The Right to Development and the Fight Against Racism

 Excepts of Statement by Bonny Ibhawoh (Chair, United Nations Expert Mechanism on the Right to Development) at the International Dialogue on Promoting and Protecting the Rights of People of African Descent and their communities In Latin America and the Caribbean in the Context of Covid-19: Building Back Better

The United Nations Declaration on the Right to Development with is the foundational document on the Right to Development conceives the right to development as the inalienable human right of everyone to participate in, contribute to, and enjoy economic, social, cultural and political development, in which all human rights and fundamental freedoms can be fully realized. A key theme in the right to development is self-determination and the equitable distribution of the resources of nations and the global community. 

The Right to Development Agenda establishes development as a fundamental right and puts people at the centre of the development process. Development is seen as a comprehensive economic, social, cultural and political process, which aims at the constant improvement of the well-being of the entire population and of all individuals on the basis of their active, free and meaningful participation in development and in the fair distribution of benefits resulting therefrom.

The right to development was first articulated and formulated by representatives from developing countries that had long been subjected to colonial racism, in their demand for a new international economic order which would be more favourable to the development of less developed countries and for the full control by people over their own natural resources. Much of this early was done under the auspices of the Non-Allied Movement at the UN. Afro-descendant people were at the forefront of putting the right to development on the international human rights agenda.

Since the adoption of the Declaration on the Right to Development by the UN General Assembly in 1986, the right to development has become a well-established principle in the international human rights system. The DRTD outlines three levels of state responsibility for the Right to Development a) in national policies within individual state jurisdiction, b) in policies affecting persons outside the state’s jurisdiction c) in global and regional partnerships. 

Since the adoption of the DRTD, efforts have been made at the UN and elsewhere to operationalize the right to development. The right to development has not been recognized at per with other human rights. There remains a tendency to see the right to development as a “subsidiary right”; a “Third World” right.

The good news, however, is that the intergovernmental Working Group on the Right to Development of the UN Human Rights Council continues to explore the content and scope of a legally binding international instrument on the right to development. The goal is to advance the right to development beyond a declaration to a legally enforceable Covenant.

International human rights and systemic racism

I will now comment on the intersection between the right to development and the fight against systemic racism. The intersection between racism and the right to development manifests in all three levels of individual state obligations, extra-territorial jurisdiction, and global partnership. 

Equality, including the right to freedom from discrimination, is at the core of the human rights framework, and included in all human rights instruments. Article 2 of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights provides for equal enjoyment of rights and freedoms “without distinction of any kind, such as race …”. 

Article 20 (2) of the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights prohibits any advocacy of national, racial or religious hatred that constitutes incitement to discrimination, hostility or violence. The International Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Racial Discrimination acknowledges systemic racism and obliges States parties to actively combat racism.  

The Durban Declaration and Programme of Action adopted in 2001,  reasserts the principles of equality and non-discrimination, and assigns primary responsibility for combating racism, racial discrimination, xenophobia and related intolerance to States, as duty bearers, while also calling for active involvement by international and non-governmental organizations, political parties, national human rights institutions, the private sector, the media and civil society. The Durban Declaration recognized that social biases and discrimination prevailing in public and private institutions continued to create barriers for people of African descent, including in the realization of human rights.

Racism and the Right to Development 

These provisions recognize a global reality that racism is not confined to any single region of the world. It is a worldwide phenomenon that requires a worldwide response. On the legal and institutional framework to fight racism, racial discrimination, xenophobia and related intolerance, the Committee on the Elimination of Racial Discrimination ERD has stated that “racial discrimination or the potential for racial discrimination exists in all societies.” 

In relations to persons of African descent, the key historical manifestations of institutional and systemic racism are the slave trade and colonialism. 

The protests against racial injustice that have erupted globally has brought renewed attention to the lingering question of institutionalised racial discrimination and its devastating impact on racialized communities, particularly communities of Afro descendant peoples. The disproportionately high infection and mortality rate of COVID 19 among racial minorities and recent incidents of the excessive use of force towards people of African descent have brought reviewed attention to the lingering problem of racism and the need to prioritise within the international human rights agenda. 

Racism, racial discrimination, and racial injustice are violations of fundamental human rights. Racism is linked to state violence, lack of economic opportunities, poverty, unemployment, and health that all bear directly on the right to development. 

The UN DRD defines development as “an inalienable human right by virtue of which every human person and all peoples are entitled to participate in, contribute to, and enjoy economic, social, cultural and political development, in which all human rights and fundamental freedoms can be fully realized.’ It calls for free and meaningful participation in development and fair distribution of its benefits; and makes equality of opportunity for development ‘a prerogative both of nations and of individuals who make up nations.’ 

Central to the Right to Development agenda is the elimination of historical and systemic obstacles that have impeded development in some regions of the world. As reflected in the preamble of the DRTD, the obstacles to be eliminated include “the massive and flagrant violations of the human rights of the peoples and individuals affected by situations such as those resulting from colonialism, neo-colonialism, apartheid, all forms of racism and racial discrimination, foreign domination and occupation, aggression and threats against national sovereignty, national unity and territorial integrity and threats of war.” 

Article 5 of the DRTD reinforces this point by enjoining states to take resolute steps to eliminate the violations of the human rights of peoples affected by racism and racial discrimination. The elimination of racism is therefore recognized as essential to fulfilling the right to development. 

The Declaration on the Right to Development is one of only a few international human rights instruments that explicitly frames racism and racial discrimination as a violation of universal human rights and a barrier to the enjoyment of human rights by those who face racial discrimination. 

While others several UN human rights prohibit discrimination on the basis of race and other individual and collective identities, the Declaration on the Right to Development explicitly identifies racism and racial discrimination as key obstacles to the enjoyment of fundamental human rights and calls for resolute steps to eliminate racism. 

The EMRTD Study 

Given the centrality of anti-racism to the right to development agenda, the Expert Mechanism on the right to Development (EDRTD) is undertaking a thematic study on the connections between the right to development and the fight against racism. The issue of racism has been a longstanding item on the UN human rights agenda. I note the important role played by the Working Group of Experts on People of African Descent and the Committee on the Elimination of Racial Discrimination (CERD) in putting racism and racial discrimination on the international human rights agenda. 

I also recognize the pivotal role of the World Conferences Against Racism (WCAR) organized by UNESCO to promote struggle against racism ideologies, policies and practices, notably the Durban Conference. The EMRTD is committed to supporting this ongoing work.

The objectives of my Expert Mechanism’s study on Racism are threefold.  

1. The first is to examine systemic and institutional racism as obstacles to fulfilling the non-discrimination, equality of opportunity and fair distribution provisions of the right to development at both national and international levels, that hinders the entitlement of all human persons and peoples to participate in, contribute to and enjoy self-determined development. This includes examining how systemic racism within individual state jurisdictions impede the right to development, for example, by exacerbating poverty and inequality. 

2. The second is to examine systemic and institutional racism as it manifests in policies affecting persons outside the state’s jurisdiction, in the context of the right to development.

3. The third is to examine the obstacles that racism and racial discrimination pose to international cooperation and global partnerships on the right to development. This includes examining how racism and racial prejudice have shaped the debates about the right to development manifesting in the persistent lack of its effective operationalization and recognition at par with other human rights.

Two recent global developments make this study necessary and timely.

The first is the current global movement for racial justice which has called to question historical and contemporary structures of racial discrimination. Across the world, marginalized racialized groups are calling for racial equality, demanding anti-racist interventions from the state, international organizations, and the international community.

The second motivation for this study is the disproportionate impact of the COVID-19 pandemic on racialized communities which has worsened poverty and reduced the quality of life in these communities. In many countries, maps of the pandemic reveal its disproportionate impact on racialized communities economically, socially and in terms of their general wellbeing. 

