were mostly people of privilege to begin with), but because it was unclear, absent significant pressure from non-government advocates, that states would be able to fully meet the moment – to shed their national pride, their diplomatic protocols, their sovereign concessions, their longstanding political grievances, their ideological predispositions and more — and demonstrate to the world that they are prepared to endure whatever pain is needed, do whatever is necessary, to heal our damaged planet, to move away from the precipice of nuclear and environmental catastrophe and  repair our damaged politics. 

A large component of fulfilling this agenda, of course, is the willingness to make use of all available wisdom and expertise wherever it might be found, to embrace the inconvenient as well as the comfortable, to shed the skin of predictability and replace it with innovation which – then as now – exists in far greater measure in cities and communities than individual governments and even multilateral institutions can apparently appreciate or assimilate (even if they would wish to do so). 

In this context, the pandemic-inspired call by some states, and acquiesced by some others, to return spaces like the UN to the primacy of “inter-governmental processes,” represents in our view a serious misreading of our current moment.  As many UN-based delegations themselves recognize, public trust in governance is lagging almost across the board.  Some of that trust deficit is related to states which seem completely out of touch with the needs and aspirations of their own people, acting as though political power is primarily an entitlement to be used to the benefit of leadership and their circles, that promises are what you use to get elected (or coronated) and then tossed into some metaphorical recycling bin in case they are needed at a later time in an attempt to prop up support for shaky regimes.

But part of this trust deficit is related to assessments of state competence, the fear that (much like in individual therapeutic contexts) some states are only willing to make only the “spare” changes they are comfortable making, not the changes that this current brew of climate change, pandemic spread, biodiversity loss, food insecurity and conflict-without-end now requires of us.  The UN, for instance, is a place where all the critical issues of our time are routinely discussed.  And yet there is also a sense more broadly held than many would like to admit that when it comes time to move from urgent discourse to meaningful change, the system too-often pumps the brakes.  Like the winter heat in my New York City apartment where the old radiators are permitted to emit only enough to stave off illness and frostbite, we are collectively still addicted to only the questions we are comfortable asking and those large, government-hosted events that produce only enough “heat” to keep some of us believing that this time – just maybe – the results will justify the vast expenditures of human energy and carbon emissions required to hold them.

As it was in my past, it is not clear that such a belief is now justified more than in part.  During the next few weeks, the UN will be seen co-sponsoring a series of major events – on sustainable transport, on biodiversity loss and on climate change – all of which have vast and direct implications for what UNSG Guterres has branded as our “suicidal war on nature.”  And while the Sustainable Transport event in Beijing produced some interesting remarks including calls to end “short-termism” by the Panamanian president, the Russia president used his time to tout the construction of new highways and designation of new air and sea corridors, reminding some of the very practices that made this event necessary in the first place.

This all-too-frequent confusion of roles and goals simply isn’t good enough to produce meaningful change, let alone to prevent a global “suicide.”  Every day that we voluntarily pump the brakes on the changes we know full well we need to make, every day that we accede to unnecessary compromises and political conveniences, the world is one step closer to a miserable and preventable end.  And every day our “leadership” fails to deliver progress on the challenges we are running out of time to resolve, it becomes harder and harder for individuals to choose the path of change and renewal in their own lives.  We live in this conundrum now — of more than a few states becoming too comfortable making “spare change,” but also (deliberately or otherwise) impeding those many individuals, organizations and institutions – including many experts in the UN Secretariat itself — who would urgently and willingly rise to to a higher calling, people who recognize that the changes required of us going forward will only become more sudden, more painful to behold.

As Global Action moves inexorably towards hibernation, it has been emotionally moving to hear from so many former colleagues struggling to forge more sustainable habits in the absence of consistent state leadership, to somehow succeed in transforming long-standing dreams of travel and other leisure activities into higher callings of solidarity with those many millions who will never board airplanes or stay in resort hotels, who will never be invited to Glasgow or Beijing or other centers of policy attention, but whose very lives are impacted by the actions we take, all of us, every day. 

I know that over this past pandemic year my own bucket list has shrunk to the size of a measuring cup.  Despite a long adulthood of (relatively) simple living, I have also been so privileged to see enough of the world to know something of its wonders and its struggles, but also to recognize the degree to which the former face precipitous decline while the latter continue to expand.  This is simply untenable.  We can’t presume to care about the future of our children as pride and greed stalk every corner of our planet, and as the gaps between our urgent words and carefully calibrated deeds continue largely un-narrowed.  Our excuses and rationalizations, clever though they may sometimes be, must come to a halt. 

