united nations – Pike & Hurricane

Don’t Read The News

Eje Brundin — Fri, 22 Jan 2021 18:00:39 +0000

This is a featured article from Pike & Hurricane’s partner magazine The Perspective of Lund University.

What is the state of the world today? Where have we been, where are we, and where are we going? Weapons of mass destruction, famine, climate crisis, asteroids hitting the earth, future pandemics, arms races, overcrowded refugee camps, super-volcanoes, fascism and alternative facts are only a few of the numerous problems that humanity faces. It can get overwhelming when trying to process all of this. However, the news tends to prioritize war over reality—when, in fact, humans are doing pretty well.

As a student of Peace and Conflict Studies at Lund University, I see patterns of polarization, violence, and the breakdown of states everywhere I look. Democracy is in global decline, rape is used as a weapon of war, nuclear arms deals are failing and social media is polarizing us into frightening bubbles of self-righteous, aggravating rhetoric. The problems are huge and complex, and affect people and families all over the world. Being hopeful is difficult, but let me help.

“Where cooperation has created death and destruction it is also the solution.”

When we see war and cruelty, there are deep patterns of cooperation that we tend to overlook. We read about war, murders, environmental degradation, and then think that human nature is greedy, selfish and cruel. However, when we say that the winners write the history books, we forget what made the writer a winner: human cooperation. You have a war? That is two or more sides, each one cooperating to win over the other. You have a nuclear bomb? It was created by scientists that cooperated through sharing knowledge. You have THE PERSPECTIVE in your hand? I am happy to say that we cooperated to get this delivered to you. Human cooperation is everywhere and we take it for granted. War and nuclear bombs are horrific things, but where cooperation has created death and destruction it is also the solution.

Cooperation is what makes humans unique. In the widely read novel Lord of the Flies by William Golding, the stranded boys slowly descend into chaos and are described to hold a beast-like quality in their human core. Rutger Bregman, a Dutch historian, found the real-life example of Lord of the Flies. It turns out six boys stranded on an island in Tonga constructively cooperated to survive for more than a year. One even broke a leg, and the others compensated to let their friend heal. Lord of the Flies is a good novel, but that’s all it is. In reality, we usually do better. We are the only species on the planet that can cooperate in large numbers with other unknown humans. This is an incredible advantage we have over other animals. Animals like wolves or monkeys can only cooperate in small numbers and not outside their circle or kin. Put ten million chimpanzees in Paris and you get chaos, but in the same space ten million humans manage to cooperate and co-exist. Human reality tends to lean toward cooperation and we see it in international politics, too.

Last year the United Nations celebrated 75 years of existence. It can be considered the pinnacle of human cooperation. It has served an instrumental role in creating peaceful international relations. States across the globe come together to discuss issues, to reach agreements and to ensure international peace. This inter-state organization has been an incredible success. Since its creation, there have been no superpower-wars. Let me say that again: there have been zero wars between superpowers while the United Nations has existed. This point might sound trivial, but oh, so important to make!

The existence of the United Nations is taken for granted today. According to Our World in Data, out of the world’s population in 2019, less than 8% is 65 years or older. This means that almost nobody alive today was of an age to witness and understand the creation of the United Nations. The pinnacle of human cooperation, to us, has always been there. Our standards of international relations and peace are very different than those who lived through the first and second World Wars. To put it into perspective, imagine instead what might have happened if there had been no United Nations at all during the Cold War. The UN has given the world the Laws of War and the Universal Declaration of Human Rights and much more. Without it, wars today would be much worse than what they currently are.

This positive development is a slow and long-term one, but it is an important one. There is much data to support this worldview. Since 1945, global life expectancy has gone up, child mortality has gone down, hunger has decreased, access to electricity has gone up, democracies have increased, war deaths are decreasing, homicides are decreasing—I could go on and on. This has only been 75 years. If we instead look back 300 years, it is fair to say that humanity has progressed just fine. If you want to know more, look at all this data by yourself through Our World in Data.

Now, compare these hard facts to the news. Have you ever heard reporters say “Today 137,000 people escaped extreme poverty” every day for the last 25 years? The answer is no, despite this being a truth of global human development. Our human reality is a reality of positives and negatives merged into one world. You almost give up on humanity when you read the news, but that is because these slow, positive developments are not covered in popular media.

“Humans are not problem-oriented; we are solution-oriented.”

In exclusive correspondence with THE PERSPECTIVE, Dr. Steven Pinker, a cognitive psychologist, writes that “peace consists of nothing happening, which by definition is not news.” News media tend to follow the motto of “when it bleeds, it leads,” but reality is not a big pile of blood. To understand the world, you cannot only look at the news. When you look at countries at war, look at the countries at peace at the same time to get the whole picture. To be fair, the fact that the news media mainly covers problems and human suffering is a very constructive and cooperative act in and of itself as well. While being aware of the positive progress humans are making, you are also getting information about problems humans have to solve to improve human life even further.