The recent report of the Working Group of Experts on People of African Descent does an excellent job of analysing the links between systemic racism and COVID-19 pandemic. As the Working Group report states: “Structural racial discrimination exacerbates inequality in access to health care and treatment, leading to racial disparities in health outcomes and increased mortality and morbidity for people of African descent. The COVID-19 pandemic has brought racial disparity and discrimination to the surface in institutions designed to confer justice, equity and redress.” 

The social and economic disruptions of COVID-19 have highlighted the persistence of deep inequalities within and between nations. The United Nations describes it as an explosion of inequality. There is need for urgent and concerted international action to prevent COVID-19 from creating even wider inequalities and exacerbating poverty around the world. These issues can all be addressed through the framework of the right to development.  

As individual states and the international community map out plan on how to distribute COVID-19 vaccines, there is justified concern that racial minority communities will be excluded and marginalized in the distribution of the vaccine. Even though it should be expected that racialized communities  that have been disproportionably affected by the COVID-19 pandemic should be among the first in line to receive the vaccines, we know from the history of pandemics and present day health disparities that racialized communities are at risk of being ignored or relegated to the background in distribution plans. 

Vulnerable racialised minority communities who may not be able to assert political and economic power in COVAX distribution should be given a voice in the distribution plans. Initiatives such as the Access to COVID-19 Tools Accelerator must consider the historical marginalization of racialized communities, particularly people of African descent and the economic and health disparities that they have made them disproportionally vulnerable to the pandemic.

Racism as an obstacle to development has been recognized by other international organizations. The European Commission Action Plan against racism in the European Union issued on 18 September 2020 acknowledges that high levels of inequality arising from racism represent an obstacle to the achievement of Agenda 2030 and the Sustainable Development Goals. 

The Expert Mechanism on the Right to Development is committed to identifying obstacles of systemic racism to the realization of the right to development and to making concrete policy recommendations on how to overcome this obstacle both in the context of individual state jurisdictions and in the context of global cooperation and partnerships. We welcome the cooperation and support of states, academics, practitioners, and civil society organizations in undertaking our work. 

The Right to Development and the Fight Against Racism

12/07/2020 12:38:00 PM human rights, world

Human Rights, Nation-States and the Persistence of Oppressive Privilege in a Divided World

Human Rights, Nation-States and the Persistence of Oppressive Privilege - A commentary on Eric D. Weitz,A world divided: The global struggle for human rights in the age of nation-states, (Princeton, Princeton University Press, 2019). 

Eric Weitz's book A World Divided offers a compelling history of the global struggle for human rights in the age of nation-states. Eric Weitz presents insightful stories of travelers, scholars, activists and statesmen who fashioned empires into nation-states from the late eighteenth century to the present period. These are stories of rights ideas and struggles at defining moments in nation-state foundings and formations. Overall, it is a narrative of the paradox of human rights, celebrating its triumphs and critiquing its failures. 

My commentary focuses on two themes that emerge from the book. The first is the question of human rights ontology; not necessarily the definition of human rights, but the varied contextual meanings of human rights and the relationships between them. I am interested in how Weitz deploys human rights as an analytical lens for his historical reconstructions. 

Like the concept of globalization, the notion of “human rights” provides historians with fresh analytic lens for creative reinterpretations of the past. With this new lens, familiar stories of human struggles, political crises and social upheavals can be re-told in ways that further illuminate our understanding of these histories. 

The doctrine of human rights has become the dominant language for public good in our world. It has become the language of choice for making and contesting entitlement claims, spawning a global human rights revolution – a revolution of norms and values that has redefined our understanding of ethics and justice.  So, the question inevitably arises: given the discursive power of human rights today, how much of the history that we see through human rights lens is an illumination of the past as it was, and how much of that history is a projection from the lens itself? 

The second theme of my commentary is the persistence of oppressive privilege. Like all histories, A Divided World is a narrative of changes and continuities – changes in the expansion of citizenship rights in emergent nations-states, and continuities of systems of oppression and exclusion. In between the lines of Weitz’s narrative of human rights struggles, we can also find histories of oppressive privileges of all sorts – white privilege, Christian privilege, ethno-cultural privilege, intellectual and epistemological privilege, and perhaps, the most enduring of all, male privilege. 

If the grand narrative of A World Divided is the complicated and paradoxical history of human rights, its sub-narrative is the equally complicated history of the persistence of oppressive privilege. Oppressive privilege has shaped the history human rights over the past two centuries. To fully appreciate Weitz’s grand human rights narrative, therefore, we must pay attention to the sub-narrative of oppressive privilege. 

The Ontology of Human Rights

The historical ontology of human rights - understood broadly as the interconnected socio-political processes by which human rights ideas have emerged - is evident throughout A Divided World.   The compelling cases in the book show the contradictions and partiality of human rights advances when built around national citizenship. 

Exclusion and inclusion, rights protection and violations, Weitz argues, have defined the emergence of the nation-state. “The contradictions are blatant and cannot be easily recovered resolved or wished away… They are irresolvable and an intrinsic part of the human rights system based on nation-state citizenship.”  

While historical reinterpretation using human rights lens can illuminate our understanding of the past, there is always the risk of overexposure. Here, photography offers a useful metaphor. In the hands of the historian, the human rights lens is most effective when it is neither underexposed nor overexposed. When underexposed, the story is deficient because the complex histories of rights ideas and struggles are insufficiently illuminated. 

Too little of the “light” that human rights have reflected on human events is recorded. When overexposed, however, the narrative becomes distorted. Too much of today’s human rights sensibilities is projected into interpretations of historical ideas and events. As in photography, therefore, effectively deploying the human rights lens for historical reconstruction requires the correct amount of exposure. 

Historians are often reminded to avoid foisting their own problem definitions on the people and societies they study. Historians should leave open the possibility that the historical actors they write about might have considered themselves part of a different drama than the one the historian imagines. 

In the context of A Word Divided, this raises a crucial question: Did eighteenth century Western travelers, who explicitly excluded Indians and Blacks from rights bearing citizenship, think of human rights in ways even remotely resembling contemporary conceptions of human rights? Weitz clarifies that the historical actors he writes about had a partial understanding of human rights, one that availed only certain categories of people defined by race, religion, ethnicity, gender and other identity markers. 

Weitz largely succeeds in the delicate task of reinterpreting familiar histories of nation-state formation through human rights lens in ways that appear “correctly exposed” – neither underexposed nor overexposed. However, he does not tell us what type of human rights lens he has used. Although he argues that the nation-state and human rights have played a central role in the making of our global world, he does not offer a definitive answer to the question of the meaning of human rights.  

Rather, he takes “an open ended, capacious, and practical approach to the disputes regarding the philosophy and history of human rights.”  Anticipating critics, Weitz states that some will dispute that the cases he recounts have anything to do with human rights. “They would say that these examples and thousands of others we could summon are too fragmentary and episodic to constitute a full blown program of human rights.”  

Even though he concedes that we need some distinctions, he rejects this argument, opting for a more fluid understanding of human rights.  On this, I agree with Weitz. The essentialist definitions of human rights preferred by those who see human rights as a uniquely twentieth century phenomenon disconnected from earlier notions of rights, limits our understanding of how rights ideas and struggles have shaped our world. A less rigid notion of human rights allows for better understanding of the deep and complex history and politics of human rights.

Still, the debate about human rights ontology remains integral to histories of human rights. Making histories of pre-twentieth century human rights struggles intelligible to twenty-first century audiences demands some definitional parameters. Weitz acknowledges that as the circle of rights bearing citizens has expanded, so has the meaning of these rights. Therefore, in order to fully understand the historical development of human rights, we first “need to see just how radical a break is our own modern world from the preceding millennia marked by empires; small, regional forms of governance; and tribes and clans - all of them built systems of inequality and non-recognition at least in terms of rights of other individuals.”  