I have had quite enough of my own hypocrisy, throwing spare change at former neighbors and using far more than my share of available resources.  But I have also had enough of “inter-governmental processes” that fail to deliver in proper measure what we all know we need with respect to every one of the UN’s core policy frameworks, from security and rights to climate and development.  The choice at this point for states in capitals or multilateral settings seems clear – find the courage and cooperative means to clean up the messes we’ve collectively made or open the doors to the rest of us with mops and cleanser at the ready and fortified with the full determination to use them.

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Power Grid: Accompanying the Traumatized and Those who Serve Them, Dr. Robert Zuber

22 Aug
See the source image

To know someone who thinks & feels with us, & who, though distant, is close to us in spirit, this makes the earth for us an inhabited garden. Goethe

When the remembering was done, the forgetting could begin.  Sara Zarr

The ripples of the kind heart are the highest blessings of the universe.  Amit Ray

You remember only what you want to remember. You know only what your heart allows you to know.  Amy Tan

I am weary of this frail world’s decay.  Murasaki Shikibu

I never live my life for itself, but always in the experience which is going on around me.  Albert Schweitzer

When you don’t think you can, hold on.  James Frey

While riding the subway to and from our shared office this week, I noticed a new public service announcement among the placards which adorn each of the cars.   This one read, “connections are stronger than addiction.”  

This reminded me of what has now been years of accumulated evidence from neuro-biology that humans are, indeed, “hardwired for connection,” that as Dr. Amy Banks and colleagues put it over a decade ago, before the onset of a death-scattering pandemic and the systemic degrading of our politics, “we need to get back to the real basics of having relationships be at the center of our meaning.”

The implications of her work (and others in her field) lie far beyond the realm of the drug and alcohol addictions which were the sub-text of the subway messaging.  Indeed, one can make the case that our “addictions” are, perhaps even more than they always have been, much broader and more pervasive than substances alone: the stubborn habits of the heart that bring pain to ourselves and others but that we feel powerless to change; the ideas and values which we have allowed to ossify into conspiracy, becoming more and more divorced from any human realities they might once have been intended to address; the defensiveness that rises to the surface at the slightest provocation, indeed often absent any provocation at all; the paranoia which comes from social isolation (often now self-imposed) and which attempts to project on to others a malevolence which has often taken shape first within our own souls.

As at least some have been reminded during this seemingly endless pandemic, connection remains a good portion of the cure for what now ails us.  Unfortunately, it has also become uncomfortably clear across lines of age, of gender, of race, of culture, that we simply don’t know enough about each other — or perhaps even care to know — to nuance our responses to the complexities of other lives, to see the flaws but also the promise, to appreciate the contributions more than the inconveniences, to resist the rush to judge and to punish which often serves interests far darker than any alleged nobility of justice.   We have “wearied of the world’s decay” in part because our experience of that decay is less and less first-hand, a product of images that tell us less than we think they do, as well as accounts from diverse media that tell us mostly what some think we want to hear or, perhaps more to the point, that share only what they think “our hearts will allow us to know.”

If as the neuro-biologists increasingly accept, that we are “hardwired to connect,” then much of our current behavior constitutes a dangerous denial of our very essence, a particularly distressing challenge to those who seek to keep connection at the heart of their own life’s mission, but also for those have suffered in greater measure and who understand the degree to which the “ripples of kind hearts” are indispensable to their own healing, indeed to the full restoration of their own capacity for kindness and compassion. 

This week at the UN, amidst some appropriate hand-wringing over the fall of Afghanistan and its implications for everything from women’s rights to state corruption, amidst the latest crises of high winds and shifting earth heaped upon the already-traumatized people of Haiti, we gratefully joined with others in modes of reverence, mourning and connection.  At a series of events honoring the sacrifices of peacekeepers, UN field personnel and humanitarian workers (as part of World Humanitarian Day), an array of speakers paid homage to those who choose to place their life energies at the service of others, to stay the course and “hold on” when others would be tempted to flee the scene or lift their hands in desperate frustration, those who choose to remain at their demanding posts, insisting as one staffer boldly said this week  that threats from terrorist violence, a pandemic and climate-related factors often closing in around them are simply not enough to “deter humanitarian vocations,” are not enough to distract their attention from those “traumatized from attacks” including women made widows and children made orphans by weapons, famine or other forms of abuse.

