essay on humanity above all nations

• World Peace

A Human Approach to World Peace

When we rise in the morning and listen to the radio or read the newspaper, we are confronted with the same sad news: violence, crime, wars, and disasters. I cannot recall a single day without a report of something terrible happening somewhere. Even in these modern times it is clear that one's precious life is not safe. No former generation has had to experience so much bad news as we face today; this constant awareness of fear and tension should make any sensitive and compassionate person question seriously the progress of our modern world.   It is ironic that the more serious problems emanate from the more industrially advanced societies. Science and technology have worked wonders in many fields, but the basic human problems remain. There is unprecedented literacy, yet this universal education does not seem to have fostered goodness, but only mental restlessness and discontent instead. There is no doubt about the increase in our material progress and technology, but somehow this is not sufficient as we have not yet succeeded in bringing about peace and happiness or in overcoming suffering.   We can only conclude that there must be something seriously wrong with our progress and development, and if we do not check it in time there could be disastrous consequences for the future of humanity. I am not at all against science and technology - they have contributed immensely to the overall experience of humankind; to our material comfort and well-being and to our greater understanding of the world we live in. But if we give too much emphasis to science and technology we are in danger of losing touch with those aspects of human knowledge and understanding that aspire towards honesty and altruism.   Science and technology, though capable of creating immeasurable material comfort, cannot replace the age-old spiritual and humanitarian values that have largely shaped world civilization, in all its national forms, as we know it today. No one can deny the unprecedented material benefit of science and technology, but our basic human problems remain; we are still faced with the same, if not more, suffering, fear, and tension. Thus it is only logical to try to strike a balance between material developments on the one hand and the development of spiritual, human values on the other. In order to bring about this great adjustment, we need to revive our humanitarian values.   I am sure that many people share my concern about the present worldwide moral crisis and will join in my appeal to all humanitarians and religious practitioners who also share this concern to help make our societies more compassionate, just, and equitable. I do not speak as a Buddhist or even as a Tibetan. Nor do I speak as an expert on international politics (though I unavoidably comment on these matters). Rather, I speak simply as a human being, as an upholder of the humanitarian values that are the bedrock not only of Mahayana Buddhism but of all the great world religions. From this perspective I share with you my personal outlook - that:

1. Universal humanitarianism is essential to solve global problems; 2. Compassion is the pillar of world peace; 3. All world religions are already for world peace in this way, as are all humanitarians of whatever ideology; 4. Each individual has a universal responsibility to shape institutions to serve human needs.

Solving Human Problems through Transforming Human Attitudes

Of the many problems we face today, some are natural calamities and must be accepted and faced with equanimity. Others, however, are of our own making, created by misunderstanding, and can be corrected. One such type arises from the conflict of ideologies, political or religious, when people fight each other for petty ends, losing sight of the basic humanity that binds us all together as a single human family. We must remember that the different religions, ideologies, and political systems of the world are meant for human beings to achieve happiness. We must not lose sight of this fundamental goal and at no time should we place means above ends; the supremacy of humanity over matter and ideology must always be maintained.   By far the greatest single danger facing humankind - in fact, all living beings on our planet - is the threat of nuclear destruction. I need not elaborate on this danger, but I would like to appeal to all the leaders of the nuclear powers who literally hold the future of the world in their hands, to the scientists and technicians who continue to create these awesome weapons of destruction, and to all the people at large who are in a position to influence their leaders: I appeal to them to exercise their sanity and begin to work at dismantling and destroying all nuclear weapons. We know that in the event of a nuclear war there will be no victors because there will be no survivors! Is it not frightening just to contemplate such inhuman and heartless destruction? And, is it not logical that we should remove the cause for our own destruction when we know the cause and have both the time and the means to do so? Often we cannot overcome our problems because we either do not know the cause or, if we understand it, do not have the means to remove it. This is not the case with the nuclear threat.   Whether they belong to more evolved species like humans or to simpler ones such as animals, all beings primarily seek peace, comfort, and security. Life is as dear to the mute animal as it is to any human being; even the simplest insect strives for protection from dangers that threaten its life. Just as each one of us wants to live and does not wish to die, so it is with all other creatures in the universe, though their power to effect this is a different matter.   Broadly speaking there are two types of happiness and suffering, mental and physical, and of the two, I believe that mental suffering and happiness are the more acute. Hence, I stress the training of the mind to endure suffering and attain a more lasting state of happiness. However, I also have a more general and concrete idea of happiness: a combination of inner peace, economic development, and, above all, world peace. To achieve such goals I feel it is necessary to develop a sense of universal responsibility, a deep concern for all irrespective of creed, colour, sex, or nationality.   The premise behind this idea of universal responsibility is the simple fact that, in general terms, all others' desires are the same as mine. Every being wants happiness and does not want suffering. If we, as intelligent human beings, do not accept this fact, there will be more and more suffering on this planet. If we adopt a self-centred approach to life and constantly try to use others for our own self-interest, we may gain temporary benefits, but in the long run we will not succeed in achieving even personal happiness, and world peace will be completely out of the question.   In their quest for happiness, humans have used different methods, which all too often have been cruel and repellent. Behaving in ways utterly unbecoming to their status as humans, they inflict suffering upon fellow humans and other living beings for their own selfish gains. In the end, such shortsighted actions bring suffering to oneself as well as to others. To be born a human being is a rare event in itself, and it is wise to use this opportunity as effectively and skillfully as possible. We must have the proper perspective that of the universal life process, so that the happiness or glory of one person or group is not sought at the expense of others.   All this calls for a new approach to global problems. The world is becoming smaller and smaller - and more and more interdependent - as a result of rapid technological advances and international trade as well as increasing trans-national relations. We now depend very much on each other. In ancient times problems were mostly family-size, and they were naturally tackled at the family level, but the situation has changed. Today we are so interdependent, so closely interconnected with each other, that without a sense of universal responsibility, a feeling of universal brotherhood and sisterhood, and an understanding and belief that we really are part of one big human family, we cannot hope to overcome the dangers to our very existence - let alone bring about peace and happiness.   One nation's problems can no longer be satisfactorily solved by itself alone; too much depends on the interest, attitude, and cooperation of other nations. A universal humanitarian approach to world problems seems the only sound basis for world peace. What does this mean? We begin from the recognition mentioned previously that all beings cherish happiness and do not want suffering. It then becomes both morally wrong and pragmatically unwise to pursue only one's own happiness oblivious to the feelings and aspirations of all others who surround us as members of the same human family. The wiser course is to think of others also when pursuing our own happiness. This will lead to what I call 'wise self-interest', which hopefully will transform itself into 'compromised self-interest', or better still, 'mutual interest'.   Although the increasing interdependence among nations might be expected to generate more sympathetic cooperation, it is difficult to achieve a spirit of genuine cooperation as long as people remain indifferent to the feelings and happiness of others. When people are motivated mostly by greed and jealousy, it is not possible for them to live in harmony. A spiritual approach may not solve all the political problems that have been caused by the existing self-centered approach, but in the long run it will overcome the very basis of the problems that we face today.   On the other hand, if humankind continues to approach its problems considering only temporary expediency, future generations will have to face tremendous difficulties. The global population is increasing, and our resources are being rapidly depleted. Look at the trees, for example. No one knows exactly what adverse effects massive deforestation will have on the climate, the soil, and global ecology as a whole. We are facing problems because people are concentrating only on their short-term, selfish interests, not thinking of the entire human family. They are not thinking of the earth and the long-term effects on universal life as a whole. If we of the present generation do not think about these now, future generations may not be able to cope with them.

Compassion as the Pillar of World Peace

According to Buddhist psychology, most of our troubles are due to our passionate desire for and attachment to things that we misapprehend as enduring entities. The pursuit of the objects of our desire and attachment involves the use of aggression and competitiveness as supposedly efficacious instruments. These mental processes easily translate into actions, breeding belligerence as an obvious effect. Such processes have been going on in the human mind since time immemorial, but their execution has become more effective under modern conditions. What can we do to control and regulate these 'poisons' - delusion, greed, and aggression? For it is these poisons that are behind almost every trouble in the world.   As one brought up in the Mahayana Buddhist tradition, I feel that love and compassion are the moral fabric of world peace. Let me first define what I mean by compassion. When you have pity or compassion for a very poor person, you are showing sympathy because he or she is poor; your compassion is based on altruistic considerations. On the other hand, love towards your wife, your husband, your children, or a close friend is usually based on attachment. When your attachment changes, your kindness also changes; it may disappear. This is not true love. Real love is not based on attachment, but on altruism. In this case your compassion will remain as a humane response to suffering as long as beings continue to suffer.   This type of compassion is what we must strive to cultivate in ourselves, and we must develop it from a limited amount to the limitless. Undiscriminating, spontaneous, and unlimited compassion for all sentient beings is obviously not the usual love that one has for friends or family, which is alloyed with ignorance, desire, and attachment. The kind of love we should advocate is this wider love that you can have even for someone who has done harm to you: your enemy.   The rationale for compassion is that every one of us wants to avoid suffering and gain happiness. This, in turn, is based on the valid feeling of '1', which determines the universal desire for happiness. Indeed, all beings are born with similar desires and should have an equal right to fulfill them. If I compare myself with others, who are countless, I feel that others are more important because I am just one person whereas others are many. Further, the Tibetan Buddhist tradition teaches us to view all sentient beings as our dear mothers and to show our gratitude by loving them all. For, according to Buddhist theory, we are born and reborn countless numbers of times, and it is conceivable that each being has been our parent at one time or another. In this way all beings in the universe share a family relationship.   Whether one believes in religion or not, there is no one who does not appreciate love and compassion. Right from the moment of our birth, we are under the care and kindness of our parents; later in life, when facing the sufferings of disease and old age, we are again dependent on the kindness of others. If at the beginning and end of our lives we depend upon others' kindness, why then in the middle should we not act kindly towards others? The development of a kind heart (a feeling of closeness for all human beings) does not involve the religiosity we normally associate with conventional religious practice. It is not only for people who believe in religion, but is for everyone regardless of race, religion, or political affiliation. It is for anyone who considers himself or herself, above all, a member of the human family and who sees things from this larger and longer perspective. This is a powerful feeling that we should develop and apply; instead, we often neglect it, particularly in our prime years when we experience a false sense of security.   When we take into account a longer perspective, the fact that all wish to gain happiness and avoid suffering, and keep in mind our relative unimportance in relation to countless others, we can conclude that it is worthwhile to share our possessions with others. When you train in this sort of outlook, a true sense of compassion - a true sense of love and respect for others - becomes possible. Individual happiness ceases to be a conscious self-seeking effort; it becomes an automatic and far superior by-product of the whole process of loving and serving others.   Another result of spiritual development, most useful in day-to-day life, is that it gives a calmness and presence of mind. Our lives are in constant flux, bringing many difficulties. When faced with a calm and clear mind, problems can be successfully resolved. When, instead, we lose control over our minds through hatred, selfishness, jealousy, and anger, we lose our sense of judgement. Our minds are blinded and at those wild moments anything can happen, including war. Thus, the practice of compassion and wisdom is useful to all, especially to those responsible for running national affairs, in whose hands lie the power and opportunity to create the structure of world peace.

World Religions for World Peace

The principles discussed so far are in accordance with the ethical teachings of all world religions. I maintain that every major religion of the world - Buddhism, Christianity, Confucianism, Hinduism, Islam, Jainism, Judaism, Sikhism, Taoism, Zoroastrianism - has similar ideals of love, the same goal of benefiting humanity through spiritual practice, and the same effect of making their followers into better human beings. All religions teach moral precepts for perfecting the functions of mind, body, and speech. All teach us not to lie or steal or take others' lives, and so on. The common goal of all moral precepts laid down by the great teachers of humanity is unselfishness. The great teachers wanted to lead their followers away from the paths of negative deeds caused by ignorance and to introduce them to paths of goodness.   All religions agree upon the necessity to control the undisciplined mind that harbours selfishness and other roots of trouble, and each teaches a path leading to a spiritual state that is peaceful, disciplined, ethical, and wise. It is in this sense that I believe all religions have essentially the same message. Differences of dogma may be ascribed to differences of time and circumstance as well as cultural influences; indeed, there is no end to scholastic argument when we consider the purely metaphysical side of religion. However, it is much more beneficial to try to implement in daily life the shared precepts for goodness taught by all religions rather than to argue about minor differences in approach.   There are many different religions to bring comfort and happiness to humanity in much the same way as there are particular treatments for different diseases. For, all religions endeavour in their own way to help living beings avoid misery and gain happiness. And, although we can find causes for preferring certain interpretations of religious truths, there is much greater cause for unity, stemming from the human heart. Each religion works in its own way to lessen human suffering and contribute to world civilization. Conversion is not the point. For instance, I do not think of converting others to Buddhism or merely furthering the Buddhist cause. Rather, I try to think of how I as a Buddhist humanitarian can contribute to human happiness.   While pointing out the fundamental similarities between world religions, I do not advocate one particular religion at the expense of all others, nor do I seek a new 'world religion'. All the different religions of the world are needed to enrich human experience and world civilization. Our human minds, being of different calibre and disposition, need different approaches to peace and happiness. It is just like food. Certain people find Christianity more appealing, others prefer Buddhism because there is no creator in it and everything depends upon your own actions. We can make similar arguments for other religions as well. Thus, the point is clear: humanity needs all the world's religions to suit the ways of life, diverse spiritual needs, and inherited national traditions of individual human beings.   It is from this perspective that I welcome efforts being made in various parts of the world for better understanding among religions. The need for this is particularly urgent now. If all religions make the betterment of humanity their main concern, then they can easily work together in harmony for world peace. Interfaith understanding will bring about the unity necessary for all religions to work together. However, although this is indeed an important step, we must remember that there are no quick or easy solutions. We cannot hide the doctrinal differences that exist among various faiths, nor can we hope to replace the existing religions by a new universal belief. Each religion has its own distinctive contributions to make, and each in its own way is suitable to a particular group of people as they understand life. The world needs them all.   There are two primary tasks facing religious practitioners who are concerned with world peace. First, we must promote better interfaith understanding so as to create a workable degree of unity among all religions. This may be achieved in part by respecting each other's beliefs and by emphasizing our common concern for human well-being. Second, we must bring about a viable consensus on basic spiritual values that touch every human heart and enhance general human happiness. This means we must emphasize the common denominator of all world religions - humanitarian ideals. These two steps will enable us to act both individually and together to create the necessary spiritual conditions for world peace.   We practitioners of different faiths can work together for world peace when we view different religions as essentially instruments to develop a good heart - love and respect for others, a true sense of community. The most important thing is to look at the purpose of religion and not at the details of theology or metaphysics, which can lead to mere intellectualism. I believe that all the major religions of the world can contribute to world peace and work together for the benefit of humanity if we put aside subtle metaphysical differences, which are really the internal business of each religion.   Despite the progressive secularization brought about by worldwide modernization and despite systematic attempts in some parts of the world to destroy spiritual values, the vast majority of humanity continues to believe in one religion or another. The undying faith in religion, evident even under irreligious political systems, clearly demonstrates the potency of religion as such. This spiritual energy and power can be purposefully used to bring about the spiritual conditions necessary for world peace. Religious leaders and humanitarians all over the world have a special role to play in this respect.   Whether we will be able to achieve world peace or not, we have no choice but to work towards that goal. If our minds are dominated by anger, we will lose the best part of human intelligence - wisdom, the ability to decide between right and wrong. Anger is one of the most serious problems facing the world today.