Indeed, only since 1945 has the emergence of international human rights offered in model of universal rights beyond the nation-states. While we might debate whether this late model of universal human rights constitutes the defining essence of human rights, most commentators agree that it provides the ontological reference point for our understanding of human rights. 

The universalist human rights model that emerged in the aftermath World War II, and in the context of the United Nations, was a response to the limitations of nation-state-based citizenship rights. The holocaust and other war-time atrocities showed that states could not be trusted to protect the rights of citizens and subjects. The adoption of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights marked the international recognition of certain fundamental and inalienable rights and freedoms to which all humans are entitled simply by virtue of their humanity, and not because they are citizens of the nations. 

The hope was that universal human rights would be the antidote to the partiality and contradictions of nation-state-based citizenship rights regimes. This promise has, of course, not been fully materialized. However, it provides a powerful reference point for understanding histories of rights struggles in the era of empires and emergent nations states. 

Oppressive Privilege

Scholars have long drawn attention to the inequities and injustices wrought on societies by systems of oppressive privilege. In his influential 1891 land reform treatise titled The Birthright of Man, the Scottish classicist William Ogilvie described “landlordism” and aristocratic land monopolies as a “most oppressive privilege, by the operation of which the happiness of mankind has been for ages invaded and restrained, more than by all the tyrannies of kings, the imposture of priests, and the chicane of lawyers, taken together...” A few men, he lamented, “were permitted to engross a most oppressive privilege - the exclusive rights to the immovable value of soil.” 

Later political theorist have shown how the preservation of oppressive privilege in the face of popular pressure for egalitarian measures, provides the principal motivation for the separation between the public political realms with citizenship rights and a private non-political one with limited rights protection.  

If citizenship rights in the eighteenth and nineteenth century contexts that Weitz discusses were so restrictive and premised on the exclusion and subordination of others, do they really fit within the ontology of human rights? True, rights may bestow privileges, but oppressive privileges (embodied, ascribed or acquired), reinforced by power, is the very antithesis of human rights. 

Oppressive privilege bestows benefits, immunities or exemptions on persons or restricted group of persons, to the exclusion of others, and at the expense of the rights of others. As Weitz notes, the establishment and expansion of human rights have never been pure and straight. The paradoxes of human rights manifest in the patterns of inclusions and exclusions that accompanied nation-states and the establishment citizenship-based rights regimes.  

Human rights are typically framed as claims against the authorial power of states; yet human rights have historically been mediated by hierarchies of power and privilege. A Divided World offers many examples of this. In his discussion of Indian removals in America, Weitz notes that the vision of the nation-state as the preserve of one race meant that Euro-American whites would be able to enjoy the full complement of rights available at the time, while indigenous people will be pushed to the margins.  

White privilege was founded on what Weitz describes as the “racial international” - a racialized way of thinking about human diversity that transcended national borders. Nineteenth century Western statesmen and writers drew on Darwin’s ideas on biological evolution and the “survival of the fittest” to promote an agenda of scientific racism that affirmed the embodied privileges of some, with devastating consequences for others. The nation-state, defined in racial terms, would mark the “the most exclusionary and potentially deadly form of categorizing populations” as Weitz shows in the cases of United States, Brazil, Namibia, and Rwanda and Burundi.  

Discourses and practices of citizenship rights in these historical contexts also then become discourses and practices of privilege - white privilege, Christian privilege, varied forms of ethno-cultural privileges, ethnic privilege, religious privilege, male privilege and elite privilege. 

To understand the paradoxes of human rights, we must first understand the ways in which oppressive privilege determined patterns of rights inclusion and exclusion. For example, the persistence of embodied privilege partly explains why nineteenth century British liberal reformists could condemn the contemptuous way English imperialists treated the Indians while at the same time advancing arguments of Indian intellectual and cultural inferiority that sustained such contemptuous treatment.   

In the increasingly cosmopolitan world of the eighteenth and nineteenth century, Western military, technological and governmental superiority came with immense power and privileges for those within the circle of a particular race, religion, culture and ideology. This would shape the pace and patterns of rights inclusion and exclusion in the era of declining empires and emergent nation-states. Privileged ideas about the hierarchy of races, cultures and civilizations influenced the organization of states and determined who could be entitled to right-bearing citizenship, when and how.

Weitz provides an insightful example of the power of this kind of privilege in the writings of Lord Byron and the English Philhellenes who supported the Greek revolution against Ottoman rule. The Philhellenes justified the exclusion of Muslims from the Greek state on grounds of what they saw as Greek subjection under Ottoman “barbarity.” Byron called on the Great Powers to rescue the Greeks from bondage and destruction while ignoring the atrocities committed by Greeks against Muslims. 

For all their humanitarian sensibilities, Byron and other Philhellenes “could not surmount the political contradictions of their positions.” They were in love with Greece, and it was a Greek state that they wanted, one in which other populations, most notably Muslims and Jews, would be rendered invisible.  

Why couldn’t Bryon and other Philhellenes of his time surmount the political contradictions of their positions? Partly, I would argue, because of the persistence of oppressive privilege – in this case, ethno-religious privilege. Philhellenes like Bryon campaigned for the Greek cause by arousing European consciences; but they also invoked the specter of the loss of Christian dominance and privilege. 

Could Europeans stand by and allow fellow Christians to be subdued? In Russia, pan-Slavists and an emergent public sphere exercised similar pressure on the tsarist government to aid fellow Orthodox Christians.  This was as much a cause to uphold Christian ascendancy and privileges as it was a cause for liberty. The Greek revolt would ultimately succeed only with European help, rendered in the name of Christian liberties. 

It did not matter that the rights claimed by Greek nationalists were limited to men who adhered to the Greek Orthodox religion. However, as Weitz notes, these rights were not static. Especially after 1945, they broadened significantly and expanded progressively. But to understand the pace and patterns of rights expansion and contraction, we must pay attention to the tenacity of oppressive privilege.

The persistence of oppressive privilege also explains the paradox of human rights in the case of Indian removals in the United States. Once indigenous nations were defeated, and Minnesota and the Dakotas were incorporated as federal states, US politicians contemplated the legal and political status of Indians. Did the Fourteenth amendment equal protection clause apply to these newly subjugated people? Were Indians to be accorded citizen rights as individuals or as collectives?  The court decisions that addressed these questions struggled with balancing the liberal promise of citizenship rights with entrenched white privilege. 

As Weitz shows, these court decisions affirmed Indian collective land rights but only to the extent that they did not impinge on the embodied, ascribed and acquired privileges of white settler population. Indians, the courts held, had rights of occupancy, not of absolute title. So long as they haunted, fished and farmed on areas clearly delineated theirs following conquest, and so long as they had not ceded land to whites through treaties, Indians possessed their land. But the absolute ultimate title lay with the “discoverer,” the Europeans and their descendants who had come from distant shores.  

In effect, the extent of Indian rights was contingent on what white privilege would accommodate. As Weitz notes, the Euro-Americans who settled in Minnesota quickly “assumed all the rights, privileges, and protections that the American nation-state had to offer. If newly arrived from Europe, they only had to declare their intent to become citizens and they could vote, speak out, and find redress in the courts.”  

The devastating power of oppressive privilege to subjugate and disenfranchise is perhaps most evident in the case of Brazil. Nineteenth century Brazilian statesmen who lauded the mixing of races, did so only because they believed it would eventually whiten the entire population and lead to the elimination of blacks as a group. 

