by Richard Gowan | Sep 27, 2011 | Conflict and security, Cooperation and coherence, Europe and Central Asia, Global system, Middle East and North Africa, North America
Trying to navigate around the special security cordon for the UN General Assembly last week, I got stuck behind a fellow with closely-cropped hair, a massive American flag and a tee-shirt with “THE UN SUCKS” written on it by hand. That got me thinking, and I have summarized my thoughts in a new op-ed for E!Sharp:
Quite a few U.S. and European officials might have liked to march with the “UN SUCKS” guy. The Palestine debate appeared to confirm that UN diplomacy is weighted against Western interests.
Developing countries backed the Palestinians. The Obama administration stuck with Israel, but was vilified at home for not heading off the issue altogether. The Europeans, failing to declare a single position in advance, looked conciliatory but rather confused.
So is it finally time to give up on the UN? I don’t think so…
China and Russia – the West’s usual foes in the Security Council – have looked uneasy. Although the two powers have a reputation for defending sovereignty and opposing Western interventionism, both proved ready to compromise on these principles in 2011.
China approved tough measures to deal with the crisis in Côte d’Ivoire and let the U.S., France and Britain have their way over Libya. In the Libyan case in particular, Beijing calculated that grand-standing against the West would do its economic interests harm.
Russia, generally more pugilistic, seemed weak. It tried to defend the defeated Ivorian president Laurent Gbagbo from Western pressure, but eventually backed down. It failed to follow through on threats to block any UN action over Libya. When they lack China’s support, the Russians appear to be an increasingly hollow power in the Security Council.
China and Russia have united in defence of the Syrian regime, heading off even the mildest Western resolutions condemning Assad’s crackdown on protestors. Brazil, India and South Africa – all holding temporary seats on the Security Council – followed along.
Yet in August, increasingly concerned for their international image, the Brazilians and Indians fixed a compromise deal to condemn Syria’s behavior. The agreed text was still extraordinarily mild. Yet the appearance of cracks among the non-Western powers holds out the possibility, however uncertain, that the Europeans and U.S. may be able to pull together unexpected coalitions of allies to push for action through the UN in future crises.
The problem, as the op-ed goes on to say, is that both the U.S. and EU have internal problems (looming elections in one case, a lack of political cohesion and the Euro crisis in the other) that may well prevent them from seizing this moment.
Nonetheless, a lot of recent coverage of UN affairs has been simplistic, with pundits applying a simple “with us or against us” test to countries like India, and concluding that they will be in the “against” column forever. The art of diplomacy is a bit more complicated that, and there are potential openings to reshape the UN (if gradually).
For a more detailed mapping of those openings, check out my latest report with Franziska Brantner on the UN and human rights for ECFR, published last week.
by Richard Gowan | Sep 27, 2011 | Africa, Influence and networks, Off topic, UK
When the current British government took office, it decreed a limit on the number of special advisers that each minister was allowed to appoint. Recent figures show that David Cameron has sixteen “spads”, Nick Clegg has eleven, and most other ministers have just one or two. Overall, there are still fewer than eighty advisers wandering around Whitehall today. Some civil servants probably think that’s still many too many.
Governor Isa Yuguda of Bauchi State, Nigeria, would beg to differ. Today he announced the appointment of a modest 924 special aides…
Governor Isa Yuguda of Bauchi State, on Monday, approved the appointment of 94 Senior Special Assistants (SSAs), 20 Special Advisers (SAs) and 810 Special Assistants.
A statement signed by the Secretary to the State Government, Ahmed Dandija, also announced the appointment of 24 Directors-General in charge of various sectors of the state.
Yuguda also approved the appointment of 20 Deputy Chairmen and 82 members for the Local Councils in the state.
The statement added that all the appointments were with immediate effect.
