Tag Archives: United Nations

Accountability, Compromise and the Future of the UN: A Reflection by Tazia Marie Mohammad.

14 Aug

Editor’s Note:  This reflection is courtesy of one of the more insightful interns/associates we have had at Global Action in my 23+ years.  Tazia did what we want all of our colleagues to do – throw themselves into many areas of UN policy and practice and then assess the current relevance of the UN as convener and problem-solver on an increasingly volatile planet. This task was made easier during July’s High-Level Political Forum when so many UN issues and concerns come to the fore.  But the HLPF also magnified opportunities for frustration, especially for younger people worried about their future and the capacities of existing global institutions to shape a more compassionate, just and sustainable world.

The day after my internship with Global Action ended, I took a 6:00 AM connecting flight from JFK to Tokyo-Haneda. Since then, I have been working as an English tutor in multiple prefectures across Japan, a welcome respite from the bustle and grit of life in New York City. The curriculum I work with, more content-based than instructional, focuses on multicultural communication and attainment of the UN Sustainable Development Goals—noticeably reminiscent of the Japanese mission’s own interventions on the General Assembly floor.

It feels a bit hypocritical to be getting these kids excited about our grand plans to change the world only days after walking out of a circle that blatantly disregards them. America, the country I effectively represent to my students, has rejected the SDGs and withdrawn from the Financing for Development conference—a culmination of decades of unwillingness to commit to its climate promises. Simultaneously, it funds the killings of over 60,000 Palestinian men, women, and children, while strong-arming sovereign bystanders into complicity in the Security Council and beyond.

The UN, over its near-eighty-year tenure, seems to have refashioned itself in America’s image: swift and adept at bullying the weak, but slow and inefficient at aiding those in need. This has long since graduated from mere unfairness: with 2030 just around the corner, only 17% of the SDGs are on track, and each state’s unwillingness to shape up digs us deeper into a grave that seems less escapable each day. If we cannot face ourselves and implement a hard narrative reset, we may well not survive.

Perhaps the greatest hindrance to SDG attainment is the UN’s inability to hold member states accountable. In the Security Council, this dearth of responsibility can be attributed to an irreconcilable truth: every resolution, stance, and condemnation issued is overshadowed by each nation’s own military exploits and casual brutality. Every law-breaker seemingly feels emboldened by the tacit understanding that they will face no substantial punishments for violating international laws, for the states responsible for upholding these laws are often the most infamous violators themselves. This is evident in Israel and America’s noncompliance with the Geneva Convention despite near-universal condemnations, and in Russia’s stubborn continuation of its invasion in Ukraine despite its pariah status in Europe. Until more rigid and autonomous frameworks for unlawful intervention are implemented, the UN cannot in good faith claim to protect the sovereignty of its members or the safety of their citizens.

This accountability crisis also stems from the Western hegemony’s open use of reality-bending narration as a shroud for its own failings. Iran, for instance, engages in a more rigorous nuclear reporting process than any other UN member, yet its compliant status with the IAEA was revoked immediately preceding Israel’s unprovoked terror attacks on its IAEA-protected nuclear plants on June 13th. Iran, which has never been recorded to possess nuclear arms, was declared a volatile adversary seemingly overnight to justify Israel’s warfare. Statements by nearly every Security Council member focused more on urging that Iran—a known non-nuclear entity—must never obtain nuclear weapons than on addressing any details relevant to the matter at hand. This air of favoritism is accentuated by the fact that Israel itself is estimated to possess 90 nuclear warheads yet refuses to sign any non-proliferation treaty or register its arsenal with the IAEA.

One must also look to Palestine, where the plight of Israeli hostages—prolonged solely by Israel’s ceasefire violations and rejection of negotiations with Hamas—is measured at equal, if not greater weight, than the deaths of over sixty thousand Palestinians. Moreover, Israel’s core arguments about the hostages are never challenged despite the obvious question: how can one protect Hamas’s prisoners while simultaneously bombing them? Even factual realities are pushed aside to make room for Israel’s excuses: some member states still push the debunked claim that Palestine’s aid blockages are caused by Hamas’s banditry and not Israel’s denial of humanitarian entry. This utter obedience to the flawed, dehumanizing logic of uncompromisingly self-interested tyrants degrades the credibility of the United Nations, and if there is to be a future for international cooperation, such atrocities cannot continue.

At the same time, efforts at achieving SDG 13 and other climate goals are undercut by the naivete of many member states, who support climate efforts only if they are cost-effective, complementary to their development ideas, and inoffensive to corporate sponsors. To illustrate this, I recall a panel I attended during the early days of the High-Level Political Forum on AI integration into bureaucratic institutions. While charismatic and well-spoken, the presenter painted a future in which AI technology is so ubiquitous that it will become inseparable from our logistical frameworks—a beautiful idea, but without any word on where the energy for such technology would come from, or how environmental implications might be reconciled. When I pressed him on this point, the answer I received was certainly optimistic: “AI will solve for AI.” Though it would be lovely to see this clever catchphrase prove true, it is irresponsible for any diplomat or lawmaker to operate with this notion in mind. The “do no harm” principle dictates that it is the innovator’s responsibility to prove her creation isn’t harmful, and there is no alternative that makes it viable to create and then market problems in hopes of fixing them later.

Yet, it seems the consensus for most wealthy and middle-income nations is to have your cake and eat it too. Climate conversations throughout the HLPF were lathered with appeals for understanding: while states want to try their best for our planet, they refuse to hinder their own economic development. This unwillingness to accept the inherent limitations of sustainability on growth sets us on a dangerous path: climate protection will always require sacrifice, and member states must compromise on growth expectations if they hope to meaningfully contribute to SDG 13 or any of the other goals.

It is easy to be swept up by the pomp and circumstance of the UN Headquarters: diplomats are ushered from their limousines by entourages at every hour, and there is constant pressure to cave to the status quo of self-aggrandizing optimism and verbose inertia. However, we cannot forget the main purpose of its existence: to protect and care for our fellow human beings. Integrity can no longer remain an afterthought on the General Assembly floor; we must be diligent in our moral convictions, and honest in our efforts at carving out a better world. Only then can we look our children in the eye and tell them sincerely that the SDGs are worth being excited about.

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Staying Engaged, Dr. Robert Zuber

29 Jun

Dear All, I wrote this short piece for another list, but thought it might be useful to some to post it here as well.

This will be a short message to all of you.  I’ve been asked on several recent occasions why I am not posting as many weekend messages as in the past.  It is a good question which requires me to “fess up” to what has been going on with me and with Global Action amidst the searing heat and personal health issues which have defined the summer so far. 

I want to remind all of you that I have never written for mass consumption, in large measure because in my case there is no “mass” to consume.  What there are is friends and colleagues, diplomats and even occasional adversaries, people who once thought we were crazy and have come around to see the benefit of what we do, people who once sided with us and now think we’re crazy.  Or worse. 

 I am grateful for all of you, more than you know. The fact is I have always written to people I know, at least in some measure, sharing challenge and hope and, if desired, a pathway to policy communities at times impactful and at times delusional.   We have written and contributed to a number of books over the years but the impact has mostly been modest as they weren’t really directed anywhere — perhaps towards some “community” of practice in disarmament or peacekeeping or human rights, but those communities are fractured at best and are sometimes resistant to the sympathetic critique which lies at the heart of our work.  

We all need critique, and I have surely benefited from yours.  We continue to bite off a lot especially inside the UN, reminiscent of the pelican whose “mouth can hold more than its Belly-can.”  And with all that is going on in the world now, there is a need to bite off even larger portions and chew them harder. This summer has been a test of endurance, dodging dramatic storms record heat and the impatience it breeds to get in front of policy actors and remind them of the consequences of the paths they have chosen and seemingly refuse to adjust.  There is a stubbornness about our sector,   a refusal to rethink the value of unimplemented resolutions, performative rhetoric and values which adorn the ice cream cone but don’t materially affect the ice cream. There is, as I reminded a group of NGOs a few days ago, a danger in sacrificing our dignity for the sake of access and acceptance in increasingly restricted UN spaces, a danger in forgetting that when our dignity suffers so does that of the constituents we are connected to, constituents who are often and already poorly placed on the lower end of the dignity scale.  

