Lecture: Arab Uprising & Social Media

Sultan Sooud Al Qassemi is one of the best known social media operators who played a key role in the momentous events which have re-cast the Middle East over the course of the past two years. He is one of the best connected Twitter users both within the region and without and is regularly ahead of the game on emerging trends.

I've corresponded with him every now and again during that time and, despite having 148,000 followers to his name, have always received friendly responses. 

Here in the West there have already been lots of seminars and debates on the role of social media throughout the events which were ignited by a self immolation in Tunisia but many have not actually featured any of those who were actually using the media directly. 

So here's a brief talk he gave to students at NorthWestern University last night in Chicago, Illinois.

Remembrance Sunday: Thoughts on peace

One of my first jobs after finishing University was a temporary post at the Royal British Legion in 1997. I was one of the few non-military people in the building, and this soon grew to be the basis of much of the ribald banter between myself and my colleagues, who were all recently retired from the three services.

I liked them, a lot, and still remember them more vividly than more recent work places. Partly because of the fantastically filthy jokes and terms they had for civvies, but mainly because they were some of the most genuine and warm people I have ever spent time with.

I remember Ron, whose hands still shook from the stress he suffered half a century before, aboard a submarine which had suddenly gone into an uncontrolled dive in the East Asian Sea during the Korean conflict. Had Ron and his colleagues not managed to get the vessel out of the dive at the last minute the pressure of the depths would have crushed it instantaneously. It had been very close.

I remember Ben, who had served on the cold war’s first front-line in Germany in the years immediately following 1945. Tensions were high between the former allies and the prospect of war erupting over what Stalin regarded as the intolerable capitalist presence in West Berlin, deep in his territory of East Germany, was very real. Ben learned a few words of Russian and, being an enterprising man, soon had an illicit cigarette business going with his erstwhile enemies. All the while knowing that if conflict did come to pass he wouldn’t stand a chance.

Both Ben and Ron had lived in a twentieth century whose first half had been obliterated by global conflict and economic depression, and a second half which existed for the most part under the constant shadow of nuclear annihilation. Understandably, then, they thought that conflict was just one of life’s constants and you had to make the best of it. The poppy appeal, held every year as a means of raising money for the Legion and a way for the nation to mark its respects to the fallen, was a practical affair which didn’t change that underlying truism about the nature of our world.

Perhaps Ben and Ron were right. Looking around today we see easily where the spotlight happens to shine, such as on Syria, but in the shadows there are far larger human tragedies unfolding daily such as in the east of the Democratic Republic of Congo.

As well as national remembrance days there is now an International Day of Peace, marked by the United Nations every September 21st on which the emphasis is less about honouring the memory of war dead, and more on what needs to be done to promote genuine peace. One of the ideas behind the day is to promote a global truce in all armed conflicts to mark the day, which is promoted by the PR campaign behind Peace One Day. 

But wouldn't it be better if we were aiming just a bit higher than a single day? And how about dealing effectively with the causes of each conflict rather than its symptoms, which is basically what a truce is about? You wonder sometimes about how limited the human imagination can be when faced with its biggest challenges.

Remembrance Sunday is about symbolism and it feels right that we honour those who gave their todays for our tomorrows, but I wonder if in future we could combine a mark of respect for the fallen with a mark of hope for a better world to come, and a determination to think big to achieve it. After all, the alternative, as the last British Tommy Harry Patch once said "...is organised murder and nothing else."

Ron and Ben would roll their eyes, laugh out loud and scoff at that idea, but secretly, I bet they’d agree.

Bottom Billion: The right theory?

Theories of change are the currency of development and peace practitioners alike, but they all rest on assumptions. So what about Professor Collier's assumption that there is a bottom billion? Have a watch of a recent TED lecture he gave, to see what you think:

London High Level Panel: Reflections

In conversation with the High Level Panel

It had been a long time coming. Since the first meeting of the High Level Panel, set up by Ban Ki Moon and co-chaired by the British, Liberian and Indonesian Heads of State in New York the massed ranks of civil society had been looking forward to this meeting with expectations and anxiety in equal measure.

Expectations were high of a genuine dialogue and opportunity to reshape the path out of extreme poverty with people at its centre, while anxieties were heightened by the prospect of politicians reverting to type and stymieing the process in the search for a bland compromise that everyone could live with.

Those of us lucky enough to have been asked to take part in the dialogue with the High Level Panel members through the Beyond 2015 campaign met wider civil society the day before, and it was already very clear indeed that there were some very impressive voices to be heard. Leaders of the disability movement from South Africa, the climate change campaign from Bangladesh and the grassroots Niger Delta Women's movement for Peace and Development were among them. Surely the Panel members had to be struck by the power of the arguments they advanced?

