Conflict in the UK

What's conflict, then? Is it war between two sets of uniformed militaries? Or is it something more complex.

Worth listening to these lyrics for a reality check of how life looks to a young mixed race man in Britain today - and then reflecting on just how far there is to go before we can begin to say to the rest of the world that we have genuinely achieved equality and dealt with our own conflicts.

Arise, EU: Nobel Peace Prize

Much sound, fury and ridicule has characterised the British response to the decision by the Nobel Peace Prize committee to award this year’s gong to the European Union. The Committee singled out the "EU's contribution for over six decades to the advancement of peace and reconciliation, democracy and human rights in Europe" in its announcement last week, which seemed to surprise the EU more than anyone else. A rushed morning press conference (above) saw a somewhat ruffled President Barroso confess to having been taken completely by surprise, before he smoothed himself down and was professing himself not to have been surprised at all by the evening's television news schedules.

It’s easy to mock. Even easier when you have comic characters to point at, as the current tussle between Barroso and Van Rompuy to collect the prize will illustrate.

And all too easy to find fault with the rationale, either by pointing to the current descent into unrest being experienced in Greece, itself provoked by the ignoring of its own rules by the Eurozone in admitting politically expedient but non-convergent economies, or by referring to the inability of the EU to do anything meaningful to stop the bloodshed in the Balkans without US assistance.

But is that really the whole picture? My own reaction to the announcement, coming hard on the heels of the award to President Obama just two years ago, was to join the chorus of disapproval. But thinking about it during the day, perhaps as President Barroso smoothed down his best suit to pitch for the chance to collect the prize, I found myself recanting.

The Committee said it valued the stabilising part played by the EU that "has helped to transform most of Europe from a continent of war to a continent of peace". The work of the EU, it argued, represents "fraternity between nations", and amounts to a form of the "peace congresses" to which Alfred Nobel referred as criteria for the Peace Prize in his 1895 will.

The big picture here, surely, is that the European Coal and Steel Community effectively locked France and Germany together and made renewed conflict a remote prospect. You needed coal and steel to make guns and armies and if you depend on each other for even that basic ability, well, best to make the marriage work.

It’s been a rocky marriage but it’s survived. And there is no union like it anywhere else in the world. Not many political projects stand the test of six decades, and none have faced the scale of the challenges that have been thrown at it over the years, from German reunification and the end of the Cold War to the present economic crisis. And there hasn’t, after all, been another general European war.

Perhaps the message from Norway, itself not a member of course, is simply to take care, in facing the biggest and potentially the most terminal challenge to date. You never quite realise what you have till it’s gone.

New ad campaign as food price shock looms

Water is Life has released a new fundraising video that does two things really well - first it powerfully makes the case for supporting the world's poorest by contrasting the scale of problems faced by them to those in the developed world, and secondly it manages to do this without robbing these people of their human dignity as certain other NGO fundraising campaigns do all too often.

No pictures of large eyed children and poor people looking up at the camera with food bowls here, simply people who are living in Haiti and therefore affected by both extreme poverty and the aftermath of a natural disaster making their point in a way that is striking and hard to ignore. These are also people who were right royally let down by the international response to their plight in 2010.  So the utter disdain of the woman that echoes the complaint about blocked wifi, turning her head as she does so, for me says it all.

A lesson worth learning in here for global civil society, then, as they seek to raise funds and make the case for what they do. It reminds me of a phrase the disability movement in the UK use: "nothing about us without us", which might be a useful rule of thumb for the PR departments of international NGOs.

And all this comes as ominious warnings have started to surface about a looming food price spike which is likely to affect those with least ability to manage the consequences. CNBC has reported that the recent downward trend in food prices is set to end, possibly in Asia first, and due in large part to volatile changes in climate affecting yields of staple crops, rice being the obvious one.

But the problem won't all be down to climate change, a bigger part of the picture is the use of formerly agricultural land to produce bio-fuels, driven in large part by the European Union and United States. The Guardian reported last month that we have the extraordinary position of the EU contributing to global instability by pursuing targets that are supposed to reduce global instability by targetting carbon emissions - and being warned to stop by the Chief Executive of a major corporation, as opposed to, say, a green NGO.