Individual Power to Shape Institutions

Anger plays no small role in current conflicts such as those in the Middle East, Southeast Asia, the North-South problem, and so forth. These conflicts arise from a failure to understand one another's humanness. The answer is not the development and use of greater military force, nor an arms race. Nor is it purely political or purely technological. Basically it is spiritual, in the sense that what is required is a sensitive understanding of our common human situation. Hatred and fighting cannot bring happiness to anyone, even to the winners of battles. Violence always produces misery and thus is essentially counter-productive. It is, therefore, time for world leaders to learn to transcend the differences of race, culture, and ideology and to regard one another through eyes that see the common human situation. To do so would benefit individuals, communities, nations, and the world at large.   The greater part of present world tension seems to stem from the 'Eastern bloc' versus 'Western bloc' conflict that has been going on since World War II. These two blocs tend to describe and view each other in a totally unfavourable light. This continuing, unreasonable struggle is due to a lack of mutual affection and respect for each other as fellow human beings. Those of the Eastern bloc should reduce their hatred towards the Western bloc because the Western bloc is also made up of human beings - men, women, and children. Similarly those of the Western bloc should reduce their hatred towards the Eastern bloc because the Eastern bloc is also human beings. In such a reduction of mutual hatred, the leaders of both blocs have a powerful role to play. But first and foremost, leaders must realize their own and others' humanness. Without this basic realization, very little effective reduction of organized hatred can be achieved.   If, for example, the leader of the United States of America and the leader of the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics suddenly met each other in the middle of a desolate island, I am sure they would respond to each other spontaneously as fellow human beings. But a wall of mutual suspicion and misunderstanding separates them the moment they are identified as the 'President of the USA' and the 'Secretary-General of the USSR'). More human contact in the form of informal extended meetings, without any agenda, would improve their mutual understanding; they would learn to relate to each other as human beings and could then try to tackle international problems based on this understanding. No two parties, especially those with a history of antagonism, can negotiate fruitfully in an atmosphere of mutual suspicion and hatred.   I suggest that world leaders meet about once a year in a beautiful place without any business, just to get to know each other as human beings. Then, later, they could meet to discuss mutual and global problems. I am sure many others share my wish that world leaders meet at the conference table in such an atmosphere of mutual respect and understanding of each other's humanness.   To improve person-to-person contact in the world at large, I would like to see greater encouragement of international tourism. Also, mass media, particularly in democratic societies, can make a considerable contribution to world peace by giving greater coverage to human interest items that reflect the ultimate oneness of humanity. With the rise of a few big powers in the international arena, the humanitarian role of international organizations is being bypassed and neglected. I hope that this will be corrected and that all international organizations, especially the United Nations, will be more active and effective in ensuring maximum benefit to humanity and promoting international understanding. It will indeed be tragic if the few powerful members continue to misuse world bodies like the UN for their one-sided interests. The UN must become the instrument of world peace. This world body must be respected by all, for the UN is the only source of hope for small oppressed nations and hence for the planet as a whole.   As all nations are economically dependent upon one another more than ever before, human understanding must go beyond national boundaries and embrace the international community at large. Indeed, unless we can create an atmosphere of genuine cooperation, gained not by threatened or actual use of force but by heartfelt understanding, world problems will only increase. If people in poorer countries are denied the happiness they desire and deserve, they will naturally be dissatisfied and pose problems for the rich. If unwanted social, political, and cultural forms continue to be imposed upon unwilling people, the attainment of world peace is doubtful. However, if we satisfy people at a heart-to-heart level, peace will surely come.   Within each nation, the individual ought to be given the right to happiness, and among nations, there must be equal concern for the welfare of even the smallest nations. I am not suggesting that one system is better than another and all should adopt it. On the contrary, a variety of political systems and ideologies is desirable and accords with the variety of dispositions within the human community. This variety enhances the ceaseless human quest for happiness. Thus each community should be free to evolve its own political and socio-economic system, based on the principle of self-determination.   The achievement of justice, harmony, and peace depends on many factors. We should think about them in terms of human benefit in the long run rather than the short term. I realize the enormity of the task before us, but I see no other alternative than the one I am proposing - which is based on our common humanity. Nations have no choice but to be concerned about the welfare of others, not so much because of their belief in humanity, but because it is in the mutual and long-term interest of all concerned. An appreciation of this new reality is indicated by the emergence of regional or continental economic organizations such as the European Economic Community, the Association of South East Asian Nations, and so forth. I hope more such trans-national organizations will be formed, particularly in regions where economic development and regional stability seem in short supply.   Under present conditions, there is definitely a growing need for human understanding and a sense of universal responsibility. In order to achieve such ideas, we must generate a good and kind heart, for without this, we can achieve neither universal happiness nor lasting world peace. We cannot create peace on paper. While advocating universal responsibility and universal brotherhood and sisterhood, the facts are that humanity is organized in separate entities in the form of national societies. Thus, in a realistic sense, I feel it is these societies that must act as the building-blocks for world peace. Attempts have been made in the past to create societies more just and equal. Institutions have been established with noble charters to combat anti-social forces. Unfortunately, such ideas have been cheated by selfishness. More than ever before, we witness today how ethics and noble principles are obscured by the shadow of self-interest, particularly in the political sphere. There is a school of thought that warns us to refrain from politics altogether, as politics has become synonymous with amorality. Politics devoid of ethics does not further human welfare, and life without morality reduces humans to the level of beasts. However, politics is not axiomatically 'dirty'. Rather, the instruments of our political culture have distorted the high ideals and noble concepts meant to further human welfare. Naturally, spiritual people express their concern about religious leaders 'messing' with politics, since they fear the contamination of religion by dirty politics.   I question the popular assumption that religion and ethics have no place in politics and that religious persons should seclude themselves as hermits. Such a view of religion is too one-sided; it lacks a proper perspective on the individual's relation to society and the role of religion in our lives. Ethics is as crucial to a politician as it is to a religious practitioner. Dangerous consequences will follow when politicians and rulers forget moral principles. Whether we believe in God or karma, ethics is the foundation of every religion.   Such human qualities as morality, compassion, decency, wisdom, and so forth have been the foundations of all civilizations. These qualities must be cultivated and sustained through systematic moral education in a conducive social environment so that a more humane world may emerge. The qualities required to create such a world must be inculcated right from the beginning, from childhood. We cannot wait for the next generation to make this change; the present generation must attempt a renewal of basic human values. If there is any hope, it is in the future generations, but not unless we institute major change on a worldwide scale in our present educational system. We need a revolution in our commitment to and practice of universal humanitarian values.   It is not enough to make noisy calls to halt moral degeneration; we must do something about it. Since present-day governments do not shoulder such 'religious' responsibilities, humanitarian and religious leaders must strengthen the existing civic, social, cultural, educational, and religious organizations to revive human and spiritual values. Where necessary, we must create new organizations to achieve these goals. Only in so doing can we hope to create a more stable basis for world peace.   Living in society, we should share the sufferings of our fellow citizens and practise compassion and tolerance not only towards our loved ones but also towards our enemies. This is the test of our moral strength. We must set an example by our own practice, for we cannot hope to convince others of the value of religion by mere words. We must live up to the same high standards of integrity and sacrifice that we ask of others. The ultimate purpose of all religions is to serve and benefit humanity. This is why it is so important that religion always be used to effect the happiness and peace of all beings and not merely to convert others.   Still, in religion there are no national boundaries. A religion can and should be used by any people or person who finds it beneficial. What is important for each seeker is to choose a religion that is most suitable to himself or herself. But, the embracing of a particular religion does not mean the rejection of another religion or one's own community. In fact, it is important that those who embrace a religion should not cut themselves off from their own society; they should continue to live within their own community and in harmony with its members. By escaping from your own community, you cannot benefit others, whereas benefiting others is actually the basic aim of religion.   In this regard there are two things important to keep in mind: self-examination and self-correction. We should constantly check our attitude toward others, examining ourselves carefully, and we should correct ourselves immediately when we find we are in the wrong.   Finally, a few words about material progress. I have heard a great deal of complaint against material progress from Westerners, and yet, paradoxically, it has been the very pride of the Western world. I see nothing wrong with material progress per se, provided people are always given precedence. It is my firm belief that in order to solve human problems in all their dimensions, we must combine and harmonize economic development with spiritual growth.   However, we must know its limitations. Although materialistic knowledge in the form of science and technology has contributed enormously to human welfare, it is not capable of creating lasting happiness. In America, for example, where technological development is perhaps more advanced than in any other country, there is still a great deal of mental suffering. This is because materialistic knowledge can only provide a type of happiness that is dependent upon physical conditions. It cannot provide happiness that springs from inner development independent of external factors.   For renewal of human values and attainment of lasting happiness, we need to look to the common humanitarian heritage of all nations the world over. May this essay serve as an urgent reminder lest we forget the human values that unite us all as a single family on this planet.   I have written the above lines To tell my constant feeling. Whenever I meet even a 'foreigner', I have always the same feeling: 'I am meeting another member of the human family., This attitude has deepened My affection and respect for all beings. May this natural wish be My small contribution to world peace. I pray for a more friendly, More caring, and more understanding Human family on this planet. To all who dislike suffering, Who cherish lasting happiness - This is my heartfelt appeal.

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Question of the Month

How can we achieve world peace, each answer below receives a book. apologies to the entrants not included..

To know how to achieve world peace, we first have to define it. When we talk about peace, we’re envisioning more than just the absence of conflict. It’s about creating an environment where harmony reigns, where needs are met, and suffering is minimized. So world considers the interactions not only among people, but also between humanity and nature; while peace , in this context, entails establishing a situation where resources are fairly distributed among all living beings without harming the environment. As such, world peace is about ensuring that everyone has access to the essentials for a decent quality of life while minimizing suffering and negative environmental impacts.

Is such a state achievable? Can we sustainably feed the world’s population without destructively depleting our natural resources? Should we consider measures like limiting population growth or resource consumption? Moreover, we must grapple with the complexities of human diversity. Does peace look the same for everyone, or are there individual or cultural variations? And do all humans truly desire peace, or do some prefer a system that allows individuals to accumulate more resources than others, leading to conflict?

To address these questions and work towards global harmony, we need a multi-faceted approach that considers politics, education and society. Policies that prioritize environmental conservation, equitable resource distribution, and social justice, can pave the way for a peaceful world. By promoting understanding of environmental sustainability, empathy, and conflict resolution through education, we can cultivate a culture of peace from a young age. Finally, by fostering dialogue, collaboration, and mutual respect among diverse groups we can bridge divides and build solidarity within and between societies. Ultimately, achieving world peace requires a collective effort. It demands a global commitment to values of compassion, justice, and sustainability.

Karin Schann, Madrid

It is tempting to omit the ‘How’, and answer the remaining question: ‘Can we achieve world peace?’ – in which case the answer is: sadly, probably not, at least in the foreseeable future. However, it is a most desirable goal. And let the goal be framed in the broadest meaning of ‘Peace’ – namely that ‘the lion shall lie down with the lamb, and justice shall prevail throughout the world’.

Since the earliest hominids left the trees, there has been chimpanzee-style conflict between groups, over territory, food, sex. That probably motivated our spread out of Africa and eventually throughout the world. Throughout history there have continued to be conflicts over land, resources, religion, ideas. For some three centuries now the driver of human development has been capitalism, and the world has seen great, but very unequal, progress. But capitalism fosters competition, greed, exploitation, injustice – and hence more conflict. With a world population now over eight billion and the limited resources of one small planet, mankind must find ways to live in harmony, with justice for all. It may take an existential threat, like global warning, or another pandemic, or an impending asteroid strike, to galvanise all nations into positive, cooperative action. Response to climate change is the immediate imperative, and must be addressed through fairer sharing of the world’s resources and technological knowledge, and greater justice for all nations. Boosting the authority and financing of the United Nations is a first step, together with strenuous efforts to improve health and education worldwide, and the relieving or even elimination of poverty and food shortages. As John F. Kennedy so presciently said in his inaugural address: “This will not be finished in the first 100 days, or even in the first 1000 days, nor in the life of this administration… But let us begin!” The future of humanity demands that we wake up to our collective failings, and take concerted and continuous action to eliminate them.

David J. Morris, Oxford

It often seems that the history of humanity is one of war and conflict: that it is human nature to war against each other, and so war is unavoidable, and peace impossible. The ancient Chinese philosopher/military theorist Sun Tzu wrote that diplomacy must be favoured over war, but acknowledged that sometimes wars must be fought. Even saints such as Thomas Aquinas have written about when war is justified rather than simply condoning pacificism. Therefore, it might be good look at the reasons for warfare, and asking whether these could, to any degree, be remedied, creating an at least partial world peace.

The greatest causes of warfare are arguably, extreme nationalistic sentiments, causing parties to stake a claim to a specific region over which they desire greater sovereignty or social-political rights. This is the case even when these claims are expressed in other terms (‘a jihad’, or a ‘crusade’, against ‘unbelievers’, or ‘terrorists’, etc). So if we could assuage extreme nationalist sentiments, we may go a long way towards securing world peace.

To achieve this, we might be well-advised to create a greater culture of diplomacy between nations: seeing war as a symptom of failure, and something relied on only as a last resort (if our own nation is invaded or attacked). Even if this is difficult, costly and time-consuming, it must be preferred over war. We may also encourage greater respect for other nations and cultures, by supporting international treaties and legislation defending their rights; and create greater social, political and economic cooperation between nation-states. All this may prevent the growth of animosity between nations. Arguably, the existence of the European Union has averted the European-led warfare that marred the last century, bringing lasting peace to its previously antagonistic member-states. We may even appeal to our common humanity above all cultural and nationalistic concerns: after all, every human alive has a common ancestor, perhaps as little as eighty thousand years ago. Therefore, if we are both more considerate of other peoples’ rights to self-determination, whilst being simultaneously more aware of our common humanity, we should be going in the right direction towards – and, perhaps, eventually achieving – world peace.

Jonathan Tipton, Penwortham, Lancashire

When the UN Charter was adopted in June 1945, following two catastrophic world wars, it set as one of its objectives to save succeeding generations from the scourge of war. Since then, the United Nations, the world’s foremost institution of global governance, has dedicated billions of dollars towards peacekeeping and peacemaking initiatives. Yet although these interventions have had some positive outcomes, they have fallen short of delivering global peace. Even now the world is experiencing several active wars, in regions such as Ukraine, Sudan, Gaza, and so on.

The 193 UN Member States are currently engaged in intensive intergovernmental negotiations on the Pact For The Future. One of the key Chapters of these discussions is on The New Agenda for Peace. One of the major stumbling blocks that will inhibit general consensus, will be the narrow national interests of Member States, and geopolitical rivalries amongst the big powers, particularly the five Permanent Members of the UN Security Council. The foremost dilemma confronting a global order of the sort envisaged in the founding provisions of the UN Charter has been how to balance the interests of nation-states as nation-states against those of nation-states as members of the ‘international community’. And to truly do justice to the notion of international community, member states need to achieve harmony with each other. For that to happen, member states need to exercise solidarity with each other, rather than being driven by realpolitik of the sort championed by the likes of Henry Kissinger.

Karl Marx made the bold claim that “the philosophers have hitherto only interpreted the world in various ways. The point, however, is to change it.” Philosophy has an important role to play in the pursuit of global peace, as the world needs re-interpretation. The global peace architecture such as the Security Council still resembles the post World War II order, close to eight decades after the formation of the United Nations.

Masotsha Mnguni, New York

If peace means not only the absence of war, but also harmonious social conditions, the means to achieve and maintain it will be as dynamic as the world’s diverse political, social, and cultural ecologies. Top-down abstract approaches to peace – like those envisioned optimistically in Dante’s On World Government or pessimistically in the fictional totalitarian states of Huxley’s Brave New World or Zamyatin’s We – are not about people. They are about ideas of people. It is not surprising that these abstract theories do not account for the variance of human experience. In treating people as an undifferentiated mass, universal theories of peace fail to recognize humans as individuals, and not just political creatures. Perhaps that is why, against the powerful urges at the transnational level to nullify, or at least ‘bracket’ (to borrow a phrase from Carl Schmitt’s Nomos of the Earth ) conflict, top-down approaches to peace have lacked the widespread success once anticipated.

Real peace, not abstract notions of peace, occurs bottom-up. It appears not as a legal duty but as a societal norm. Peace is not legislated; it is constructed. Universal peaceful traits, such as humility, restraint, and forgiveness, become meaningful only when understood in terms of individual lives. So to effect change, peaceful values must be advocated for within a particular context, and account for the sentiments, passions, and experience of individuals.

How best to promote peaceful values, then? Perhaps the best place to begin is through education. As Hannah Arendt said in The Crisis in Education (1958): “Education is the point at which we decide whether we love the world enough to assume responsibility for it”, and how we prepare our children “for the task of renewing a common world.” It seems that if ‘we’ are seeking a common world where we can live harmoniously with each other, the first step is teaching that peace is a virtue that’s honored by our society, and infused in our cultural understandings of what it means to be ‘us’.

Chris Swartz, North Potomac, Maryland

There are many aspects to this question, not least according to whether one is an optimist or a pessimist. It’s well known that people underestimate the duration and cost of a project even when it’s their profession, because people are generally optimists by default. Only pessimists are realistic. I’m in the latter category.

There are a number of factors that mitigate against world peace – the primary one being that humans are inherently tribal and quick to form ingroup-outgroup partitions, as exemplified by politics the world over. In this situation, rational thought and reasoned argument take a back seat to confirmation bias and emotive rhetoric. Add to this dynamic the oft-repeated phenomena that we follow charismatic, cult-propagating leaders, and you have a recipe for destruction on a national scale. This is the biggest obstacle to world peace. These leaders thrive on and cultivate division with a demonisation of the ‘other’. The focus for all of society’s ills becomes an outgroup identified by nationality, race, skin-colour, culture or religion, etc.

Wealth, or the lack of it, is a factor too. Inequality provides a motive and a rationale for conflict. It often goes hand-in-hand with oppression, but even when it doesn’t, the anger and resentment can be politicised by populist leaders whose agenda is more focused on their own sense of deluded historical significance than actually helping the people they supposedly serve. As you have leaders who refuse to compromise, you’ll never find peace. Only moderates on both sides can broker peace.

So, while I’m a pessimist (or realist), I do see a ‘how’. If we only elect leaders who seek and find consensus, and remove leaders who sow division, there is a chance. The best leaders are the ones who bring out the best in others and are not just feeding their own egos. But this is easier said than done, as we are witnessing right now. For as long as we elect leaders who are narcissistic and cultish, we will continue to sow the seeds of destruction.

Paul P. Mealing, Melbourne

World peace could be considered at the global, country or individual level.

Addressing the global level first, countries are often incapable of acting in a responsible global-centric away if left to their own devices. But the United Nations currently has the same degree of utility as a chocolate teapot. Key changes would be to remove powers of veto, enable it to make proper enforceable decisions, and give it the wherewithal to actually enforce those decisions. This requires giving the UN a standing army and the powers to force countries into mediation. There would also need to be some beefing up of the powers of the International Criminal Court which UN members should not be allowed to resign from. Finally, there would need to be proper agreement on things which are not currently ‘owned’, such as the oceans, the Arctic/Antarctic, air space and other planets.

At a national level, much harm has resulted from the election of narcissistic sociopathic megalomaniacs intent only on consolidating their positions. Elections are often a sham. It should be possible to draft robust constitutional guidelines enforceable by the UN which countries would need to adhere to. Also, the effect of religion on the quality of countries’ governance and legislation is highly debateable, and it is likely to be beneficial for religious principles to be made subservient to the laws of the country. Borders create a natural tension with other countries. In the long term it would be beneficial if countries were more of an administrative unit than a fortress. But this would require major policies of wealth and resource redistribution in order to avoid mass immigration from developing countries.

At the individual level, the human race has become the predominant life form because of our capacity for learning, planning, and developing. Unfortunately, with this has come acquisitiveness and competition. It seems likely that with the greater influence of technology there will need to be some alterations in the concepts of work, progress, and wealth acquisition. If individuals can focus more on cooperation, personal development and contentment, this is likely to feed into their nation’s foreign policy. Education and encouragement of social-responsibility will also have a part to play.

Julian Stafford, Cambridge

But can we? After WWI, and to a lesser extent WWII, there was the cry of ‘never again’ – but we did it again. Our species carried on doing what it has done since history was recorded, and has continued to find reasons to destroy and to kill.

However, there has been a change. Since the first atomic bombs in the 1940s there has been continuous research and development by very clever people in nuclear weaponry and other weapon systems. We know this not mainly from seeing the results, but by being aware of the expertise, secrecy and funding put into them under the heading of ‘defence’. Our principal defence against using these modern weapons has been our belief that by using them our species would risk extinction. We have proxy wars instead, restricted to old-fashioned ‘conventional’ weapons so the casualties are regarded as acceptable, provided escalation to nuclear weapons is avoided by the sponsoring powers. We hope this will last; that there will be no nuclear exchange and so no extinction. But we are human beings, and given our motivations why would we expect this to continue? There does appear to be an instinct within our species to fight, and it appears to be sufficiently strong under the ‘right’ circumstances to outweigh all other considerations. Our time may be relatively short.

There are alternatives. These would need humanity to reject fighting and change in ways not experienced before. Amongst other things there would need to be changes in people’s attitudes to national leaders, to each other, wherever they live on our planet, and to our own individual sense of worth and worthiness.

It’s difficult to be optimistic.

Steve Hubbard, Beccles, Suffolk

From peace platitudes to the most powerful anti-war advisories and caveats, to the utmost in heart-rending songs, through the TED talks, to the centuries of sermons, poetry and music, to the lengthy and profound peace advocacy in books such as The Iliad and War and Peace to Fromkin’s A Peace To End All Peace , to UN publications warning about the catastrophe of nuclear weapons… None of these philosophical commentaries, songs, poems, histories, or political science investigations have, for the last five thousand years or so, brought us a general and lasting peace. And we are now, incredibly, possibly at the start of another world war.

It’s not that these great and wise counsels aren’t insightful and valid; it is that they’re all preaching a sermon to a species wired to be essentially aggressive and avaricious. It is true that humans can behave in a prosocial (peaceful) manner. But when our frequent violent and gluttonous behaviors emerge, worldwide disasters such as war and greedy exploitation endlessly result.

So, what can save us from our profoundly stupid and socially immature actions? Physical Control of the Mind: Toward a Psychocivilized Society (1969) is a brilliant neuroscience study and program by Jose M.R. Delgado and his Yale colleagues that advocates for, and demonstrates, the use of Deep Brain Stimulation (brain manipulation) for human prosocial (peaceful) behavior.