On the day, the session for civil society was the second of three outreach events and our trepidation wasn’t helped by the sight of the first lot coming out in super sharp suits and uber confident smiles. Yes, it was the business folk who’d come to pow-wow over a power-breakfast, get down to the bottom line and seal the deal with the panel. Business has a vital role to play and it was absolutely right they were there, but they have a very different way of doing things, those folk from the City. And we had to follow them.

So with some nerves in we went and for the next 90 minutes our faith in the process, I think, was very much reinforced. It became immediately obvious that these Panel members genuinely wanted to rise to the challenge that they’d been set: find a way forward that delivers on the goal first outlined in 2000: of ending poverty in our time.

Graca Machel during our discussions

They listened and genuinely engaged, among them Graca Machel, a former Mozambican education minister and advocate for the rights of southern African women and children, who herself had some challenging words for us. Keep up the pressure, she said, but look to yourselves too. We could not expect, she argued, to be taken seriously if we couldn’t demonstrate as civil society that we genuinely represented our constituencies and managed to construct a single coherent narrative from within ourselves.

The Panel, who by and large mix in high circles generally, were confronted by some uncomfortable truths from the ground. No, we didn’t need a “social floor”, whatever that jargon means, said the woman from the Niger Delta, responding to a Panel member's suggestion. It’s quite straightforward – we need insurance, just like any other business, as she described how a group of women in her community had received micro credit loans to start fish farming businesses. But a recent flood had destroyed the fish farms leaving them with no assets but a mountain of debt. Pencils were sharpened and notes were made. It was one of many references to climate change throughout the day.

Lunch was at the IoD

Our discussions were over too soon, of course, and off we trooped for lunch which was cleverly procured by those bods at Development Initiatives who’d hired a room in the Institute of Directors next door. The irony of discussing extreme poverty over prawn sandwiches in the plush surroundings of the IoD was not lost, but it was a good chance to debrief, and the mood among us was really positive. We were actually getting somewhere with these guys.

The youth were the next bunch in, and by all accounts they were seriously impressive too.

But at 4pm things, in my view at least, started to go downhill. There was a town-hall style meeting, the idea of which was to allow members of the panel to hear direct from members of civil society who hadn’t been part of the earlier chunks of the day. And, frankly, I think we all rather let ourselves down.

The Panel members were lined up in a row in front of the massed ranks of what must have been over 200 people, who'd been urged to tweet like there was no tomorrow, even having been issued with WiFi passes on the way in. Top blogger Duncan Green of Oxfam did a great job chairing the debate and managed to drill some discipline into the first exchanges. 15 seconds was your lot, he said, any more and you are effectively robbing someone else of the chance to speak.

What followed, however, was two hours of mostly random single issue mini and not-so-mini speeches with each speech maker, in some cases reading from a pre-prepared script, underlining how their own issue was the single most important thing of all and really must be seen as such, you know.

This prompted Graca Machel to re-iterate her plea for coherence and discipline – “I am you” she said standing from her chair, referring to her own civil society status, “but you must help us”. The message was that we were definitely not helping by this sort of approach. What we needed was a ”package” and civil society had to help, not hinder that work. Having completed this oration she promptly announced she had a plane to catch and left the stage, still telling us to behave ourselves, as an unfortunate aide tried to disentangle her from the microphone cable on her lapel, nearly falling over in the process. Quite an exit.

Tawakkul Karman

This was also the message from Yemeni Nobel Peace Prize Laureate Tawakkul Karman, a fearsomely impressive young woman, who has fought for human rights and social justice in the context of highly conservative Yemen, and the “war on terror” being prosecuted all around her. I would imagine she doesn't take fright too easily. We had to keep up the pressure, yes, she said – but we also had to help the panel, not pepper them with a very long shopping list.

Yet this was immediately followed by one gentleman who treated us to a long and winding speech, which seemed to be punctuated by regular name checks for his organisation. Oh dear.

Towards the end however, my own faith was renewed by one young man from Sierra Leone.

He had no interest in long speeches, nor name checking anyone or anything. He was a former child soldier who had been forced to do terrible things, he said. Kidnapped at a very young age during the waves of civil war, that was his reality. That had been his childhood. By now he was speaking to a silent hall, as he looked at the Panel members and told them calmly that if they produced a framework that again missed the likes of people like him as the MDGs had, the world would never forgive them. And then promptly sat down.

Clearly moved, former Clinton Chief of Staff John Podesta, responded that missing people like him had been one of the biggest errors of the previous framework, and that it couldn't be allowed to happen again.

That is the scale of the challenge, both for the Panel members but also for us. And reflecting on the last couple of days I think there is an awful lot of work to do on both sides.

