Tag Archives: urgency

Bomb Shelter: Deferring the Risks We are Expected to Face, Dr. Robert Zuber

24 Aug

All choices are fraught with peril, but inaction is the most perilous of all.  Frewin Jones

To become spring, means accepting the risk of winter. To become presence, means accepting the risk of absence. Antoine de Saint-Exupéry

A bend in the road is not the end of the road…Unless you fail to make the turn. Helen Keller

To really ask is to open the door to the whirlwind. The answer may annihilate the question and the questioner.  Anne Rice

To save all we must risk all.  Friedrich von Schiller

The desire for safety stands against every great and noble enterprise.  Tacitus

Burning bridges behind you is understandable. It’s the bridges before us that we burn, not realizing we may need to cross, that brings regret.  Anthony Liccione

I have been asked often over these past two weeks by widely dispersed colleagues about the 10th Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty (NPT) Review Conference taking place this month in New York.

While I no longer expend enough energy on the issue of nuclear weapons to be branded anything but an active onlooker, I have spent more time in these NPT sessions than I might have done otherwise.  This is due to the (relative) lack of policy activity inside the building, the exceptions this past week including some appropriately moving tributes to humanitarians killed or injured in the service of others and another policy event designed to extend treaty protections for the oceans and its biodiversity to areas beyond national jurisdiction (BBNJ). 

While many stakeholders came to New York in the hopes of informing the NPT and BBNJ negotiations, to ensure that urgency rather than propriety dominated the affective policy landscape, processes continued the post-pandemic trend in UN spaces of calling for NGO involvement on the one hand while marginalizing it on the other.  Despite a few glimpses courtesy of short, infrequent plenary sessions, the BBNJ has been conducted almost entirely in informal sessions to which our collective participation is largely unwelcome.   The NPT has offered more opportunities to watch the proceedings but rarely to challenge their content or direction.  Moreover, the most important of the discussions, those taking place in the “subsidiary bodies” have been almost completely off-limits to those, many with considerable expertise themselves, who dared (foolishly or otherwise) to risk time and treasure (and burn considerable carbon)  in yet another attempt to ensure that delegations embrace a larger portion of their generally under-implemented treaty obligations and otherwise “meet the moment.”

Aside from stakeholder marginalization, what the NPT and BBNJ process have in common is that both are treaty processes dealing with what are widely regarded as existential threats to our very survival as a species.  The humanitarian consequences of nuclear weapons use have been in full view since the “duck and cover” days of my youth, and more contemporary efforts to modernize arsenals (as opposed to de-commissioning them) have produced weapons which are quicker to deploy, more powerful, better able to avoid detection and other features which provide little comfort to those tracking the impacts of nuclear explosions on our already violence-prone and over-heated planet. 

In much the same manner, our oceans are rapidly approaching their own tipping points as water temperatures and sea levels rise, as the PH of the oceans continues to slide towards unhealthy metrics and as the open ocean remains in some of its areas a massive water-borne dump for ocean-going vessels and other polluters with degraded plastic becoming an increasingly prominent feature of the diets of marine wildlife.  As we need an NPT which is functional and accountable, especially to its disarmament obligations, so too do we need a BBNJ process to result in treaty obligations that extend and amplify our concerns for the oceans beyond national jurisdiction to the ubiquitous areas of our inter-connected seas negatively impacted by human activity.

In both instances, there are grave reasons for concern.  The clock is ticking on both existential threats, and it is clear from the vantage points that we are still able to occupy that there is insufficient urgency on the part of delegations and negotiators to create and/or move existing agreements forward in ways that both speak to this uneasy moment and serve to bring us back from the brink of a ruin which we (including our policy leadership) have literally brought upon ourselves. We have created space to deliberate on this ruinous state of affairs but have largely failed to ask the questions that might set off a “whirlwind” of change beyond the narrow confines of diplomatic control. We have spent much energy (and wasted the energy of others) in an attempt to justify the unjustifiable, such as recent Russian nuclear weapons threats against Ukraine and the US position that, despite all evidence to the contrary, my government is upholding its commitments under Article 6 of the NPT.  For those of you fortunate to have escaped previous iterations of this double-speak, Article 6 is the disarmament pillar of this treaty, a condition which has been piously flaunted for the most part by the nuclear weapons states since the NPT first entered into force.