The extinction of the black race in Brazil was the primary motivation for seemingly liberal attitudes toward miscegenation. Even though Brazilian racists did not believe that race mixing led to the degeneration of the race, (unlike most European and North American intellectual racists of their day), they shared a common goal of maintaining white ascendency and privilege – one group, by segregation, the other by strategic dilution. In all cases, the belief in black inferiority, strengthened by so-called racial science, furthered the ideology of white supremacy and its associated privileges.

Conclusion

The stories that Weitz tells in A World Divided are as much about the tenacity of oppressive privilege as there about human rights and the foundings of nation-states. The logic of the nation-state that emerges and prevailed after World War I was founded on expansions and constrictions of citizenship rights in patterns mediated by oppressive privilege. 

As Weitz concludes from his cases, “The nation-state granted Orthodox Christians in Greece, Euro-Americans in the United States, light skinned males in Brazil the privileges and responsibilities that came with rights. They possessed the benefits of full citizenship, including security of property and persons and the ability to participate politically, that human rights offer. For those who did not fit determinant category, it was a different matter, even more so with the rise of the explicit category of minority.”  

To be sure, since the mid-twentieth century the circle of human rights has extended beyond propertied white men, as was largely the case in the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. Universal human rights now specifically encompass several previously excluded groups – children, persons with disability, asylum seekers, indigenous people, stateless persons, and more broadly, women. 

However, as we see in the global rise of xenophobic populism, exclusionary nationalism, growing economic inequalities, and the proliferation of toxic forms of digital communication that reinforce prejudice, oppressive privilege continues to constrain human rights. Contemporary debates about the prioritisation of human rights centre on questions of power and privilege. Why have certain human rights agendas gained prominence and visibility over others despite the rhetoric of the indivisibility of human rights? 

Even the dominant generations of human rights ordering where first generation individual-centred civil and political rights precede second generation economic and social, and third generation collective solidarity rights, are steeped in histories of power and oppressive privilege. Power and privilege continue to mediate human rights doctrine, raising fundamental questions about its normative objectivity. 

This partly explains why the bulk of the cases before the International Criminal Court (ICC) have originated in weak African states and why, as Weitz opines, it is unlikely that any of the Great Powers will ever be hauled before the court for human rights violations.  Thus, as in the eighteenth century, the reach of the ICC is contingent on what Great Power privileges will allow.

A World Divided captures the contradictions of human rights and the processes of inclusion and exclusion as the circle of human rights expanded with the emergence of nation-state settings. However, explaining these contradictions remains an ongoing task. We need to better understand how historical and contemporary systems of oppressive privilege engender the many paradoxes of human rights so vividly captured in this book.

(This commentary first appeared as a book review in the Journal of Genocide Research)

Human Rights, Nation-States and the Persistence of Oppressive Privilege in a Divided World

9/06/2020 05:57:00 PM history, human rights, world

"Dad, what did you do for racial justice?"

Years from now, kids will ask their parents, "Dad, what side were you on during the great protest for racial justice of 2020?" Can you look them in the eye and say "On the side of justice," or will it be "I took no position"?

"Dad, what did you do for racial justice?"

5/31/2020 01:19:00 PM human rights, reflections, world

After Pandemic: Imagining a post-Covid-19 World

Amidst the current COVID-19 pandemic, I asked my friend, colleague and the most versatile historian I know, Dr. John Weaver, to reflect on what we can learn from history about the aftermath of the current pandemic. Here’s his insightful take.

After Pandemic: Imagining a post-Covid-19 World

John Weaver

As a way of thinking about a Plan B, I’d begin with an unremittingly pessimistic assessment of what could happen after the pandemic passes.  After other pandemics and plagues, there were swift economic recoveries because individual and government debt loads were small or there were even savings and state surpluses.  Neither is the case now.

The effects of the quantitative easing from 2008 are still evident in the form government debts (fiscal imbalance) and now governments in charge of major economies are shooting the works to cushion full the socio-economic impact of social distancing.  Admirable actions, though I’ve heard officials admit that they have no idea where this will lead.  They are not proceeding with targeted expenditures on infrastructure but channelling to support employees and employees.  This all seem sensible or at least the best policy choice when there are no good choices.

For historical precedents, which are probably a worse source of informing current policy than digging deeply into how the world economy currently functions (correcting yesterday’s problems in a dynamic environment is unwise), maybe the best flawed model we have is post-WWI.  In terms of debt and potential for trade imbalances, the situations seem similar.

Central banks then did not fully fund their governments’ debts (except for the UK which financed the war with bonds and taxes).  Most belligerents printed money, leading to post-war inflation.  Currently, central banks in some major economies are desperately trying to find assets to enable liquidity and to avoid merely printing money without something to show for it: they are buying government debt (bonds) and likely will soon accept corporate assets (maybe are already). 

Not only do they have to do this to fund the new government spending programmes , but my reading of some news suggests that a few overseas commercial banks have their backs to the wall and need injections of funds from the lenders of last resort (central banks).  They have their backs to the wall because employers and general populace are tapping into lines of credit and savings rates are low.   The banks are running out of capital.  Commercial banks are squeezed and where they are already weak, they may fall over.  Canada’s system is more robust.  Let’s hope so.

After WWI, the crises rippled on and on from one emergency and international Band-Aid to another; many remedies were quite creative.  We might experience some of the 1920s troubles: inflation, especially in assets, and trade protectionism.  The hidden inflation is what we have had since 2008: housing and stocks rising as ‘money’ seeks safe havens.  But unlike the 1920s, there are deflationary pressures now as well  Commodity prices will tumble (oil already) and countries with over-valued fixed exchange rates will not be able to defend their currency and will have to devalue deeply in order to compete in export markets.

Some countries may try rationing imports to reduce the damage to their balance of payments.  Whatever route is taken, a deflationary cycle will spiral downward.  Instead of a decade-long 1920s style period of crisis ours will come on fast and go through a series of emergencies almost concurrently, and they will be asymmetrical in terms of countries and regions.  The daily news will be packed with bank failures, governments defaulting on their debts (with pension fund consequences), and governments lacking residual fiscal firepower.

Taxes will have to be increased and social justice will properly require wealth taxes; however, this additional tax-take will not make up for the loss of revenue from an economic slow down or even marking time.  Widespread national defaults are probably out of the question.  Therefore, combined with tax increases, there will be expenditure cuts, probably more fully reflected in personnel and wages than in direct expenditure programmes.

I won’t go into what my suicide research would imply, except to say I would have little faith in prevention initiatives apart from our own individual care for others. 

Plan B?  No one policy answer.  Muddle on.  Keep the memory alive so that several decades from now, things might be refashioned.  On the health front, reform may have been achieved by then.  But the economic inter-dependency asymmetries and wasted resources through conflict will not have been. History is poor guide to policy, but perhaps not to attitude.       

After Pandemic: Imagining a post-Covid-19 World

4/03/2020 02:36:00 PM history, reflections, world

Is Democracy in Crisis?

A panel of scholars discuss the crisis of democratic politics, the possibilities of democratic innovations and the future of politics

• Leonardo Avritzer, Professor of Political Science at Federal University of Minas Gerais, Brazil
• Selen Ercan, Associate Professor of Politics, Centre for Deliberative Democracy and Global Governance, University of Canberra, Australia
• Archon Fung, Winthrop Laflin McCormack Professor of Citizenship and Self-Government, Harvard University, USA
• Bonny Ibhawoh, Professor of History, and Centre for Peace Studies, McMaster University, Canada
• Melissa Williams, Professor of Political Science, University of Toronto, Canada
• Moderator: Professor John Gaventa, Institute of Development Studies, University of Sussex, UK

Is Democracy in Crisis?

6/14/2019 11:22:00 AM human rights, politics, world

Do truth and reconciliation commissions heal divided nations?