My wonderful summer intern, Tazia Mohammad, has quickly grasped the “tangibility gap” which characterizes much of what we witness and try in our own small way to amend.  As a gift to me and to others, her reaction to this “gap” has been less cynicism and more about trying to discern how Security Council members and other people with considerable authority in the world could invest that authority so timidly, as though there were no institutional values to uphold and as though previous practical investments — on climate, on weapons, on women, on conflict prevention, on the health of ocean and forests — had gotten us over even one future-challenging hump.   The numerous younger people who have passed through our program have felt the weight of a future which seems murky at best and frightening at worst.  Many have retreated into a world that politics can’t easily reach, including various cyber spaces where the world might actually seem more manageable.  Others want to know clearly and concretely what they and their future are up against.  Tazia is one of those. 

There were others like her this past week in a large auditorium at the New School where I joined Professor Peter Hoffman and two senior officials with the UN Department of Political and Peacebuilding Affairs to talk about the future of peacekeeping and related matters.  I always enjoy helping to explain to younger audiences the extraordinary complexity which accompanies the mandates, planning, discharge and eventual drawdown of such missions.  As with many things in life, relevant complexities are often hidden from view rendering the criticisms which inevitably follow lacking in both sympathy and context.  Indeed, one of my concerns about modern society is that we don’t know much about how things work — including how the things we rely on for our comfort, safety and general well-being actually come to pass..  We don’t know what it takes to get vegetables into our kitchens or water into our sinks.  We certainly don’t know what it takes to protect civilians in a conflict zone let alone protect an entire country from hostile attack.  I could fill pages with those things which are essential to our well-being which we merely take for granted, to which we are entitled but not cognizant.  In a complex and at times frightening world, the logistics of things need to remain fully in our sphere of appreciation and support. 

Beyond complexities, we New School speakers all took turns describing threats to peacekeeping from terrorism and budgetary limitations to the deliberate spreading of hate speech and disinformation and the concerns of more and more UN member states that peacekeeping must do more itself to blend its mandates with national priorities.  My own contribution to this part of the program (surprise, surprise) was a bit different, seeing the main threat in the form of a UN (and especially a Security Council) which refuses to uphold its own values, its own Charter, its own reason for being.  More and more, the Charter and international law violations of states are serving as cover for violations and abuses by other states.  If there is only impunity for breaking the most fundamental of organizational principles, then more states will cross those lines.  If there is only impunity for breaking those principles, then the UN’s reputation is sure to continue taking the “hits” with implications for how peacekeepers and their mandated tasks are perceived and trusted in the field. 

While we are well down the list of concerned parties, these reputational issues affect our sector as well.  Many of us have gotten the message in recent years (from inside and outside UNHQ) that our input is neither necessary nor particularly valuable, that our presence is more annoyance than appreciated, that our role is merely tolerated rather than cultivated.  But we also don’t have “thin skin” and we have no right to thin skin as we are duty bound to make the most of our place at the table even if at times we seem to have been relegated to the kiddie table.  People worldwide need to know what is going on in that large complex at Turtle Bay.  They also need to know how they can meaningfully connect to that daunting space.  These things we know how to do, and it is important in these times that we keep doing them without whining and with whatever tools and resources are at our disposal.  

While we continue, we offer to all of you our heartfelt thanks as well as access to our platform to get your best ideas and deepest concerns in front of global policymakers.  Certainly, we don’t have the best platform around, not by a long shot.  But we have penetrated the system deeply through many thousands of hours of listening and reflection.  We know what works and what doesn’t, and we know where to go with ideas and concerns even if we can’t always go there ourselves. 

We’ll report back again at the conclusion of the High-Level Political Forum in July.  Fingers crossed for bold policies and even bolder practices to help reverse some of our current slide.

Blessings, 

Bob

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Earth Year: A Call to Clarity of Hands and Hearts, Dr. Robert Zuber

2 Apr
Florida, the Bahamas and Cuba as seen by the International Space Station.

From NASA

The holy men say we are entering a period of clarity. Rigoberta Menchu

The greatest privilege is to live well in flourishing lands. Hamza Yusuf

Virtue can only flourish among equals.  Mary Wollstonecraft

For millions of years, this world has been a great gift to nearly everything living on it. Rebecca Solnit

If beautiful lilies bloom in ugly waters, you too can blossom in ugly situations. Matshona Dhliwayo

Peace is the creation of an environment where all can flourish regardless of race, color, creed, religion, gender, class, caste or any other social markers of difference. Nelson Mandela

Around the globe, people from all walks of life are holding their breath in the hope that a flurry of activity at all levels of policy and human community will be sufficient to reverse what is commonly known at the UN as the “triple” planetary threats from climate change, biodiversity loss and pollution (especially plastics pollution).  

The UN has seen its own frenetic activity as leaderships tries to both make up for precious lost time while encouraging member states to take more political risks and step-up ambitions to find more robust and cooperative measures to address threats which clearly are not inclined to wait for us to make the change we need to make in order to secure a future for our children, especially those children residing in the most climate-vulnerable regions.

The UN has certainly created numerous spaces for member state deliberations on virtually all aspects and dimensions related to the “triple threat,” including implications for human health (mental, physical and nutritional), for international peace and security, and for more inclusive processes which not only heed the voices of women, youth and indigenous people but which actually seek to incorporate their learning and insights into policy decision making.    

Some of these processes, as many of you recognize, take the form of large, carbon-intensive events which create some consensus-driven movement but generally lacking in practical implementation of pledges which fully mirror their rhetorical origins.   Case in point is the fund for “loss and damage” agreed to at COP 27 in Egypt, an important step which has yet to generate the remedial funding which the most climate affected states had anticipated (and still anticipate).  Diplomats also agreed recently on elements of a treaty to impose structures of governance on ocean areas beyond national jurisdiction (BBNJ), a theoretically important framework to mitigate at least some of the “wild west” mentality which has encouraged massive ocean dumping and deep-sea mining and has also precipitated a decline in ocean species as waters warm and the remains of our collective overconsumption now reach the furthest ocean depths. The recently concluded UN Water Conference resulted in over 600 pledges (albeit voluntary) to strengthen “trans-boundary water cooperation, promote universal sanitation and explore security and other implications of severe access challenges regarding this most precious of resources.  The General Assembly for its part passed a unanimous resolution (sponsored by Vanuatu and others) seeking clarity from the International Court of Justice regarding the legal obligations of states whose production and consumption patterns, as noted during the week by UNEP director Inger Andersen, now serve to threaten the very existence of other states.   Even the Security Council got into the act recently as Mozambique chaired an Arria Formula discussion on protecting water-related infrastructure.  But despite what (to us at least) seems like an obvious linkage between a dangerously warming climate and prospects for armed conflict, several Council members past and present remain unconvinced that climate concerns should be folded into the Council’s peace and security mandate.

This bevy of activity (we didn’t even mention the biodiversity conference in Montreal or the Forum on Forests) is welcome but can also obscure the fact that most of these commitments are voluntary, are unenforceable or constitute some subtle form of “greenwashing” which leads people beyond UN confines to think that more is happening to forestall disaster than is actually the case. Having been around the UN for what seems like forever, we understand well that in large multi-lateral spaces facilitated by the UN, spaces filled with diplomats representing national positions and increasingly insisting on elusive consensus, progress is likely to be slow, perhaps too slow given crises weighing down human community like a bad case of COPD.  It certainly seems as such to the growing number of youth environmental activists who, despite their energies and practical commitments across the globe, still struggle for their place at the policy table to help ensure progress that is more than textual and rhetorical.  Indeed, as one youth activist noted during the days of the UN Water Conference, holding these large eco-events in expensive UN cities literally ensures that many of the people who wish to present testimony regarding the effects of and responses to climate change, pollution and biodiversity loss in their communities – testimony unmediated by diplomats and NGOs like me – will continue to experience great difficulty in doing so.

While some turn red at the suggestion that the UN isn’t doing enough on a range of environmental challenges, the troubling consensus of senior UN leadership (and many of the rest of us) reveals a serious disconnect between what is needed, what is being proposed in response, and the risks that member states – including some of the world’s largest polluters – are willing to take in order to preserve healthy options for succeeding generations.  And because states in the main are not doing enough despite some claims to the contrary in UN conference rooms, the rest of us are thereby encouraged to not do enough also.  Indeed, to our minds at least, the mass of discouragement experienced about the state of the world by many is another unfortunate consequence of rhetoric that is not matched by concrete policy support for the actions at community level, actions which ultimately have the most to do with whether or not the current “triple threat” becomes what Costa Rica referred to recently as a full-on “death sentence.”