Which all makes the need to get some coherent action around the sustainable development agenda arising out of the Rio+20 conference ever more pressing. If we don't see that, then those people back in Haiti are going to have an awful lot more to worry about than their wifi connection. 

UN General Assembly: View from the sidelines

Ahmadinejad protest

Last week Manhattan was in lockdown. The 193 member states of the United Nations General Assembly were in town, each bringing delegations that in some cases took a whole fleet of cars to move around. Disgruntled New Yorkers tried to get on with their lives as jumpy police officers tried to keep the traffic moving, banging on bonnets where necessary.

Inside the hall a succession of leaders gave speeches that were, for the most part, largely unreported except in their own countries. Exceptions included Obama and, of course, the Iranian President Ahmadinejad, fresh from a TV interview, who provoked the usual midtown demonstration in protest at his widely reviled views on the Holocaust and actions against his own people. If you read the papers that's probably all you heard about.

I was there, along with a host of other NGOs, to try to contribute to the process kick started by the Secretary General with the formation of a High Level Panel of world leaders to look at what will come after the expiry of the Millennium Development Goals in 2015.

International Alert, for whom I work, is currently co-ordinating global civil society input into the UN thematic consultation on conflict, fragility and disaster which will feed into the work of the world leaders, along with eight other consultations. This is as part of the Beyond2015 coalition.

In recent months there has been some welcome momentum building behind the idea that, in order to “do development” effectively, you have to “do the politics” first. That’s if by ‘development’ we are talking about long term progress that removes the need for aid altogether. And that’s if by ‘the politics’ we mean navigating the complex factors that shape every country, including our own.

You might think that’s common sense, but it’s not what the MDGs ended up doing. And the result for those countries experiencing armed conflict or the threat of it, is that none of them have ended up achieving a single MDG goal. So addressing the politics – that is to say the relationship that people have with their governments at all levels - is key. In UN jargon this ends up being called “Governance”.

Mark Malloch-Brown

That’s a conclusion already reached by the World Bank, and other elements of the UN, while key donors such as the UK have also pledged to address these factors directly from now on. Speaking to me earlier that week at the Liberal Democrat party conference in Brighton a chief architect of the MDGs, former UN Deputy Secretary-General Mark Malloch-Brown, also publicly acknowledged that this had been a weakness. He said this: “…if, as a global community, we can tackle governance it could be the single biggest breakthrough of MDGs Mark II”. Exciting stuff.

So it was a bit worrying a day later in New York to hear the EU Commissioner for Development Andris Piebalgs say, in his opening remarks at a high level side event, that what we needed was more of the same. In fact Commissioner Piebalgs said that one of the biggest strengths of the MDGs had been their simplicity, adding that this was important for people back home in his country of Latvia who should be covered in the next framework along with every other country, to understand them. They had been “a good start”, he said uninspiringly.

Commissioner Piebalgs

This strikes me as being wrong on two levels. Firstly, and apart from the common sense angle, there is now a large body of evidence that suggests trying to over simplify your interventions in what are inherently complex situations doesn’t work. And it works the least for the poorest and most vulnerable people. The World Bank estimates that there are 1.5 billion people who live in countries affected by conflict, which is quite a lot of people to let down.

Secondly, and I say this as a former would-be politician, it’s just plain lazy. Lazy because it’s coming from people who are, as politicians, supposed to be good communicators and able to lead people with the power of their arguments. Are they really saying that what we need is simplicity because the average person on the street is incapable of understanding anything else? It seems some of them are.


It was therefore reassuring that the Swedish Minister for International Development Gunilla Carlsson, speaking at the same meeting, was quick to respond. No, business as usual was not an option, she said bluntly. She argued passionately that the continued exclusion of women from positions of influence in their own countries, and the exponential rise in sexual violence they suffered in areas of conflict had to be challenged effectively. And she said that to ignore the role of governance would lead to an unacceptably poor return and called for a fundamental rethink. Phew.