“Frankenstein!” you say. Yet brain interventions are currently effectively being used therapeutically in brain and mind disorders from epilepsy to Parkinson’s to depression. But what’s this got to do with our general ‘healthy’ human behavior?

Effective prosocial scientific correction may be still some years away. But a prosocial, psychocivilized, society is a realistic hope! The most urgent scientific challenge is understanding human behavior. End the futile preaching. Support a true cure – a scientific correction for our heretofore terrible human nature.

Tom Baranski, Somerset, New Jersey

In early Greek thought, peace, a state of affairs caused by what Martha Nussbaum calls ‘fostering natural and social circumstances’, was considered a prerequisite for a flourishing life.To truly live well required favourable circumstances such as prosperity and good fortune, as well as a prevailing peace that ensured safe sanctuary and fertile ground for the provision of our needs.

What then is ‘peace’? A helpful starting point might be with the Norwegian sociologist Johan Galtung, who argued that peace is a set of social arrangements where violence is absent. In his essay Violence, Peace and Peace Research (1969), Galtung further argues that peace is not simply the absence of overt physical aggression but also requires the removal of deeper structural violence that pervades institutions and wider society. This broader definition of peace sees peace-building as the creation of institutions and structures that sustain peaceful societies.

The pursuit of any utopia or positive goal-oriented endeavour, however, always runs the risk of perpetuating the very violence it purports to reject, since such projects contain assumptions which have the potential to generate forms of oppression. In Beyond Peace Education: Toward Co-Poiesis and Enduring Improvisation (2010), Ilan Gur-Ze’ev argues that “‘peace’ in a less than perfect world is a terrible condition” and that there may be circumstances under which it may justly be challenged or even violently resisted. Such views are also echoed by the likes of Herbert Marcuse in One-Dimensional Man (1964), his critique of the neo-capitalist order, with its “comfortable, smooth, reasonable, democratic unfreedom.”

So despite its rhetorical appeal, world peace in a less than perfect world is neither attainable nor, arguably, desirable. All utopias are, in essence, manifestations of power where individuals vie for hegemony so as to impose their particular vision of the good. The flourishing life, therefore, is not to be found in any universal ideal, but instead, in what Gur-Ze’ev labels a ‘negative utopia’: a society characterised by a rejection of ultimate ideals, ideologies, and dogma, in favour of a state of ‘eternal diaspora’ and a ‘homelessness’ that rejects an actual ‘promised land’.

Daniel Janke, Bristol

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The Official Website of the Worldwide Bahá’í Community

In 1985, the Universal House of Justice addressed a message to the peoples of the world, inviting them to consider that a new social order can be fostered by all peoples’ seeing themselves as members of one universal family. This message was presented to world leaders and countless others during the United Nations International Year of Peace.

The Promise of World Peace can be read in full at the Bahá’í Reference Library .

October 1985

To the Peoples of the World:

The Great Peace towards which people of good will throughout the centuries have inclined their hearts, of which seers and poets for countless generations have expressed their vision, and for which from age to age the sacred scriptures of mankind have constantly held the promise, is now at long last within the reach of the nations. For the first time in history it is possible for everyone to view the entire planet, with all its myriad diversified peoples, in one perspective. World peace is not only possible but inevitable. It is the next stage in the evolution of this planet—in the words of one great thinker, “the planetization of mankind”.

Whether peace is to be reached only after unimaginable horrors precipitated by humanity’s stubborn clinging to old patterns of behaviour, or is to be embraced now by an act of consultative will, is the choice before all who inhabit the earth. At this critical juncture when the intractable problems confronting nations have been fused into one common concern for the whole world, failure to stem the tide of conflict and disorder would be unconscionably irresponsible.

Among the favourable signs are the steadily growing strength of the steps towards world order taken initially near the beginning of this century in the creation of the League of Nations, succeeded by the more broadly based United Nations Organization; the achievement since the Second World War of independence by the majority of all the nations on earth, indicating the completion of the process of nation building, and the involvement of these fledgling nations with older ones in matters of mutual concern; the consequent vast increase in co-operation among hitherto isolated and antagonistic peoples and groups in international undertakings in the scientific, educational, legal, economic and cultural fields; the rise in recent decades of an unprecedented number of international humanitarian organizations; the spread of women’s and youth movements calling for an end to war; and the spontaneous spawning of widening networks of ordinary people seeking understanding through personal communication.

The scientific and technological advances occurring in this unusually blessed century portend a great surge forward in the social evolution of the planet, and indicate the means by which the practical problems of humanity may be solved. They provide, indeed, the very means for the administration of the complex life of a united world. Yet barriers persist. Doubts, misconceptions, prejudices, suspicions and narrow self-interest beset nations and peoples in their relations one to another.

It is out of a deep sense of spiritual and moral duty that we are impelled at this opportune moment to invite your attention to the penetrating insights first communicated to the rulers of mankind more than a century ago by Bahá’u’lláh, Founder of the Bahá’í Faith, of which we are the Trustees.

“ The winds of despair ”, Bahá’u’lláh wrote, “ are, alas, blowing from every direction, and the strife that divides and afflicts the human race is daily increasing. The signs of impending convulsions and chaos can now be discerned, inasmuch as the prevailing order appears to be lamentably defective. ” This prophetic judgement has been amply confirmed by the common experience of humanity. Flaws in the prevailing order are conspicuous in the inability of sovereign states organized as United Nations to exorcize the spectre of war, the threatened collapse of the international economic order, the spread of anarchy and terrorism, and the intense suffering which these and other afflictions are causing to increasing millions. Indeed, so much have aggression and conflict come to characterize our social, economic and religious systems, that many have succumbed to the view that such behaviour is intrinsic to human nature and therefore ineradicable.

With the entrenchment of this view, a paralyzing contradiction has developed in human affairs. On the one hand, people of all nations proclaim not only their readiness but their longing for peace and harmony, for an end to the harrowing apprehensions tormenting their daily lives. On the other, uncritical assent is given to the proposition that human beings are incorrigibly selfish and aggressive and thus incapable of erecting a social system at once progressive and peaceful, dynamic and harmonious, a system giving free play to individual creativity and initiative but based on co-operation and reciprocity.

As the need for peace becomes more urgent, this fundamental contradiction, which hinders its realization, demands a reassessment of the assumptions upon which the commonly held view of mankind’s historical predicament is based. Dispassionately examined, the evidence reveals that such conduct, far from expressing man’s true self, represents a distortion of the human spirit. Satisfaction on this point will enable all people to set in motion constructive social forces which, because they are consistent with human nature, will encourage harmony and co-operation instead of war and conflict.

To choose such a course is not to deny humanity’s past but to understand it. The Bahá’í Faith regards the current world confusion and calamitous condition in human affairs as a natural phase in an organic process leading ultimately and irresistibly to the unification of the human race in a single social order whose boundaries are those of the planet. The human race, as a distinct, organic unit, has passed through evolutionary stages analogous to the stages of infancy and childhood in the lives of its individual members, and is now in the culminating period of its turbulent adolescence approaching its long-awaited coming of age.

A candid acknowledgement that prejudice, war and exploitation have been the expression of immature stages in a vast historical process and that the human race is today experiencing the unavoidable tumult which marks its collective coming of age is not a reason for despair but a prerequisite to undertaking the stupendous enterprise of building a peaceful world. That such an enterprise is possible, that the necessary constructive forces do exist, that unifying social structures can be erected, is the theme we urge you to examine.

Whatever suffering and turmoil the years immediately ahead may hold, however dark the immediate circumstances, the Bahá’í community believes that humanity can confront this supreme trial with confidence in its ultimate outcome. Far from signalizing the end of civilization, the convulsive changes towards which humanity is being ever more rapidly impelled will serve to release the “potentialities inherent in the station of man” and reveal “the full measure of his destiny on earth, the innate excellence of his reality”.

The endowments which distinguish the human race from all other forms of life are summed up in what is known as the human spirit; the mind is its essential quality. These endowments have enabled humanity to build civilizations and to prosper materially. But such accomplishments alone have never satisfied the human spirit, whose mysterious nature inclines it towards transcendence, a reaching towards an invisible realm, towards the ultimate reality, that unknowable essence of essences called God. The religions brought to mankind by a succession of spiritual luminaries have been the primary link between humanity and that ultimate reality, and have galvanized and refined mankind’s capacity to achieve spiritual success together with social progress.

No serious attempt to set human affairs aright, to achieve world peace, can ignore religion. Man’s perception and practice of it are largely the stuff of history. An eminent historian described religion as a “faculty of human nature”. That the perversion of this faculty has contributed to much of the confusion in society and the conflicts in and between individuals can hardly be denied. But neither can any fair-minded observer discount the preponderating influence exerted by religion on the vital expressions of civilization. Furthermore, its indispensability to social order has repeatedly been demonstrated by its direct effect on laws and morality.

Writing of religion as a social force, Bahá’u’lláh said: “ Religion is the greatest of all means for the establishment of order in the world and for the peaceful contentment of all that dwell therein. ” Referring to the eclipse or corruption of religion, he wrote: “ Should the lamp of religion be obscured, chaos and confusion will ensue, and the lights of fairness, of justice, of tranquillity and peace cease to shine. ” In an enumeration of such consequences the Bahá’í writings point out that the “perversion of human nature, the degradation of human conduct, the corruption and dissolution of human institutions, reveal themselves, under such circumstances, in their worst and most revolting aspects. Human character is debased, confidence is shaken, the nerves of discipline are relaxed, the voice of human conscience is stilled, the sense of decency and shame is obscured, conceptions of duty, of solidarity, of reciprocity and loyalty are distorted, and the very feeling of peacefulness, of joy and of hope is gradually extinguished.”

If, therefore, humanity has come to a point of paralyzing conflict it must look to itself, to its own negligence, to the siren voices to which it has listened, for the source of the misunderstandings and confusion perpetrated in the name of religion. Those who have held blindly and selfishly to their particular orthodoxies, who have imposed on their votaries erroneous and conflicting interpretations of the pronouncements of the Prophets of God, bear heavy responsibility for this confusion—a confusion compounded by the artificial barriers erected between faith and reason, science and religion. For from a fair-minded examination of the actual utterances of the Founders of the great religions, and of the social milieus in which they were obliged to carry out their missions, there is nothing to support the contentions and prejudices deranging the religious communities of mankind and therefore all human affairs.

The teaching that we should treat others as we ourselves would wish to be treated, an ethic variously repeated in all the great religions, lends force to this latter observation in two particular respects: it sums up the moral attitude, the peace-inducing aspect, extending through these religions irrespective of their place or time of origin; it also signifies an aspect of unity which is their essential virtue, a virtue mankind in its disjointed view of history has failed to appreciate.

Had humanity seen the Educators of its collective childhood in their true character, as agents of one civilizing process, it would no doubt have reaped incalculably greater benefits from the cumulative effects of their successive missions. This, alas, it failed to do.

The resurgence of fanatical religious fervour occurring in many lands cannot be regarded as more than a dying convulsion. The very nature of the violent and disruptive phenomena associated with it testifies to the spiritual bankruptcy it represents. Indeed, one of the strangest and saddest features of the current outbreak of religious fanaticism is the extent to which, in each case, it is undermining not only the spiritual values which are conducive to the unity of mankind but also those unique moral victories won by the particular religion it purports to serve.

However vital a force religion has been in the history of mankind, and however dramatic the current resurgence of militant religious fanaticism, religion and religious institutions have, for many decades, been viewed by increasing numbers of people as irrelevant to the major concerns of the modern world. In its place they have turned either to the hedonistic pursuit of material satisfactions or to the following of man-made ideologies designed to rescue society from the evident evils under which it groans. All too many of these ideologies, alas, instead of embracing the concept of the oneness of mankind and promoting the increase of concord among different peoples, have tended to deify the state, to subordinate the rest of mankind to one nation, race or class, to attempt to suppress all discussion and interchange of ideas, or to callously abandon starving millions to the operations of a market system that all too clearly is aggravating the plight of the majority of mankind, while enabling small sections to live in a condition of affluence scarcely dreamed of by our forebears.

How tragic is the record of the substitute faiths that the worldly-wise of our age have created. In the massive disillusionment of entire populations who have been taught to worship at their altars can be read history’s irreversible verdict on their value. The fruits these doctrines have produced, after decades of an increasingly unrestrained exercise of power by those who owe their ascendancy in human affairs to them, are the social and economic ills that blight every region of our world in the closing years of the twentieth century. Underlying all these outward afflictions is the spiritual damage reflected in the apathy that has gripped the mass of the peoples of all nations and by the extinction of hope in the hearts of deprived and anguished millions.

The time has come when those who preach the dogmas of materialism, whether of the east or the west, whether of capitalism or socialism, must give account of the moral stewardship they have presumed to exercise. Where is the “new world” promised by these ideologies? Where is the international peace to whose ideals they proclaim their devotion? Where are the breakthroughs into new realms of cultural achievement produced by the aggrandizement of this race, of that nation or of a particular class? Why is the vast majority of the world’s peoples sinking ever deeper into hunger and wretchedness when wealth on a scale undreamed of by the Pharaohs, the Caesars, or even the imperialist powers of the nineteenth century is at the disposal of the present arbiters of human affairs?

Most particularly, it is in the glorification of material pursuits, at once the progenitor and common feature of all such ideologies, that we find the roots which nourish the falsehood that human beings are incorrigibly selfish and aggressive. It is here that the ground must be cleared for the building of a new world fit for our descendants.

That materialistic ideals have, in the light of experience, failed to satisfy the needs of mankind calls for an honest acknowledgement that a fresh effort must now be made to find the solutions to the agonizing problems of the planet. The intolerable conditions pervading society bespeak a common failure of all, a circumstance which tends to incite rather than relieve the entrenchment on every side. Clearly, a common remedial effort is urgently required. It is primarily a matter of attitude. Will humanity continue in its waywardness, holding to outworn concepts and unworkable assumptions? Or will its leaders, regardless of ideology, step forth and, with a resolute will, consult together in a united search for appropriate solutions?

Those who care for the future of the human race may well ponder this advice. “If long-cherished ideals and time-honoured institutions, if certain social assumptions and religious formulae have ceased to promote the welfare of the generality of mankind, if they no longer minister to the needs of a continually evolving humanity, let them be swept away and relegated to the limbo of obsolescent and forgotten doctrines. Why should these, in a world subject to the immutable law of change and decay, be exempt from the deterioration that must needs overtake every human institution? For legal standards, political and economic theories are solely designed to safeguard the interests of humanity as a whole, and not humanity to be crucified for the preservation of the integrity of any particular law or doctrine.”

Banning nuclear weapons, prohibiting the use of poison gases, or outlawing germ warfare will not remove the root causes of war. However important such practical measures obviously are as elements of the peace process, they are in themselves too superficial to exert enduring influence. Peoples are ingenious enough to invent yet other forms of warfare, and to use food, raw materials, finance, industrial power, ideology, and terrorism to subvert one another in an endless quest for supremacy and dominion. Nor can the present massive dislocation in the affairs of humanity be resolved through the settlement of specific conflicts or disagreements among nations. A genuine universal framework must be adopted.

Certainly, there is no lack of recognition by national leaders of the world-wide character of the problem, which is self-evident in the mounting issues that confront them daily. And there are the accumulating studies and solutions proposed by many concerned and enlightened groups as well as by agencies of the United Nations, to remove any possibility of ignorance as to the challenging requirements to be met. There is, however, a paralysis of will; and it is this that must be carefully examined and resolutely dealt with. This paralysis is rooted, as we have stated, in a deep-seated conviction of the inevitable quarrelsomeness of mankind, which has led to the reluctance to entertain the possibility of subordinating national self-interest to the requirements of world order, and in an unwillingness to face courageously the far-reaching implications of establishing a united world authority. It is also traceable to the incapacity of largely ignorant and subjugated masses to articulate their desire for a new order in which they can live in peace, harmony and prosperity with all humanity.

The tentative steps towards world order, especially since World War II, give hopeful signs. The increasing tendency of groups of nations to formalize relationships which enable them to co-operate in matters of mutual interest suggests that eventually all nations could overcome this paralysis. The Association of South East Asian Nations, the Caribbean Community and Common Market, the Central American Common Market, the Council for Mutual Economic Assistance, the European Communities, the League of Arab States, the Organization of African Unity, the Organization of American States, the South Pacific Forum—all the joint endeavours represented by such organizations prepare the path to world order.

The increasing attention being focused on some of the most deep-rooted problems of the planet is yet another hopeful sign. Despite the obvious shortcomings of the United Nations, the more than two score declarations and conventions adopted by that organization, even where governments have not been enthusiastic in their commitment, have given ordinary people a sense of a new lease on life. The Universal Declaration of Human Rights, the Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide, and the similar measures concerned with eliminating all forms of discrimination based on race, sex or religious belief; upholding the rights of the child; protecting all persons against being subjected to torture; eradicating hunger and malnutrition; using scientific and technological progress in the interest of peace and the benefit of mankind—all such measures, if courageously enforced and expanded, will advance the day when the spectre of war will have lost its power to dominate international relations. There is no need to stress the significance of the issues addressed by these declarations and conventions. However, a few such issues, because of their immediate relevance to establishing world peace, deserve additional comment.

Racism, one of the most baneful and persistent evils, is a major barrier to peace. Its practice perpetrates too outrageous a violation of the dignity of human beings to be countenanced under any pretext. Racism retards the unfoldment of the boundless potentialities of its victims, corrupts its perpetrators, and blights human progress. Recognition of the oneness of mankind, implemented by appropriate legal measures, must be universally upheld if this problem is to be overcome.

The inordinate disparity between rich and poor, a source of acute suffering, keeps the world in a state of instability, virtually on the brink of war. Few societies have dealt effectively with this situation. The solution calls for the combined application of spiritual, moral and practical approaches. A fresh look at the problem is required, entailing consultation with experts from a wide spectrum of disciplines, devoid of economic and ideological polemics, and involving the people directly affected in the decisions that must urgently be made. It is an issue that is bound up not only with the necessity for eliminating extremes of wealth and poverty but also with those spiritual verities the understanding of which can produce a new universal attitude. Fostering such an attitude is itself a major part of the solution.

Unbridled nationalism, as distinguished from a sane and legitimate patriotism, must give way to a wider loyalty, to the love of humanity as a whole. Bahá’u’lláh’s statement is: “The earth is but one country, and mankind its citizens.” The concept of world citizenship is a direct result of the contraction of the world into a single neighbourhood through scientific advances and of the indisputable interdependence of nations. Love of all the world’s peoples does not exclude love of one’s country. The advantage of the part in a world society is best served by promoting the advantage of the whole. Current international activities in various fields which nurture mutual affection and a sense of solidarity among peoples need greatly to be increased.

Religious strife, throughout history, has been the cause of innumerable wars and conflicts, a major blight to progress, and is increasingly abhorrent to the people of all faiths and no faith. Followers of all religions must be willing to face the basic questions which this strife raises, and to arrive at clear answers. How are the differences between them to be resolved, both in theory and in practice? The challenge facing the religious leaders of mankind is to contemplate, with hearts filled with the spirit of compassion and a desire for truth, the plight of humanity, and to ask themselves whether they cannot, in humility before their Almighty Creator, submerge their theological differences in a great spirit of mutual forbearance that will enable them to work together for the advancement of human understanding and peace.