Thankfully, there are many communities and individuals from all walks of life who have refused to have the potential for abundant living by their families and communities sidetracked by misleading policy utterances including those from senior officials which are insufficiently hopeful or mindful  of the vast and increasing web of environmentally healing measures proliferating worldwide.  From habitat restoration and community composting to organic agriculture, bee-keeping and tree planting on a massive scale in countries like Pakistan and across the Sahel, people of all ages and cultures are seeking a new clarity, refusing to be distracted by either doom and gloom or passive indifference.  They have not given up on prospects for a world which can genuinely flourish for many more people, a world which remains plausible despite the circulating metrics from competent researchers associated with insects decline, plastics inundation and sea level rise.  

The UN, for all its contributions and deliberations, is not really in the “flourishing business;” indeed it is at its best a place which provides a policy platform to support and enable work which needs to take place elsewhere. But we know how easy it is to get distracted by the glamour of UN conferences or discouraged by the sometimes-dismal reports emanating from UN sources which such conferences often do too little to address.  We must remind ourselves that what both glamour and doom have in common is that they are poor recruiters for hopeful, virtuous, collaborative activity at community level which can do much to rebalance our world of sometimes gross inequalities, a world which we have been told much too often has reached or even exceeded survival “tipping points.”   

In this momentous year for the earth and our presence within it, we must not allow ourselves to be deterred by the eminence and capacity of our large institutional frameworks and spokespersons nor allow ourselves to retreat into smaller circles of life in an attempt to protect what is closest to us from the “ugly” storms looming over an uncertain horizon. We cannot survive the storms by ourselves, but the truth is that neither can they be survived without us.  In this Earth Year, we all need to urgently recalibrate the sustainability of our own lives; but perhaps even more importantly we need to help ensure that millions more people now situated firmly on the sidelines of climate action are encouraged and supported to lend hands and hearts to prospects for planetary abundance, such that more and more of us and other life forms might “live well in flourishing lands” on a planet we are running out of time to truly love. 

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On Caring and Enabling: Navigating Crisis Response on a Post-Twitter Planet, Dr. Robert Zuber

19 Nov

The goal is not to get something said but to get something heard.  Fred Craddock

We cannot feel good about an imaginary future when we are busy feeling bad about an actual present.  Daniel Gilbert

It is our daily lament that we cannot love enough.  Charles H. Spurgeon

We want our leaders to inspire us because we’ve been inspiring them for so long.

This last quotation from Vanessa Nakate, one of the leading youth representatives at COP 27 in Egypt, hit me in ways that most of the oft-compromised, policy speechmaking emanating from this climate COP (and previous COPs for that matter) has not. 

While preparing yet another Advent Letter and while assessing the value of our work and how it needs to change going forward given the possible end of twitter and some predictable disappointments from the latest (and now extended) UN climate change event in Egypt, the words of a compelling young advocate seeking from “leaders” what they should be providing to our youth as a matter of course is, to my mind at least, both jarring and dispiriting.   

For over 20 years, we at Global Action have chosen to tether ourselves to institutions which tend towards being long on activity and short on progress and the inspiration which progress engenders, institutions (and their talented people) which largely mean well but which fail to communicate the limits of their own efficacy; institutions which urge people to have confidence in state capacities which have proven largely insufficient given the magnitude of threats and challenges which now dominate our social and political landscape. In process and rhetoric, the emphasis seems to be on maintaining control of issues and their response narratives much more than most officials of these institutions would ever acknowledge.

Many of us know what it feels like to “mean well,” to grant ourselves some form of emotional participation trophy for efforts – good faith and not – to honor our promises and commitments to others.  In our own modest line of activity at the UN and beyond, such honoring has taken the form of both careful scrutiny and feedback which has attempted to be harsh when needed, complimentary when deserved, and mindful that the insight and skills of our policy competitors and even our adversaries are likely to be as indispensable to a healthy, secure, peaceful future as our own.

After years of engagement, we continue to believe that our own small-scale energies are mostly on the hopeful side of issues from climate change and capital punishment to weapons spending and the well-being of persons with disabilities.  And while we may have over-rated a bit the capacities of we humans to rise to difficult occasions, especially in cases where our status and income might be called into question, we have seen enough change over the years – much of it welcome — to know that the fact of change – if not its general direction – is inevitable.  Painful to navigate at times, raw material for a barrage of grievances often, but also potential never to be dismissed. 

Still, we who spend time in the endless gabfests of international policy have forgotten things which are perhaps not in our remit but are indispensable to the success of our efforts to address problems beyond operative paragraphs in resolutions that all governments (and even some civil society organizations) can accept in theory if subsequently ignore in practice. We especially forget that beyond the range of our policy bubbles, resolutions represent promises.  People anticipate, and have the right to anticipate, that our erstwhile “leaders” are fully committed to global well-being, and that the skilled diplomats who carry their messages and incarnate them in agreements are as committed to honoring public expectations in a timely manner as they are to honoring “political realities” or diplomatic consensus.  

We also seem to forget that the messes we have made in the world are unlikely to resolve themselves, that the sickening mold on our walls will only expand unless we take firm measures to remove it and then impede it from returning.  Such firmness in the policy realm requires commitments to both boldness and fairness, ensuring that crises are met with actions that can bring us back from the brink and can do so to the best of their ability without inflaming further the tensions currently tearing our grossly unequal world apart. 

Such a scenario is not outside the realm of possibility, even in this time of shrinking response options. But we need more – much more – from the people who hog the podium, negotiate tepid agreements beyond public view, accept outcomes which they know will not solve the problems to which they point, and dare to get inspiration from talented, energized youth advocates rather than providing more of it themselves. 

No, the ones who gobble up the speaking slots and then stand and accept the applause for their “leadership” should also be providing a larger share of the inspiration, encouraging the rest of us to do more, care more, and take more risks while promising to watch our collective back.  It should not be left to a group of diverse and determined teens to inspire leaders to do more to mitigate climate and other global threats, to take more tangible responsibility for the health and well-being of this next generation as they would take for those of that generation in their own households.

Nor is it unreasonable for me to wonder if after all these years of monitoring and organizing, of creating spaces of hospitality and access for people who could otherwise not afford to have their voices heard in UN policy spaces, if we haven’t also, at times inadvertently, enabled the perpetuation of some of what we say needs to be fixed. Enabled by showing up every day and tacitly (and at times explicitly) equating what the UN does with what the world now needs; emabled by sharing critiques that are little more than feathery blows against a system which has amply fortified itself against much stronger winds; enabled by failing at times to communicate the best of what we see at the UN in anticipation of its potential recurrence, or to hold up the worst of what we see in the hope that repairs can commence at the earliest possible moment.

I don’t want to be that sort of enabler any longer.  To the extent that I and my colleagues have been so, we should have had the sense to divert from that path long ago.  Of course, enabling itself can be (and often is) an act of love, one which commits to attentiveness beyond our comforts, which seeks to magnify the voices, capacities and skills of others, to help more and more people find places in the world where they can not only speak but be heard, and where possible, even be heeded.  This is the sort of enabling we wish to do, what we have long sought (and sometimes failed) to do, the sort of enabling which helps create and inspire more in the world of what we seek beyond the limits of our own mandates, energies and capacities for care.

The possible demise of twitter has sent many users, including within our own community of some 6800 followers, into a state of alarm. Some have already found an alternative platform in an effort to preserve a modicum of community engagement which an otherwise-flawed resource has for some time allowed them.  If twitter dissolves, a large portion of our own monitoring work will likely dissolve with it.  But we will continue to write, continue to engage our lists, continue to create spaces for hospitality and presence in and around multilateral settings, continue to enable others to take up their hopeful tasks in the world as our frustratingly constrained capacity for loving this planet and its diverse inhabitants permits. 