Press conference

Speaking later, after the first meeting of the High Level Panel of which Mr Piebalgs and Ms Carlsson are both members, the three co-chairs of the Panel gave a press conference. David Cameron, British Prime Minister, described what he calls the “golden thread” of the absence of corruption and conflict being key to building strong governments with people at the heart of them. Liberian President Ellen Johnson-Sirleaf returned to the theme of women and argued strongly that their role was key as was the role of the private sector in driving growth and in time replacing the need for aid. President Yudhoyono of Indoenesia concentrated on the need to ensure the process itself was open, participatory and transparent.

All good stuff, and it was only mildly obscured by the British press embarassing themselves with questions about a British politicians run-in with a policeman to Cameron, and a very awkward moment for the Indonesian President.

An important strand in their work is the need to build on the New Deal for Engagement in Fragile States which arose from a process involving donors, civil society and the g7+ group of nations, all of whom have experienced conflict. That process led to a number of conclusions which sign-post how we might collectively address the issue of governance, and achieve genuinely long-term sustainable development. Five key goals were identified, and will be pursued in the coming years in a number of pilot projects. Those goals are legitimate politics, justice, security, economic foundations and revenues and services.

G7+ Ministers of fragile states, plus partners - April 2012

Fine words, you might think, but at a side event in New York Lancedell Mathews, Executive Director of the New African Research and Development Agency and a member of the civil society group lobbying from the perspective of conflict affected states, set out clearly why they were much more than that:

“The MDGS do not capture the complexity of development work in fragile areas whereby processes are as important as outcomes. That is precisely what the New Deal is trying to achieve: through focusing on 5 very sound Peace and State building Goals, countries will find their ways to build resilient societies, with accountable governments responsive to people’s needs and providing them with security, justice, social services and a chance to be included in decision-making processes. For that to happen, we need all stakeholders - governments, donors, international partners and civil society – to work together, in democratically-owned processes, to create the healthy state-society relations that must underpin peace”.

Including people in politics. Building resilience against shocks. Democratically owned processes that make the citizen and the government reliant on each other. We might be back to common sense here, but these are voices from those countries most affected who are arguing that these are the gaps that need to be filled.And the work has already begun to think about how we go about measuring that.

It’s a bit more complicated than some politicians might like to admit, but if we’re to see a post-2015 framework that stands a chance of genuinely achieving progress for people living in the shadow both of poverty and of violence then I’m afraid they’re just going to have to work that little bit harder.

A European breakup

Well worth a watch ... if a little weird!

UK Aid: Stick or twist?

New broom: Justine Greening MP

David Cameron arrived back at his desk after a summer break dominated by a rising chorus of criticism from his own side that he just wasn’t up to it. Boris Johnson, Mayor of London and erstwhile rival for the top job in a few short years, had called for Cameron to “stop pussyfooting around”. Nadine Dorries, an oft-mocked MP but nevertheless representing a strong right of centre faction in the party expressed fury that the Government was not Conservative enough and out of touch with ordinary people, a malaise she blamed on the fact that Cameron and his ally Chancellor George Osborne were both “rich posh boys”. While Peter Bone, representing the Right-of-Right faction who call themselves the Cornerstone Group, even speculated about who might take over in the event of David Cameron’s death. A tad bizarrely, perhaps.

Put that alongside the disastrous unravelling of the budget in recent months and a series of badly handled policy gaffes and it was all getting a bit hard going for this Government.

Last week’s re-shuffle, then, was intended to put a spark back into the administration and seize back the initiative from an Opposition Labour Party that was coasting along without having to do much at all, really. It seems to have succeeded, according to the punditocracy. 

But for the international development sector it has put a giant cat amongst a group of frankly terrified pigeons.

Late on Monday afternoon I received a part-typed part-handwritten letter from Andrew Mitchell, the departing Secretary of State, in which he paid tribute to the work of International Alert, for whom I work.

Signing off personally with best wishes for the future he had underlined words for effect and it spoke volumes about him, that he would take the time to draft such a letter in the final hours of his tenure instead of handing it to his officials. That was why the development sector generally liked Andrew Mitchell – he was approachable, and thoroughly understood our work, having taken care to use his time in Opposition to do so.

He was also very tough and single minded in pursuit of value for taxpayers money, introducing independent scrutiny of his own Department's effectiveness including its' funding of NGOs, and did not suffer fools gladly. But he inspired confidence and even warmth among many.