The emancipation of women, the achievement of full equality between the sexes, is one of the most important, though less acknowledged prerequisites of peace. The denial of such equality perpetrates an injustice against one half of the world’s population and promotes in men harmful attitudes and habits that are carried from the family to the workplace, to political life, and ultimately to international relations. There are no grounds, moral, practical, or biological, upon which such denial can be justified. Only as women are welcomed into full partnership in all fields of human endeavour will the moral and psychological climate be created in which international peace can emerge.

The cause of universal education, which has already enlisted in its service an army of dedicated people from every faith and nation, deserves the utmost support that the governments of the world can lend it. For ignorance is indisputably the principal reason for the decline and fall of peoples and the perpetuation of prejudice. No nation can achieve success unless education is accorded all its citizens. Lack of resources limits the ability of many nations to fulfil this necessity, imposing a certain ordering of priorities. The decision-making agencies involved would do well to consider giving first priority to the education of women and girls, since it is through educated mothers that the benefits of knowledge can be most effectively and rapidly diffused throughout society. In keeping with the requirements of the times, consideration should also be given to teaching the concept of world citizenship as part of the standard education of every child.

A fundamental lack of communication between peoples seriously undermines efforts towards world peace. Adopting an international auxiliary language would go far to resolving this problem and necessitates the most urgent attention.

Two points bear emphasizing in all these issues. One is that the abolition of war is not simply a matter of signing treaties and protocols; it is a complex task requiring a new level of commitment to resolving issues not customarily associated with the pursuit of peace. Based on political agreements alone, the idea of collective security is a chimera. The other point is that the primary challenge in dealing with issues of peace is to raise the context to the level of principle, as distinct from pure pragmatism. For, in essence, peace stems from an inner state supported by a spiritual or moral attitude, and it is chiefly in evoking this attitude that the possibility of enduring solutions can be found.

There are spiritual principles, or what some call human values, by which solutions can be found for every social problem. Any well-intentioned group can in a general sense devise practical solutions to its problems, but good intentions and practical knowledge are usually not enough. The essential merit of spiritual principle is that it not only presents a perspective which harmonizes with that which is immanent in human nature, it also induces an attitude, a dynamic, a will, an aspiration, which facilitate the discovery and implementation of practical measures. Leaders of governments and all in authority would be well served in their efforts to solve problems if they would first seek to identify the principles involved and then be guided by them.

The primary question to be resolved is how the present world, with its entrenched pattern of conflict, can change to a world in which harmony and co-operation will prevail.

World order can be founded only on an unshakeable consciousness of the oneness of mankind, a spiritual truth which all the human sciences confirm. Anthropology, physiology, psychology, recognize only one human species, albeit infinitely varied in the secondary aspects of life. Recognition of this truth requires abandonment of prejudice—prejudice of every kind—race, class, colour, creed, nation, sex, degree of material civilization, everything which enables people to consider themselves superior to others.

Acceptance of the oneness of mankind is the first fundamental prerequisite for reorganization and administration of the world as one country, the home of humankind. Universal acceptance of this spiritual principle is essential to any successful attempt to establish world peace. It should therefore be universally proclaimed, taught in schools, and constantly asserted in every nation as preparation for the organic change in the structure of society which it implies.

In the Bahá’í view, recognition of the oneness of mankind “calls for no less than the reconstruction and the demilitarization of the whole civilized world—a world organically unified in all the essential aspects of its life, its political machinery, its spiritual aspiration, its trade and finance, its script and language, and yet infinite in the diversity of the national characteristics of its federated units.”

Elaborating the implications of this pivotal principle, Shoghi Effendi, the Guardian of the Bahá’í Faith, commented in 1931 that: “Far from aiming at the subversion of the existing foundations of society, it seeks to broaden its basis, to remold its institutions in a manner consonant with the needs of an ever-changing world. It can conflict with no legitimate allegiances, nor can it undermine essential loyalties. Its purpose is neither to stifle the flame of a sane and intelligent patriotism in men’s hearts, nor to abolish the system of national autonomy so essential if the evils of excessive centralization are to be avoided. It does not ignore, nor does it attempt to suppress, the diversity of ethnical origins, of climate, of history, of language and tradition, of thought and habit, that differentiate the peoples and nations of the world. It calls for a wider loyalty, for a larger aspiration than any that has animated the human race. It insists upon the subordination of national impulses and interests to the imperative claims of a unified world. It repudiates excessive centralization on one hand, and disclaims all attempts at uniformity on the other. Its watchword is unity in diversity”.

The achievement of such ends requires several stages in the adjustment of national political attitudes, which now verge on anarchy in the absence of clearly defined laws or universally accepted and enforceable principles regulating the relationships between nations. The League of Nations, the United Nations, and the many organizations and agreements produced by them have unquestionably been helpful in attenuating some of the negative effects of international conflicts, but they have shown themselves incapable of preventing war. Indeed, there have been scores of wars since the end of the Second World War; many are yet raging.

The predominant aspects of this problem had already emerged in the nineteenth century when Bahá’u’lláh first advanced his proposals for the establishment of world peace. The principle of collective security was propounded by him in statements addressed to the rulers of the world. Shoghi Effendi commented on his meaning: “What else could these weighty words signify,” he wrote, “if they did not point to the inevitable curtailment of unfettered national sovereignty as an indispensable preliminary to the formation of the future Commonwealth of all the nations of the world? Some form of a world super-state must needs be evolved, in whose favour all the nations of the world will have willingly ceded every claim to make war, certain rights to impose taxation and all rights to maintain armaments, except for purposes of maintaining internal order within their respective dominions. Such a state will have to include within its orbit an International Executive adequate to enforce supreme and unchallengeable authority on every recalcitrant member of the commonwealth; a World Parliament whose members shall be elected by the people in their respective countries and whose election shall be confirmed by their respective governments; and a Supreme Tribunal whose judgement will have a binding effect even in such cases where the parties concerned did not voluntarily agree to submit their case to its consideration.

“A world community in which all economic barriers will have been permanently demolished and the interdependence of capital and labour definitely recognized; in which the clamour of religious fanaticism and strife will have been forever stilled; in which the flame of racial animosity will have been finally extinguished; in which a single code of international law—the product of the considered judgement of the world’s federated representatives—shall have as its sanction the instant and coercive intervention of the combined forces of the federated units; and finally a world community in which the fury of a capricious and militant nationalism will have been transmuted into an abiding consciousness of world citizenship—such indeed, appears, in its broadest outline, the Order anticipated by Bahá’u’lláh, an Order that shall come to be regarded as the fairest fruit of a slowly maturing age.”

The implementation of these far-reaching measures was indicated by Bahá’u’lláh: “ The time must come when the imperative necessity for the holding of a vast, an all-embracing assemblage of men will be universally realized. The rulers and kings of the earth must needs attend it, and, participating in its deliberations, must consider such ways and means as will lay the foundations of the world’s Great Peace amongst men. ”

The courage, the resolution, the pure motive, the selfless love of one people for another—all the spiritual and moral qualities required for effecting this momentous step towards peace are focused on the will to act. And it is towards arousing the necessary volition that earnest consideration must be given to the reality of man, namely, his thought. To understand the relevance of this potent reality is also to appreciate the social necessity of actualizing its unique value through candid, dispassionate and cordial consultation, and of acting upon the results of this process. Bahá’u’lláh insistently drew attention to the virtues and indispensability of consultation for ordering human affairs. He said: “ Consultation bestows greater awareness and transmutes conjecture into certitude. It is a shining light which, in a dark world, leads the way and guides. For everything there is and will continue to be a station of perfection and maturity. The maturity of the gift of understanding is made manifest through consultation. ” The very attempt to achieve peace through the consultative action he proposed can release such a salutary spirit among the peoples of the earth that no power could resist the final, triumphal outcome.

Concerning the proceedings for this world gathering, ‘Abdu’l-Bahá, the son of Bahá’u’lláh and authorized interpreter of his teachings, offered these insights: “ They must make the Cause of Peace the object of general consultation, and seek by every means in their power to establish a Union of the nations of the world. They must conclude a binding treaty and establish a covenant, the provisions of which shall be sound, inviolable and definite. They must proclaim it to all the world and obtain for it the sanction of all the human race. This supreme and noble undertaking—the real source of the peace and well-being of all the world—should be regarded as sacred by all that dwell on earth. All the forces of humanity must be mobilized to ensure the stability and permanence of this Most Great Covenant. In this all-embracing Pact the limits and frontiers of each and every nation should be clearly fixed, the principles underlying the relations of governments towards one another definitely laid down, and all international agreements and obligations ascertained. In like manner, the size of the armaments of every government should be strictly limited, for if the preparations for war and the military forces of any nation should be allowed to increase, they will arouse the suspicion of others. The fundamental principle underlying this solemn Pact should be so fixed that if any government later violate any one of its provisions, all the governments on earth should arise to reduce it to utter submission, nay the human race as a whole should resolve, with every power at its disposal, to destroy that government. Should this greatest of all remedies be applied to the sick body of the world, it will assuredly recover from its ills and will remain eternally safe and secure. ”

The holding of this mighty convocation is long overdue.

With all the ardour of our hearts, we appeal to the leaders of all nations to seize this opportune moment and take irreversible steps to convoke this world meeting. All the forces of history impel the human race towards this act which will mark for all time the dawn of its long-awaited maturity.

Will not the United Nations, with the full support of its membership, rise to the high purposes of such a crowning event?

Let men and women, youth and children everywhere recognize the eternal merit of this imperative action for all peoples and lift up their voices in willing assent. Indeed, let it be this generation that inaugurates this glorious stage in the evolution of social life on the planet.

The source of the optimism we feel is a vision transcending the cessation of war and the creation of agencies of international co-operation. Permanent peace among nations is an essential stage, but not, Bahá’u’lláh asserts, the ultimate goal of the social development of humanity. Beyond the initial armistice forced upon the world by the fear of nuclear holocaust, beyond the political peace reluctantly entered into by suspicious rival nations, beyond pragmatic arrangements for security and coexistence, beyond even the many experiments in co-operation which these steps will make possible lies the crowning goal: the unification of all the peoples of the world in one universal family.

Disunity is a danger that the nations and peoples of the earth can no longer endure; the consequences are too terrible to contemplate, too obvious to require any demonstration. “ The well-being of mankind, ” Bahá’u’lláh wrote more than a century ago, “ its peace and security, are unattainable unless and until its unity is firmly established. ” In observing that “mankind is groaning, is dying to be led to unity, and to terminate its age-long martyrdom”, Shoghi Effendi further commented that: “Unification of the whole of mankind is the hall-mark of the stage which human society is now approaching. Unity of family, of tribe, of city-state, and nation have been successively attempted and fully established. World unity is the goal towards which a harassed humanity is striving. Nation-building has come to an end. The anarchy inherent in state sovereignty is moving towards a climax. A world, growing to maturity, must abandon this fetish, recognize the oneness and wholeness of human relationships, and establish once for all the machinery that can best incarnate this fundamental principle of its life.”

All contemporary forces of change validate this view. The proofs can be discerned in the many examples already cited of the favourable signs towards world peace in current international movements and developments. The army of men and women, drawn from virtually every culture, race and nation on earth, who serve the multifarious agencies of the United Nations, represent a planetary “civil service” whose impressive accomplishments are indicative of the degree of co-operation that can be attained even under discouraging conditions. An urge towards unity, like a spiritual springtime, struggles to express itself through countless international congresses that bring together people from a vast array of disciplines. It motivates appeals for international projects involving children and youth. Indeed, it is the real source of the remarkable movement towards ecumenism by which members of historically antagonistic religions and sects seem irresistibly drawn towards one another. Together with the opposing tendency to warfare and self-aggrandizement against which it ceaselessly struggles, the drive towards world unity is one of the dominant, pervasive features of life on the planet during the closing years of the twentieth century.

The experience of the Bahá’í community may be seen as an example of this enlarging unity. It is a community of some three to four million people drawn from many nations, cultures, classes and creeds, engaged in a wide range of activities serving the spiritual, social and economic needs of the peoples of many lands. It is a single social organism, representative of the diversity of the human family, conducting its affairs through a system of commonly accepted consultative principles, and cherishing equally all the great outpourings of divine guidance in human history. Its existence is yet another convincing proof of the practicality of its Founder’s vision of a united world, another evidence that humanity can live as one global society, equal to whatever challenges its coming of age may entail. If the Bahá’í experience can contribute in whatever measure to reinforcing hope in the unity of the human race, we are happy to offer it as a model for study.

In contemplating the supreme importance of the task now challenging the entire world, we bow our heads in humility before the awesome majesty of the divine Creator, Who out of His infinite love has created all humanity from the same stock; exalted the gem-like reality of man; honoured it with intellect and wisdom, nobility and immortality; and conferred upon man the “unique distinction and capacity to know Him and to love Him”, a capacity that “must needs be regarded as the generating impulse and the primary purpose underlying the whole of creation.”

We hold firmly the conviction that all human beings have been created “to carry forward an ever-advancing civilization”; that “to act like the beasts of the field is unworthy of man”; that the virtues that befit human dignity are trustworthiness, forbearance, mercy, compassion and loving-kindness towards all peoples. We reaffirm the belief that the “potentialities inherent in the station of man, the full measure of his destiny on earth, the innate excellence of his reality, must all be manifested in this promised Day of God.” These are the motivations for our unshakeable faith that unity and peace are the attainable goal towards which humanity is striving.

At this writing, the expectant voices of Bahá’ís can be heard despite the persecution they still endure in the land in which their Faith was born. By their example of steadfast hope, they bear witness to the belief that the imminent realization of this age-old dream of peace is now, by virtue of the transforming effects of Bahá’u’lláh’s revelation, invested with the force of divine authority. Thus we convey to you not only a vision in words: we summon the power of deeds of faith and sacrifice; we convey the anxious plea of our co-religionists everywhere for peace and unity. We join with all who are the victims of aggression, all who yearn for an end to conflict and contention, all whose devotion to principles of peace and world order promotes the ennobling purposes for which humanity was called into being by an all-loving Creator.

In the earnestness of our desire to impart to you the fervour of our hope and the depth of our confidence, we cite the emphatic promise of Bahá’u’lláh: “ These fruitless strifes, these ruinous wars shall pass away, and the ‘Most Great Peace’ shall come. ”

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The document that redefined humanity: The Universal Declaration of Human Rights at 75

In this section.

• After an attempted assassination, how to turn back a rising tide of political threats and violence 
• The populism of self-destruction: How better policy can blunt the anti-clean energy backlash that threatens humanity’s future
• Public policy, values, and politics: Why so much depends on getting them right
• The Ghost Budget: How U.S. war spending went rogue, wasted billions, and how to fix it
• The Great Creep Backward: Policy responses to China’s slowing economy
• Two peoples. Two states. Why U.S. diplomacy in Israel and Palestine needs vision, partners, and a backbone
• We can productively discuss even the toughest topics—here’s how
• Legacy of privilege: David Deming and Raj Chetty on how elite college admissions policies affect who gains power and prestige
• Need to solve an intractable problem? Collaboration is hard but worth it.

Harvard Kennedy School Professor Kathryn Sikkink and former Human Rights Watch executive director Kenneth Roth tell the story of the document some scholars call humankind’s greatest achievement.

FEATURING Kathryn Sikkink AND KenNETH Roth

43 minutes and 10 seconds.

Harvard Kennedy School Professor Kathryn Sikkink and former longtime Human Rights Watch executive director Kenneth Roth have spent years both studying the transformational effects of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights (UDHR) and working on the ground to make its vision of a more just, equal world a reality. On December 10th, the world celebrated not only the annual Human Rights Day, but also the 75th anniversary of the UDHR, which some scholars consider to be the greatest achievement in the history of humankind. It was the first time representatives of the world community declared that every person on earth was entitled to the same rights as every other, without discrimination, and no matter the circumstances.

It was an achievement that was both historically radical—legal slavery in the United States had ended just 80 years earlier—and yet one which made perfect, urgent sense in the post-World-War-II context of a humanity whose collective conscience was still reeling at the horrors and inhumanity of conflict. Appalled by the dehumanization and mass slaughter of the Holocaust, where 6 million Jews were exterminated by the Nazis along with Roma, homosexuals and other groups, by Japanese atrocities including 2.7 million people murdered in Northern China alone, by the first use of atomic weapons, and by other acts of mass civilian killing, the world’s nations gathered to write a new definition of what it means to be human.

The result was the UDHR, which was drafted by a committee led by former U.S. first lady Eleanor Roosevelt. It was radical not just because it was so universal, but also because it was remarkably comprehensive—going far beyond basics like life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness. It enumerated human rights to privacy, health, adequate housing, freedom from torture and slavery, the right to nationality, to take part in government, to work for equal pay, to have protection against unemployment, to unionize, to a decent standard of living, to rest and leisure, to enjoy culture, art, and science, and finally to a social and international order where the rights in the Declaration could be fully realized. Sikkink is a faculty affiliate of the Carr Center for Human Rights Policy at HKS, where Roth just finished a senior fellowship. They  join PolicyCast host Ralph Ranalli to explain how the UDHR has forever changed the way we think about our fellow human beings, and to suggest policies that will keep pushing the global community toward a more just, fair, and compassionate world. 

Episode Notes:  

Kathryn Sikkink is the Ryan Family Professor of Human Rights Policy at the Harvard Kennedy School and a faculty affiliate of the Carr Center for Human Rights Policy. Sikkink’s work centers on international norms and institutions, transnational advocacy networks, the impact of human rights law and policies, transitional justice, and the laws of war. She has written numerous books, including “The Hidden Face of Rights: Toward a Politics of Responsibilities,” “Evidence for Hope: Making Human Rights Work in the 21st Century,” and “The Justice Cascade: How Human Rights Prosecutions are Changing World Politics,” which was awarded the Robert F. Kennedy Center Book Award and the Washington Office on Latin America/Duke University Human Rights Book Award. She holds an MA and a PhD from Columbia University and has been a Fulbright Scholar in Argentina and a Guggenheim fellow. She is a member of the American Philosophical Society, the American Academy of Arts and Sciences and the Council on Foreign Relations. 

Kenneth Roth is the former executive director of Human Rights Watch, one of the world's leading international human rights organizations, which operates in more than 90 countries. Roth has been called  “the godfather of the human rights movement” for his role in changing the way rights violations were covered in the international media. He first learned about human rights abuses from his father, whose Jewish family ran a butchery near Frankfurt in Hitler’s Germany. Prior to joining Human Rights Watch in 1987, Roth served as a federal prosecutor in New York and for the Iran-Contra investigation in Washington, DC. A graduate of Yale Law School and Brown University, Roth has conducted numerous human rights investigations and missions around the world. He has written extensively on a wide range of human rights abuses, devoting special attention to issues of international justice, counterterrorism, the foreign policies of the major powers, and the work of the United Nations. He was most recently a senior fellow at the Carr Center for Human Rights Policy at HKS.