While many in the audience resonated with the words of UN High Commission Bachelet honoring this “work of a lifetime,” to accompany survivors and raise our voices on their behalf, many also recognized that this is now, in places from Yemen to Tigray, much easier said than done.  Yes, we must learn better how “to support each other” along life’s journey.  Yes we must, as SG Guterres notes this week, place more services at the disposal of those facing unimaginable “heartbreak.” And yes, we must continue to honor and support the sometimes-incomprehensible risks taken each and every day by humanitarian workers in conflict zones — but this requires the rest of us to ensure an end to the violence which complicates every facet of their life-preserving work and which also claims the lives of far too many of the workers themselves well before their time. 

And then there were the discussions focused on the survivors themselves, survivors of often horrific terrorist violence which represented, as noted by the Iraqi Ambassador to the UN in Geneva, “attacks on humanity itself.”  As USG Voronkov acknowledged, there are times when our preoccupation with fighting terrorism “obscures our view of the victims who need more from us.” Indeed it can also obscure from view the testimony of victims who know for themselves what they need in order to overcome the trauma that generally lingers longer than they could possibly have imagined, trauma that, as one said, can change life dramatically “through no fault of your own.”

And what did they say they most need?   For starters, they need people around them who can resist the temptation to forget, to forget about the dark side of the what this world can continue to offer up once the remembrances have concluded and the symbols of honor have been stored away for another year.  Moreover, survivors of terror, or mass atrocity violence, or sudden displacement or tragic personal loss recognize that the pain can never be healed through social isolation, can never be restored by allowing personal trauma to metastasize into a life force, an addiction if you will, one which denies the core of our biological essence.  It was so encouraging to hear one survivor after another call for “platforms for healing and connection,” for “powerful victims’ networks” which can help restore something close to full functionality in this challenging world.  It was also encouraging to note the support expressed by survivors for the humanitarian workers who so often stand in courageous attention between those vulnerable persons for whom “time seems to be running out” and the person-centered services that can help them re-engage with more of the life which can still be experienced in many places as a kind of “inhabited garden.”

For those who doubt that lives of trauma can become lives of healing and purpose, for those who believe that the deep pain of violence and abuse is forever consigned to impede and isolate, we end as we began, with words from Amy Banks and her neuro-biology colleagues, those who understand that lasting change in our distraught human community is still possible despite all contrary evidence.  The key to this change, they make clear,  is within us, in the quality and steadfastness of our “motivation and interest in making different choices which will stimulate new areas of the brain and re-wire us.”  And as they know, and as the survivors of violence and abuse we heard from this week and those humanitarians who accompany them also know, there is no choice more impactful to healing and change than the choice to connect, to widen our circles, to reinvest in what we think we know of others including those we have already “given up on,” to have the courage let whatever kindness we have at our disposal flow to every corner of life that needs it, to refute the lonely conspiracy and paranoia that a life of isolation and distance is prone towards, to affirm what is most natural to us rather than investing in what are often vast quantities of energy required to keep connection buried under layers of resentment, suspicion and grievance.

Every once in a while in our UN spaces, the traumatized and victimized among us serve up reminders to those of us who seek to “re-wire” our national and global institutions, to both recover the core of why they were founded in the first place and help them meet current expectations. One such reminder is directed squarely at us; that we also can recover and nourish that capacity at the core of our human condition, the connection that alone can ease the deepest pain, stem chronic suffering, vanquish isolation, and restore that kind, human presence which can steadfastly rewire our institutions and refresh relationships with those they are mandated to serve.

The good news is that we still have what it takes to do this, though we must resolve to return to the path of connection without delay.  The longer we deny who we truly are, the longer we bury the power of our own hardwiring, the longer we will have to deal with the consequences of people and institutions being less, sometimes far less, than we need them to be.