Hurricane Sandy: Haiti isn't Manhattan

24/7 rolling footage of water breaching middle class streets on the coast of New Jersey, or the southern financial district of Manhattan, is the diet we've all been fed for the past day. But hasn't the storm, which has already lost it's official "hurricane" status been around for just a bit more than that?

Indeed it has, having killed 66 people in the Caribbean before reaching the eastern seaboard of the US and reportedly having led directly to an outbreak of cholera in Haiti, helpfully introduced to the island by Nepalese UN forces, by contaminating water supplies.

Breathless reporting from the US

On the short film above, shot by the Bri Kouri Nouvèl Gaye media team and which has somehow missed the prime time slots of CNN and the BBC, a man looks at the camera and reports that "the NGOs have finished wasting funds and we are still under tents".

And those tents didn't really stand much of a chance against one of the biggest storms in living memory, but the 350,000 camp dwelling residents of Haiti won't be pinning their hopes on another international humanitarian rescue mission.

Priorities, eh?

Anna Frank and the IDPS

Amsterdam canal, next to Anna Frank's House

What's the International Dialogue on Peacebuilding and Statebuilding (IDPS), the new framework for tacking conflict and fragility reached at the Busan summit got to do with a Jewish girl murdered by the Nazis during the second world war?

Well, nothing directly. But I spent three days in The Hague, Holland, last week with members of civil society organisations from across Europe, America, Africa and Asia who are trying to make a new way of tackling armed conflict work, and I was struck by the role of history in shaping our future.

Back at the end of November 2011 world leaders met at a High Level conference in Busan, South Korea to have a difficult conversation. It had been clear for a long time that the aid agenda for eradicating extreme poverty had failed at least 1.5 billion of the poorest and most vulnerable people. Now, to make mattters harder, the world was in the grip of the biggest financial crisis since the Great Depression, and donor countries needed to show their electorates that they were getting value for their aid dollars. So both the poorest in the world and the voters of hard pressed donor states were being short changed.

But some of the countries most affected by violence had a plan, and the plan made a lot of sense. Together with donor countries they launched what became known as the New Deal, marking a fundamental shift in the way the world responded to the threat of conflict, and supported states building their way to peace and prosperity.

They all accepted that the old world of top-down, one-size-fits-all, we know best, take it or leave it aid had to end, and be replaced by a genuine partnership between governments of each unique set of circumstances and donors, who jointly designed their interventions according to the reality on the ground rather than an economists' spreadsheet in a UN agency or a World Bank office. It was a breakthrough that led to a set of five Peacebuilding and Statebuilding Goals: legitimate politics, justice, security, economic foundations and revenues and services — to give clarity on the priorities to be pursued in fragile states.

Here's part of the declaration unveiled at the summit:

"We, the members of the International Dialogue on Peacebuilding and Statebuilding (“the Dialogue”), comprised of the g7+ group of 19 fragile and conflict-affected countries, development partners, and international organisations, believe that a new development architecture and new ways of working, better tailored to the situation and challenges of fragile contexts, are necessary to build peaceful states and societies. These are presented in the New Deal for Engagement in Fragile States (the “New Deal”)".

Inspiring stuff, and most exciting for me was the fact that civil society, so often pushed to one side by governments because they tend not to toe a party line, was this time considered vital to the chances of success. So my meetings in the Hague were all about taking a reality check on how things were getting on and sharing ideas about how some of the real progress made in this process can be contributed to the wider vision of what the world of development might look like in 2015, once the old world of the Millenium Development Goals have expired.

So these are genuinely exciting times. But what drew me to the link between these meetings and Anna Frank was the question of history. It's something you can't feel or poke or touch but it's a factor that has so much power to constrain what we can or can't do today.

It didn't go unnoticed by several of the partners from West Africa last week that we were meeting in The Hague. Where, of course, Charles Taylor had just been sentenced to life in prison for the obscene levels of human carnage he wrought over lands in that region. And the place, as our colleagues from the Democratic Republic of Congo also noted, where warlord Thomas Lubanga had also met his judgement.

Anna Frank

As you walk down quiet streets in Amsterdam in Autumn you are struck first by the beauty of the scene of bobbing canal boats and leaves drifting from the trees, but secondly, as you approach Anna Frank's house, the difficulty of imagining the sound of Nazi boots that once echoed down the cobbles on their way to seize more victims of the "race war" they had been indoctrinated to pursue.

So Holland is a place where the history of humanity's inhumanity is all around you and it was, at least last week, the scene of intense debate between a group of committed people trying to steer the world in a better direction.

High stakes indeed.

International Space Station: cool footage

This blog is mostly about global issues and responses to conflict, but occasionally I like to go beyond the mere global, and go, er, universal! Take a look at this footage, taken today and speeded up by 5 times, of a freight pod called Dragon disembarking with over a 1,000 lbs of stuff ready to take back to earth.

Impressive stuff. To me, anyway.