Ralph Ranalli of the HKS Office of Communications and Public Affairs is the host, producer, and editor of HKS PolicyCast. A former journalist, public television producer, and entrepreneur, he holds an AB in Political Science from UCLA and an MS in Journalism from Columbia University. 

The co-producer of PolicyCast is Susan Hughes . Design and graphics support is provided by Lydia Rosenberg, Delane Meadows, and the OCPA Design Team. Social media promotion and support is provided by Natalie Montaner and the OCPA Digital Team.  

For more information please visit our  webpage  or contact us at  [email protected] .

This episode is available on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, and wherever you get your podcasts.

Preroll: PolicyCast explores evidence-based policy solutions to the big problems we’re facing in our society and our world. This podcast is a production of the Kennedy School of Government at Harvard University. 

Intro (Kathryn Sikkink): I would first go back to the creation of the United Nations, which happened in 1945, where 50 countries of the world, the Allies, not the Axis powers, assembled in San Francisco and were creating this new international organization, a new charter. And there was a demand to get human rights into the UN Charter, and they succeeded in doing that. That was a demand led by NGOs that were present as consultants to the U.S. delegation to San Francisco, and it was led by small states, including the 20 Latin American states that were present there. First, they got human rights into the UN Charter, and then people realized we don't have a definition of human rights. But the charter did set up a human rights commission as one of the few specified commissions that the charter demanded. And that new human rights commission got to work. People, delegations arrived from around the world, and started trying to figure out a declaration, a definition of what we meant by human rights. 

Intro (Kenneth Roth): It began to change really with apartheid in South Africa, which was just such an outrageous system that it was hard to say, "Oh, this is just South Africa doing its own thing the way any sovereign would do." That was the opening for governments to start commenting on each other's practices. It got a further jump forward with the 1973 Pinochet coup, which was then very much led by exiles from Chile who would go to Geneva and talk about the torture, the disappearances, the executions under Pinochet. And that also generated global outrage. So, it was really a handful of situations that broke the ice, where governments suddenly were not just comfortable saying, "Oh, that's what governments do. That's sovereignty.”  

Intro (Ralph Ranalli): Some scholars and advocates consider it to be the greatest achievement in the history of humankind: a worldwide declaration made in 1948 that every human person on earth is entitled to the same rights as every other, without discrimination, and no matter the circumstances. It was an achievement that was both historically radical—legal slavery in the United States had ended just 80 years earlier—and yet one which made perfect, urgent sense in the post-World-War-II context of a world whose collective conscience was still reeling at the horrors and inhumanity of human conflict. Appalled by the dehumanization and mass slaughter of human beings in the Holocaust, where 6 million Jews were exterminated by the Nazis along with Poles, Roma, homosexuals and other groups, by Japanese atrocities including 2.7 million people murdered in Northern China alone, by the first use of atomic weapons, and by other acts of mass civilian killing, the world’s nations gathered to write a new definition of what it means to be human. The result was the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, which was drafted by a committee led by former U.S. first lady Eleanor Roosevelt. It was radical not just for it being universal, but also for being comprehensive—going far beyond life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness to enumerating human rights to privacy, health, adequate housing, freedom from torture and slavery, the right to nationality, to take part in government, to work for equal pay, to have protection against unemployment, to unionize, to a decent standard of living, to rest and leisure, to enjoy culture, art, and science, and finally to a social and international order where the rights in the Declaration could be fully realized. Our guests today have spent years both studying the transformational effects of the UDHR in the world and worked on the ground to make its vision of a more just, equal world a reality. Kathryn Sikkink is the Ryan Family Professor of Human Rights Policy at the Harvard Kennedy School and the award-winning author of numerous books on rights and international law. Ken Roth is just wrapping up his term as a senior fellow at the Carr Center for Human Rights Policy at HKS and is the former longtime director of Human Rights Watch, one of the world’s leading human rights organizations which operates in 90 different countries around the world. They’re with me on the occasion of the 75th anniversary of the UDHR to explain how it has changed forever the way we think about our fellow human beings.  

Ralph Ranalli: Ken, Kathryn, welcome to PolicyCast. 

Kenneth Roth: It's good to be here. 

Kathryn Sikkink: Thank you. 

Ralph Ranalli: So we're talking about the Universal Declaration of Human Rights. It was created in 1948, and it marked the first time the world had a documented global agreement that declared all humans as free and equal regardless of sex, color, creed, religion, and other characteristics. It's been translated into over 500 languages, and it's widely recognized as having paved the way for the adoption of more than 70 human rights treaties around the globe. What were its origins? Kathryn, do you maybe want to start us off on this? 

Kathryn Sikkink: The Universal Declaration for Human Rights has its origins first in the interwar period, but especially after World War II. World War II made the issue of human rights on everyone's mind. We saw the terrible suffering and violence created by the absence of human rights in the world, and so, after World War II, scholars, diplomats, the NGOs and the general public were all committed to finally get human rights onto the world agenda and into international diplomacy. That was not only led by the great powers, like the United States and the United Kingdom, it was also led by many other countries in the world, including countries in Latin America. 

Kenneth Roth: Yeah. I would just also say I think it's useful to see the Universal Declaration as part of this burst of standards setting that was very much, as Kathryn said, a response to the atrocities of the Second World War. So, within a few years, 1948, 1949, we saw not only the Universal Declaration but also the convention against genocide and the first four conventions of 1949 on the latter setting forth standards for the conduct of war. 

Ralph Ranalli: What was the feeling in that post-war period? Because you had the horrible revelations of the atrocities of the Holocaust, but also those committed by Japan in China, where millions of people were also killed. What was the atmosphere like that created this window where you could achieve something that was this sweeping and this unprecedented? 

Kathryn Sikkink: I would first go back to the creation of the United Nations, which happened in 1945, where 50 countries of the world, the Allies, not the Axis powers... World War II was still going on and still being finalized. So, these 50 countries assembled in San Francisco and were creating this new international organization, a new charter. And there was a demand to get human rights into the UN Charter, and they succeeded in doing that. That was a demand led by NGOs that were present as consultants to the US delegation to San Francisco, and it was led by small states, including the 20 Latin American states that were present there. 

First, they got human rights into the UN Charter, and then people realized we don't have a definition of human rights. But the charter did set up a human rights commission as one of the few specified commissions that the charter demanded. And that new human rights commission got to work. People, delegations arrived from around the world, and it started trying to figure out a declaration, a definition of what we meant by human rights. If I can just give one little example to give an idea of what was going on still, the representative from China was a man named P.C. Chang. He was in New York because his university had been closed when it was overrun by the Japanese, by the Japanese invasion of China. So, he happened to be at Columbia University, and the nationalist government realized he was there and appointed him to be a member of the Human Rights Commission. So we have to realize it was a time when people were having trouble traveling, and yet they persisted, meeting to try to hammer out this definition. So, there's a sense of urgency. I think, at the same time, as this was definitely still a post-war scenario, Europe was in terrible disarray, there was immense flows of refugees, reconstruction was barely underway. So, I think that has been the atmosphere of the time. 

Kenneth Roth: The only thing I would add to what Kathryn is saying is that the Charter does include the term human rights, but it actually means something a little bit different to what it's come to mean. That, I think, also reflects the limitations of the Universal Declaration in that, if you look to the Charter, it talks about promoting and encouraging respect for human rights. It doesn't use the terminology that today is associated with a bit of a tougher approach, which is protecting human rights. Promoting and encouraging sounds like every government's- 

Ralph Ranalli: Kind of aspirational? 

Kenneth Roth: Yeah. Every government's supposed to do what's best, but it was still a very state-centric approach. You can see this really for the first two decades of the Universal Declaration because, if you go to the first of this United Nations Commission of Human Rights, its first task was to draft the Universal Declaration, but it then was the guardian of the Universal Declaration. What that meant was having nice, polite conversations about human rights and never naming any offender. That was the case for the first two decades because it was just encouraging, it was just promoting, and it was considered undiplomatic to name names. That's not what diplomats do. They don't say, "You, government X, are suppressing the rights of your people." They just say, "Wouldn't it be good if everybody respected human rights?" So, needless to say, that's not a very effective way of doing the job because, if nobody feels singled out if there's any pressure, they keep doing their own thing. But that was the product of the era, where, even though the UN Charter introduced the concept of human rights, the UN as a tribe of governments still gave priority to sovereignty. And it was really supposed to be the duty of each state to do what it was supposed to do within the realm of human rights, but not really the subject of pressure from others. They could talk about it generically but not talk about it in too concrete a way. That would still be deemed interference in the government's internal affairs. 

Ralph Ranalli: When did that change? You said it was the first two decades. I know Human Rights Watch, which you were the head of for a long time, was created in 1978 as Helsinki Watch to monitor the compliance with the Helsinki Accords specifically, especially in terms of human rights in the Soviet Union and Eastern Europe. When did that change, and what drove that change? 

Kenneth Roth: It began to change really with apartheid in South Africa, which was just such an outrageous system that it was hard to say, "Oh, this is just South Africa doing its own thing the way any sovereign would do." That was the opening for governments to start commenting on each other's practices. It got a further jump forward with the 1973 Pinochet coup, which was then very much led by exiles from Chile who would go to Geneva and talk about the torture, the disappearances, the executions under Pinochet. And that also generated global outrage. So, it was really a handful of situations that broke the ice, where governments suddenly were not just comfortable saying, "Oh, that's what governments do. That's sovereignty. Everybody figures out their own path to respect human rights." But you still heard from many governments, "To criticize them for their human rights record is to interfere with our internal affairs." 

I would say that that didn't really tip until the emergence of a series of human rights organizations that really pushed the envelope, and that, when it was just left up to governments, they still were fairly polite with each other. It was only the emergence of NGOs that were not going to play that game, that were not going to accept the definition of diplomatic as never criticizing a government, just sticking in the realm of generic statements. They really changed that, to the point that, today, you still get this defense. And we can talk about who are the worst perpetrators of this internal affairs defense. The norm at what is now the Human Rights Commission, which was transformed into the Human Rights Council, now the norm is to comment on the behavior of particular governments, but not universally. Even some of the supposed guardians of the Universal Declaration fall short in some very important respects. 

Kathryn Sikkink: Mm-hmm. If I could just get a little context around what Ken just said, first, this mention of the apartheid movement, of course the context there is decolonization. The world has gone from these 50 countries that were at San Francisco to today we have 143. Most of those new countries joined the UN via processes of decolonization. So, they brought new concerns and values, and one of them, of course, was demanding the end to the apartheid regime in South Africa. 

Then, secondly, about the point about Chile. We're talking about the 75th anniversary of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, but we're also talking about the 50th anniversary this year of the Chilean coup. And that was an issue. People say, "Well, why Chile? Why did Chile make such a difference?" It was an issue that the first world, the second world, and this new third world of decolonizing states could all agree on. The Soviet Union was worried about what happened to Salvador Allende and the electoral rocked socialism, but so were countries in Europe, and so very much were countries in the developing world. But once they broke the rules with Chile, they started naming countries by name in the UN Human Rights Commission. They started writing country reports in the Inter-American Commission of Human Rights. Then you couldn't go backwards again. You created a new set of practices that needed to be extended to all states. 

Kenneth Roth: Actually, if I could pick up on Kathryn's colonization and decolonization point, which is, I think, important because it was also the colonial process that laid behind this disinclination to name offender governments. Because, if you look at the world in 1948, at the time the Universal Declaration was drafted, who didn't want to talk about their human rights record? European governments that had colonies. Also, the U.S. government because of racism in the United States. So, some of the governments that today are seen as the big proponents of human rights were actually not going to get into the business of commenting on each other for fear of how they would come out in that process. It was the evolution of what today is known as the 193 members of the General Assembly. 

Kathryn Sikkink : Oh, I said 143. I'm sorry. 193. Yes, correct. Yeah. Yeah, yeah. Sorry. 

Kenneth Roth: That includes, on the one hand, many former victims of colonization, but also we have to recognize still many abusive governments. So this idea that you don't comment on each other's human rights offenses still resonates with governments that are deeply into violating their people's human rights. The biggest proponent of maintaining that system today is China. The terminology has varied year to year. Sometimes, they talk about win-win strategies, where everybody promotes their own thing and it’s win-win. We're not going to be critical. We'll talk about cooperative efforts as opposed to pressure.  

The latest terminology from Xi Jinping is civilization. We should recognize that there are different civilizational paths to respect human rights. So there's the Chinese civilization that does its autocratic thing. Now, who defines what that Chinese civilization is? Not the people of China. They have no say. In fact, when the people of Hong Kong said, "We want nothing to do with Beijing's dictatorship," they were shut down. All the protests were ended. The national security law was imposed. But Xi Jinping, sitting there in Beijing, decides what Chinese civilization is and then says, "That's our route. Each government does their own thing. The UN should be promoting, not protecting human rights." That approach is still articulated, but it doesn't really resonate anymore. It's not the norm at all. And it now is de facto accepted that the UN Human Rights Council does regularly comment on governments' internal affairs—if you want to put it that way. 

But there are others who—even surprisingly—really will not criticize another government standing alone for the most part. Even though it's a democracy, but it just is stuck in this old-fashioned view that to each their own when it comes to respecting human rights. So that is still out there, something we still bump up against, but it has been discredited. And the main reason it's been discredited is because of the emergence of NGOs, of human rights organizations that are just not going to settle for this cheap governmental excuse to get away without pressure with human rights violations. 

Ralph Ranalli: Is there any, though, validity in any way to the criticism that the UDHR represents a fundamentally Western viewpoint? Because, Kathryn, you mentioned P.C. Chang from China. According to former first lady Eleanor Roosevelt, who was the chair of the drafting committee for the UDHR, one of Chang’s arguments was that there was more than one kind of reality, and that the committee should be studying Confucianism as well as Western moral thought. Now in the human rights discussion there are some people who suggest that perhaps maybe the countries of the Global North are imposing a certain definition of human rights on the Global South, who may not share those same values. What do you think about those arguments?  

Kathryn Sikkink: These debates go back to the debates within the committee that was drafting the Universal Declaration on Human Rights. It was a larger committee that included delegates from many countries around the world. But the five key people who were the core, really six key people who were the core drafting committee were, as Ralph just mentioned, Eleanor Roosevelt from the United States, René Cassin from France, and then these three other individuals from countries in the Global South. We said P.C. Chang. There was Charles Malik, who came from Lebanon, and there was Hernan Santa Cruz, who was from Chile. 

Each of them brought different perspectives. P.C. Chang did bring perspectives from the Confucian tradition into the discussion. Hernan Santa Cruz was really the person who insisted that both economic, social, and cultural rights and civil and political rights both be included in the Universal Declaration for Human Rights. And he persuaded the main staff person, John Humphrey, who was from Canada and who was a social democrat or a democratic socialist, to make sure that that happened. So already there was a wide participation.  

Now, of course, many, many countries, especially in Africa, were not yet decolonized. And so when they came into the system, they wanted to write new conventions. The second convention that was written, human rights convention that was entered into force after the genocide convention, was the Convention on the Elimination of all forms of Racial Discrimination, what's called CERD. That's because these newly decolonized African countries or Caribbean countries were very worried about racial discrimination. They fast-forwarded to get that treaty to enter into effect before the two big covenants, the Covenant on Civil and Political Rights and the Covenant on Economic, Social, and Cultural Rights. So it shows that, when countries in the Global South were united around a theme, like racial discrimination, they really could put that at the center of the debate. 

Kenneth Roth: Yeah. Let me maybe add to what Kathryn said. Kathryn described, I think, in drafting terms why the Universal Declaration really is universal. Let me look at this a bit more in operational terms, because I think one of the great legacies of the Declaration is that it did give rise to this global movement. Today, really in every country, you've got activists and groups that are trying to promote human rights. Even in places where it's oppressive for them to exist, they exist in exile. So, if you just look at this body of organizations that has emerged from the declaration, it underscores universality. That's not a doctrinal point, it's an operational point, it's a point of fact.  

Now, to put this another way, when I was at Human Rights Watch, I did a lot of traveling. It was part of the job, and I would be all over the world. I never met somebody who wanted to be executed. I never met somebody who wanted to be tortured or arbitrarily imprisoned, or discriminated against, or deprived of housing or education or healthcare. If you look at it in terms of what do people want, they want these things. So it's easy for some autocratic government to say, "Oh, no, we just want a dictator. I'm going to have all the solutions here." But, in fact, people want these rights. And that is the great refutation of those who claim that these are somehow Western in positions.  

Now, I think it's worth noting the three areas that are most contested, where you tend to hear this Western position point most frequently, have to do with women's rights, with the rights of sexual minorities, and with religious freedom. Again, the best refutation is to look at the people of the country. Take a place like Saudi Arabia. Now, some women may be perfectly happy subordinating themselves to their husbands—okay, that's their choice. But clearly, many Saudi women want a modern life. They want to be able to drive, they want to be able to travel without some male's permission. They want just basic freedoms. And it's not the West telling them to do that. Nobody's whispering in their ear and say, "Do this, do that." This is what they want. And the imposition is not a Western imposition. The imposition is by these conservative, retrograde leaders who want to maintain their patriarchal system.  

You can say the same thing about LGBT rights, where nobody's telling people to be gay. That's who they are. It's the local conservative hierarchy that is trying to prevent them from being who they are, from leading their lives. So, I find that this argument that it's the Western imposition a facile, easy defense by governments that are trying to avoid scrutiny, but it just doesn't match up with reality. These rights are not imposed, these rights are what people universally want. 

Kathryn Sikkink: One additional piece of evidence for that is, of course, the Universal Declaration got translated into all of these treaties, and then the treaties got ratified by many, many countries. So, the oddest thing is sometimes you have countries claiming that there's imposition, but then you say, "Well, but you ratified this treaty."  

People have done research. Beth Simmons and others have done research on this. There's really very little evidence that diplomats twisted the arms of countries in order to ratify human rights treaties. Now, there's some evidence that countries thought it was cheap talk. They thought they could ratify the treaties and there would be no costs. That was the case. General Pinochet himself and his inner circle ratified the Convention Against Torture, and that was the treaty that ended up getting him arrested in London. But the second point is that countries ratify, they voluntarily accept the obligations under these human rights treaties. 

Ralph Ranalli: What do you see as the major impediments to the advancement of this notion of universal human rights? Is it authoritarian nationalism? Is it just human tribalism? Is it neoliberal capitalism or economic Darwinism? What are the major roadblocks to a world where this notion of universal human rights advances even further? Ken, do you want to start with this one? 

Kenneth Roth: I guess I'll take that easy question on. 

Kathryn Sikkink: I'll start if you want me to. 

Kenneth Roth: Whatever. Either way. Go ahead. Sure, Kathryn, go ahead. 

Kathryn Sikkink: I would say first is, yeah, part of it is authoritarianism. We know that there's a direct correlation between authoritarian governments and bad human rights practices. And we know that authoritarian governments repress human rights because they want to stay in power. So they have a direct interest, they want to stay in power, they want to accumulate money, and they use repression as a tool to stay in power. So, yes, one big barrier in the world to human rights is that we have a lot of authoritarian governments and that the trend towards democratization has stalled. There was the third wave of democracy, and that brought a bunch of new countries into having better human rights practices, but that has now stalled. Unless we have a fourth wave of democracy, unless we restart the turn to democracy, human rights will not improve in the world, will not significantly improve in the world. That's the first thing I was saying.  