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Mentoring Protection: A Caregivers’ Role, Dr. Robert Zuber

30 May

“Survivor” by Bisa Butler

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

It is today that our best work can be done.  W. E. B. Du Bois

Every man I meet wants to protect me. I can’t figure out what from.  Mae West

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

As time went on, we learned to arm ourselves in our different ways. Some of us with real guns, some of us with more ephemeral weapons, an idea or improbable plan or some sort of formulation about how best to move through the world. Colson Whitehead

Life is so complete that even when we are knocked on our backs, we have the best view of the stars. Laura Teresa Marquez

Yeah, exactly where a dad should be. Holding a firearm and warding off potential suitors until that daughter is of consenting age, he said. “Which in my book is about forty-six.  Mary H.K. Choi

This was “protection of civilians week” at the UN, an annual event when we examine our commitments to protect the vulnerable and threatened, but also to honor those whose skills and instincts for protecting others put their lives at risk and much-too-often end them entirely. 

We at the UN normally associate our protection commitments with peacekeeping operations, the soldiers, police and civilian components, most often seconded from UN member states, who are tasked with protecting civilians in some of the most demanding conflict environments on earth.  Through ever-more sophisticated intelligence gathering, logistical support, threat assessment and (in the best of circumstance) adequate ground and air assets, peacekeepers are increasingly able to stay a step ahead of armed groups and other “spoilers” while providing gender and culturally-sensitive assistance to communities and host states through what seems to be an ever-widening range of mandated duties from election monitoring and vaccination assistance to “quick impact projects” designed to build both trust and capacity in host communities.

In a series of UN discussions over this past week, including in the Security Council, the UN and its partners both honored sacrifices made and assessed the current state of play in what is an increasingly complex tapestry of both protection responsibilities and threats to protectors.  Among the former are efforts to address deficits related to food insecurity and health-related access as climate change and armed conflict disrupt agricultural cycles and vaccine “hoarding” leaves many millions vulnerable to a deadly virus and its seemingly unrelenting variants.  Among the latter are threats from formally-designated terrorists and other armed groups increasingly able to incite violence through digital means with seemingly unfettered access to trafficked weapons and the capacity to construct and deploy improvised explosive devices which constitute perhaps the greatest, current, operational threat to peacekeeper safety.

To my mind, amidst the many helpful protection-related discussions at the UN this week, two in particular stood out.  The first of these was an event entitled “Local Perspectives on the Protection of Civilians: The Impact of Conflict and Hunger,” which shifted vantage points on protection towards the most fundamental of needs – for nutrition, for access to water, for livelihoods that can sustain families and communities.  A South Sudanese advocate spoke of the “dream” of many women in her country for “livelihood options” in a country still wrestling with corruption and insurgency, weapons trafficking (despite an arms embargo) and diverse impediments to agricultural sufficiency.  The Afghanistan director of the UN’s World Food Programme put the local protection crisis in sharper (and somewhat shocking) relief, citing vast, conflict-induced nutritional deficits that raise the prospect, based on her long experience in conflict zones, of generations literally “being wiped out.” One speaker after another reinforced what has now and sadly become commonplace, the degree to which the impacts of conflict in this time of asymmetrical threats, now complicated by a pandemic, bear protection implications far beyond conventional fields and/or modalities of struggle.

Another important protection event of the week was hosted by Ireland and devoted to “Improving the Protection of Civilians in UN Peacekeeping Transitions,” a discussion on how UN contingents can best honor responsibilities assumed and relationships forged once the decision has been made by the Security Council to draw down peacekeeping operations and transition responsibilities to other UN capacities and, especially, to national contingents.  Ireland’s Minister of Foreign Affairs Simon Coveny made several helpful contributions to the broader discussion on protection, noting that peacekeeping transitions must be sensitive both to the situation on the ground and to the relationships which have been forged at local level, people who may now find themselves dependent for some aspects of protection on government forces who may have the capacity to protect but may also lack the will to do so.  The MFA noted that the “path to peace,” the path that could one day make peacekeeping obsolete, requires more of us in the interim, including greater sensitivity to the anxiety from security risks that withdrawal might engender.  At the very least, he noted, we must ensure that the pace of such withdrawals is determined by specific community concerns and security-related circumstances and not driven merely by “budgetary considerations.”

While protection mandates for peacekeepers continue to expand there is also the need to expand our assessment of what protection requires; certainly to those tasked with providing it but also to those living in that zone that most of us find ourselves in over the course of our lives – needing protection in some aspects but also offering it ourselves, offering it to children of course but also to neighbors, the elderly, those who have been through harrowing circumstances, those experiencing limited capacity to fend off threats to themselves in the short or long term.  