When colleagues ask us about the status of treaty negotiations and/or review, they are largely asking about functional levels of urgency in evidence amongst the delegations.  Do the people responsible for creating normative and/or legal frameworks to help ensure a future for human and other life genuinely understand the dynamics of this precarious moment?  Do they understand that the “inter-governmental processes” which they increasingly seek to protect from the undiplomatic utterances of those of us focused on doomsday clocks rather than UN clocks, that these processes and the “consensus” outcomes which more often ensure non-compliance than inspire its opposite have simply not yet delivered the goods, have not allowed constituents to rest easier or, in many cases, to rest at all?

After countless hours in UN conference rooms, I still wonder myself.  More to the point, the colleagues reaching out to us about these treaty processes are generally expressing more anxiety than confidence, more skepticism than gratitude. They are asking, as we might also, questions more human than diplomatic, questions that go beyond the diplomatic calculus of sufficiency to the wider concern of a world in flames that those tasked with response have done too little to remediate.

Is the diplomatic community both authorized and willing to turn a corner when a corner urgently needs to be turned?  Are they prepared to engage the hard (and possibly unauthorized) questions and not only the ones which will “cause no trouble” to their permanent missions or careers?  Can they properly assess the bridges we have carelessly burned such that we also avoid burning the ones we will need to cross over to escape the damage wrought by our endlessly tepid policy outcomes and the sometimes-misleading promises they communicate to constituents?

The polarities of the UN community’s relationship to risk have been clearly evident over the last week.  On the one hand are the humanitarians, those who feed and protect under dangerous conditions, those who lay their lives on the line to compensate for the policy failures of the states who pay the UN’s bills and largely – increasingly unilaterally – govern its policy processes.  And while peacekeepers are being attacked and humanitarian workers are being abducted, we fail to resolve the conflicts which threaten them (let alone prevent their occurrence). We continue to speak in repetitive tones in this UN space about “leaving no one behind” without communicating clearly that we understand the dramatic political and economic risks which need to be taken  in order to address what in our complex human history would be the fulfillment of a genuinely unprecedented SDG mandate.

And so we go forth in a system made up of often-bewildered civil society organizations, NGOs who too often reinforce a game we are running out of time to change, and diplomats who represent positions, often ably, which they largely do not create themselves.  Ours (if I might be so presumptuous) is a system which privileges consensus, not as an aspiration but as a de-facto veto, resulting in resolutions and other obligations likely to be implemented only in part if at all, documents couched in language likely to inspire only states already walking the pathways which our oft-compromised resolutions and treaties seek to define.

 As diplomats continue their work to create documents on which all can agree if not commit to actually implement, we continue to send willing soldiers, security officers and aid workers into the field, people who have worked through their need for safety in order to feed and clothe, house and protect those facing the ravages of war and terror, of drought and flooding, of environmental degradation, of exile from familiar people and places.  We continue to send them into the conflict zones we have not been able to resolve through political means, into zones of deprivation courtesy of endemic economic inequalities and a climate crisis which we are seemingly willing to allow to devour what is left of our forests, biodiversity and ice caps.

We know that diplomats around the UN generally work hard.  They are skilled at compromise, at pouring over text that would make the eyes of the rest of us glaze over.  They are also able to keep the windows of diplomacy open, to refuse to allow personal or national grievances to impede the potential for negotiating progress.  But their energy is not the energy that global constituencies can easily relate to, the energy that communicates that we are genuinely in trouble, and that we are willing to do what is needed and all that is needed to remove threats to our existence while we are still able to do so. 

Moreover, that we are willing to put more of ourselves on the line; we who function mostly within our bureaucratic and career bubbles, we who cannot pretend not to know, not to know what is coming, not to know what will happen once it comes, once the tipping points of violence and environmental degradation have been crossed for good.