The second thing I was saying, it's not capitalism per se, because some of the worst human rights violations have occurred in non-capitalist societies. The Great Leap Forward in China, the terrible purges in the Soviet Union. Human rights violations have occurred in capitalist and non-capitalist societies. Now, we could say that some of the excesses, I would say some of the excesses of hyper-globalization in recent years have exacerbated some of the economic and social rights. But I would not say that capitalism per se is at the root of human rights violations. 

Kenneth Roth: Let me pick up with, first, I agree very much with what Kathryn said is the first cause. Autocrats, by definition, view human rights as a pain in the ass. They're an impediment to staying in power, and so they violate human rights to maintain all the great benefits of being in power, often corruption or just the prestige of it. So that's always going to be an obstacle, and there always needs pressure on these autocrats to change the calculation that leads it to be seen as beneficial to violate human rights. 

Second, I would put in terms of maybe the populist threat, which is often combined with autocrats, but is, I think, best understood analytically as distinct. What the populists typically do is to demonize some unpopular minority and therefore make the deprivation of their rights popular among... and often they're a religious majority in the country. And that challenges the basic idea of community that lies at the heart of human rights. If you think of why I should respect your human rights, it's because we're in the community and I recognize that, if they come from your rights today, they'll come from my rights tomorrow. That's the classic Kantian understanding of it. But, if you're able to define a community in exclusionary terms and to treat these immigrants, these Muslims, or these gays as somehow outside the community, it becomes easier to violate their rights because this kind of reciprocity that is often at the basis of respect for human rights is lost. So, I think that there has been a real determination on the part of populist leaders to narrow the national community, and that endangers human rights. 

Then the final thing I would note is that human rights need defense. If we go back to the origins of the Universal Declaration, with just each government to do their own thing, we're going to have an impoverished world when it comes to human rights. So you need not only non-governmental human rights groups but also governments themselves and UN officials and the like to be standing up for human rights consistently. When some of the major proponents of human rights have real double standards in the willingness to stand for human rights, it undermines the enterprise. It leaves the entire effort to defend human rights open to charges of hypocrisy.  

Clearly, the U.S. government is guilty of this. It's actively defending Israel to the point where it's bombarding Palestinian civilians in Gaza, but it tries to rally people to stand up for rights of Ukrainians when Russia bombards civilians there. That double standard doesn't work very well. People see through it.  

So, there's a need for much work in defensive human rights. Even some of the top UN officials. Volker Türk, the UN High Commissioner for Human Rights, just gave his big Universal Declaration of Human Rights 75th anniversary speech, ran through a bunch of countries, and somehow didn't get around to China, which in my view is the biggest global threat to human rights today. This is an utter abdication of his responsibility. It is utter cowardice. I don't know what he's thinking. This is not just one speech or a mistake. He's been in office for well over a year and in this time has never condemned Beijing for the crimes against humanity, the mass persecution and detention of Uyghurs in Xinjiang. This is, in many ways, the most outrageous offense he faces, and he says nothing. Whether this is cowardice or some naive conception of what his quiet diplomacy will secure, it is nothing, I have no idea, but it is utterly shameful and it undermines this effort to defend human rights. 

Ralph Ranalli: Can we talk for a bit about what I see as the very complicated relationship between religion and human rights? On the one hand, I think it's fair to say that certain religious tenants, particularly universal ones, like the Golden Rule—do unto others as you would have them do unto you—have deeply influenced the notion universal human rights. But then, if you look at some of the worst and most intractable conflicts in the world, a lot of them have a religious component to them. Jews and Muslims in Israel and Palestine, Protestants and Catholics in Northern Ireland, Hindus and Muslims in India and Pakistan. And that's not even to mention the suffering imposed on religious minorities around the world.  

And history has shown that there are invariably people in every faith who are going to say, "My god tells me that I have a right to take your land, or to deny you the right to be a citizen, or to keep certain rights and freedoms for myself and my group while denying them to you." But on the other hand, the UDHR says, "No. Human rights are universal and indivisible no matter what the circumstances are." Is religion in at least some ways antithetical to universal human rights? How do you solve for religion in the human rights equation? 

Kathryn Sikkink: First, I would begin by just going back to the Universal Declaration of Human Rights and say one of the most controversial issues in those debates was not that one has a right to have a religion but that one has a right to change their religion. That language went in the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, and it led to some of the early abstentions or votes against the Universal Declaration. Then, later, there was an attempt right around the time we got the Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Discrimination, the CERD treaty, there was attempt to get a treaty on religious freedom, protecting religious freedom, and that treaty failed. It's one example of a human rights treaty that could not get through. So, it's a very contentious issue. 

Now, I would say not say that religion is a basis for human rights violations because there's also many examples of religious communities that were deeply involved in the promotion and protection of human rights. Back when I was a young human rights activist, when I first met Ken, and he knows the story well, the early human rights people were very involved with religious communities, missionaries, the World Council of Churches, the U.S. Catholic Conference. They were committed to promoting human rights. So I want to go back to something Ken said earlier. The problem is not religion per se, the problem is dehumanization. Religious groups, when they dehumanize other religious groups, are a huge problem for human rights. But you don't have to be religious to dehumanize. Some of these populists Ken was talking about are not religious, but they are dehumanizing others. And this dehumanization, this exclusion of people, Ken used this word, you're excluding people from the realm of obligation. You think, "They're not worthy of being protected." That's the root, not religion, in my mind. 

Kenneth Roth: Let me just add to that. First off, Ralph, part of what you're describing as religious problems, they could be called ethnic problems as well. Israel-Palestine isn't really about religion. It's about two ethnic groups that are competing over the same land. It's not as if there's religious conviction here for the most part. There are parts on both sides who say, "Oh, yeah, this is our land. God said so." But, for the most part, it's an ethnic national conflict. And that is often true of things that are described in religious terms. But I think, as Kathryn said, religion often is an ally human rights because, if religion is trying to teach respect for the individual and a certain public morality, that often is quite compatible with human rights.  

But there are certain views of religion which go beyond saying, "Everybody can pray to their own god. Everybody is entitled to this basic religious freedom," to saying, "I get to impose my religious views on other people." That's where, as Kathryn was describing, the contested right to convert comes in. Why should I care if you change your religion? What does it have to do with me? I still have my freedom of religion, but some people want to impose their views than others. And this is also translated into restrictions on women, into restrictions on LBGT people, into a way of not just ordering one's own private beliefs but using self-declared religious beliefs and opposing those on others. So, this just gives the veneer of legitimacy to what is really no different from what autocrats do. It's an effort to dictate the way their society would operate without input from the people.  

Ralph Ranalli: We're at 75 years for the UDHR. What do you think would be the most appropriate way to celebrate it in terms of proposing policies—either national or international—that advance universal human rights? So I'd like your recommendations here for policies that would get us closer to this world where there's less conflict and more respect for rights that emerged as the UDHR vision 75 years ago. What would you both recommend?  

Kathryn Sikkink: Some of these things have already come up, but I want to start with one that sounds facile, maybe. But I truly believe in human rights education. I think one of the reasons the Universal Declaration for Human Rights has been so important is it's a wonderful tool for human rights education. I think it's important to have people study it, but also to teach them about its origins. Because then, if you talk about all the countries, all the people involved in creating it, that helps people understand that this belongs to all of us and that it came from many communities. 

Second, things we've already talked about, but let's put them in policy terms. We've already said that these authoritarian countries and leaders are a big problem for human rights. I've already said but I want to underscore here that we need to take up again this campaign for democracy. There was a time—and Ken and I both remember this—where there were human rights people to one side and democracy proponents to the other side during the Reagan administration. And I feel like, if we haven't put that behind us, we need to completely put that behind us. Promoting democracy helps promote human rights, and promoting human rights helps promote democracy. No one thinks democracy only means holding elections, right? There's a lot of authoritarians or very imperfect democracies out there that have elections but aren't truly democratic. So that's number one, I would say. It's very important to get democracy promotion that really geared up again. 

As a political scientist, I can tell you the single biggest factor that correlates with human rights violations is war. In particular, these big civil wars. So, once again, all the work that can be done to end wars. Then, of course, we get in a difficult situation, and that's that human rights were founded right after World War II, which was one of those necessary wars for human rights. So, sometimes, I think in relatively rare situations, people have to be willing to stand up and fight, including fight wars, to protect human rights. I categorize the Russia-Ukraine War in that way. It's my personal way, but I believe that what's going on in Israel-Palestine today, the only way that we can start protecting human rights is to have an end to that war as soon as possible. Again, that's my position. So I'll pass it on to Ken because I know he has lots of good suggestions. 

Ralph Ranalli: Ken, if you had your hands on the levers of policy power for one day, what would you accomplish? 

Kenneth Roth: Let me answer this in terms of, sure, we are celebrating the UDHR. Let me talk about appropriate and inappropriate celebrations as a way of trying to address this policy question. What I view as an inappropriate celebration is conversations which stay at the level of platitudes and never discuss governance. As if we just have these standards floating around in the air and we're not going to bother applying them. And that is such a disservice to what the UDHR has become. It may be true to the initial limited intent of the document, but it stands for so much more now.  

So I think that the way we celebrate this, we should, one, recognize the central role of non-government groups. They should be at those celebrations, and they should be protected. And it shouldn't just be governments clinking glasses of champagne with each other, but they should be rededicating themselves to protecting NGOs as essential for protecting human rights. The celebration should talk about violations and name names because that, in my view, is true to the real spirit of what the declaration has become, even if it wasn't what it was intended at first. And that's its strength. If you can't put pressure on particular governments, what's the point of this document? It's just an aspirational thing that sits there and is violated. 

Then I also think that, because of the importance of being universal, of not having double standards, this is an opportunity for governments that say they promote humanity as part of their foreign policy to dedicate themselves to doing so without double standards, and to really reexamine where they stand and stop defending the abuses of their allies and criticizing the abuses of their adversaries. That doesn't work very well; people see through that. So, I hope that we recognize that the universality is not simply a description of what people around the world want, but it also should be a description of what governments do in defense of the rights details in the Declaration. 

Ralph Ranalli: Great. This was a fascinating and informative conversation, and I'd really like to thank you both for being here. 

Kenneth Roth: Thank you for thinking of us. 

Kathryn Sikkink:  Yeah. It's our great pleasure to be here. 

Outro (Ralph Ranalli): Thanks for listening. If you want to read more about the transformational impact of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, the Carr Center for Human Rights Policy has compiled a collection of 90 short essays by scholars and experts at the Kennedy School and around Harvard. To read them online, please visit the Carr Center at carrcenter.hks.harvard.edu or our PolicyCast website at hks.harvard.edu/policycast. And if you want to keep hearing more about policy solutions to big world problems, please subscribe to PolicyCast on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or your favorite podcasting app so you don’t miss any of our upcoming episodes. And until next time, from all of us here at the Kennedy School, remember to speak bravely, and listen generously. 

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Embracing Humanity: A Path to Global Peace and Prosperity

Being human is given. But keeping our humanity is a choice. In the grand tapestry of human existence, there exists a paradoxical interplay between magnificence and horror. Across continents, humanity showcases its capacity to rise to challenges, yet simultaneously descends to unfathomable depths. We celebrate life’s miracles while perpetrating acts of violence. We revere nature’s wonders but desecrate our surroundings with heedless abandon. Amidst this tumultuous drama, one fundamental truth stands clear: the salvation of humanity lies in our collective hands.

To make the world a more peaceful place everyone should think about humanity. It seems all too often that people only think about their local community, nation or their religion and they discount everyone else. We can no longer wait for our faith to save humanity. We have to take action and we can save humanity. This does not mean we cannot be proud of our community, proud of our nation, proud of our culture, or proud of our faith. It means we need to first think about humanity as a whole and not only our community, nation and not only our culture or not only our faith.

It’s an observation often made but seldom acted upon: the need to transcend narrow boundaries of community, nation, religion, or culture and embrace the common thread that unites us all—our shared humanity. The urgency of this realization cannot be overstated. We can no longer afford the luxury of waiting for divine intervention or relying solely on the goodwill of a select few. The responsibility to safeguard humanity falls upon each and every one of us.

We think too much and feel too little. More than machinery, we need humanity; more than cleverness, we need kindness and gentleness. Without these qualities, life will be violent and all will be lost. Charles Chaplin

Respecting one’s own identity—be it national, cultural, or religious—should naturally extend to respecting the identities of others. At the heart of this principle lies a profound understanding: regardless of our differences, we are all inhabitants of this fragile planet, bound by a common aspiration for peace and prosperity. It’s a simple yet profound truth: to respect humanity is to respect each other.

In the face of mounting global challenges, it’s imperative to recognize that the battle for humanity is not a contest between conflicting ideologies or worldviews. Rather, it’s a collective endeavour aimed at securing a future where diversity is celebrated, differences are embraced, and humanity serves as our guiding light. We need not all march to the same beat or adhere to identical beliefs; diversity of thought and action enriches our collective journey towards a brighter tomorrow.

Love and compassion are necessities, not luxuries. Without them, humanity cannot survive. Dalai Lama XIV, The Art of Happiness

In cultures like India, ancient wisdom underscores the interconnectedness of all life forms and the imperative of collective responsibility. The concept of “Vasudhaiva Kutumbakam,” meaning “The World is One Family,” encapsulates this ethos, reminding us of our shared destiny as inhabitants of a global community. Throughout its rich history, India has exemplified these principles, offering refuge to those fleeing persecution and upholding the values of tolerance and inclusivity.

The hallmarks of Indian civilization since the pre-Vedic period are diversity, tolerance, and acceptability. The Indian civilization prospered and survived thousands of years because of this nature despite a series of onslaughts on this civilization. The Indian civilisation has always given preference to humanity over everything else.

Yet, the path to a more harmonious world is not without obstacles. Demonic ideologies that seek to sow division and hatred must be confronted head-on, and rooted out before they can take hold. Tolerance, a cornerstone of civilized society, demands not only forbearance from others but a steadfast commitment to introspection and self-improvement. It’s incumbent upon each of us to hold ourselves to the same standard of decency and empathy that we expect from others.

India has received refugees not only from some of its neighbouring countries but also from distant countries like Afghanistan, the Islamic Republic of Iran, Iraq, Somalia, Sudan and Uganda. India has been the home to refugees belonging to all religions and sects.

We believe not only in universal toleration, but we accept all religions as true. I am proud to belong to a nation which has sheltered the persecuted and the refugees of all religions and all nations of the earth. I am proud to tell you that we have gathered in our bosom the purest remnant of the Israelites, who came to the southern India and took refuge with us in the very year in which their holy temple was shattered to pieces by Roman tyranny. I am proud to belong to the religion which has sheltered and is still fostering the remnant of the grand Zoroastrian nation. Sectarianism, bigotry, and their horrible descendant, fanaticism, have long possessed this beautiful earth. They have filled the earth with violence, drenched it often and often with human blood, destroyed civilization, and sent whole nations to despair. Had it not been for these horrible demons, human society would be far more advanced than it is now. But their time is come; and I fervently hope that the bell that tolled this morning in honor of this convention may be the death-knell of all fanaticism, of all persecutions with the sword or with the pen, and of all uncharitable feelings between persons wending their way to the same goal. Swami Vivekananda, Chicago, Sep 1893

In the final analysis, the measure of our humanity lies not in grand gestures or lofty ideals but in the everyday choices we make: to treat others with kindness and compassion, to confront injustice wherever it may arise, and to cultivate a spirit of unity amidst diversity. As we navigate the complexities of the modern world, let us never lose sight of our shared humanity—the beacon that illuminates our path towards a more peaceful and prosperous future for all.

I quote a 15th century poet of Bengal — Chandidas , who said:

সবার উপর মানুষ সত্য, তাহার উপরে নেই

“ Shobar upor manush shotto tahar upore nai .” In English, it means: “Above all is humanity, none else.”

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13 thoughts on “ embracing humanity: a path to global peace and prosperity ”.

A very valid thought sir. Humanity should rule above all – including religions, community, caste, etc etc.

Like Liked by 2 people

Thanks Somali. 🙂

Great insight and so cleary explained. Humanity is important to our very well being.

Like Liked by 1 person

Thanks Cally.

If only every human could understand that. great post http://www.aparnamudi.com

Thanks Aparna.

Yes, humanity is first and foremost. Nice insight.

Thanks Sunil.

Pingback: HUMANITY OVER RELIGION IS WHAT COUNTRY NEEDS - Jus Corpus

Very insightful. Yes, humanity is above all. We’re humans first.

Thanks, Sanchita.

Excellent, Hindu philosophy from ancient times to modern times. In modern times its utility has undoubtedly increased even more. I had no idea about Chandidas. thnx for this informative post

Thanks, Nitin. In order to make the world a more peaceful place everyone should think about humanity.

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Friday essay: reflections on the idea of a common humanity

Professorial Fellow, Faculty of Arts and the Melbourne Law School, The University of Melbourne

Disclosure statement

Raimond Gaita does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organisation that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.

University of Melbourne provides funding as a founding partner of The Conversation AU.

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It is striking how often people now speak of “a common humanity” in ethically inflected registers, or ethically resonant tones that express a fellowship of all the peoples of the earth, or sometimes the hope for such a fellowship.

It is also striking how often we speak of our humanity as something that is not given to us once and for all, as species membership is, but something towards which we are called upon to rise – not until such time as we achieve it, which could be different from one person to another – but unendingly, until we die.

The two seem interdependent: to recognise the humanity of others we must rise to the humanity in ourselves, but to do that we must at least be open to seeing fully the humanity of all people.

In a similar way, the acknowledgement of human rights – rights that all people are said to possess merely by virtue of being human – appears to be interdependent with the acknowledgement of a common humanity with them.

The same is true for the recognition of the “Dignity of Humanity” to which, we are told in preambles to important instruments of international law, an unconditional respect is owed, as it exists, inalienably, in every human being.

More often than not, we refer to the idea of a common humanity when we lament the failure of its acknowledgement. The forms of that failure are depressingly many: racism, sexism, homophobia, the dehumanisation of our enemies, of unrepentant criminals and those who suffer severe and degrading affliction.

As often as someone reminds us that “we are all human beings”, someone will reply that to be treated like a human being you must behave like one.

There are two kinds of explanations for this. Each has its place. One assumes that we retain a firm hold on the idea that all peoples of the earth share a common humanity, but for various psychological, social, moral and political reasons fail to live up to our acknowledgement of it.

The other suggests that the very idea of a common humanity waxes and wanes with us and at times – when we dehumanise our enemies or are vulnerable to racism, for example – becomes literally unintelligible to us.

Racism is again on the rise in many parts of the world. So is the dehumanisation – in some cases demonisation – of our enemies. They have come together in attitudes to ISIS and have spread to Muslims and some immigrants as effortlessly as water flowing downwards in a channel.