My op-ed in the National Post on Truth Commissions as mechanisms for addressing historical injustices, bringing justice to victims of human rights abuses, and reconciling divided nations. 

National Post
The Conversation 

As long as unresolved historic injustices continue to fester in the world, there will be a demand for truth commissions.

Unfortunately, there is no end to the need.

The goal of a truth commission — in some forms also called a truth and reconciliation commission, as it is in Canada — is to hold public hearings to establish the scale and impact of a past injustice, typically involving wide-scale human rights abuses, and make it part of the permanent, unassailable public record. Truth commissions also officially recognize victims and perpetrators in an effort to move beyond the painful past.

Over the past three decades, more than 40 countries have, like Canada, established truth commissions, including Chile, Ecuador, Ghana, Guatemala, Kenya, Liberia, Morocco, Philippines, Rwanda, Sierra Leone, South Africa and South Korea. The hope has been that restorative justice would provide greater healing than the retributive justice modelled most memorably by the Nuremberg Trials after the Second World War.

There has been a range in the effectiveness of commissions designed to resolve injustices in African and Latin American countries, typically held as those countries made transitions from civil war, colonialism or authoritarian rule.

Most recently, Canada’s Truth and Reconciliation Commission addressed historic injustices perpetrated against Canada’s Indigenous peoples through forced assimilation and other 

Its effectiveness is still being measured, with a list of 94 calls to action waiting to be fully implemented. But Canada’s experience appears to have been at least productive enough to inspire Australia and New Zealand  to come to terms with their own treatment of Indigenous peoples by exploring similar processes.

Although both countries have a long history to trying to reconcile with native peoples, recent discussions have leaned toward a Canadian-style TRC model.

South Africa set the standard

There had been other truth commissions in the 1980s and early 1990s, including Chilé’s post-Pinochet reckoning.

But the most recognizable standard became South Africa’s, when President Nelson Mandela mandated a painful and necessary Truth and Reconciliation Commission to resolve the scornful legacy of apartheid, the racist and repressive policy that had driven the African National Congress, including Mandela, to fight for reform. Their efforts resulted in widespread violence and Mandela’s own 27-year imprisonment.

Through South Africa’s publicly televised TRC proceedings, white perpetrators were required to come face-to-face with the Black families they had victimized physically, socially and economically.

There were critics, to be sure, on both sides. Some called it the “Kleenex Commission” for the emotional hearings they saw as going easy on some perpetrators who were granted amnesty after demonstrating public contrition.

Others felt it fell short of its promise — benefiting the new government by legitimizing Mandela’s ANC and letting perpetrators off the hook by allowing so many go without punishment, and failing victims who never saw adequate compensation or true justice.

Saving humanity from ‘hell’

Dag Hammarskjöld, the secretary general of the United Nations through most of the 1950s who faced criticism about the limitations of the UN, once said the UN was “not created to take mankind to heaven, but to save humanity from hell.”

Similarly, South Africa’s Truth and Reconciliation Commission was not designed to take South Africa to some idyllic utopia. After a century of colonialism and apartheid, that would not have been realistic. It was designed to save South Africa, then a nuclear power, from an implosion — one that many feared would trigger a wider international war.

To the extent that the commission saved South Africa from hell, I think it was successful. Is it a low benchmark? Perhaps, but it did its work.

Since then, other truth commissions, whether they have included reconciliation or reparation mandates, have generated varying results.

Some have been used cynically as tools for governments to legitimize themselves by pretending they have dealt with painful history when they have only kicked the can down the road.

In Liberia, where I worked with a team of researchers last summer, the records of that country’s truth and reconciliation commission are not even readily available to the public. That secrecy robs Liberia of what should be the most essential benefit of confronting past injustices: permanent, public memorialization that inoculates the future against the mistakes of the past.

U.S. needs truth commission

On balance, the truth commission stands as an important tool that can and should be used around the world.

It’s painfully apparent that the United States needs a national truth commission of some kind to address hundreds of years of injustice suffered by Black Americans. There, centuries of enslavement, state-sponsored racism, denial of civil rights and ongoing economic and social disparity have yet to be addressed.

Like many, I don’t hold out hope that a U.S. commission will be established any time soon – especially not under the current administration. But I do think one is inevitable at some point, better sooner than later.

Wherever there is an ugly, unresolved injustice pulling at the fabric of a society, there is an opportunity to haul it out in public and deal with it through a truth commission.

Still, there is not yet any central body or facility that researchers, political leaders or other advocates can turn to for guidance, information and evidence. Such an entity would help them understand and compare how past commissions have worked — or failed to work — and create better outcomes for future commissions.

As the movement to expose, understand and resolve historical injustices grows, it would seem that Canada, a stable democracy with its own sorrowed history and its interest in global human rights, would make an excellent place to establish such a centre.

Do truth and reconciliation commissions heal divided nations?

1/29/2019 12:24:00 AM war and peace, world

“WILL THERE EVER BE PERMANENT PEACE AND EQUALITY IN THE WORLD?”

http://alumni.mcmaster.ca/s/1439/17/interior.aspx?sid=1439&gid=1&pgid=7514  “WILL THERE EVER BE PERMANENT PEACE AND EQUALITY IN THE WORLD?”

A frequently asked question: “WILL THERE EVER BE PERMANENT PEACE AND EQUALITY IN THE WORLD?” Yes, I think there can be “more” world peace. The emphasis is of course on “more” because peace is never absolute. Conflict is a part of human life and human nature. The realistic goal is to be able to transform conflict situations peacefully and build cultures of peace that will reduce the scale and frequency of human conflicts. In Peace Studies, we talk about levels of global peacefulness and “peacelessness.” The Institute for Economics and Peace, a policy think-tank, issues an annual Global Peace Index (GPI) that uses a variety of indicators to score and rank peacefulness in 162 countries around the world. In its latest report, the Institute stated that while the overall number of wars being waged around the world is declining, the world has become much less peaceful. Although overall conflicts between nations are becoming less frequent, global peacefulness has been falling for the past seven years. Over 500 million people currently live in countries at risk for further declines in peacefulness in the short-term. So, how can wars and peace decline at the same time? How can we have fewer wars, yet less peace? This is because large-scale armed conflicts are longer the preserve of national armies and sovereign powers. Non-state actors increasing have the capacity to engage in armed conflict thereby reducing overall peacefulness around the world. This takes the forms of domestic terrorism, insurgencies, rebellions, revolts and uprisings. We have fewer wars and less peace today because conflict has become democratized. Democratic civic action and peace advocacy can also be the antidote. With fewer wars, we can have more world peace. But this requires concerted citizen action to put pressure on governments to avoid wars, and to build cultures of peace and tolerance within our respective communities. The civil rights movement of the 1960s, the anti-Vietnam War movement of the 1970s and the anti-nuclear movement of the 1980s and ‘90s, provide the clearest examples of the power of ordinary citizens to bring about a more just and peaceful world.

This week’s answer is provided by Dr. Bonny Ibhawoh, the director of McMaster’s Centre for Peace Studies. Dr. Ibhawoh’s research focuses on global human rights, peace and conflict studies and legal and imperial history. He is currently studying global truth and reconciliation commissions.

“WILL THERE EVER BE PERMANENT PEACE AND EQUALITY IN THE WORLD?”

1/20/2019 12:07:00 AM war and peace, world

The Dawn of a Post-Human Rights World?

With all the talk about alternative facts and fake news, it is perhaps time to ponder whether the global rise of reactionary populism – from Brexit to Trump – signals the dawn of the end of human rights. The indications are that we are not simply heading towards a “post-truth” era, we might also be headings towards a post-human right world.