Humans are not problem-oriented; we are solution-oriented. Dr. Pinker emphasized that by looking at data and seeing trends in the long-term, we can “muster the energy to reduce [war] further.” We learn from looking at what we did wrong in the past. We also learn by looking at what we are doing right, and it seems we have more to learn about what we’re doing right. It is difficult to process all the problems we face today, but it is because we are more aware and know more about all of our problems today. We are facing immense inequality, traumatizing wars and environmental crises. Alone, it can feel impossible to deal with it, understand it, and try to change it. Luckily, we are by nature experts at cooperating and in the last centuries we have (statistically) passed the challenge of progress with flying colors.

Featured image: Japanese Women Visit Lake Success, by United Nations Photo, CC BY-NC-ND 2.0

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A Path to Prosperity? The Place of the Private Sector in the Sustainable Development Goals

Taminka Hanscamp — Tue, 06 Dec 2016 10:24:24 +0000

No poverty, prosperity for all and a healthy planet by 2030: this is the promise of the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs). Set in 2015 this quixotic set of 17 goals is deliberately more aspirational compared to the eight concrete Millennium Development Goals (MDGs) which underpinned the UN agenda on international development from 2001 to 2015. The MDGs alongside the optimism and momentum of the Make Poverty History Campaign, microfinance and the Fairtrade label defined much of the development work and discourse in the first 15 years of the twenty-first century. Progress was made, child mortality was cut in half and the percentage of people living in extreme poverty in developing countries dropped from 47 per cent in 1990 to 14 per cent in 2015 (UN, 2016). However, whilst purporting to have learnt from, and improve the development agenda since the MDGs, the SDGs are still plagued with problematic westerncentric assumptions.

The MDGs essentially targeted Sub-Saharan African countries and were often critiqued for providing a one-sided, top down transfer of assistance from the Global-North to the Global-South. Since the implementation of the MDGs International development discourse has become more aware of how it can be neo-colonialist, paternalistic and dismissive and this is reflected in the broader, more inclusive focus of the SDGs. For example, in addition to no poverty and zero hunger, the goals address reducing inequality, responsible consumption and production and climate action, issues that affect and originate from countries across both the Global-North and Global-South.

The naming of the goals under the ‘sustainable development’ banner reflects this at a normative level as well. Sustainable development evokes ideas of capacity building rather than dependency, self determination, environmentalism, and a long term, intergenerational outlook. Therefore the SDGs signal a shift at least in understanding, recognising that the Global-North has a responsibility, not only its aid and development work but also at a domestic level to address global issues of inequality, discrimination and environmentalism. Nonetheless with the expansion of globalisation the interrelationship and inter-causality of the issues that the SDGs address becomes even more important.

The MDGs were limited in scope to address very traditional areas of concern within the development and non-government sphere and provided little invitation to civil society, the private sector or public institutions to share in the responsibility or initiatives designed to tackle the issues. The SDGs however have deliberately emphasised the role of the private sector and state bodies. For the private sector this is fairly consistent with new focuses and projects on Corporate Social Responsibility (CSR) and its related counterparts.

It is appropriate that the private sector be included and recognised as potential key contributors to the realisation of the SDGs. This reflects the reality of our globalised world.

Further the SDGs engage a holistic approach that recognises how achieving health, education and a healthy environment relate to each other and how aiming for these things presupposes and can lead to, other development outcomes such as jobs, peace, justice and partnership. However, before this innovative and holistic approach is accepted on its face, the underlying causes and contributors that have prevented the realisation of these outcomes needs to be appreciated. At an oversimplification, hunger and preventable diseases continue to kill not because we do not know how to address them but because we prioritise industry, patents, profits and greed.

There remains an inherent hypocrisy and impossibility in expecting the private sector to help reduce inequality and promote responsible consumption and production. At the most basic level the goals operate within a capitalist mandate. A mandate which supposes that accumulation of wealth for personal gain is a primary good.

How are the companies that predicate their existence on this assumption and their survival on the basis that customers adopt the same practice, expected to redress global inequality?

At a panel discussion on implementing the SDGs in the business sector, hosted at Lund University on November 16 in conjunction with the Swedish Aid Department FUF and the Lund UN chapter, Mats Svensson, International Secretary at IF Metall discussed the landmark industrial trade union agreement achieved with H&M to ensure local enforceable workers rights and conditions. The work of IKEA, H&M and others should be applauded and their practices are deserving of recognition and are certainly a lot better than many competitors, however analysing their application points to the hypocrisy of the goals. If H&M have worked to achieve decent work conditions for the employees in their supply chain, it is partly at the cost of promoting responsible consumption and production.