Reports this morning suggest that COP 27 might actually have endorsed creation of a fund for “loss and damage” directed towards the states and peoples suffering disproportionate impacts from climate threats. We greatly honor those who have advocated for this breakthrough while we wait to see if this fund can be sufficiently capitalized to address the fossil fuel-influenced loss and damage which continues to slowly, inexorably engulf our world and which too many of our policy compromises — including at COP 27 –seem as likely to inflame as to abate. Given this and going forward, twitter or no twitter, we all must do more and better to enable life-preserving outcomes.

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Opportunity Beyond Uncertainty and Action Beyond Words: Reflections of an Afghan Student, Jamshid Mohammadi

27 Mar

Editor’s Note: Jamshid came to us this spring via Kandahar, Kabul and the Bard Globalization and International Affairs Program. While Jamshid is not the first Afghan intern we have had over the years, he is most likely the first intern from any source to have escaped from his home country prior to his tenure with us. As the UN continues to open up after two years of COVID restrictions, he is already experiencing the richness and frustration of UN policy environments. Jamshid is not the last young person to experience grave uncertainty due to conflict and political turmoil. We need to do more to accompany their difficult journeys.

One global trend today is a mismatch between what fragile governments can provide and what the citizens expect or rather need. Take the de facto state in Afghanistan as an example, where the cause of a growing mismatch is well beyond the ability of the state to resolve due to wide-ranging factors including but not limited to a lack of political will. As in other regions, a void has been created in Afghanistan and subsequently filled mostly with uncertainty which could ultimately be either disruptive or constructive depending on the models we adopt and the frameworks we construct around this uncertainty.

I grapple with a similar uncertainty on an individual level. I experience a growing mismatch between what I envisioned 2022 would look like what it is like today. I had assumed, as a Fulbright Semi-Finalist and a U.S. Embassy in Kabul alumnus, that my higher education was destined to be in the United States. I also assumed that I would go back to Afghanistan and tell the tales of Central Park to my friends who are obsessed with the “Friends” series, an American TV Show popular among young Afghan adults.

My country and I are facing many of the same questions: what lies beyond uncertainty and what lies beyond words (or beyond “work” as in meetings at the UN and elsewhere to discuss Afghanistan compared to taking actions that can make larger and more lasting differences)? As is the case with Afghanistan, my own growing mismatch is at some level caused by myself and our own people, and at some level caused by outsiders.

As a kid who went to high school in Kandahar, Afghanistan, I had to work so hard to be able to debate global issues with my fellow exchange students who came from Europe, the Americas and Eastern Asia to join the Bard Globalization and International Affairs Program where I now study. My country had gone through so much in order to rise from having almost no functioning institutions to having a recognized state apparatus, albeit corrupt and largely ineffective. For my own part, I admit that I could do better and work harder, and my country also acknowledges that some elite Afghans could do better and do more to finally end the longstanding suffering of the Afghan people. Surely I should not have missed my classes to sometimes join soccer matches to satisfy my personal desires. Corrupt elites (often with dual citizenship) do as I did but on a much larger scale, prioritizing personal gains over the national interest.

I want to ask those who are reading this personal post alongside Dr. Zuber’s thoughtful pieces: is it now unfair of my country or myself for that matter to seek a more stable, less uncertain life?

As I unpack my things here in New York and plan for my future, I still see commonalities between my country and me. I see opportunity beyond uncertainty, but to make that happen I need to go beyond planning. Some perhaps disagree, but I believe that there is also opportunity beyond uncertainty for Afghanistan. But to grasp that opportunity, we must go beyond meetings and discussions of issues affecting Afghanistan and risk more specific, tangible actions on the ground.

As a sovereign actor, the burden of my future falls solely on me. However, there are obvious impediments to realizing opportunity in the case of Afghanistan, including an international structure designed and based largely on neoliberal ideals that can compromise and even undermine the sovereignty of fragile states by large global powers or even by supra-national organizations such as the UN, IMF and World Bank.  For Afghanistan the involvement of large states and institutions has been a mixed blessing, a source of assistance but also a collective burden.

We must remind ourselves that the quantity of assistance to Afghanistan is not as important as effective aid management.  We must also do more for ourselves, to open educational opportunity for all and ensure that our economy and politics are fully inclusive.  In this regard, the recent reversal by the Taliban of a decision to allow girls in school is a major setback for the future of Afghanistan.  And yet there is hope that the recent, welcome renewal of the UNAMA mandate, including its human rights monitoring, will help ensure that the Taliban will keep its promises and meet its international obligations.

Rightly focused now on the situation in Ukraine, the international community must also strive to maintain its practical attention on other conflict settings. When it fails to do so, this implies that ending such conflicts is merely a means for protecting strategic interests rather than ending human suffering. My internship at Global Action to Prevent War and Armed conflict, providing me the opportunity to write and reflect alongside Dr. Robert Zuber, has given me a chance to scrutinize UN meetings on Afghanistan but also to keep appraised of other conflict settings in global regions where opportunity is being compromised.  

To keep Afghan opportunity in focus, the United Nations ought to reform much of its policies toward Afghanistan. For me, beyond uncertainty is the opportunity to go to a decent graduate school and use this time to prepare to contribute to a more stable and inclusive Afghanistan. For UN and other international partners, the goal must be to enable a viable pathway towards a self-sustaining Afghanistan: The opportunity to put modern labor forces together with the agricultural base of Afghan communities to gradually develop a self-sustaining economy.  The opportunity to democratize Afghanistan by integrating inclusive governance models which already exist which align with the realities of Afghanistan. The opportunity to pressure the de facto authorities to, among other things, respect the promise of general amnesty, uphold the rights of all, open schools to girls, and end corrupt practices, trafficking and threats from terror groups. 

There is so much more to be done.  I am grateful for this opportunity to prepare to help my country turn the current period of uncertainty into a longer period of opportunity. 

 

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Home Wrecking: Fleeing Callous Humans and our Warming Planet, Dr. Robert Zuber

7 Nov
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Tuvalu Addresses COP 26

We have become a place of long weeping; A house of scattered feathers; There is no home for us between earth and sky.   Rebecca Roanhorse

And so you travel.  Forgetting that the problem is you.  And wherever you go, you carry yourself.  Ezinne Orjiako

The ultimate paradox and irony of this tragedy is that, in many cases, those who caused their displacement and those who hate them in their newfound ‘homes’ in exile are the same people! Louis Yako

There is no destination other than towards yet another refuge from yet another war. Theresa Hak Kyung

Distance is the journey. Displacement is the result.  Jaclyn Moriarty

People returned to live on city streets and pavements, in hovels on dusty construction sites, wondering which corner of this huge country was meant for them.  Arundhati Roy

She had sculpted the mist, the way those who have no choice do. Padma Lakshmi

One of the seemingly eternal struggles of small organizations as ours has been for a generation is how to add value:  how to support the work of others without taking credit for its outcomes; how to call attention to the pain of others without appropriating that pain to raise our funds or build our brand;  how to join voices with others without losing our own distinctive notes; how to honor those “sculpting the mist” without losing sight for one moment of the privileges associated with honoring such profoundly challenging sculpting in the first place.

For me, for us, as we end our current iteration the journey towards a fresh engagement with global crises is already underway. What is already clear is that the path to engagement will likely run through the issue of displacement, those who have lost their homes as the result of family meltdown or economic collapse, those “taking refuge from another war” as we now see in Ethiopia, those who can no longer harvest their lands or their traditional fishing grounds due to ruinous levels of flooding and drought, especially those living on relatively remote islands facing climate shocks which they did not create, for which they cannot possible be prepared, and from the increasing fury of which there is simply nowhere to hide.

Of course, settling on a rubric is not the same as settling on a strategy to encourage and support change.  To that end, I joined yesterday with some activist friends on a march in support of unhoused people and the services which are both insufficient and indispensable in moving people off the streets, helping them find both stability and identity in multiple forms, from reliable indoor plumping to a equally reliable mailing address.

Sadly, this march took place not in a populated area, not in a place where homeless people gather, but in the parking lot of a sports arena.  Somehow, some way, the decision was made to organize a 5K walk in a place with no relationship whatsoever to the people for whom we were allegedly advocating.  There were apparently few if any unhoused persons on the march. There was no audience to inspire along the route.  There were no occupied homes or apartments in sight. There was no press to speak of.  No one could even enter the march route through security unless they could demonstrate that they had both paid their fee and had been vaccinated for COVID, two requirements virtually guaranteeing that none of those experiencing the “long weeping” of displacement (or perhaps none of those currently on the cusp of their own homelessness) would be able to join the lovefest ostensible organized on their behalf.