If the processes at the UN these past two weeks are any indication, especially with regard to the NPT, it is still unclear if delegations can move beyond their training and instructions and convince the global public that they truly understand the moment.   We will find out tomorrow if global constituents have been misled once more by rhetoric insufficiently backed by devotion, the sort of energy that keeps humanitarian actors seeking out lives to save in our numerous killing fields.  Given the likelihood of insufficient movement, it behooves us to remind delegates that constituents deserve more than summary overviews of a month-long engagement, more than pledges “to do better next time.”

They deserve an apology. 

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Ambulance Chasers: Clearing a Path for Policy Change, Dr. Robert Zuber

7 Mar
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They were partners. They were two halves of the same brain.  Margaret Peterson Haddix

It was an honor, to be listened to closely, to be heard. Meg Waite Clayton

She was hearing the words. They just weren’t registering on her Richter scale of sanity.  Dakota Cassidy

Life is a long preparation for something that never happens. W.B. Yeats

In a sense we are all prisoners of some memory, or fear, or disappointment – we are all defined by something we can’t change.  Simon Van Booy

Life is so constructed, that the event does not, cannot, will not, match the expectation. Charlotte Brontë

It wasn’t a particularly momentous week at the UN, though there was plenty of momentousness in the world to discuss, including the growing threat from hate speech and atrocity-crime level violence committed in the Tigray region of Ethiopia and against protesters on the streets of Myanmar.  In addition, while a session on the use of chemical weapons in Syria fell flat – largely due to the lack of new information from the existing investigative mechanisms – there was nonetheless a palpable sense of frustration in diverse sessions that 10 years into the Syrian conflict, the violence still continues, the disappearances and arbitrary detentions still continue, the foreign occupation still continues, the displacement and material deprivation still continue.

Those of you who still find some value in these weekly missives know of our preoccupation with a relationship between structure and outcomes, especially in multilateral forums.  We affirm that solutions to global problems, much like personal ones, are undermined by gaps between rhetoric and response; between promises made and promises kept; between the growing expectations of the parties and honest appraisals of what it is possible to achieve (or not achieve), including by the UN or any other institutional frameworks. Such appraisals would do well to point out other sources of potential relief beyond the most obvious, underscoring that the attainment of relief supersedes any other concerns, including the authority of the relief-giver.

If a child requires urgent medical assistance, the over-riding goal is to get the child to hospital.  It matters less who transports the child than that the child arrives in time to stave off disaster. 

In many ways, it seems, the international community has lost touch with that fundamental principle.  While public approval for the UN remains high within most of its member states, and while the UN maintains its singular function as a convener of dialogue regarding the world’s greatest challenges, there are also flaws in a system that is so heavily dependent on the permissions and funding of large states; that invests massive amounts of skill and resources providing assistance to people damaged by the conflicts we are too institutionally “conflicted” to stop; a system that is constantly “selling” its work to its state benefactors without clear assessments of where that work has gone off the rails, where we might actually be “unfit for purpose,” and where self-inflicted institutional and political impediments have become the erstwhile traffic jams that threaten to prevent constituents from receiving what we have given them every reason to expect from us.

We still insist on driving the sick child to the hospital ourselves even when there are other vehicles in better operating order and more at the ready.  We often insist on being at the center of things, at the core of solutions and resolutions.  Our institutional branding has become at times almost insufferable, people of considerable skill and integrity forced as a matter of professional protocol to tell us much about “what they’re doing” and little about how its working and, heaven forbid, what else needs to happen in the world beyond our bubbles and their aspirations to ensure that the metaphorical child reaches the hospital in time.

Thankfully, from various parts of the world in our zoom-saturated existence, officials and civil society still come into UN spaces to share and report, to attempt to put a human face on “global problems,” to remind diplomats and NGOs alike that what we’re doing isn’t quite working as we intended, that the vehicle holding the “sick child” is too often stuck in horrible traffic as the child’s vital signs plummet and with few willing to sacrifice their place in line to free up the ambulance ‘s path.