The thousands of employees that now have ‘good jobs’ are able to do so because of the required mass production that fuels quick product turnover which directly opposes responsible consumption at an individual level. Also at this panel IKEA’s Global Communication Manager of Next Generation Social Entrepreneurs Ann-Sofie Gunnarsson talked about the innovative CSR work done by IKEA. For one project, IKEA invests in training entrepreneurial women in selected rural locations in developing countries to build handicraft businesses and then aims to sell these products in their stores. However good this might be, the impact of the best handicraft initiative is still dwarfed by what could be achieved if IKEA stopped dodging taxes. If the money they cleverly avoid paying in taxes went to the governments of the countries where these initiatives occur, the conditions, infrastructure and accountability needed to achieve ‘development’ for the people targeted in these projects would be allowed to occur at the local level. Yet, achieving tax justice is not addressed by most actors who are apparently on board with the SDGs. One estimate suggests that in 2008 developing countries lost more than USD $160b through two forms of multinational corporate tax dodging, those same countries collectively received USD $120b in aid the following year.

Whilst the inclusion of the private sector in the SDGs is appropriate, for it to have integrity, the private sector needs to realise and address their underlying practices which contribute to the global issues that the SDGs aim to address. If this does not happen, it remains easy to be cynical and consider the work done through CSR to simply be about positive branding.

The legacy of colonialism is once again seen to rear its head through the inclusion of the private sector in the SDGs, whilst western economies were allowed to develop and profit from their histories of exploitation and are only now expected to implement sustainable practice, initiatives and organisations in the Global-South are now subject to these checks from the outset. This is seen in the IKEA handicraft project which ensures that the rural, small-scale businesses they support, are mandated to remain just that, small-scale and rurally based. Thus, the women will now have some income, skills and experience but they are prevented for aiming for the larger profit margins and mass production that allows IKEA to be a globally successful company.

The reality of the world as one plagued with inequality, poverty and suffering cannot and should not be ignored. There will always be dispute and cause for critique about how these problems are being tackled. Nonetheless, the SDGs remain an important, normative and unified agenda for addressing these issues. The inclusion of the private sector allows for greater force and diversity in the approaches adopted to address the SDGs. It is unlikely the 17 goals and 169 subgoals will be achieved by 2030 but just as the SDGs changed to incorporate the lessons learnt from the progress made in the MDGs, so too success may be better measured not in what is achieved but by what is challenged and changed in the process.

Taminka Hanscamp

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Crisis in the Democratic Republic of the Congo

Stuart Cosgrave — Tue, 06 Dec 2016 09:47:19 +0000

The Democratic Republic of the Congo is a country whose past is steeped in violence, conflict, internal strife and an ongoing humanitarian crisis. Throughout its history, this country has gone through numerous changes of name and regime. In recent years, it has become the location of one of the United Nation’s longest ongoing peacekeeping operations. Due to civil wars and natural disasters, over 2 million of the country’s 79 million inhabitants are internally displaced, one of the highest levels of internal displacement worldwide. A recent UN report states that over 180,000 civilians have been displaced between July and September of this year alone. Since 2009, over 60 percent of the people who were forced to abandon their homes were under the age of eighteen. These numbers do not even take into account the Congolese who are living as refugees in neighbouring countries.

As well as displacement of their own population, the DRC hosts 120,000 refugees from its neighbouring countries of the Central African Republic, Rwanda, Burundi and others. In addition to those who are without a permanent place to live, a huge portion of the population is food insecure with some estimates putting the number at seven million. This food insecurity again affects children, with the UN finding that three million children are malnourished in the DRC. This malnutrition crisis, as well as diseases such as measles and cholera, means that the DRC has one of the highest child mortality rates in the world. In 2015, UNICEF estimated that the number of children per 1000 of the population dying under the age of five could be as high as 129, though this number has been decreasing consistently over the last few decades.

The UN operation has received criticism in the past for being too passive in their actions. One such incidence occurred in 2014 where peacekeepers ignored pleas for help from local villagers. The village of Mutarule in DRC’s South Kivu province was attacked and at least 30 civilians were killed. Despite being informed that there were armed assailants attacking the village, the UN forces chose not to take action. Whether the UN’s efforts in the DRC can be viewed as successful is up for debate, but there is certainly no lacking of manpower on the ground. It’s biggest peacekeeping operation by personnel. The UN has 22,498 people stationed in the country as of 2016. As well as the highest number of personnel, the UN’s mission in the DRC also has the highest budget with 1,235,723,100 US Dollars being pledged for use from July 2016 to July 2017. Even, democracy is questioned as a contentious election draws near. Delayed elections coupled with violence across the country, where 34 people were killed by militia this past November in eastern part of the country, it remains to be seen whether or not the crisis will improve in the near future. The question is whether the UN can deliver peace?

Stuart Cosgrave

Photo by CIAT

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