When British Tory politicians introduced a bill in 2014 to allow British Judges ignore rulings from the European Court of Human Rights, the British tabloids hailed the move as “The End of Human Rights Farce" and the “end of the Human Rights madness.” Although born out of anxieties over national sovereignty and the European Court's perceived judicial overreach, these headlines speak to a growing cynicism about the value of human rights doctrine in our world today.

The alarm bells have already been raised by those who should know. The BBC reports that in Geneva, home to the UN Human Rights Office, the UN Refugee Agency, and the International Committee of the Red Cross (ICRC), the guardian of the Geneva Conventions on international humanitarian law, there is talk of a 'post human rights' world.

In my forthcoming book on Human Rights in Africa (Cambridge University Press), I argue that the adoption of the United Nations Universal Declaration of Human Rights in 1948 ushered in a tentative global human rights revolution. The post-World War II international human rights order held three distinct, yet related revolutionary promises. It held the promise of a revolution of self-determination, a revolution of democracy and a revolution of equality.

If the granting of independence to formerly colonized nations of Asia and Africa in the 1950s and 60s, marked the triumph of the revolution of self-determination, the post-colonial and post-Cold War global order has failed to materialize the revolutions of democracy and equality.

Across the world, the tentative gains of the human rights revolution are being gradually eroded. With an increasing number of states seemingly reluctant to honor international human rights treaties or fulfil domestic rights obligations, we may indeed be heading towards a post-human rights world characterized by repudiations of established human rights norms and the roll back of international humanitarian law.

The clearest indication of this trend is the global rise of reactionary populism, xenophobia and the growing tolerance of torture. Countries in both the West and the Global South are increasingly reluctant to uphold their commitments to refugee protection and the humanitarian conduct of war under international human rights treaties. Another example is the growing list of countries that have opted to withdraw support for international human rights institutions, such as the International Criminal Court.

The human rights genie, it seems, is being put back in the bottle. These existential challenges to human rights signal the specter of a post-human rights world, and invite serious reflections on old questions about the relevance and legitimacy of universal human rights.

The Dawn of a Post-Human Rights World?

2/20/2017 01:13:00 PM human rights, reflections, world

How Should we Respond to Terrorism?

Recent terrorist attacks in Paris and Belgium have prompted questions about how ordinary citizens should respond to terrorism. Fear, anger, anxiety? I recently received an e-mail from a former student asking precisely this question. I have posted our redacted exchange below with her permission.

Good evening Dr. Ibhawoh,

My name is XXX and I was part of the ARTSCI 1C06 Inquiry class that you taught last year along with Dr. XXX.

I was recently prompted by a family member to sign an online petition to "Stop resettling 25,000 Syrian refugees in Canada" and was very deeply unsettled upon reading the petition goals and justification. The recent attacks in Paris have also set the internet up in flames and I find myself at a loss as to how to respond rationally to widespread fear, as petitions like this gain over 20 thousand signatures.

I realize this is quite unconventional but I was wondering if you could direct me to any reliable resources/individuals/organizations that might help me try and start to understand the complexity of the refugee crisis? I am quite upset by some of the reactionary actions that people have taken and feel altogether disoriented as to how to proceed to discuss these very important problems.

I would very much appreciate any guidance you can provide.

Sincerely,
XXX

MY RESPONSE

Hello XXX

The terrorist attacks in Paris (and Belgium) are heartbreaking but they are not isolated events. There have also been recent similar mass terrorist attacks in many other counties - Turkey, Lebanon, Pakistan, Nigeria, Malaysia, Burkina Faso, Ivory Coast, the list goes on. Russian and Somalian aircrafts have also been subject to terrorist attacks. Terrorism is a global problem that requires a global solution. How does the world respond to these mindless attacks on civilians? Here is what I think.

First, we should condemn them and stand firmly against all forms of terrorism. In an age of terror, we must also be vigilant and proactive about stopping those who seek to inflict pain and suffering on innocent people in the name of ideology or religion. On this question, there can be no sitting on the fence.

The other instinctive response is to take a hard line against all migrants and refugees from Syria and other conflicted countries. However, it is important to remember that most of these refugees are themselves victims of these atrocities. An estimated 250,000 people have been killed since the start of the Syrian conflict. A vast majority of these have been Muslims who dared to disagree with the extremist Islamist jihadists. Many of them are also women and children who have lost their husbands/fathers in the war.

Refugees from war affected regions must be carefully screened to ensure that those seeking asylum are legitimate refugees and not terrorists trying to sneak in. But we cannot shut the door on everyone who needs help, especially the children. One of the themes we discussed in our Global Challenges class is the fallacy of judging individuals by stereotypes. Rather we should strive to "fracture simplistic binaries."

We need to be careful about who we let in but we cannot and should not turn our backs on legitimate Syrian refugees. Canada has historically been a place of refugees for those fleeing wars and famine such as the Irish, Poles and Ukrainians. We have an obligation to continue with this noble tradition which has saved so many lives in the past and served our nation well.

If you would like to know more about these matters, I would suggest you subscribe to the mailing list of human rights organizations such as Amnesty International and Human Rights Watch mailing list. AI and HRW have human rights expert and researchers who think through these matters carefully before taking a position.

Best wishes

  

BI

How Should we Respond to Terrorism?

3/22/2016 12:13:00 PM war and peace, world

A Case for Pragmatic Pacifism

 

I have been thinking a lot about pacifism lately. In the decades since the anti-war peace movements of the 1960s and 70s, peacemaking has come to be seen as synonymous with absolute pacifism or what some describe as anarchic pacifism. Absolute pacism is the opposition to violence under any circumstance even in defense of self and others. For religious and moral reasons there will always be those who subscribe to absolute pacifism and oppose any form of violence; those who believe that war should never be conducted, even in the justified pursuit of peace. For the absolute pacifists, there can be no moral grounds which can justify resorting to war.

For the absolute pacifists who subscribes to the unconditional rejection of all forms of warfare, there are no just wars; all wars are unjust. This moral position will continue to have a place even in a dangerously conflicted world. When people think about peace movements, they invariably think about absolute pacifists and it becomes easy to dismiss the movement as idealist and utopian, even irrational, offering no real world solutions.

But pacifism covers a spectrum of views. At its most basic level, pacifism is the opposition to war and violence. In a complex and conflicted world such as ours, strategies for peacemaking need not be limited to absolute pacifism. There is a place for pragmatic pacifism.

Many of today’s pacifists are what can be described a pragmatic pacifists who subscribe to Just War theory. Pragmatic pacifists believe that domestic and international disputes can and should be resolved peacefully. If institutions of the military and instruments war must be used, they should be used as a last resort and only in defense of self and others. They reject the use of physical violence to obtain political, economic or social goals.

The pragmatic pacifist believes that if the foe is willing to egregiously hurt others, then it is justified to respond with force. True, some believe that those who subscribe to any use of force are really not pacifists at all, but that is a matter for debate.

I would suggest that peacemaking in today’s conflicted world requires a pragmatic pacifism. Within pragmatic pacifism there is room for humanitarian intervention. The foundational premise of the post-Second World war universal human rights regime, drawn from the lessons of the Holocaust, is that we can no longer allow the excuse of state sovereignty to be used to justify gross human rights violations.

No longer can oppressive dictatorships be allowed to massacre their citizens on the perverted argument that posits: “These are our own people, we can do with then whatever we want.” Universal human rights is the right to meddle in the business of other nations. Backed by the provisions of the UN Charter, the Universal Declaration of Human Rights and the emerging doctrine of the Responsibility to Protect (R2P), the international community now has an obligation and the legal framework to intervene to protect victims of gross human rights violations wherever they may be.

Within these international legal frameworks, UN Peacekeeping missions involved in humanitarian interventions in conflict situations have the mandate to stop hostilities, protect civilians, restore order and enforce peace. Only when law, order and security are restored (sometimes through the use of force) can peacebuilding initiatives be put in place.