It was difficult to escape the conclusion that I and the others on that march had done nothing of substance to help the displaced.  What we had done, if anything, was to help brand the sports arena and the major donors who are, after all, so often the preferred destination for the efforts of the organizers.  It was all about money, we didn’t have much of it to offer, and so we were relegated to walking around an empty parking lot as though being exiled as punishment for our modest resources and/or our political naivete.

This trek in the parking lot at least called to my own mind scenes on the other side of the world: in Ethiopia where armed groups inch closer to Addis Ababa, creating both panic in the capital and fresh displacements along the route of conflict.  And, of course, in Glasgow where erstwhile global “leadership” convened, yet again, to offer a bevy of “solutions” to the climate crisis ranging from the genuinely hopeful to the merely distracting, a crisis already displacing millions with millions more likely to come.

More than officialdom made its way to Glasgow.  Thousands of young people did also, youth for whom climate change represents more than an inconvenience requiring more than a chain of UN-brokered “talk-fests” which might well result in more dangerous carbon emissions than prospects for meaningful change.  These youth filled the streets and, in some limited instances, the conference rooms, lamenting the reality that youth are much more likely to be heard than heeded, that decisions about the policy trajectory for climate mitigation and adaptation, for reducing disaster risks and increasing options for survival when risks turn so many lives of the affected into “scattered feathers;” these decisions continue to be made by older folks like me. Many of these decisionmakers are unlikely to ever be displaced from their private jets let alone their homes. Moreover, they will never have to sit across a table and break the news to climate-affected people that their dreams are soon to be burned or washed away, or that the footsteps of armed groups are fast approaching. Older folks not unlike myself will never have to share the news with affected people, as former Liberia president Ellen Johnson Sirleaf noted this weekend, “that they must leave their community or drown.” 

The youth in Glasgow this week were thankfully not marching back and forth across the parking lot of a sports stadium.  They were visible to the public, to the global press, surely even to those inside the COP 26 conference rooms. And their urgent, frustrated and at times defiant messaging was picked up, especially by those from the least developed and small island states who, as we and others have noted time and again, have done the least to create climate change but who suffer the most from its impacts. Such impacts include many displaced crossing borders and regions seeking a modicum of safety and stability from climate threats and the economic ruin and armed violence which often follow, those forced frequently to take refuge amidst hostility from people who, in more than a few instances, made significant contributions to the conditions that prompted displacement in the first place.

The impact of these youthful voices on small island and other officials was clearly apparent, including on  Fiji’s fine Ambassador Satyendra Prasad who bluntly asked, “If we are not to achieve 1.5 degrees, what are we here for?  Everything else is a side-show.” The president of climate-impacted Madagascar reminded us all that “forests are the lungs of our planet,” but that these lungs are being damaged at a staggering rate. And perhaps the most compelling address from officialdom was delivered by the remarkable Prime Minister of Barbados, Mia Mottley, who underscored the “immoral and unjust” implications of lives and livelihoods lost as we continue to ignore our climate pledges or fulfill them only incompletely. As did the youth on Glasgow streets, Mottley pondered boldly and wistfully, “when will leaders lead?”

On the UN side, Secretary-General Guterres warned about the “delusion” that we are making the progress we need to make on climate change. The former Ambassador of Jamaica, Courtney Rattray, now Under Secretary-General for the Least Developed States, made several high profile appeals for climate funding to help stabilize least developed societies and avoid mass displacement. And in a related event on tsunami risk, the head of the UN’s Disaster Risk Reduction program Mami Mizutori urged us to never forget the “the disasters we were unprepared for and the casualties they caused.”

But it was the ever-passionate David Attenborough, early on at this COP event, who worried and wondered if “this is how it ends” for we humans, allegedly the greatest problem solvers in the history of this planet?  Ends in fires and floods, ends in mass displacement and homelessness, ends in “bad faith” engagements by officials who know better and refuse to act on what they know? One compelling response to this lament came later from a Samoa youth advocate who reminded us of the power of words “to save us or sell us out.” You all know why you are here, she proclaimed. “Do the right thing” and while you are doing that, look to the leadership of Pacific youth. “We are fighting not drowning.” 

Indeed, their struggle must be our struggle as well. The alienation, insecurity and displacement they experience now are coming for us as well. For people like me, the grave might save us from having to confront the consequences of our folly, of our willingness to only make the changes it is convenient to make, not the changes that we know we must make.  But this should offer no comfort, no excuses.  Instead, while we are still able, we must do more to ensure that the toxic consequences of our inept climate and economic policies – the unhoused, the unfed and the unprotected – are not allowed to define life for other generations.

This week, Costa Rica’s president reminded delegations of the absurdity of conducting war — military or economic — on a planet which is slowly dying. He called instead for an “army of ideas, of courage, of peace.”  It is increasingly likely that such an “army,” if it comes to exist, will consist largely of the young.  If the rest of us want to make a real difference, including on the causes and consequences of human displacement, we will need to do more to support, sustain and enrich youthful aspirations.

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WordPress: Pedagogy for an Ailing Planet, Dr. Robert Zuber

31 Oct
click here for larger version of figure 2 for PIA23403


The Jack-o-Lantern Nebula Courtesy of NASA

All you have to do is write one true sentence. Write the truest sentence that you know.  Ernest Hemingway

Much of what was said did not matter, and that much of what mattered could not be said.  Katherine Boo

No persons are more frequently wrong, than those who will not admit they are wrong.  François de La Rochefoucauld

Better a cruel truth than a comfortable delusion.  Edward Abbey

The truth is rarely pure and never simple.  Oscar Wilde

The truth isn’t always beauty, but the hunger for it is.  Nadine Gordimer

It is far better to grasp the universe as it really is than to persist in delusion, however satisfying and reassuring.  Carl Sagan

In a week when UN diplomats struggled, as they often do, to speak words that truly matter, that can truly inspire and clarify  – on climate change, on international justice, on the latest iteration of longstanding struggles for peace in the Sudan and Mali, on the need to protect educational opportunity from threats of conflict, on the role of technology (including in space) in enhancing our lagging sustainable development priorities – it was a series of compelling images that captured more of my own imagination, more of my own bandwidth as I try in my own small way to help guide our troubled path.

Among the many ways in which I seem to be no longer “fit for purpose,” is my own preoccupation with words, their meaning and impact.  I have tried over several years to “write the truest sentences I know,” not confusing “truest” with “true,” but also not reducing words to their instrumental value, as a means to some unconfessed end or as a mere tool for building a personal brand, staking out political turf or inflaming constituent grievance.  I have always believed in the value of what is becoming more and more of a dead art – the careful selection and arrangement of words can help both to clarify and inspire, that can remind people of the proper contexts for the “facts” we toss around with reckless abandon, but also provide the takeaways that leave a “taste” that lingers long after the initial presentation has concluded.

The UN, as most of you know, often drowns in words uttered by speakers whose need to “present” often far outstrips the pedagogical value of their presentations.  Speakers are assembled, and often over-assembled based on position and entitlement. Those who are authorized to speak are given every opportunity to do so, regardless of how familiar,predictable or even uninspiring their words are likely to be.  A few speakers do thankfully say things which linger, which clarify, which remind listeners that predictable statements of policy or token gestures of deference to academics or civil society leaders are not the same thing as thoughtful, mindful reflections on issues which are generally speaking more urgent and complex than our presentations imply.

The UN, like many other institutions, routinely struggles to “get its message out,” to connect with people in diverse circumstances who need more than provisions and peacekeepers.  More than we often recognize in this multilateral space, people also need a clearer sense that leadership “gets it,” gets the urgency of things, gets that “we” spend too much time speaking to funding sources and “excellencies” and too little to constituents, gets that “we” waste too much time and energy honoring protocol, including by expressing endless gratitude to speakers for episodically-inspiring remarks that “we” actually didn’t pay any attention to, remarks that often sound more like the political version of “nagging” than like a serious exploration of fresh options for resolving conflict and solving stubborn global problems to replace our largely stale ones.