In this regard, an image was offered at the top of this post courtesy of Bisa Butler’s remarkable exhibit now at Chicago’s Art Institute. Among her stunningly colorful, woven portraits of African-American culture is this one depicting a woman in considerable distress being held up by two other women, neither of whom appear to be “protectors” in the professional sense, but both of whom were clearly in accompaniment to the suffering of the third, bearing at least some of her burdens and providing reassurance that the suffering she now experienced would not have to be experienced alone.

For many of us, this is the lens on protection that is most familiar, bearing the wounds of others in real time, caring for those close at hand, making hard decisions about when and how to assume risks, acting on our best assessments of the experiences that harm and those that traumatize, how to respond best to short and longer-term dangers to personal and and community well-being.

In a world awash in weapons often in the hands of unscrupulous actors, it is understandable to put protection from weapons in the hands of those also bearing weapons, those able to respond to threats of armed violence with coercive measures in kind. But this is not at all the end of the matter. For instance, Indonesia made a particularly good point this week in calling for “mentoring” of national contingents by peacekeeping forces, thereby helping to ensure that such contingents manifest both the capacity and the will to protect, and that such protection is undertaken with full regard for the dignity and rights of the protected. 

But there is another piece to this mentoring, the piece communicated by Butler’s woven portrait, the piece embodied by those with their fingers on the pulse of what protection is needed and what is merely intrusive, the protection that requires a blend of both outside assistance and community resolve, including the will to accompany and the creation of enabling environments to endure, to heal and to reintegrate.  The mentoring of these equally-essential skills and capacities, as some of the voices from diverse conflict zones made plain this week, must also be a part of our modalities of protection, must also and increasingly be part of how we help our professional protectors help the rest of us to be “each other’s magnitude and bond” when troubles loom.

In this time of multiple stressors, we find more and more people pulling inward, creating moats of sorts around their most intimate places, protecting with a vengeance from threats that seem largely assumed and at times even invented.   We must resist the tendency to allow the rain to drive us to the wrong shelter, a shelter that is either heavily weaponized or cut off from the world we should be prepared to re-enter once the rain passes. The “business” of protection is for all of us, not only in assessing threats but in holding each other up in times of crisis, in times of need, of being each other’s harvest, of ensuring that loss and pain will not be the final word.

As many who serve in peacekeeping operations know well, weapons and other coercive measures are only part of the solution to protection threats. The rest is a common responsibility grounded in our capacity to formulate and uphold, to assess and accompany, to assist those knocked on their backs to recognize that there are stars above, that there is, indeed, hope for peace and health, for sustenance and livelihood once the current misery has been dispelled.

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Visiting Hours: Sojourning with the Sacred, Dr. Robert Zuber

22 Dec

Manger

There is nothing so secular that it cannot be sacred, and that is one of the deepest messages of the Incarnation.  Madeleine L’Engle

Action is always superior to speech in the Gospels, which is why the Word became flesh and not newsprint. Colin Morris

Holy work in the world has always been like this: messy, earthy, physical, touchable. Catherine McNiel

We are the creators, and our mission is to detach from all the chains we imposed upon ourselves and create a bridge to the infinite self. Journey back to where we started. Ana O’Malley

Do not have so much fear of this world that it will ruin the next incarnation. Dada Bhagwan

This is the first day of Hanukkah, the first full day of winter, and just three days from Christmas.  Like many of our places of employment and engagement, the UN has wound down the bulk of its activities for the year. Unlike some of these other places, however, the UN is now licking its wounds from recent failures to reach a climate agreement sufficient to the magnitude of the current threat and, in the Security Council, the shameful inability to reauthorize the “cross-border mechanism” which most everyone believes is essential to keeping Syrian civilians alive as Special Envoy Pedersen pursues a long-awaited political settlement.

Due in part to the fact that I am not always well in my head, these discouraging policy failures actually led me to think more this week about “incarnation,” a seminal attribute of this season for Christians but one which tends to vanish from interest once the bills of the season have been paid and the images of the baby sleeping in the cold have given way to how we (at least in the northern climes) are going to cope with our unrelenting and mostly colorless winter.

I believe it would be better for all of us if we could hold on to incarnation a while longer.