It is true that the principle of humanitarian intervention can and has been politicized, sometimes used as an pretext in big power politics to undermine the sovereignty and territorial integrity of less powerful states. But we have also seen military humanitarian intervention put to good use such as the case of NATO intervention in Kosovo and Bosnia Herzegovina in the late 1990s which stopped ethnic cleansing and an impeding genocide.

One of the great tragedies of the Rwandan Genocide was that Roméo Dallaire, the Canadian General who led the UN peacekeeping force in that country on the eve of the genocide could not convince his superiors at the UN secretariat to change the mandate of the force to allow for active military intervention to stop the genocide.

In his compelling and poignant [poin-yant] account of the Genocide, Shake Hands with the Devil, Dellaire points out that it was clear to him and his colleagues in the UN Peacekeeping force that Hutu extremists were making elaborate plans to massacre Tutsi civilians. Prompt and decisive intervention by the international community, some of simple as jamming radios stations broadcasting hate propaganda, may have prevented the genocide and saved thousands of lives. But in that case, as in the Cambodian Genocide two decades earlier, the apathy and indecisiveness of the international community allowed the massacre of a million people.

What are the guarantees that pragmatic pacifism can provide the solutions to conflict in our deeply divided world? Simply, there are no guarantees. But what are the alternatives to peace? The appeal of pragmatic pacifism is that it recognizes that just wars may sometimes be waged in self-defense or the pursuit of peace, and it yet offers the hope of avoiding the scourge and devastation of war.

The US President Ronald Regan, more pragmatist than pacifist himself, faced similar questions when he initiated nuclear disarmament talks with the Soviet Union in the1980s. He was confronted by critics and sceptics who worried that the Soviets could not be trusted to keep their own end of the agreements, and warned that disarmament talks would undermine US security and strategic geopolitical interest. In response, Reagan famously stated: “Peace is not the absence of conflict. It is the ability to cope with conflict by peaceful means.” Despite the gloomy predictions of the skeptics, Reagan pushed on with the nuclear disarmament talks, setting the tone for de-escalating US-Soviet tensions and ultimately, ending the Cold War.

It is ironic that a bi-polar Cold War world of superpowers, nuclear proliferation and the threat of mutually assured destruction now seem more stable than a fragmented unipolar world. The end of the Cold War was expected to usher an era of unmitigated world peace.

This clearly has not happened. Angry voices of war and fear have drowned out the voices of hope and peace.

Our conflicted world needs more voices of peace, now more than ever before.

A Case for Pragmatic Pacifism

1/15/2016 05:10:00 PM war and peace, world

Winston Churchill: Wartime hero and an Uncertain Legacy

Winston Churchill has been written into the history books as a heroic wartime leader. His resolute stand against Nazism rallied Britain and the Allies to victory during World War II. But now, a BBC News Magazine story sheds light on his more uncertain and complicated record.

While many may condemn these revisionist accounts of Churchill’s legacies, the lesson here is that all great leaders are products of their time. In the quest for culture heroes, societies often construct one-dimensional narratives about leaders who often lived complicated lives.

We put them on a pedestal and deify them. But our heroes need not be unblemished. If anything, their failures and foibles humanize them and make them more realistic role models. We can emulate their many good sides and learn to avoid what, with hindsight, we now recognise as their not-so-good sides.

Mandela’s legacy as a peacemaker is not diminished by his armed militancy and resort to violence at a critical point in the struggle against apartheid. Gandhi’s humanism and philosophy of Ahimsa (Non-violence) is not diminished by his support for British mobilization of Indian troops during World War I. These aspects of their lives help us better appreciate the realities of the times they lived.

In the same way, drawing attention to Churchill’s racism, anti-Semitism and support for the wartime use of poison gas doesn't make him any less a great wartime leader.

In my book Imperialism and Human Rights, I argued that although Churchill was idolized in Britain and its allies, many African nationalists struggling against British colonialism during the war considered him a duplicitous and die-hard imperialist. I received a lot of flak for this claim.

Winston Churchill: Wartime hero and an Uncertain Legacy

1/31/2015 11:34:00 PM reflections, war and peace, world

War has no real winners

After months of fighting, Kurdish fighters battling the Islamic State jihadists in Syria finally succeeded in recapturing the key town of Kobane. The Kurds defeat of the Islamic State jihadists was widely celebrated as a victory for the forces of moderation and toleration against extremists. Rightly so.

If ever there was a just war, this would appear to be one. But even in this war, there are ultimately no real winners. Everyone involved loses something – lives, dignity, relationships, hope, aspirations, community, property. This Associated Press photo of the “liberated” Kobane tells it all. It could well be a scene from the apocalypse. A remainder that in war, there are no real winners.

More photos below

War has no real winners

1/31/2015 10:29:00 PM war and peace, world

Peace on Earth: Lessons from the Christmas Truce of 1914

This Christmas marks the centenary of a remarkable event in peacemaking.

On Christmas day of 1914, amidst the ruins and devastation of the First World War, British and German infantrymen declared an unlikely truce.  In a story that has come to represent the hope and generosity of the human spirit, soldiers on both sides took a break from war to sing Christmas carols. They left their trenches to exchange pleasantries and gifts in sub-zero temperatures. By some accounts, they even took time to play a soccer match before returning to their trenches to continue the fighting and killing. For a fleeting moment, peace was possible.

As a year defined by global conflicts and social upheavals draws to a close, the holiday season provides another opportunity to reflect on the proclamation “peace on earth and goodwill to all.”

The Christmas truce of 1914 holds 3 important lessons for peacemaking in our world today.

1. Peace is always possible. Even in the darkest moments of conflict and bitterness; even in the hostile and dehumanizing trenches of warfare peace is always a possibility.

2. Peacemaking stands a better chance at the early stages of conflict. Nothing like the Christmas truce of 1914 ever happened again throughout the course of the First World War. As the war progressed, annihilation rather than fraternization came to characterize the conflict. The Christmas truce could only happen at the beginning of the war, before attitudes hardened on both sides of the conflict. As one historian notes, "This was before the poisoned gas, before aerial bombardment … By the end of 1915 both sides were far too bitter for this to happen again."

3. Ordinary people can be effective peacemakers. Peace initiative need not always be top-down; they can come from the bottom-up. The Christmas truce of 1914 was a spontaneous initiative of weary solders in the trenches who desperately wanted a break from war. Had the generals, monarchs and politicians any say in it, the truce would never have happened. After all, soldiers are supposed to be fighters not peace makers. But peacemaking cannot be the sole prerogative of politicians, statesmen and diplomats in conflict situations. The stakes in war are simply too high.

Coalitions of ordinary citizens, even common solders in war trenches, can be the engines of peace-making. Unfortunately, the truce of 1914 was short-lived. But the key lesson for all of us is that the possibilities for peace are often closer than we think.

For more on the Christmas truce see:

A handwritten letter from British soldier Gerald Blake, describing the event as perceived by a participant, one who would later be killed in action. The original letter is held at the McMaster University Library

The Christmas Truce Website

BBC: “What really happened during the Christmas Truce?”

The Forgotten Christmas Truce of 1914

Peace on Earth: Lessons from the Christmas Truce of 1914

12/19/2014 11:22:00 AM war and peace, world

World enduring 'more dangerous times' than at height of Cold War:

Global security expert: Insurgencies making world more dangerous than even at height of Cold War | CTV News

The world is a more dangerous place “than even at the height of the Cold War,” when the threat of mutually assured destruction kept the world’s superpowers in check, says one historian and global security expert.
With fighting between Israel and Hamas flaring once again and adding to what seems like a growing list of conflicts around the world, the threat to global peace is more significant than ever before, says Bonny Ibhawoh of the Centre for Peace Studies at McMaster University in Hamilton, Ont.