Surely we recognize that our endless parades of “speakers” is more about protocol than substance, more about ticking the boxes of national or institutional interest than of exercising a pedagogical responsibility beyond institutional walls.  Surely we recognize that the worst way to influence anything is through endless speeches largely devoid of metaphor or of genuine invitations to co-create a better future.  Surely we recognize that much of what is said within UN confines does not matter enough in pratical terms and that much of what could matter cannot easily or readily be said, in part because no one is “authorized” to speak those words.

This week as in times past, the UN has struggled with the still-growing problem of disinformation and misinformation, largely focused on a pandemic that some still deny but also with regard to climate change that may or may not move beyond the pious words of global leaders who will soon convene in Glasgow and who continue to hedge their political bets regarding actions that might actually galvanize response at the levels now required.  On Friday, the UN held a side-event entitled “Empowering Civil Society in Strengthening Media and Information Literacy,” during which attention was given to the current “infodemic” wherein what were descreibed as “established facts” were being systematically ignored if not outright rejected.  A panel of journalists from different global regions made helpful, if sobering points, including highlighting the dangers facing journalists in this disinformation age, as well as the mass quantities of energy required to debunk errors and misconceptions, especially as those errors move from elements of cognition to lynchpins of identity.

As one of many who has abundant respect for the statistical and other expertise which the UN has gathered around itself; as one of many who deem the protection of journalists and other info-contributors to be of the highest priority; I still wonder if what heads of state referred to in the Security Council this week as “toxic narratives” (Kenya) and “demons” (Tunisia) reference a larger problem, one characterized by convenient condemnations of the narratives of others coupled with an over-confidence that our own narratives are somehow beyond reproach or even self-executing. 

I have deep confidence in science, but also understand its essentially evolving nature based on fresh evidence.  I believe in facts, but also understand that facts have a context, and that both require attention if “truth” is ever to become a less elusive goal.  I have deep confidence in the UN’s expertise, but do not assume the value of that expertise to every situation where it seeks to be applicable. I have a “hunger” to see the core values of the UN Charter enacted worldwide, including its “rule of law” aspects, but also understand the degree to which those values have been tread under foot by people, including people like me, who have misplaced at least part of the responsibility to narrow gaps between what we espouse and how we live. 

The narrative that too many of us now seem to adopt, deliberately or not, regarding some alleged chasm between “truth tellers” and “liars,” is itself unempirical, even dangerous.   It appears that, more and more, we are witnessing a struggle in part about the nature of truth itself but even more about those who authorize and promote it.  In such a scenario, the hill we need to climb seem to be less about facts themselves and more about cultivating minds open and receptive to their full complexity, minds attached to people able to demonstrate attentiveness to context, curiosity, courage, even (can we actually propose this) humility.  

How do we enable these traits of character in a time when ideas are more about social identity than attempts to understand our place in the universe, more about comforting delusions than about the courage to face up to the reality of things as they are and our collective responsibility to fix what is broken, to more deeply examine the complexities of the truths we espouse but incompletely understand, to embrace the contexts of the truths we promote without slipping into some careless relativism?

Maybe words are now becoming, in and of themselves insufficient to these tasks.  I mentioned at the beginning the “compelling images” from this week, and I am so very grateful to the contributions of some of our twitter followers who continue to send thoughtful and at times powerful images of art that can help us to see more deeply than we might be inclined to otherwise. I equally honor those who share extraordinary images from space – not the space that some now pay millions to visit for an hour-long joyride, but the origin of extraordinary images supplied by sources from Hubble to backyard astronomers, images of galaxies pulling each other apart or being slowly consumed by black holes, images of gaseous clouds allegedly containing enough alcohol to make 400 trillion pints of beer, images that stretch our hearts and minds beyond the moment, beyond the conventional, beyond the petty and familiar, images that remind us of just how much can go wrong in this vast universe and how very fortunate we are on this relatively isolated blue ball for the opportunity to push back hard against the life-threatening damage we have clearly been doing to ourselves.

This bit of the truth of our times was underscored by an enormously clever video produced by the UN Development Program (click here for the video), one which depicts a dinosaur making its way down the center aisle to the UN rostrum to remind diplomats of the obvious — that “extinction is not a good thing” — referencing both our habitual climate stupidity and the asteroids that created the extinction event for those large lizards.  The video does a fine job of reminding we humans that this particular extinction moment is something we are doing to ourselves. There is no space rock that we can credibly blame for our current climate predicament. As such it is past time, as the dinosaur-speaker notes, for we humans, especially those in positions of authority, to swiftly agree to stop making “excuses and start making changes,” to stare our complex realities in the face with firm and flexible resolve no matter how unsatisfying and unreassuring those realities are now likely to be.

There are times when I am so “old school” I’ve altogether forgotten where the school was in the first place.  But I can still recognize the genius of this video – its blending of jarring and unforgettable images with words (not gratuitious speeches) to match.  Clearly the changes we need to make, and urgently, are about correcting the mistakes we are currently disinclined to acknowledge, about changing habits of behavior we continue to justify instead.  But it is also about recalibrating the false dichotomies that allow us the indulgence of positing a world constituted by truth-tellers (ourselves) and liars (those others).

It is ironic that the light from those those birthing and exploding stars, those galaxies expanding and contracting, those nebula which we can anthropomorphize from a vast difference, that light left some of those celestial bodies during the era of the last major extinction event on earth. We don’t know with any certainty what has happened to those bodies since light was released from them so long ago. But we do have a good sense of where we are headed if we don’t put our petty political ambitions, gratuitious narratives and lifeless speech making behind us, if we do not take the risks we need to right this planetary ship before it finally tips over, ensuring at a minimum that all aboard will drown.

As one who has trafficked in words for most of his life, I am aware of how impotent words can be, especially when they fail to represent the “truest” that I know. We do need to identify and counter the “toxic narratives” and other disinformation with the best truth at our disposal, but we need to do so by ensuring “truth” that is rigorous, humble, attentive to context and pedagogically sound, truth that can help us make a more reliable, more inclusive, less-polarizing case for the world we can still have.

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Roaring 20s: The Voices we Need Now, Dr. Robert Zuber

10 Oct

Next year’s words await another voice.  T.S. Eliot

The loudest words are the ones we live.  Mia Sheridan

If you can roar, roar for others.  M.L. Shanahan

She was a voice with a body as afterthought, a wry smile that sailed through heavy traffic. Don DeLillo

Speech is the voice of the heart.  Anna Quindlen

Their comfort isn’t worth your silence.  Rudy Francisco

Don’t let a loud few determine the nature of the sound. It makes for poor harmony and diminishes the song.  Vera Nazarian

Two things happened at the UN this week, both potentially quite positive and both related to each other at least in my mind, though perhaps only to my mind.  First off, amidst all the appropriate hand-wringing about the decline of both biodiversity and human agricultural health, amidst the gloom in some quarters (including ours) that the upcoming COP 26 meeting in Glasgow will not result in firm commitments to the changes we are running out of time to make, the Human Rights Council passed a resolution affirming that “access to a clean, healthy and sustainable environment is a human right.”  With leadership from Costa Rica and other states, this resolution will soon be passed on to the UN General Assembly for final consideration, hopefully in time to create even more pressure on the Glasgow delegations to negotiate urgently and act boldly while action is still a remedial option.

And in New York, a group of 61 countries with Denmark and Costa Rica (again) in the lead, urged through the Third Committee of the UN General Assembly to end what was deemed the “silence” of civil society, referencing groups that through their lived experiences, diverse range of expertise and feet on the ground, “enrich and improve the relevance and outcomes of our work.” This statement called both for UNHQ access for NGOs and a stronger online component to allow those far from New York to keep abreast of what the UN is doing and not doing to address global needs.   The statement also highlighted that while this silencing of NGO voices impedes engagements between delegations and diverse civil society backgrounds and expertise, it also sends a signal to abusive regimes that civil society involvement is no more than a marginal enterprise, and that attacks on human rights and environmental advocates, indigenous leadership, media professional and more can more easily be conducted absent UN rights scrutiny.  This is especially jarring with respect to civil society leaders who choose to cooperate with the UN in implementing its own human rights and environmental priorities.

Those of you paying attention so far might well have ascertained the linkage that forms the basis of this post.   But if not, please allow me to lay it out as best I can.

