Alternative Editorial: When Will The World Catch Up?
HOW MANY people listening to the news recently have been experiencing the co-incidence of a sense of extreme danger, and a weariness around our ability to do much about it? Whether you are thinking about the opening of new battle fronts in an escalating war in the Middle East, the sharp increase of violent storms bringing fires and floods or the possibility of President Trump back in the White House - it's enough to stop you in your tracks.
Yet the discussion which accompanies it holds nothing comforting in response: none of these issues are new and those on the stage don't seem to be developing the requisite capacity to solve the problems we have been facing for decades. This is not because there are no good responses available - there are many - but because it is not yet in the broader interest of government or the media to do more than preserve the status quo.
Preserving the status quo means maintaining authority at all costs: each political party is more invested in discrediting the oppositional parties than risking their own credibility with a radical solution. Politicians would rather be elected on a manifesto that doesn't rock the boat too much, than jump ship and join those protesting and demanding a viable future.
Mainstream journalists - with a few notable exceptions - would rather reflect and amplify the public emotions, growing their audience, than take the risk of calling out the elephants in the room. They will live and die, content they were part of an industry that reported the facts, never owning up to the facts they ignored.
A good example of this is the interview below with Dr Scilla Elworthy, thrice nominated for a Nobel Peace Prize for her work in conflict zones all over the world. We first met Scilla when, as co-founder of the Oxford Research Group she was sending daily briefs to PM Tony Blair with evidence that Saddam Hussein did not have weapons of mass destruction. More than that, she explained how Blair's misguided accusations were buoying up Saddam's popularity - a good reason for him to play us along.
Not only was she ignored, but her evidence - gathered by workers on the ground through UN and related agencies - was dissapeared by Downing St media, insisting there was no evidence to be discovered. Even if the inflammatory news headlines were wrongly founded, both Blair and Hussein were getting something out of it, as well as the newspapers selling fear each day. Only Scilla and the movement for peace were thinking of the lives at stake.
Fast forward to our situation today. Watching Laura Kuenssberg on the BBC on Sunday (21st Jan) morning tv was alarming. Although her mode was full-alert - reporting on new military operations in Iran and Yemen - she demanded that Secretary of State for Defence, Grant Shapps reveal how much money the government would be spending on improving the UK military capacity and pressed him aggressively on this timetable. Her single-minded insistence on preparing for military action was nothing short of warmongering.
Shapps responded energetically with further danger warnings - China, Russia, Iran, North Korea! - but no credible timetable. Neither Kuenssberg of Shapps acknowledged that the UK army has only been shrinking over the years, not for lack of investment but due to failure to recruit.
In a pattern being echoed across the world, young men are increasingly unlikely to pick up a gun to shoot - or be shot by - a fellow human being on the orders of flawed politicians. There is less and less interest in living as automatons, subjecting the self to override any logic your own mind offers in favour of obeying orders. Even the extremely poor, who used to sign up for a wage and roof over their head, are not lining up to be cannon fodder as much as they once did.
While the missing soldiery and the objectors are still more of a trickle than a flood, the recruiters cannot fix the leak. Knowing that, it's painful to watch Kuenssberg et al demand an outcome that seems both outdated and cruel: why does she insist on war? No doubt some reading will say she - and we - have no choice. We are not the aggressors but the defenders against evil - should we just step aside and let the invaders have their way?
To those who have studied war and peace for much of their lives, this narrow logic is not far from insisting we eat cake because we're hungry and we made a cake for dinner. If you want to assuage your hunger and live longer, don't make a cake for dinner. To contradict Andrew Carnegie in the National Arbitration and Peace Congress of 1907, if you want peace, prepare for peace. Unless, like Carnegie, you are prepared to live with the constant tension (nuclear deterrents, armies on standby) of knowing one false move or a clumsy accident could mean the end of the world.
The alternative is not the same as doing nothing in the face of aggression or pretending that aggression does not exist. Instead, it's the better design of a society that understands aggression and develops cultures and structures that contain it well. Not by threat but through emotional intelligence, the widespread ability to self-regulate and therefore self-organise in the face of dangers of all kinds. Add to that a better distribution of resources to generate security from within communities, not without. Peace is not merely a nice thing to have—it's a structure, a culture, a capacity and an economy.
Going back now to Dr Scilla Elworthy, see below for an introduction to her Business Plan for Peace. You'll note that the interview took place in 2019 - over four years ago - but it's not dated any more than other essays and books she wrote 20 years ago, that hold many of the keys to change. How many more years will go by before a Laura Kuenssberg, faced with organised aggression, insists on hearing from a Grant Shapps: “what is the state of the peace process you're in” - instead of “how much money are you spending on weapons”?
Three Most Effective Ways to Build Peace
Where others would give up because of the sheer scale of the task of building peace and preventing war on a global scale, Elworthy takes a practical and analytical approach.
She combined her experience with thorough research for her book ‘The Business Plan for Peace‘, the title of which alone distances itself from our expected image of peacebuilders.
As well as reviewing 25 different ways of building peace, Elworthy calculates that the cost of preventing conflict would only be $2 billion over 10 years, as opposed to the $1,789 billion spent each year on war.
Of the 25 ways to build peace considered in the book, she considers three of them to be the most urgent methods of preventing conflict:
Firstly, armaments industries must be treated like the fossil fuels sector, which would give investment funds good reasons to divest them from their portfolios.
Secondly, more budget and focus must go into conflict prevention rather than post-conflict resolution, especially to ensure that all NATO countries have a conflict prevention budget in addition to their defence budgets.
In many ways, the third solution is far more fundamental. War and conflict have been very much a male creation and preserve. A critical part of the solution is to enable and ensure that more womengain powerful and senior positions to prevent conflict, as well as to build and create peace.
The Power of Women
Elworthy cites UN figures from 2009 which show that only 2.5% of those involved in peace negotiations were women and that the average length of peace agreements negotiated was five years.
Today, when women account for even 10% of negotiators, peace agreements can last for more than 15 years.
From her experience, Elworthy has spotted the reason.
“Warlords at peace tables are vying for power, resources, money and positions in a future government, while women bring to the table the needs of orphans, the injured, the widows and those with PTSD,” she says.
“This means that the cycle of violence can be broken, and people can move from revenge to rebuilding.”
For more of this interview, go to ByLine Times. And click on the following for more on Dr Scilla Elworthy.