For that reason, many people now fear that within ten years or so, national and international politics will be dominated by crises that are caused and inflamed by the shameful gap between the rich and the poor nations, aggravated by the effects of climate change.

We now have reason to believe that instability in many regions of the earth may cause even more people to be uprooted than were last century. Strong nations are likely to protect themselves in ways that become increasingly brutal, testing the relevance and the authority of international law.

It is, I believe, almost certain that my grandchildren’s generation will not be protected as mine has been from the terrors suffered by most of the peoples of the earth, because of impoverishment, natural disasters and the evils inflicted upon them by other human beings.

More and more, I fear, the reality of affliction together with unrelenting exposure to what is morally horrible – to evil if you have use for that word – will test their understanding of what it means to share a common humanity with all the peoples of the earth, and to a degree almost to awful to imagine, their faith that the world is a good world despite the suffering and the evil in it.

Inherent dignity and inalienable rights

The Universal Declaration of Human Rights adopted by the UN General Assembly in 1948, stated in its preamble that

the recognition of the inherent dignity and of the equal and inalienable rights of all members of the human family is the foundation of freedom, justice and peace in the world.

It also spoke of crimes that had recently “shocked the conscience of mankind”.

Two years earlier, the UN’s Resolution on Genocide declared genocide to be a “shock to the conscience of mankind … contrary to moral law and to the spirit and aims of the United Nations” and a crime “which the civilized world condemns”.

Yet at the time those words were written, the peoples of the European nations who drafted them and created international law looked upon most of the peoples of the earth as primitive savages who, of their very nature, lacked the kind of understanding presupposed in what is meant by speaking of genocide as “a shock to the conscience of mankind” - even though some of them had been victims of colonial genocides.

Racism of that kind was then, and is now, often marked by incapacity to see depth in the lives of Blacks, Asians and Central and South Americans. Some other forms of racism are different. Anti-Semitism is different in many ways from the racism of whites towards coloured peoples. I do not know enough about racism of coloured peoples to one another and towards whites to comment on it.

At issue in the kind of racism I will be talking about is not the truth of the factual stereotypes to which racists often appeal in order defend their attitudes, but rather the meaning they are able to see – or fail to see – in the lives of the peoples they denigrate.

When James Isdell, Protector of Aborigines in Western Australia in the 1930s, was asked how he felt when he took children of mixed blood from their mothers , he answered that he

would not hesitate for a moment to separate any half caste from its aboriginal mother, no matter how frantic her momentary grief might be at the time.

They “soon forget their offspring”, he explained. It was literally unintelligible to him that “they” could grieve as “we” do, that grief for a dead child could lacerate a black woman’s soul for the remainder of her life.

To get the hang of what I mean by “unintelligible”, think of why one couldn’t cast someone who looked like a racist caricature from a Black and White Minstrel Show, to play Othello. Such a face can express nothing deep. Not even an omniscient God could see in it the expressiveness needed for such a role.

It’s hardly disputable that expressions like “failing full to see the humanity of peoples” come naturally in discussions of racism of the kind betrayed by Isdell’s remark.

So when I speak of a common humanity of all the peoples of the earth I mean, at least in the first instance, that there are no peoples who are as Isdell saw Aboriginal Australians. Given my earlier remarks about the colonial context in which the Universal Declaration of Human rights emerged, and the resurgence of racism world wide, the importance of such an affirmation cannot be overstated.

In making it, however, I do not want to suggest that I understand what it is to be fully human, that I and others who make the same affirmation discovered it and wish to impose that discovery to formerly denigrated peoples.

But when I say we have not discovered it, that we do not know what full humanity is, I don’t mean that we might one day. There is no such thing to discover.

Earlier, I said that we sometimes speak of humanity as something towards which we are called upon to rise, that it is task with no end, and would have no end even if we lived a thousand years. That is the idea of humanity that informs what I have been saying about this topic. Reviewing my book A Common Humanity: Thinking about Love and Truth and Justice (1999), Greg Dening said that “for Gaita, humanity is a verb, not a noun”. I couldn’t have put it better.

What it means to be human

It is, I think, uncontroversial that Australia’s Aboriginal peoples think differently about what it means to be human than non-aboriginal Australians do – a difference expressed, not discursively, but as the great Australian anthropologist WH Stanner put it, in

all the beauty of song, mime, dance and art of which human beings are capable.

The difference can be described most generally as being in their attitude to the natural world and their place in it. That is vague, of course, but it is enough to sustain the point that the difference has inevitably shown itself politically in, for example, disputes and court rulings about land and title and in the many, sometimes angry, arguments about what counts truly (practically) as reconciliation as opposed to merely symbolic gestures towards it.

Perhaps the most bitter disagreements were over whether genocide was at least sometimes, in some parts of Australia, committed against the Stolen Generations, as the 1997 Bringing Them Home report alleges.

I want to comment on this, though not in order to set new fires burning. Genocide is perhaps one of the most controversial concepts of international law. There is disagreement over whether it entails murder and over whether the Holocaust should be regarded as its paradigm or only as an extreme instance of a crime that, at its other extreme, might be forced assimilation.

Bringing Them Home consists largely of heartbreaking stories. The argument that genocide was committed is brief and depends on its definition. The 1948 Convention on the Prevention and punishment of the Crime of Genocide allows that there may be genocide without a single killing in service to a genocidal intent and that taking the children of a group may be a means to genocide, if it is done with the intention to destroy, “in whole or in part, the group as such”.

Stories, I have argued elsewhere, cannot of themselves tell us whether that allegation is right. Stories, no matter how many and how moving, cannot settle the controversies about the nature of genocide.

In the West, where the concept was developed, stories or narratives like Primo Levi’s If This Is a Man (1979) which played such an important role in our understanding of the Holocaust, speak to us only against the background of a common understanding. It is the work of discursive thought, usually in disciplines like anthropology, philosophy and history to try to render it reasonably perspicuous. But I must enter two important qualifications to that point.

Firstly, the kind of thought that engages with the stories should be answerable to the same critical concepts that determine the degree to which the stories contribute to understanding, rather than to edification or to delight. Those concepts are, of course, partly those with which we assess literature.

About virtually everything that matters in life, including matters of law, we argue not only about facts and the logical inferences made from them, but also about whether certain accounts of them move us only because we are vulnerable to sentimentality, or pathos, are deaf to what rings false, and so on.

For that reason, there can be no marked distinction between the concepts with which we critically assess narratives and those to which discursive engagement with them is answerable.

Bringing Them Home was criticised for being emotional. Hostile to its allegation of genocide, many Australians said that it convinced only people whose reason had given way to their emotions. Kim Beazley, some of you may remember, wept in Parliament when he read out some of those stories.

It is, of course, a failing – sometimes a very serious one – to be “emotional” in the pejorative sense of the term. Then we ignore or deny facts and arguments that are not congenial to beliefs to which we are emotionally committed. That is usually what people have in mind when they say “stop being so emotional”. Hold on to your reason, they say, especially in turbulent times like ours – like advising someone to hold onto to their hat in a storm.

But there is a danger here that threatens our capacity, indeed our desire, to see things. It is the tendency to oppose reason to emotion in a way that makes us insensible to, or uneducated in, a form of understanding in which thought and feeling and form and content are inseparable.

Sentimentality, a disposition to pathos, a failure to register what rings true, a tin ear for irony – these undermine understanding more often and surely than when emotion usurps reason, if reason is conceived as separate from and unfriendly to emotion.

When that happens it is not because emotion defeated reason that we affirm beliefs that we regret holding and having acted upon when we become morally clear sighted. It is because we were bereft of a sensibility, educated and disciplined, that would have enabled us to detect the sometimes crude, sometimes sophisticated, sentimentality, pathos and so on in what seduced us.

I come now to my second qualification. There is no shared understand between Aboriginal and non-aboriginal Australians about what it means to be human, and therefore, I think, no shared understanding of what we would naturally call crimes against humanity – if the concept of humanity plays any serious role in the ethical characterisation of such crimes.

Aboriginal peoples have no power of the kind that could force anything on non-Indigenous peoples, no power to force them to negotiate a treaty, for example.

Awful though it must be to peoples treated as they have been by their colonisers and their descendants, whatever further justice they are given will be a function of the openness of non-aboriginal Australians to seeing that justice must be done and, most importantly, seeing what that comes to if it is true to the history of this land.

For that to happen, non-aboriginal peoples must come to see what is at issue from the perspective of the Aboriginal peoples. That requires more than we usually mean by empathy, because it depends on acquiring new concepts or modifying old ones – concepts that are a condition of empathy, rather than its product.

For most non aboriginal Australians, that will involve a perceptual gestalt switch of the kind, which, for example, would enable them fully to acknowledge that this land is under occupation, if not legally as defined in international law, but morally, nonetheless.

If you think that is an exaggeration, a step way too far, then listen to Pat Dodson.

While the 1788 invasion was unjust, the real injustice was the denial by [Governor] Phillip and subsequent governments, of our right to participate equally in the future of a land we had managed successfully for millenniums. Instead, the land was stolen, not shared. Our political sovereignty was replaced by a virulent form of serfdom; our spiritual beliefs denied and ridiculed; our system of education undermined. We were no longer able to inculcate our young with the complex knowledge that is acquired from intimate engagement with the land and its waterways. The introduction of superior weapons, alien diseases, a policy of racism and enforced biogenetic practices created dispossession, a cycle of slavery and attempted destruction of our society. The 1997 report Bringing Them Home highlighted the infringement of the UN definition of genocide and called for a national apology and compensation of those Aborigines who had suffered under laws that destroyed indigenous societies and sanctioned biogenetic modification of the Aboriginal people.

For many people, to see Australia like that, really to see it like that, will at first be like seeing one aspect and then the other of an ambiguous drawing.

Crimes and lacerated souls

There is, of course, much more to understanding Aboriginal cultures than seeing the impact on them of the crimes committed against the Aboriginal peoples. But if we are to talk seriously about a treaty then we cannot avoid talking about crimes.

Understanding the crimes committed against the indigenous peoples of this country depends on an ethical understanding of what they suffered. Understanding of that can never be too distant from their stories and other forms of art that express that suffering.

If that is so, then it is obvious that, for the most part, Aboriginal and non-aboriginal peoples of this country do not have a shared understanding of that suffering and, therefore, of how it should enter the ethical characterisation of the crimes against them.

The development of such understanding will be unnerving, radical and almost certainly novel to the classical traditions of Western political thought.

When people’s souls have been lacerated by the wrongs done to them, individually or collectively, openness to their voices requires humbled attentiveness. Such attentiveness is growing in Australia, I believe: slowly, by no means surely, but growing nonetheless

Philosopher Martin Buber said that the basic difference between monologues and “fully valid conversation” is “the otherness, or more concretely, the moment of surprise”. His point is not merely that we must be open to hearing surprising things.

We must be open to being surprised at the many ways we may justly and humanly relate to one another in a spirit of truthful dialogue. It is in conversation, rather than in advance of it, that we discover, never alone but always together, what it means really to listen and what tone may properly be taken. In conversation we discover the many things conversation can be.

No one can say what will happen when, through such conversations, we understand better how Aboriginal peoples have experienced – in the past and now – the crimes committed against them and, therefore, how that understanding should inform the ways that Aboriginal and non aboriginal peoples will be able to say “we”, truthfully and justly, in political fellowship.

It might not be “we Australians”. We might change the name of the country. Maybe not, but I cannot see how one can respond with truth-seeking humility to Dodson’s words and at the same time rule that out.

An act of faith

As things stand, the preambles to some of the most important instruments of international law that I mentioned earlier deploy Eurocentric concepts to express the ethical significance of those laws, to reveal what it means ethically to break them. The Dignity of Humanity and the inalienable dignity of every human being are amongst those concepts.

Elsewhere, I have expressed deep reservations about the way we speak of human rights and Human Dignity with a capital D (the capital D is necessary because the issue is not the alienable dignity people fear to lose as a result of injury, or enfeeblement in old age).

Like French philosopher Simone Weil , I fear that the way we now speak about human rights rests on an illusion. The illusion is that no matter how unrelentingly savage or cruel our oppressors, we can retain a Dignity that they cannot touch.

Some people suffer affliction so terrible, either through natural causes or because of human cruelty, affliction that crushes their spirits so completely, that the heroic key in which we talk about Dignity and inalienable human rights sounds like whistling in the dark.

But I have also said that the battles for what we call “human rights” and for the acceptance that all the peoples of the earth share an inalienable Dignity that defines their common humanity have been amongst the noblest in Western history. God only knows where we would have been had we not fought and won so many of them.

Talk of inalienable dignity is often an attempt to capture the shock of encountering the violation of something precious, a kind of wrong that cannot fully be captured by reference to the physical or psychological harm that is part of, sometimes integral, to it.

In much of my work, I have developed the implications of the fact, wonderful but also commonplace, that sometimes we see something as precious only in the light of someone’s love for it.

Our sense of the kind of preciousness that we feel is violated when we speak of a person’s inalienable dignity was historically shaped, I believe, by the works of saintly love. They were the inspiration, I believe, for what we mean when we say that even people who have committed the most terrible crimes and those who suffer severe and ineradicable affliction possess inalienable dignity.

Kant, to whom we owe the modern heroic inflections attached to those ways of speaking, was right to say that we have obligations to those we cannot love and may even despise.

He was right. But it was the works of saintly love, I believe, that transformed our understanding of what it means to be human and in fact are the source of the affirmation that we owe unconditional respect to the inalienable dignity possessed by every human being.

One doesn’t have to be religious – I am not – to acknowledge that. Doing so will enable us to talk of the inalienable dignity of every human being without falling victim to the illusion that its heroic resonances encourage.

I spoke earlier of my fears for the world my grandchildren will grow into.

I dread the prospect of a world in which my grandchildren could no longer affirm – for it is an affirmation, an act of faith to be true to what love has revealed but reason cannot secure – that even the most terrible evildoers, those whose characters appear to match their deeds, who are defiantly unremorseful and in whom we can find nothing from which remorse could grow – are owed an unconditional respect, are always and everywhere owed justice, for their sake, rather than because we fear the consequences if we do not accord it to them.

I dread the prospect of a world in which we no longer even it find intelligible that those who suffer radical, degrading and ineradicable affliction could be accorded a respect that is without trace of condescension, and thereby kept fully amongst us, mysteriously our equals.

This is an edited version of a lecture Raimond Gaita gave on Wednesday August 10 in the series The Wednesday Lectures, held at the University of Melbourne.

Professor Gaita will be available for an author Q&A on Friday 12 between 3.30 and 4.30pm AEST. Post your questions in the comments below.

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Universal Declaration of Human Rights: Why does it matter?

Published December 17, 2015 This content is archived.

Claude Welch, SUNY Distinguished Service Professor of Political Science, talks about the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, ratified by the United Nations General Assembly nearly 70 years ago. An internationally renowned expert in human rights, Welch wrote an essay on the topic for the U.S. State Department that was published in French, Russian, Farsi and other languages, and distributed internationally.

Why does the Universal Declaration of Human Rights (UDHR) matter?

CW: The UDHR is among the most important documents of the 20th century. It has been translated into 337 different languages. It has become a touchstone for actions by governments, individuals, and nongovernmental groups. It has been ratified by every country in the world. Practically no other international instrument can claim this honor. In short, the UDHR has acquired a moral and political significance matched by few documents.

It provides both a guide to present action and an evolving set of ideas for future implementation at the national level. Increasingly, the UDHR’s principles have been embodied in what states do and it serves as the foundation for the International Bill of Rights and several other crucial human rights agreements. And, not least, the UDHR has proven a remarkably flexible foundation for a continued broadening and deepening of the very concept of human rights. How many treaties can claim such honors?

How did the UDHR come into being?

CW: Every country in the world had been touched directly or indirectly by World War II. Seventy million people perished. Planning for a future international organization to succeed the League of Nations started during the war. In the spring of 1945, 50 governments and hundreds of nongovernmental organizations met in San Francisco. The states hammered out the “constitution” of a new United Nations.

The preamble to the U.N. Charter includes these famous words: “We the peoples of the United Nations determined … to reaffirm faith in fundamental human rights , in the dignity and worth of the human person, in the equal rights of men and women and of nations large and small …”

The U.N. Charter called for a commission on human rights, which was chaired by Eleanor Roosevelt. With the help of the U.N.’s Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization, the new Commission on Human Rights studied how different cultures, nations and philosophers viewed human rights.

In September 1948, the commission sent its draft to the U.N. General Assembly. Lengthy debates clarified the draft language and built increasing consensus. Discussion and approval took two full years, including 81 meetings, 168 amendments to the draft text and nearly 1,400 votes. The climax came on Dec. 10, 1948, when the General Assembly adopted the UDHR without a single dissenting vote, although eight states abstained.

What does the UDHR say?

CW: The UDHR sets forth a number of objectives — some to be achieved immediately, others as rapidly as feasible. The UDHR also provided the foundation for a series of other international agreements, both global and regional. Finally, the UDHR inspired people around the world to claim their rights, not simply accept the diktat of others.

The UDHR provides “a common standard of achievement for all peoples and all nations.” Every “individual and every organ of society” shall promote “respect for these rights and freedoms … by progressive measures ...” The goal was “to secure their universal and effective recognition and observance.”

Underlying the entire declaration is a basic value, as stated in Article 1: “All human beings are born free and equal in dignity and rights.” This assertion ran in the face of centuries of practice and widespread beliefs. The UDHR could not, by itself, reverse or transform popular attitudes. Nonetheless, it pointed in a crucial direction.

Perhaps most important, the clarity and directness of its language inspired millions. An increasing number of translations and conscious efforts to spread the UDHR’s message popularized its principles. Men and women everywhere recognized that they enjoyed rights that no government should take away.

Drafters of the UDHR consciously drew upon several legal and philosophical traditions. Many of its 30 articles deal with civil and political rights, which protect individuals from government and from state-condoned private abuses. Others discuss freedoms common to each individual, such as the right to free expression. Still others set forth economic, social and cultural rights, such as access to education and the right to work.

What are some of the results of the UDHR?

CW: Several major treaties, ratified by more than 100 countries, trace their origins to the UDHR. They include, in chronological order:

• The International Convention on the Elimination of Racial Discrimination (1965).
• The International Covenant on Economic, Social and Cultural Rights (1966).
• The International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights (1966).
• The Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Discrimination Against Women (1979).
• The Convention Against Torture and Other Cruel, Inhuman or Degrading Treatment or Punishment (1984).
• The Convention on the Rights of the Child (1989).

When a country ratifies an international agreement, it assumes a legal obligation. Citizens of states signing on to the UDHR and its progeny thus possess rights they may not have fully enjoyed earlier because their government has acknowledged and pledged to respect those rights. Signatories to many human rights treaties must prepare and submit regular reports on their citizens’ freedoms. All these reports go to U.N. specialists who study them carefully and recommend where changes are needed.

Citizens groups increasingly provide their own reports, with additional details. Thus, one of the hopes of the drafters of the UDHR has been increasingly met: People have a voice in their own destiny.