As welcome as the Human Rights Council resolution is in placing clean, healthy and sustainable environment squarely within the domain of the UN’s human rights pillar, questions of implementation stalk this resolution as they do most that emanate from this Council or the General Assembly to which it is tethered.  Questions go beyond how we can possibly guarantee such a right to other fundamental questions of how we should best pursue this fresh obligation.  Whose job is it to promote the kind of environment we increasingly do not now have, to enable the benefits of a healthy, sustainable environment to the communities most in need, those who are most threatened by eco-predators, whose fields are most rapidly losing their productivity as floods and drought ravage and pollinators have long since fled the scene?

In our own work and through wonderful partners such as Green Map, we have long advocated a localized approach to mitigate the impacts of environmental deterioration and climate change and have done our small part to develop and disseminate tools that can help recover both a sense of place and the full, healthy recovery of those places, recovery led by those who know their spaces and its diverse inhabitants better than any outsider or algorithm possibly could, leaders with homegrown ideas about how to address threats, including from mining interestes and other eco-predators, which are less likely to make circumstances for themselves and their families even more challenging.  

In this tech-charged and overly bureaucratized world we are fashioning for ourselves, it is relatively easy to romanticize local leadership.  We have certainly done so, though many of our previous travels and connections have led us to the conclusion that this is not a wholly inappropriate exercise.  People in these diverse settings may not always “know” what we know, but they certainly “know” differently, sometimes better, and what they know can be essential elements in both local environmental restoration and in building capacity to cope with shocks to come, shocks generally not of their own making but certainly the cause of their own suffering.  It is this ability to convince local others that restoration is still possible and then to grow the number of hands and minds devoted to that restoration which ultimately gives me hope, indeed as much hope as welcome resolutions emanating from Geneva and New York, some of which have mostly gathered dust after the initial energy generated by their passage has worn off.

We know that there are many such people of commitment and energy, many caretakers of locally-led organizations that offer tangible hope to people who may well feel let down or under-served by people like me, people like me who so badly want to get back inside the UN that we may have forgotten what we are there to do. We can forget what privilege requires of us as we return to a setting where our own voices have always had an outsized volume, a “roar” which is too often about our organizational mandates and not often enough about enabling those who seek and deserve the opportunity to roar for themselves, not only to speak at our conferences and zoom meetings but to have that speech be meaningful, actionable, influential.  We reference here voices that aren’t always required to be polite or driven by protocol, that are able to speak their accumulated truth firm in the knowledge that such is more than a mere exercise to gain status or funding, more than a one-off which moves an audience out of their comfort zones for a fleeting moment but which does not often enough result in real partnership based on the flow of ideas that better connect the norm-builders in our global centers with the people who, from their more local vantage point, don’t always experience those norms as amounting to enough.  

Given the time left for us, and despite my profound gratitude for those seeking to enable our UNHQ return, I don’t know for sure that I will ever again set foot inside the UN.  Our 20 months of remote online coverage has convinced me (and a few of our junior colleauges as well) that the UN has become akin to alien space, well branded, utterly state-centric, attracted to money and organizational heft like bees to honey, stubbornly holding on to antiquated fire codes while the world burns around it.  We have long fought thse trends as we have reisisted what we have seen as the “voice over” disease, the tendency to roar over the aspirations of others, the tendency also to forget that as our speech is the voice of our hearts, so too is it the voice of the hearts of millions of others. These are the millions whose own path to progress remains akin to navigating heavy traffic, overcoming one obstacle after another, one burnt field or frightened child after another, one crisis that they are late to solve before another crosses their path. But these are also some of the voices of persistence, the persistent convinction that sustainable progress is possible, that lands laid low can regain their bounty, that damaged biological chains can recover their predictability, and that the guns which have stood as an almost insurmountable barrier to any sustainable relief can finally go silent.

In a policy world of voices muted or unheeded, ours has mostly had a volume disproportionate to the size of our lungs and the strength of our vocal chords.  Given this, we have tried our darndest to let our lives drive our voice, to embed our values in our policy and organizational choices and less in our speeches. But we also recognize that the world has changed so much over 20 years. There are now so many voices in the queue waiting to roar, waiting for a chance to be heard, waiting to be taken with full seriousness.  Perhaps more than any time in our professional lives, “next year’s words await another voice,” another voice which can convince and contextualize, which can cajole and correct, which can sing an energetic tune demanding the more harmonious relations which have largely eluded us during our own tenure.  With whatever time we have left, and for the sake of a planet in multiple forms of distress, we will continue to do what we can to find and encourage those next voices.

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Speech Therapy: A Youth Lens on Urgent UN Discussions, Brady Sanders

17 Aug

Editor’s Note: A student at Georgia Institute of Technology, Brady spent part of the summer with GAPW on what turned out to be a completely virtual internship. While not what he had hoped for, and not what we hoped for him, Brady was a diligent follower of summer UN processes, asking good questions while not allowing the steep learning curve which the UN often presents to newcomers deter him from engaging with complex issues in the Security Council and, especially, in the ECOSOC High-Level Political Forum.

When signing up for an opportunity with GAPW at the end of May, I was very anxious at first, as I had no idea what I was getting myself into. I expected a lot of dialogue on subjects that I knew very little about, people talking too fast for me to understand – as New York has a reputation for being all hustle and bustle, and meetings consisting of solely legal or technical jargon that I would not know how to digest. 

For the first few days, I was lost and thought everyone was repeating each other. So much was going on with the High-Level Political Forum — my very first UN engagement — that it was hard to keep all of the countries and their agendas straight, especially for someone who has no prior experiences with these countries. However, once I began to look in on more meetings and learned about some of the counties’ histories, the subtleties made more sense, and I could then fully digest what the delegations were discussing. 

Of the meetings I attended, my favorite ones discussed climate change, hunger, and the crisis in Myanmar. While these topics are interesting to me in general, I feel like these were the best presentations: not only because of the material, but because of the speakers themselves. They rallied their respective audiences by talking with us instead of to us. For the food security sessions, Mr. David Beasley was by far the most compelling speaker. He was able to rally the room behind what he said because of his level of enthusiasm which most other speakers did not seem to have. Another speaker I enjoyed was a diplomat from Colombia who talked about her experiences with the cartels there. She brought in very personal details and accounts of how her life changed due to the violence from the drug trade. By being vulnerable like that, she was able to form an emotional connection with people in the meeting, which made what she had to say so much more impactful. In my opinion, finding speakers like this is singlehandedly the most important thing the UN can do to garner support from people in the wider world. 

While there have been many things that I thought the UN did well, there are a few things I thought could have been improved upon. One of which is the UN’s stated goal for youth involvement. While the UN encourages youth involvement, they seem to talk more about this than acting on it. Sure, there were two days during my internship when youth leaders held meetings, but besides that, there was not much evidence of youth participation. Additionally, these meetings simply highlighted the work already done by young adults rather than a discussion with young adults about what they want to see done now, what they are eager to do now. So, to the UN, include more young adults in your discussions instead of just highlighting how we have been trying to change the world. This is our future at stake, so it would be proper if we had a more substantial influence on what happens to it going forward, the priorities that will shape the future. 

To close, I want to talk about one more concern I have witnessed from the meetings. Delegations are, to put it frankly, moving too slowly. While I understand treaties and resolutions take time to complete, action must occur rapidly when our future is at risk. Climate change won’t slow because delegations need time to talk about the wording of resolutions. Rising hunger rates won’t slow because delegations need time to talk about wording. Terrorist organizations won’t slow their advances because delegations need time to talk about wording. If we want our future to be peaceful and equitable for all, we must demand that delegations work more swiftly to actively and practically address looming crises. Because on matters such as climate change we will soon pass a tipping point, and then no resolution will be able to stop what is now well in motion. 

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Revise and Consent: Enabling a World of Change, Dr. Robert Zuber

18 Apr
See the source image

We were revisionists; what we revised was ourselves.  Margaret Atwood

Not everything that can be counted counts, and not everything that counts can be counted. Albert Einstein

Improperly documented history, or more precisely, fraudulent versions of history not only deprive the victims of pasts injustices due recognition of their suffering, but also rob the living of a fair chance at a future free from the dangers of repeating past injustices.  A.E. Samaan

We have learned primarily by tinkering. Curt Gabrielson

In talking about the past we lie with every breath we draw. William Maxwell

If we don’t have real answers, it is because we still don’t know what questions to ask. Our instruments are useless, our methodology broken, our motivations selfish.  Jeff VanderMeer

It is in this childishly speculative state of mind, so different from common sense and its logic, that we know the world to be good. Vladimir Nabokov

Thanks to the confidence placed in me by a colleague, Barbara Adams, I recently published an article in a journal of development policy entitled “A Volatile Context: A Revisionist Lens on Good Governance.”