We had to wait hours, then a day, for his replacement to be unveiled as she apparently argued vehemently against the idea. After an eternity entered stage left Justine Greening, the former Secretary of State for Transport.

At a meeting later that week well over thirty development NGOs, who happened to be meeting anyway, had a discussion about who she was and what she might be like. It soon transpired that nobody knew very much but from what we did know there seemed to be a sense that Ms Greening would be constructive and positively disposed to her new brief.

The very next day brought a story in the Times newspaper that painted a very different picture. She had argued against the job, it claimed, and did not regard the work of the Department for International Development very highly. This sent the Oppositon Labour Campaign for International Development into a spin, quite literally, as they issued dire warnings of what all of this meant for aid.

I asked the journalist, Sam Coates, why she was claiming things in the spin she put on her article, such as the fact that Ms Greening wants to end the ringfencing of development spending, that did not appear in the article itself. She refused to answer.

answer there came none

But this week-end brought more. The Sun, Daily Mail and Express newspapers, all of which represent the Peter Bone outlook on the world, joined the chorus of approval for what they expect – and want – to be cuts to the UK aid budget - or the "foreign aid madness" as the Express calls it. 

An iron law of British political life is never to believe what you read in newspapers. We have a sick press in this country that is currently being investigated by the police and even a High Court Judge, after all. So all of this is likely to be guesswork and wishful thinking.

But if Ms Greening is of the Peter Bone persuasion when it comes to aid it may give some pause for thought to the sector as a whole. He was, after all, the man who personally intervened to block a piece of legislation that would have guaranteed UK aid spending to be maintained at 0.7% of Gross Domestic Product only months ago.

Whether that target is the right thing to be doing anyway is an argument for another article, but for the time being the anxiety levels of those same NGOs, as they scan the Sunday papers for any signs of what the new Secretary of State really thinks, and where she might take UK policy, is likely to remain sky high.

Post-2015: An agenda for peace and development

The debate over what happens after 2015 is beginning to heat up. The Rio+20 conference onsustainable development was an attempt to develop an alternative set of Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs), while the formation of a High Level Panel of World Leaders has focussed minds on what might replace the Millennium Development Goals (MDGs).

In June the UN System Task Team, established by the Secretary-General to lead the UN’s planning for what happens after the expiry of the MDGs, issued a new report, Realising the Future We Want for All, which builds on the status-quo challenging conclusions of several before it which underline that the way the world does development assistance has to fundamentally change, if it is to be genuinely transformative.


From a peacebuilding perspective there is much to welcome in the UN System Task Team report, continuing as it does to build on the conclusions which have been reached by individual donors and the international financial institutions about how best to try to shape approaches to development in some of the most intractable and complex situations in the world.

The bald fact that no low income conflict affected country has achieved a single MDG is taken as an indication that business as usual cannot continue. In addition the report places issues of governance, inequalities, violence against women, human rights and the rule of law centre-stage. In fact it sets out the conclusion that any future framework must have at its’ heart the “core values of human rights, equality and sustainability”.

Building on those key values the report proposes a post 2015 framework that is based on “four key dimensions of a holistic approach”, namely inclusive social development, inclusive economic development, environmental sustainability and peace and security. In pursuit of these four dimensions the report sets out a series of “enablers” that the system should use to advance the pursuit of each.

proposed post-2015 framework

So far so good, although as Amy Pollard from Cafod points out, the enablers are sufficiently vague as to be argued over as contenders to be a “dimension” in their own right, and may end up as a means by which everyone’s issues are shoe-horned into what might become an unwieldy final document.

So what would the final framework look like to be peace positive? Would it need another goal specifically for security as the ODI recently suggested, or is there something more fundamental than that that needed?

I would argue the time for conceptual debates about development and conflict are over, and the questions that remain unanswered are primarily operational. They are not answered by an additional goal called “conflict” or “fragility” but relate to the system as a whole.

That the period between 2000-2015 has failed the 1.5 billion people who live in conflict affected and fragile states is not in dispute. Even the reasons why that is the case are now largely accepted – a lack of focus on awkward issues like governance, accountability and corruption in favour of measuring success solely through GDP growth and other readily quantifiable targets meant that the politics of development was never meaningfully addressed. Leading development NGOs such as Oxfam now argue that a single focus on GDP without considering how equitably that growth is spread is a mistake.