At the height of the Cold War in the 1960s, the United States and Soviet Union were ultimately prevented from engaging in all-out war by the threat of mutually assured destruction, Ibhawoh told CTV’s Canada AM on Thursday.

“But today we live in a world where the weapons of mass destruction are in the hands of militias, insurgencies and so there’s really no control over how these weapons are used around the world,” he said.
During the Cold War, the West had a clearly defined enemy in the Soviet Union and containing Communism was a singular goal.

Now, there are almost too many enemies, Ibhawoh says.
“Fragmented warfare, insurgencies, asymmetrical warfare: That is exactly the problem,” he said, noting that one scholar has coined the term “the democratization of the weapons of mass destruction.”
And unlike the 1960s, when a strong and vocal peace movement tried to drown out the sound of war drums with popular protest songs, activists and artists today are not writing this generation’s “Imagine” or “Blowin’ in the Wind.”

“Today we see that the voices for peace have been drowned out by the voices of extremism and the voices of intolerance and I think that makes us an even more dangerous world today,” Ibhawoh said.
What is also missing today, he says, is grassroots political activism that has the power to push world leaders to the negotiating table to solve conflicts, he said. For example, “a very vigorous grassroots activist movement” in South Africa and around the world helped end apartheid.

“That is missing today,” Ibhawoh said. “And I think that unless you begin to create a space for these kinds of grassroots activism, the prospects for peace in our world are very slim.”

World enduring 'more dangerous times' than at height of Cold War:

7/25/2014 06:29:00 PM history, politics, war and peace, world

#BringBackOurGirls: Let the Outrage Persist

The global outrage must persist until the young girls kidnapped by militant Islamists in Nigeria are found and brought back home. In our 24 hour media news circle, I worry that the issue, like many others will soon drop off our global outrage radar. These missing girls represent the most vulnerable in any society and in our world. Their safe return should rightly be a collective responsibility.

#BringBackOurGirls: Let the Outrage Persist

5/07/2014 11:46:00 PM politics, world

Why do we need Peace Studies?

Scholars of Peace Studies are familiar with this question. Why do we need peace studies? With the end of the Cold War, hasn't humanity safely avoided the existential threat of Mutually Assured Destruction? Didn't the political scientist Francis Fukuyama proclaim triumphantly at the end of Cold War that humanity had finally reached the End of History? Why should we be investing in the study of peace when there are diseases to be cured, bridges to be built, computers to be invented, and the cosmos to be explored? 

True, these are all important human endeavors but so is the study of global peace and conflict. According to the World Health Organization, the leading worldwide public health problem today is not cancer, malaria or HIV/AIDS. It is violence. In the last century alone, more people died from violence within and between nations than any known disease (Read WHO Report). The Cold War may have ended, but we continue to live in an age of terror, asymmetrical warfare and genocides. The study of peace remains as relevant today as it ever was.

I was invited to talk about my current Peace Studies project as part of the 3 Minutes Thesis Competition (3MT). The 3MT Competition is aimed at encouraging graduate students and post-doctoral scholars develop and learn how to effectively communicate complex research in just three short minutes. As Graduate Dean, I thought that I should show by example. 

Why do we need Peace Studies?

2/02/2014 01:37:00 PM education, war and peace, world

Three Lessons from Mandela's Life

Following the death of Nelson Mandela, there has been much outpouring of accolades on the former South African president. Mandela has been praised as a hero and a reconciler who saved a nation. But Mandela was more than just a global symbol of peace and forgiveness. He was a more complex figure. He was a community leader, freedom fighter, pro-democracy activist, social intellectual, politician and statesman. As a scholar of human rights and peace, three aspects of Mandela‘s life and legacies stand out: his vision of forgiveness and reconciliation; his example of dialogue and confidence building; and his supple humanism.

Forgiveness and reconciliation
With the establishment of the South African Truth and Reconciliation Commission (TRC), Mandela offered the world a new paradigm for dealing with historical injustices. His optimistic approach to transitional justice through forgiveness and reconciliation reinforced the restorative justice model as an alternative to the retributive justice model.

When he first muted the idea for Truth and Reconciliation soon after his release from prison in 1990, many thought the old man had lost his mind. Critical voices, even within his own party – The African National Congress, wanted accountability for the crimes of apartheid and thought that a Truth Commission might undermine this. Mandela had to vigorously sell his vision of forgiveness and reconciliation.

The circle of violence, anger and hate, he urged his comrades, had to be broken. The African philosophy of Ubutu – the notion that my humanity is contingent on your humanity - was mobilized effectively to legitimize a transitional justice agenda that sought not only accountability for historical wrongs but also collective healing and national reconciliation.

Following the model of the South African TRC, over 20 countries around the world have now adopted the Truth and Reconciliation framework to deal with historical crimes and injustices – among them Brazil, Columbia, Chile, Peru, Poland, Philippines, South Korea, Sri Lanka, East Timor and Ukraine. Canada has also been a beneficiary of Mandela’s vision. In 2008, the Indian Residential School Truth and Reconciliation Commission was established following the settlement arising from the abuses in the Residential School system.

Three Lessons from Mandela's Life

12/21/2013 11:21:00 AM africa, politics, reflections, Tributes, world

Everyone has a Story

Part of McMaster University's "Spotlight on the Arts" Festival 2013

Here is my story:

Every once in a while, I get asked the question “Where are you from?”

In my mischievous moments I respond: “I’m from planet earth – I am a true earthling, born and bred.” Then, there is often the follow up, “… I mean, where are you from originally?”

But you see, I really do think of myself as an earthling – a global citizen. My “show and tell” object today is a globe-shaped bookend that normally sits on my office bookshelf. It is a reminder to me that we all share a common humanity and “home” can be anywhere in the world.

Although I am originally from West Africa, Nigeria, I have lived and worked in 3 continents. Before I settled in Canada, I worked in Nigeria, South Africa, the UK, Denmark, Sweden and the United States. In all these countries I have come to realize how similar people and cultures are, even in our global diversity.

As a “coloured” person, the country where I felt most visibly different was Denmark where I worked in the late 1990s. As anyone who’s been to that part of the world knows, all Scandinavians appear to be tall, blue-eyed and blonde. Yet, the rural countryside of Frederikshavn in northern Denmark was a place where I felt very much at “home.”

I saw much in Danish folk culture and tradition that reminded me of my own African heritage – the food, music and dances, family traditions, folk tales and of course, the booze.  My favourite was Gammel Dansk (literally, "Old Danish") a liquor made from bitter herbs and roots. Gammel Dansk reminded me so much of akpeteshi (root gin), a common drink in West Africa and Chibuku beer of rural South Africa.

But what I fell most in love with in Denmark was the spirit of Hygge (pronounced hügge). There is no equivalent English word for Hygge; the closest is “coziness” but even this is inadequate. Hygge is a fundamental aspect of Danish culture. It means relaxing with good friends or loved ones, often while enjoying good food and drink in a friendly candle-lit atmosphere. Enjoying Hygge with my Danish friends reminded me of the moon light story telling sessions of the African villages where family and friends would gather to share food and stories around a bonfire.

Although Denmark was the country where I looked most different from those around me, in all my travels it was also the one place that reminded me most about my African childhood. The lesson for me is that human beings and societies have more in common than we accept or recognize. Strangers are often friends that we have not yet met; and distant foreign lands can be homes that we have not yet visited.

So, when someone asks me now, “Where are you from?” I answer, “From the planet earth...” When they add, “… where from originally?”, I respond with a straight face, “Frederikshavn, Denmark.”

What is your story?....

Everyone has a Story

9/24/2013 12:26:00 AM reflections, world