But if this week was any indication, those summoned to “brief” this UN community on global crises might be losing confidence in our ability to do more than “tick” our own boxes of concern, to hear and then file-away testimony as though we are somehow doing these leaders a favor by allowing them to present.  Twice in the span of a couple of days, two female NGO leaders – one from Syria and the other from South Sudan, shared frustration at the ways in which their testimony seemed as likely to enable inertia as galvanize a tangible, sustainable response.  Each in their own way they made clear the pressures they feel from colleagues who wonder what the point is of engaging the UN on issues it has failed to resolve over many long years.  What can the General Assembly and Security Council possibly need briefers to tell them about these longstanding crises that they don’t already know? After all, as Wafa Moustafa noted about Syria after questioning the value of speaking to a General Assembly session, “you’ve all seen the photos.”

Indeed they have. We all have. From Syria, from Yemen, from DR Congo, from Myanmar, discouraging images seen over and over to the extent that they are now insufficiently evocative except perhaps insofar that they remind us of the consequences of our collective inability to translate diplomatic dialogue into sustainable peace. As Jackline Nasiwa of South Sudan noted in the Security Council, “we are tired of sharing the same stories,” lamenting that what she highlighted as the considerable resilience of the South Sudanese people “is clearly fading” in the face of ongoing, persistent, unresolved trauma.

And once finished with their own statements, both of these women were expected to listen to a series of largely predictable responses from delegations, expressions of concern largely genuine but also untethered to much in the way of fresh thinking or fresher commitments, anything that might possibly register on the “Richter scale of sanity” of these women.  In many ways the responses from delegations merely confirmed the lament – that we are not only unable to fix what is so clearly wrong, but that we have few good suggestions for where relief might be found beyond our own walls and values.  We can’t fix the problem, or so it seems, and we really don’t know who can.

The concerns of these women and of the people they serve and represent deserve a better outcome than words falling to earth like seeds on concrete.

With all due regard for the mindset of civil society – hoping for more, insisting on more than we are ever likely to see ourselves – we are right to insist that there is something collectively the matter with us here, something which lies at the heart of  the frustration punctuated by the women briefers this week. We talk about the world as though we are in a race to survive a series of deadly pandemics but we act too often as though the world suffers merely from a simple head cold.  We take our sweet time, preferring to delay appropriate action until we reach consensus, forgetting that consensus is an aspiration not a demand, forgetting also that while national priorities differ, the fundamental obligation of this system to prevent violence in the first instance and alleviate the suffering such violence causes should never be up for grabs. Not here. Not in this place.

One suggestion for the UN going forward is that it thoroughly examines its use of the term “partnership,” a phrase so utterly overused and misunderstood that it has lost much of its “flavor,” has in fact degenerated into something akin to proximity and assistance. Our “partners” are the ones who are “around” and help us do our job. They are not, apparently, the ones who help shape what that job is, how it is conducted, how its successes are measured, what course corrections might be required. They are not, apparently, the ones whose briefings demand responses akin to “what we are going to do differently now,” what are we as a community prepared to rethink and renegotiate in order for women such as these briefers to take something of value away from the session, perhaps a sense that they were really listened to and, in these instances at the very least, an assurance that human misery trumps institutional protocol as the motivation and inspiration for our common work. Like most of the rest of us, these women are not “partners” in any real sense, not yet “halves of the same brain,” but voices that we solicit when we need them, voices that we tap when we need to show concern genuine at one level, intangible at another. This is not real partnership. This is not enough.

Public opinion polls regarding the value of the UN notwithstanding, there is a fair amount of cynicism afoot regarding the ability of the international community to ensure that our metaphorical ambulances are able to get to hospital in time to save their patients. When women such as Ms. Nasiwa and Moustafa question the value of their UN testimony — not its content but its audience — we need to take serious note. It may be that we all are defined by things we cannot change. But the violence, heartache and trauma embedded in their testimony, this must change. Most all of us have endured the experience of not being heard, of urgency more often patronized than acted upon. I worry that women such as these will stop speaking to us at all, will rather take up the search for settings where there is closer synergy between rhetoric and response, where there is a higher probability that the ambulance will reach its intended destination. This is an outcome the UN can and must do more to avoid.

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