According to the dictionary, what is “incarnate” is that which has been made manifest or comprehensible; something that has been made clearer to us; a veil that has been lifted; blinders that have been removed from our eyes, allowing us to see a fuller reality beyond our preconceptions and prejudices. This notion of incarnation has ramifications for Christians at Christmas of course – the baby in the hay that somehow represents the “goodness and light” that had been promised and which has seemingly remained more elusive than we might otherwise have wished.

But there are many other veils that surely need to be lifted, other blind spots to which we have become a bit too comfortable, logs in our own eyes that prevent us from seeing the “specks” that are in the eyes of others.  To be able and, even more, to be willing to see all that is constantly being made “manifest and comprehensible” to us is a great gift to ourselves, to those around us, and especially to all we seek to serve.

And there are other meanings to this incarnation season that we would also do well to consider further.

One of these is fully present in the manger scene but also at the core of some of our most cherished rituals – the mystery associated with turning items from a common to a sacred use:  the common barn that housed an infant savior; the common candles of Hanukkah mysteriously burning in a temple for days instead of hours, the common waters that somehow become the conduit for sacred baptisms. This “re-purposing” is also part of incarnation, also part of how we recognize and appreciate the mystery within the commonplace, the divine within the profane.

And it is not only in the religious realm where this re-purposing takes place.   Many of our Global Action colleagues (Green Map and others) are doing their part of the “messy, holy work” that we need so much of in these times, investing what might otherwise be considered common and easily-disposed resources with fresh value and meaning.  For several years, Lin Evola’s Peace Angels Project has been our own re-purposing guidestar, an effort across cities and cultures, collecting weapons, melting them down, and then turning these instruments of death and criminality into sculptures of beauty and inspiration. Especially in this season of incarnation, we honor all of this work, all these reminders that “there is nothing so secular” that it cannot also be re-purposed for the greater benefit of people and planet.

Finally, there is the dimension of incarnation that we are perhaps most prone to forget, or at least to overlook – the depth of commitment which such incarnation implies.  The child in the manger represents no mere visitation, no temporary port of call, no visceral drive-by, no stop on a longer tour.  The manger is, instead, a symbol of enduring presence, of a commitment to help us through our most difficult times, to accompany us as we attempt to detach from our self-imposed chains and get back in touch with our truer natures, to overcome the fears that inhibit the freedom of our movements that is indispensable to rebuilding those bridges to our “infinite selves.”

Incarnation has little relation to the material things and personal relationships that we have been “trained” to use for a short season and then discard; nor does it represent a short, seasonal distraction from the habits embedded in our personal calendars.  Indeed it is the key to calendars with a genuine human future.

The three dimensions of incarnation noted here all have important implications for both our personal lives and our policy choices. They represent a call to lift the veils that prevent our clarity of vision; to accept the duty to re-purpose, thereby creating sacred space where there is now only (sometimes quite vulgar) material interest; to seize on the value of accompaniment, making ourselves reliable advocates for people who are themselves reliable in their pursuit of a truth worth keeping; people who can help us re-purpose the material plane which is now burying us in plastic and cynicism; people for whom “visiting hours” has no closing time.

The sacred texts that define this season of incarnation make clear that action takes precedence over speech, that how we act in response to the clarity and permanence promised during this season means more to the world than what we say (or write).  The world that we seek to inspire and heal needs this incarnation moment; it needs us to witness more reliably to the sacred in our midst, to do our part to create new sacred spaces and deeper relationships, and to renew the commitment to see our own re-purposing projects to their very end.

Do you hear what I hear?  Do you see what I see?  The season of incarnation is upon us.  May it never leave.

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Civil Society: Making Change without Making Enemies, Dr. Robert Zuber

1 Jul

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A politician thinks of the next election; a statesman, of the next generation.  J.F. Clarke

Political parties are on the hunt to search and destroy each other, as though we were involved in some kind of enemy combat, rather than the work of statesmanship.   John Lewis

The challenge was that it was harder to be subtle than strident.   Nancy Gibbs

New truth is only useful to supplement the old; rough truth is only wanted to expand, not to destroy, our civil and often elegant conventions.  Robert Louis Stevenson

This was an exhausting week at the UN for all its stakeholders, including a high level General Assembly event on countering terrorism, planning for important resolutions on infectious diseases and a September Mandela Peace Summit, and an outcome document for the Review Conference of the Programme of Action on Small Arms that had delegates negotiating over issues from women’s participation in disarmament affairs to the control of ammunition supplies well into early Saturday morning.