One can only imagine that the administration of Bauchi State is about to make a great leap forward. [H/T Teju Cole.]
by Jules Evans | Sep 26, 2011 | Economics and development, Influence and networks
Martha Nussbaum has another book out. Does she never sleep? This one is called Creating Capabilities: The Human Development Approach
, and looks at the necessity of moving beyond GDP by measuring a broader range of human ‘capabilities’, such as education, health etc. Professor Nussbaum developed the ‘capabilities approach’ together with the Cambridge economist Amartya Sen, who then went on to advise the French government on its launch of national well-being measurements in 2009. But, unlike her former colleague, Nussbaum seems determinedly sceptical about the value or point of national measurements of subjective well-being. She says, in an interview on the Freakonomics podcast:
It’s all a question of what you think happiness is. And this is a question that philosophers have asked for centuries. And the minute that Jeremy Bentham said that we should look at happiness in terms of pleasure and satisfaction, John Stuart Mill immediately said, “Now wait a minute, it’s better to be Socrates dissatisfied than a pig satisfied.” And so he then insisted that we had to think about happiness as containing many different kids of experiences, many different kinds of activity. And well, Mill wasn’t the first to say that. He was really getting all of that from Aristotle. So I’m with Mill, and I think that the Benthamite approach, where we just think of happiness as a single feeling, has got very little going for it. If you just think about a daily experience, the pleasure I get from writing is very different from the pleasure that I get from going out and buying a very nice dress. They’re just very different things. And the pleasure that somebody might get from bringing up a child is different again. So I think that’s not a good idea. And I think we should have a much more Millian rather than Benthamite conception of happiness.
Very well, I agree so far. Others – like Charles Seaford of the New Economics Foundation, have noted this contemporary clash in well-being policy between Benthamite and Aristotelian definitions of well-being. The question for Nussbaum is, does she think this more Aristotelian definition of well-being can be measured in individuals or nations using social science? If you look at the list of capabilities Nussbaum came up with, it includes some rather intangible things like ‘play’, ‘practical reason’, ‘senses / imagination’, ’emotional attachment’, ‘control over one’s environment’. When I say they’re intangible, I’m not denying they exist. But does Nussbaum think these capabilities can be measured for an individual, or for a society? Or does she think this more Aristotelian idea of human flourishing simply isn’t readily measurable using social statistics?
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by Andy Sumner | Sep 24, 2011 | Climate and resource scarcity, Conflict and security, Cooperation and coherence, Economics and development, Global system
Just back from a lot of discussion on scarcity, resilience and crises at a conference convened by the Development Studies Association and European Association of Development Institutes.
The basic rationale for the conference are outlined well here and here. Crudely – lots of interlinked crisis and a need to think how to build adaptive institutions, ideas, and political coalitions. The conference blog is worth a look (here).
In short – global shocks in economics, food security and fuel prices, together with chronic stressors relating to demographic pressure, climate change and resource scarcity – aka ‘the long crisis of globalisation’ or the ‘perfect storm’ of problems – are combining to produce complex, shifting configurations of vulnerability as experienced by households and communities. And all of this is leading to more interest in the ideas of resilience.
Understanding these complexities and vulnerabilities in global development, and navigating global volatility for resilience-building purposes, is not straightforward (surprise). Together with Rich Mallet at the Overseas Development Institute, we review (and published by UNDP’s International Policy Centre for Inclusive Growth in Brasilia) represents one attempt to make sense of this problem. Reviewing the inter-disciplinary literature on vulnerability, we found that existing definitions of the concept largely fail to capture the multidimensional and complex nature of vulnerability in the twenty-first century. Vulnerability tends to be viewed narrowly by discipline or sector, which obstructs the kind of broad, holistic analysis needed to understand how patterns of vulnerability occur, how they shift, and what can be done to strengthen people’s capacities to respond. We call for a new analytical approach that is able to manage complexity and recognise the many faces of vulnerability…
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by Jules Evans | Sep 24, 2011 | Climate and resource scarcity
Two years ago, the CIA set up a Centre for Climate Change and National Security. The Centre would “do more than bring together in a single place expertise on an important national security topic. It will also be aggressive in outreach to academics and think tanks working the issue. The goal is a powerful asset recognized throughout our government, and beyond, for its knowledge and insight.”
Two years later, and the Centre responded to a Freedom of Information request by National Security Archive scholar Jeffrey Richelson with a letter saying: ““We completed a thorough search for records responsive to your request and located material that we determined is currently and properly classified and must be denied in its entirety.” Yes, the Centre’s entire research, if it has any, is classified. How’s that for aggressive outreach!
Set up a year after president Obama’s election, in a brief moment of euphoria when it appeared the US might do something (anything!) about climate change, the Centre rapidly found itself under attack from a resurgent Republican party, including Senator John Barrasso, who tried to get the Centre’s funding scrapped in 2010, declaring “The CIA’s resources should be focused on monitoring terrorists in caves—not polar bears on icebergs”. The Centre’s response, alas, appears to have been to bunker down and keep schtum. Climate change? Shhhh.