I’m not going to invite you to read the piece. It’s not dis-similar to the themes of this weekly post, but it is longer and surely more dense. It also reflects an assignment which I only accepted due to the editorial staff’s embrace of the “what if.” What would the world look like if our structures of governance were devoted to fostering care and equal access among constituents? What if governance were as competent and transparent as it often claims to be? What if governance were as concerned — in terms practical more than rhetorical — with the needs and aspirations of constituents as it is with its own protocols and power dynamics?

These and other, similar questions punctuated my piece, for better and worse. To be honest, I’m surprised it got published at all. In an age driven by data and branding, by professionals seeking control over smaller and smaller domains of human experience, speculative writing of the sort I indulge in has become a bit of a reach, and not an altogether welcome one. People in our governance and educational bureaucracies are rather preoccupied — and not without reason — with the accumulation and management of data, data that can establish trends and help ensure that, in the realm of policy and to the extent we are able, human and financial capital are directed towards the holes in security and justice that need to be filled and can be filled.

But it is clear in many places, including at the UN, that data of varying levels of sophistication and reliability does not always bring us closer to governance that is caring, responsive and trustworthy. Indeed, the pursuit of data can be its own endgame, accumulating “information” that in many instances is untethered to strategies to both unlock and incarnate its power to effect change; moreover, such data is often in flux as its gaps are only slowly recognized and fresh experiments are conducted that render the previous “truths” subject to a revised consent.

One of the smartest statements coming from youth climate activist Greta Thunberg was when she said, “don’t listen to me, listen to the science.” Yes, listen to the science, listen to those with data pertinent to the rendering of what are often dire predictions for our common future if we do not mange to revise our ways. But as Greta already knows, as any of us who ply our wares in the halls of global governance knows, such governance is as likely to render the power of science to something akin to a “petting zoo” as it is to unleash its full and furious influence over all our actions.

Simply put, we now know more than we do. Just this week, several good UN events underscored the degree to which having accurate data and incarnating relevant policy commitments are still at loose ends. We “know” that hording vaccines is ultimately detrimental to both the global economy and to the suppression of future variants — as noted this week in a special, high level event on “Vaccines for All” hosted by the president of the UN Economic and Social Council — and yet our commitment to equitable vaccine access remains well short of the need. We “know” as was stated often during an important UN event this week on “Financing for Development,” that a combination of debt burdens, limited investment access and illicit financial flows has made pandemic response and recovery a mere pipe dream, and yet our commitment to a revised, more inclusive financial system remains more the subject of speechmaking than practical application. We “know” as a civil society advocate from South Sudan testified in the Security Council this week that the wide availability of often-trafficked arms fuels so much of the violence and abuse in her country (and many others), and yet our addiction to the production and trade in deadly weapons shows little signs of abating. We “know” the many thousands in Yemen whose lives remain threatened after years of war by famine and economic collapse, and yet the Security Council remains largely impotent to end the violence let alone the impunity to which it has given rise. We “know” that we are unlikely given our current course to forestall the biology-altering consequences of a rapidly warming planet, but we continue to take more credit for our limited climate responses than to earnestly prepare to enact what the president of the UN General Assembly this week urged: “a greener and more equitable recovery that can keep our SDG commitments on track,” including and especially our lagging climate actions.

These disconnects between knowing and doing should not be laid at the feet of scientists, many of whom have no doubt had more than a few sleepless nights over these past months as emissions continue to rise and policymakers continue to defy reasonable, pandemic-related limitations in the name of disinformation or “freedom.” The same scientists who developed safe and effective COVID-19 vaccines in record time and implemented health protocols to keep many more virus victims alive than was the case last spring — including no doubt many COVID-deniers — know that such measures alone won’t end the pandemic if large segments of the public remain uncooperative and revision-phobic, and they certainly won’t help us prepare for the pandemics sure to come as we continue to wantonly disrupt the planet’s biological safeguards.

It may be the case, as suggested above by Curt Gabrielson, that we learn primarily by “tinkering,” through small-scale revisions to what is known and seen, small-sale adjustments in what is given. But for the policy community such revisions at small scale are no longer suitable, if they ever were, as they don’t sufficiently address the diversity of threats facing our current world. They don’t sufficiently address the barriers that keep so many human skills — of youth, of cultural minorities, of women, of persons with disabilities — on the sidelines of policy deliberations and decisions. And they don’t address the deficits of trust which are themselves a legacy of promises deferred or ignored, assistance barely rendered, entitlements and privileges not shared or even acknowledged.

If we are not careful, if we are not sufficiently vigilant, the “bubble” that institutions like the UN are accused of operating within will morph into an “island” to which we in the policy community might well be exiled. Such exile would complicate positive change as it would cut off large swaths of the global community from a UN system which still connects, still convenes, still calls attention to looming threats and policy options — and often with considerable skill. But the threat of exile looms, primarily from constituencies who feel that they can no longer believe in us or in the words we speak, who display an eroded confidence in our ability to distinguish between what can be counted and what counts, to prioritize those responses that truly matter to human and planetary well-being.

In this regard, I worry most about any potential erosion among the youth, this large and diverse generation trying to organize their lives and dream their dreams under clouds of pandemic, climate change, weapons proliferation, and massive debt. Despite all the outreach the UN does to young people, do they –will they — find the UN sufficiently responsive, sufficiently committed to their future, sufficiently savvy on matters from technology access to policy inclusion? Will they find value in our answers to compelling crises let alone consent to at least some of the questions we are actually willing to ask? Will they find in their interactions with us evidence that the world is good and beautiful, and will they continue to feel that it is worth their time and energy to preserve that beauty and extend that goodness?

On this the jury is out. Among the formal events on the UN’s calendar this week was a side discussion, organized by the Youth4Disarmament initiative of the UN’s Office for Disarmament Affairs, which brought together diverse young people — including several of our colleagues — to examine that elusive “what if,” their dreams of a world that is fit for the aspirations and well-being of both this large generation and those who will come after. What if nuclear weapons were abolished? What if emissions could be brought firmly under control? What if the discrimination and incitement to violence highlighted by France and others this week could finally be stricken from the human register? What if our grand institutions — so often stuck in the mud of their own cultures and working methods — could be made to truly breathe again, breathe the air enveloping a human race which finally understands that care for the planet and solidarity with each other are practices, not premises?

At this “what if” event, the invitations to youth were sincere: to share stories from diverse contexts that need to be heard even if those stories (like many of my own) wouldn’t always pass the muster of fact-checkers; to envision (as High Representative Nakamitsu invited) what the world might actually look like if we spent less on weapons and more on people; to imagine as well (as Costa Rica’s Ambassador Chan advocated) a world “where “people no longer felt compelled to take up weapons in the first place,” where we were able to educate every child, where climate change impacts could be mitigated and even reversed? Can we envisage and then build a world where (as Pakistan noted) “power rivalries are disavowed,” where impacts from human selfishness are not a foregone conclusion, where injustices and atrocity crimes are no longer in mortal danger of endless repetition?

As the older speakers at this event noted, the policy and legal groundwork has been laid for such aspirations, including at the UN. But many traps have already been set in the form of crises we should have seen coming, crises that we failed to prevent in the first instance or forthrightly addressed in the second. There is still much for us to revise in our institutions and in ourselves, much in our own, sometimes “fraudulent” versions of personal and cultural history to clarify and confess, much in the stories of young people — especially those compelling “what ifs” — that can guide and inspire their practice but that must be better honored by the rest of us if they are ever to achieve their full flowering.

For better and worse, prospects for a more caring, trustworthy and visionary governance are still in old and worn hands like my own. We who are attached to such hands must undertake the revisions that history and circumstances now demand of us, revisions to our institutions and to ourselves, as we seek to deposit data and dreams into the anxious, younger hands of others.

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