The Nelson Mandela Peace Summit preparatory discussion — with the goal of a consensus political declaration — was particularly interesting for us as delegations shared insights on matters important for the entire UN community; including how to define “vulnerabilities” beyond group categorizations and how to position the declaration so that it reinforced system-wide commitments to “sustaining peace” and the 2030 Development Agenda. The discussion was led by the always entertaining and insightful Ambassador of South Africa, Jerry Matjila, who reminded delegations that these “unusual times require an unusual declaration,” one that can help convince people that “the impossible is still possible.”

As we were also reminded this week by African women themselves at an excellent side event on preventing violence extremism in Africa, the multiple threats from poverty and climate-affected desertification and drought conspire to create openings for extremists that bring danger even to daily routines.  If peace “is still possible” in the poorest, driest parts of Africa, it will take more reassuring capacity support and non-partisan leadership from the rest of us; more than these determined women can alone deliver for their communities, as they themselves made clear.

Such leadership is elusive in our time. On Saturday I was in New Mexico to join with a wide range of stakeholders — from activists representing area (often displaced) indigenous tribes to mothers clutching children themselves clutching signs of frustration and determination,  as the reality of the family separation being chronicled from the stage by those who had experienced it’s effects first-hand was almost too painful to bear.

The advocacy around the plaza ranged from those seeking only to reunite separated children to those seeking to oust the current US president using language that struck me as a tad on the reckless side – as though lecturing and insulting people you don’t like is an effective way to change their behavior, or as though any deference to civility in our currently ravaged political discourse is little more than code for passive indifference.

Civility did take a bit of a hit at this rally, with some declaring an era of state fascism and otherwise alleging political enemies in categorical terms.  As the scene unfolded, I kept thinking back to a poll released this week by Transparency International indicating that by a shockingly wide margin, people report only limited “trust” in their government.   The poll, it must be noted, was conducted through Facebook and would likely not rise to the highest polling standards.  And yet, at least in the main, it confirmed so much of what I read and hear about through the UN – societies becoming simultaneously suspicious, insular and polarized, with fewer and fewer opportunities for the “dialogue” that we constantly (and rightly) advocate for conflict states from Syria to Cameroon.

As some of the Hispanic speakers at the rally rightly claimed, too many people in this world are simply not being heard, and simply not being heard by governments.  Indeed, there are some people in this world who have a hard time being heard by any government – including voices from some of the indigenous communities represented on the plaza.  But “hearing” now seems to have become primarily a partisan activity as our views on what kinds of societies we want to live in continue to diverge. And to make matters worse, there is now a scarcity of statesmen/women who heed needs and voices beyond partisan bases and who help us grasp our longer-term responsibilities to the children who depend on us for things other than staking out political turf.  We need more of these leaders in both national and multilateral settings to help us resolve this current cycle of mistrust and recrimination while it is within our capacity to do so.

Through its sometimes powerful norm building, the UN for its own part seems to embrace a mostly progressive worldview with mostly-diligent diplomats working hard to “keep the doors open” for effective policy negotiations.  But there are tremors lurking here as well as some of the most visible and respected diplomats at UN headquarters represent leadership in national capitals whose “heads” are wrapped around decidedly different policy priorities. At the UN, we collectively know a fair bit about how to diffuse and even overcome some of the short-term policymaking and partisan venom that has infected discourse in so many political contexts.   We have learned much about the challenge and necessity of seeing value in the actions and priorities of even our policy adversaries. What we don’t yet know how to do, at least with consistency, is to use UN norm building as a tool to actively stem the tide of intolerance and authoritarianism that seems to be cascading over more and more of our member states.

In looking for clues in these urgent times, we all have things to atone for, including exclusions that we have done more to enable than we are willing to acknowledge. But we have also had past successes in reaching beyond limitations of trust and context that it would be helpful to recall.  Indeed, one of the most memorable speeches at the New Mexico rally was also one of the least incendiary.  A Vietnamese woman took the stage to remind the audience of its own history – specifically the successful integration of Vietnamese in the 1970s to places like New Mexico and Oklahoma which could not have been more different from where these people had come from but where –somehow, some way — people eventually made it work.

We can make it work again, she exclaimed.

Indeed we can.

 

 

 

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