And those mistakes meant that the underlying drivers of armed conflict which did and does so much to undermine, stop and reverse progress were never tackled as they needed to be. This was set out in some depth by the World Development Report of 2011. That this conclusion was reached by the World Bank, who’s currency after all is quantifiable targets and economic growth data, was a hugely positive sign.

So with those lessons learned and the focus firmly on the operational what do we need to think about?

First, and absent from the UN Task Team report, is a focus on how the system itself operates. Agencies too often enter some of the most highly politicised and conflicted areas in the world without the tools to carry out a comprehensive and accurate analysis of the context to guide their actions and at a minimum avoid doing unintentional harm. Getting this right is called being conflict sensitive.

anti mining protest

 In order to be conflict sensitive you need tools to tell you what sort of things to think about. Tools should prompt practitioners to understand the root causes of conflict and the likely conflict-impact of their own actions, and encourage the development of early-warning indicators of how their own activities or those of others may be contributing to greater fragility and risk of violence, so that they can adjust effectively. Such tools, effectively used, should be a minimum pre-requisite to doing development effectively in these areas in future.

Secondly, and also absent from the Task Team report, is a focus on legitimacy. The report rightly points to the critical role that local institutions have to play in enabling societies to manage conflict without recourse to violence and sees them as central to both statebuilding and peacebuilding engagements. But what seems to be missing is a focus on the people inside those institutions and how they are viewed by local people. Local institutions that are staffed by people who were formerly engaged in an armed conflict against many in the local population are not likely to succeed. In many cases this includes the local police force.

How legitimate?

For the same reasons the process that leads to either the creation or the shaping of those institutions needs to have their likely perceived legitimacy factored in as a criteria as important as getting the right people with the right qualifications in to run them.

Thirdly the report draws attention to the risk of natural disaster and the need to build resilience in order to respond to them. It’s difficult to argue with that but it is also worth pointing out that societies in conflict are inherently less resilient to such events and overcoming that vulnerability will require context specific planning that takes into account the conflict dynamics as much as the practical arrangements needed to lessen a population’s exposure.

What seems to be absent from the Task Team’s report, however, is an acknowledgment that disasters are not only catastrophes that happen overnight, as it were, but are also long-term in nature. The slow onset of climate change has already heightened the risk of conflict in many areas of the world and building resilience both to these non-sudden environmental changes and their implications for human security will need to be part of any holistic response.

Lastly the report calls for a global framework with timebound targets in order to make it meaningful. It is not difficult to see the logic of this but in terms of operationalising our approach surely we need to learn from the lessons of 2000-2015, which are that globally designed targets pursued at local level without adequate context specificity will fail. Worse still, they may do harm. Therefore while we need a global framework to maintain political attention and momentum, which the Task Team report helpfully sets out in terms of core values and principles, we surely need an operational approach that takes each local context first, and designs interventions accordingly.

This includes the allocation of time-bound deadlines. The WDR 2011 found that any post conflict environment needed to look at timescales in generational terms rather than the chunks preferred by financial institutions and most donors, for understandable reasons. You simply cannot build legitimacy and trust sufficient to manage conflict without violence in the space of 5, 10 or even 15 years.

That’s a hard sell for donors who have to justify their expenditure to hard-pressed taxpayers back home. But the good news is that if you are measuring the right things you can demonstrate progress, and the idea that by investing over the long term you save greater resources being spent on countries relapsing into violence is not a difficult idea to communicate. In fact, it's easier to explain - and justify - than simply banging on about 0.7% GDP.

skeptical press

So – so far so good. The report is out and it marks another welcome advance, and bodes well for the work of the High Level Panel.

From a peace perspective the conversation has moved on from the conceptual to the operational.

Attention to how the development system itself works on the ground, the extent to which it builds legitimacy, its attention to slow onset challenges to resilience and a longer term vision of progress would do much to ensure the post 2015 approach to development meets the challenges of conflict and fragility which have done so much to hold back progress for the 1.5 billion people who live in the shadow of violence.