Still other international agreements have stemmed from the UDHR:

• Prosecution of indicted war criminals by the International Criminal Court, functioning as of 2002.
• The “responsibility to protect,” as approved by the General Assembly in 2005, which places a moral obligation on countries to help states wracked by widespread disturbances or civil wars.
• An August 2006 agreement on a draft convention on the rights of the disabled.
• Adoption of a Universal Declaration of Indigenous Rights by the U.N. in September 2007.
• Reducing or eliminating the death penalty in much of Europe and elsewhere.
• Giving more attention to how transnational corporations affect human rights where they operate.

These developments required significant discussion. Nearly 20 years passed between adoption of the UDHR and the “entry into force” — full acceptance into international law — of the two international covenants described above. Twenty-five years of discussion preceded general assembly acceptance of the Universal Declaration of Indigenous Rights. On the other hand, agreement about establishing the International Criminal Court came within four years and the convention on children’s rights in less than a year. The picture is thus mixed.

What steps lie ahead?

CW: For six decades, the UDHR has proven its durability. Yet debates remain.

Cultural distinctiveness continues to arouse discussion about universality — the “u” in UDHR. Although the declaration’s principles have been reaffirmed time after time, some assert that cultures or regions differ so much that no real global standards can exist.

A second area of controversy swirls around the rights of persons belonging to ethnic groups and national minorities. As individuals, they cannot be discriminated against because of their backgrounds. However, long-term economic or political disadvantages, deeply engrained social attitudes, and the like against the groups to which they belong raise profound questions. Do groups per se have rights?

Additional uncertainty exists with respect to internally displaced persons. They are individuals who cannot live in their usual homes because of conflict, but have not crossed an international border. Internally displaced persons (known as IDPs) confront horrendous, dangerous living conditions. They also exist in a legal no-man’s-land. Had they left their own countries, they would have enjoyed international legal protection. Having remained at home or near home, they continue to be liable to many problems.

A fourth area of controversy centers on how best to settle large-scale civil conflicts. Should the international community intervene for humanitarian reasons? Should peace and reconciliation committees or similar groups be set up to establish the “truth”? Should negotiations be encouraged between opposing groups by promising amnesty to those accused of war crimes? Or would justice be served better by trying to arrest and try them in the International Criminal Court? How far do the obligations of the “right to protect” extend? Who should take responsibility for any coercive intervention?

Still another area of concern involves apologies and reparations for previous human rights injustices. Earlier violence against large numbers of people of other nationalities can — and does — sour relations between and among governments and their populations. Hence, this whole area is fraught with political difficulties, irrespective of its importance for human rights generally.

Truth commissions and truth and reconciliation groups provide an additional dimension, showing the evolution and growth of human rights. They investigate previous abuses. Their establishment suggests that previous “human wrongs” cannot be hidden forever.

Serious economic issues undercut how much — and indeed whether — individuals can enjoy full human rights. If human rights “begin with breakfast,” persons must have reasonable chances for employment and schooling. They must be able to break out of the trap of poverty and avoid the debilitating impact of malnutrition and endemic disease. The UDHR speaks about these concerns in general terms. However, serious problems remain in light of economic inequalities within and between nations. Wasteful or corrupt practices by government officials reduce what is available for other needs.

Finally, and in many ways most significant, the UDHR cannot be enforced by “traditional” means of coercion. The U.N. has no armed forces of its own, but must obtain parts of other states’ militaries for help. The U.N. agencies directly concerned with human rights, such as the Geneva-based Office of the High Commissioner for Human Rights, receive little funding.

Looking back to 1948, however, progress has been remarkable. A visionary document has become a living reality. The UDHR should be celebrated for its firm foundation and flexible structure.

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In defense of the humanities: Upholding the pillars of human understanding

This essay is part of a series exploring the enduring importance of the humanities. Stay tuned for more insights on why the humanities still matter.

Loss and literature

Maria and her grandmother, 2003.

Often, the shortest stories are the most resonant. 

In 2020, I lost my maternal grandmother. “Maternal,” in her case, was more than a qualifier–she quite literally played the role of “mother” in my life. My first words, my first steps, and the most formative milestones of my childhood and adolescence happened in her care. She bore the brunt of my insufferable teenage angst, offering a consoling embrace when life seemed to get ahead of me. When I lost her, a chapter of my life ended.

To lose such a constant in one’s early twenties is to lose a tether to one’s reality. The years after my grandmother’s death have been fraught with uncertainty. How could I possibly recover from such a loss? How are my accomplishments meaningful if she is not present to witness them? And, perhaps most disconcerting: who will I be by the time my own life begins to wane? 

Everyone copes with and experiences loss differently. For me, it was acutely alienating. My relationship with my grandmother was singular, making my perspective on loss unique. I operated for what felt like ages on the assumption that no matter how much support I had, I could not possibly be seen.

That is, until I picked up A Very Easy Death . This brief, 112-page memoir by Simone de Beauvoir details her mother’s final days from an honest, compassionate perspective. Laden with recollections of a mother-daughter relationship and personal confrontations with mortality, it resonated with me in a way that no other text had. The acts of death and grief are explored in her memoir as though de Beauvoir were sitting across from me at a bistro recounting the experience. For the first time since my own experience and despite preceding me by thirty-six years, someone had finally seen me.

The humanities: Studies of the human condition

The connection I achieved through literature highlights the critical importance of the humanities. Encompassing history, literature, philosophy, art, and more, the humanities provide a lens through which one can view one’s personal experiences–making the universal personal and the personal universal.

The humanities and humanism have evolved significantly over centuries. In Western society, humanism traces back to Greece in the fourth and fifth centuries BCE. Sophists saw humanism as a cultural-educational program, aiming for the development of human faculties and excellence, as noted in Perez Zagorin’s “On Humanism Past & Present.”  

Agrippa: Human Proportions in Square. n.d. Wellcome Collection.

In Rome, the concept evolved into “an ideal expressed in the concept of humanitas … [which] designated a number of studies–philosophy, history, literature, rhetoric, and training in the oratory.” Most influential, though, was the humanism that emerged from the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries that was “centered increasingly upon human interests and moral concerns rather than religion.” Its purpose was to cultivate a population of Christian men who were well-spoken, literate, and capable of integrating with high society. 

Growing more secular over time, humanist values began to compete with the physical and biological sciences, the social sciences, and other modern subjects which comprised nineteenth century liberal education. Zagorin suggests that scientific and empirical research approaches overtook human-centered perspectives, particularly after the massive loss of life in World War I and the disillusionment that followed. 

“Through de Beauvoir’s philosophical inquiries into life and death, I was able to confront and process my own grief more profoundly. Her reflections on mortality and the mother-daughter relationship resonated deeply with me, helping me to navigate my personal loss while also offering insights into the universal human condition.”

Scholarly perspectives on the importance of the humanities

Scholars argue that the humanities are essential for comprehending complex social dynamics and ethical questions. In “The Power of the Humanities and a Challenge to Humanists,” Richard J. Franke argues that humanistic interpretation “contributes to a tradition of interpretation.” Franke posits that human emotions and values are at the core of humanistic study, offering the ability to explore domains that “animate the human experience.” This is precisely how my engagement with Simone de Beauvoir’s memoir, A Very Easy Death, provided a foundation for evaluating broader human concerns.

Le Brun, Charles, 1619-1690., and Hebert, William, fl. 18th century. A Man Whose Profile Expresses Compassion. n.d. Wellcome Collection.

Through de Beauvoir’s philosophical inquiries into life and death, I was able to confront and process my own grief more profoundly. Her reflections on mortality and the mother-daughter relationship resonated deeply with me, helping me to navigate my personal loss while also offering insights into the universal human condition. This connection underscores the humanities’ power to transform personal experiences into a deeper understanding of shared human emotions and values.

Moreover, Franke postulates that subjects under the humanities all lend themselves to critical thinking, which he defines as “that Socratic habit of articulating questions and gathering relevant information in order to make reasonable judgements.” Through the humanities, one can approach topics from varied vantage points to develop a holistic understanding of them. 

In a study published in 2018 by the Journal of General Internal Medicine , medical students across institutions suggested that exposure to the humanities had an appreciable influence on their “tolerance of ambiguity, empathy, and wisdom.” The study’s discussion section further indicates that both the performance and observance of drama increase empathy, and that “even good literature prompts better detection of emotions.” These findings highlight that studying the humanities cultivates essential skills and attributes that have practical applications in real-world settings.

Scholarship, then, suggests that the humanities teach us to be human, whether through the ability to form nuanced questions or to feel empathy. I experienced this firsthand while reading Simone de Beauvoir’s A Very Easy Death. Her detailed account of her mother’s final days helped me navigate my own grief. It also gave me a deeper understanding of the emotional complexities involved in facing mortality as a concept. These characteristics—developed through engagement with the humanities—can improve interpersonal relationships and foster a more empathetic and accepting society.

The impact of the humanities extends beyond personal growth; it influences professional practices and societal outcomes. The empathy and wisdom nurtured by humanities education can enhance the quality of patient care in the medical field, as evidenced by the medical students’ testimonies. Similarly, professionals in law, education, and public policy benefit from the critical thinking and ethical reasoning stimulated by humanities education. By emphasizing these real-world applications, we can better advocate for the continued support and integration of the humanities in various sectors of society.

Challenges affecting the humanities: Economic pressures and academic isolation

Even in light of their demonstrated value, the humanities face significant challenges that threaten their vitality and relevance. In “ The Decline of the Humanities and the Decline of Society,” Ibanga B. Ikpe describes how today’s labor market increasingly demands qualifications for specific sectors. Courses in the humanities that are not tailored to particular career paths put them at a disadvantage in universities. 

Ikpe also attributes the decline in humanities education to the fact that “economic rather than academic motivations have become the primary basis for decision making in universities.” He raises the notion that the humanities and similar disciplines cannot be elucidated into digestible pieces of information, which makes them more difficult to sell. The more defined the subject, the more profitable. Thus, funding for humanities programs at educational institutions has reduced significantly. This has both limited resources for teaching and research and signaled a devaluation of the humanities as a whole. 

Finally, Ikpe presents the argument that humanities scholars are partially to blame for the current state of the humanities. He raises the accusation that humanities scholars have become withdrawn from greater society, sequestering themselves in academia. The niche views and dialogues they produce in this environment may sever their connection with a broader audience. 

Sustaining the humanities today

The future implied by the above rings grim, but there are still significant opportunities to advocate for the humanities by highlighting their interdisciplinary relevance to contemporary issues. For example, the study of ethics in philosophy can provide crucial insights into debates on artificial intelligence and biotechnology. Similarly, understanding historical contexts can help policymakers make informed decisions about current social and political challenges.

Organizations like JSTOR play a crucial role in preserving and promoting the humanities. JSTOR’s vast digital library of academic journals, books, and primary sources ensures that humanities scholarship remains accessible to students, researchers, and the public, advancing knowledge, strengthening critical thinking, and supporting interdisciplinary studies.

ITHAKA, the parent organization of JSTOR, is also increasing the utility of this knowledge. More than a mere repository, ITHAKA uses technology to analyze and contextualize vast amounts of information, making it more accessible and meaningful. By doing so, they help transform scholarly resources into practical tools that can drive real change in society. Their initiatives facilitate connections between research and practice, allowing the humanities to inform solutions to contemporary challenges.

By leveraging the support of organizations like JSTOR and embracing technological advancements, we can turn the tide in favor of the humanities. Advocating for their interdisciplinary relevance and addressing contemporary social issues will ensure that these vital disciplines thrive. The humanities are not relics of the past—they are essential to navigating the complexities of the present and shaping the future.

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"This is, above all, a human crisis that calls for solidarity"

About the author, antónio guterres.

António Guterres is the ninth Secretary-General of the United Nations, who took office on 1st January 2017.

19 March 2020 - We are facing a global health crisis unlike any in the 75-year history of the United Nations — one that is spreading human suffering, infecting the global economy and upending people’s lives.

A global recession – perhaps of record dimensions – is a near certainty. 

The International Labour Organization has just reported that workers around the world could lose as much as 3.4 trillion U.S. dollars in income by the end of this year.

This is, above all, a human crisis that calls for solidarity. 

Our human family is stressed and the social fabric is being torn.  People are suffering, sick and scared. 

Current responses at the country level will not address the global scale and complexity of the crisis.

This is a moment that demands coordinated, decisive, and innovative policy action from the world’s leading economies.   We must recognize that the poorest countries and most vulnerable — especially women — will be the hardest hit.

I welcome the decision by G20 leaders to convene an emergency summit next week to respond to the epic challenges posed by the COVID-19 pandemic – and I look forward to taking part.

My central message is clear:  We are in an unprecedented situation and the normal rules no longer apply.  We cannot resort to the usual tools in such unusual times.

The creativity of the response must match the unique nature of the crisis – and the magnitude of the response must match its scale.

Our world faces a common enemy.  We are at war with a virus.

COVID-19 is killing people, as well as attacking the real economy at its core – trade, supply chains, businesses, jobs.  Entire countries and cities are in lockdown.  Borders are closing.  Companies are struggling to stay in business and families are simply struggling to stay afloat. 

In managing this crisis, we also have a unique opportunity. 

Done right, we can steer the recovery toward a more sustainable and inclusive path.  But poorly coordinated policies risk locking in -- or even worsening -- already unsustainable inequalities, reversing hard-won development gains and poverty reduction.

#COVID19 is a crisis unlike any in the 75-year history of the @UN . World leaders must come together and offer an urgent & coordinated global response. More than ever before, we need solidarity, hope and the political will to see this through together. https://t.co/4qGoAhTYpe pic.twitter.com/yogPhUio7l — António Guterres (@antonioguterres) March 19, 2020

I call on world leaders to come together and offer an urgent and coordinated response to this global crisis.

I see three critical areas for action:

First, tackling the health emergency.

Many countries have exceeded the capacity to care for even mild cases in dedicated health facilities, with many unable to respond to the enormous needs of the elderly.

Even in the wealthiest countries, we see health systems buckling under pressure.

Health spending must be scaled up right away to meet urgent needs and the surge in demand -- expanding testing, bolstering facilities, supporting health care workers, and ensuring adequate supplies – with full respect for human rights and without stigma.

It has been proven that the virus can be contained.  It must be contained. 

If we let the virus spread like wildfire – especially in the most vulnerable regions of the world -- it would kill millions of people. 

And we need to immediately move away from a situation where each country is undertaking its own health strategies to one that ensures, in full transparency, a coordinated global response, including helping countries that are less prepared to tackle the crisis.

Governments must give the strongest support to the multilateral effort to fight the virus, led by the World Health Organization, whose appeals must be fully met.

The health catastrophe makes clear that we are only as strong as the weakest health system.  

Global solidarity is not only a moral imperative, it is in everyone’s interests.

Second, we must focus on the social impact and the economic response and recovery.

Unlike the 2008 financial crisis, injecting capital in the financial sector alone is not the answer.  This is not a banking crisis – indeed banks must be part of the solution. 

And it is not an ordinary shock in supply and demand; it is a shock to society as a whole.

The liquidity of the financial system must be guaranteed, and banks must use their resilience to support their customers.   

Let’s not forget this is essentially a human crisis. 

Most fundamentally, we need to focus on people -- the most vulnerable, low-wage workers, small and medium enterprises.

That means wage support, insurance, social protection, preventing bankruptcies and job loss.

That also means designing fiscal and monetary responses to ensure that the burden does not fall on those who can least afford it. 

The recovery must not come on the backs of the poorest – and we cannot create a legion of new poor.

We need to get resources directly in the hands of people.  A number of countries are taking up social protection initiatives such as cash transfers and universal income. 

We need to take it to the next level to ensure support reaches those entirely dependent on the informal economy and countries less able to respond.

Remittances are a lifeline in the developing world – especially now.  Countries have already committed to reduce remittance fees to 3 percent, much below the current average levels.  The crisis requires us to go further, getting as close to zero as possible.

In addition, G20 leaders have taken steps to protect their own citizens and economies by waiving interest payments.  We must apply that same logic to the most vulnerable countries in our global village and alleviate their debt burden. 

Across the board, we need a commitment to ensure adequate financial facilities to support countries in difficulties.  The IMF, the World Bank and other International Financial Institutions play a key role. 

And we must refrain from the temptation of resorting to protectionism.  This is the time to dismantle trade barriers and re-establish supply chains.

Looking at the broader picture, disruptions to society are having a profound impact.

We must address the effects of this crisis on women.  The world’s women are disproportionally carrying the burden at home and in the wider economy.

Children are also paying a heavy price.  More than 800 million children are out of school right now — many of whom rely on school to provide their only meal.  We must ensure that all children have access to food and equal access to learning – bridging the digital divide and reducing the costs of connectivity.

As people’s lives are disrupted, isolated and upturned, we must prevent this pandemic from turning into a crisis of mental health.  Young people will be most at risk.

The world needs to keep going with core support to programs for the most vulnerable, including through UN-coordinated humanitarian and refugee response plans.  Humanitarian needs must not be sacrificed. 

Third, and finally, we have a responsibility to "recover better."

The 2008 financial crisis demonstrated clearly that countries with robust social protection systems suffered the least and recovered most quickly from its impact.

We must ensure that lessons are learned and that this crisis provides a watershed moment for health emergency preparedness and for investment in critical 21st century public services and the effective delivery of global public goods.

We have a framework for action – the 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development and the Paris Agreement on Climate Change.  We must keep our promises for people and planet.

The United Nations – and our global network of country offices -- will support all governments to ensure that the global economy and the people we serve emerge stronger from this crisis.  

That is the logic of the Decade of Action to deliver the Sustainable Development Goals.

More than ever before, we need solidarity, hope and the political will to see this crisis through together.

Download the full statement

S7-Episode 2: Bringing Health to the World

“You see, we're not doing this work to make ourselves feel better. That sort of conventional notion of what a do-gooder is. We're doing this work because we are totally convinced that it's not necessary in today's wealthy world for so many people to be experiencing discomfort, for so many people to be experiencing hardship, for so many people to have their lives and their livelihoods imperiled.”

Dr. David Nabarro has dedicated his life to global health. After a long career that’s taken him from the horrors of war torn Iraq, to the devastating aftermath of the Indian Ocean tsunami, he is still spurred to action by the tremendous inequalities in global access to medical care.

“The thing that keeps me awake most at night is the rampant inequities in our world…We see an awful lot of needless suffering.”

:: David Nabarro interviewed by Melissa Fleming

Brazilian ballet pirouettes during pandemic

Ballet Manguinhos, named for its favela in Rio de Janeiro, returns to the stage after a long absence during the COVID-19 pandemic. It counts 250 children and teenagers from the favela as its performers. The ballet group provides social support in a community where poverty, hunger and teen pregnancy are constant issues.

Radio journalist gives the facts on COVID-19 in Uzbekistan

The pandemic has put many people to the test, and journalists are no exception. Coronavirus has waged war not only against people's lives and well-being but has also spawned countless hoaxes and scientific falsehoods.

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Saving Lives in a Time of Crisis: Why the Global Humanitarian System Matters

Transcript — February 5, 2019

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KIMBERLY FLOWERS: Welcome to the Center for Strategic and International Studies. It’s great to see a large crowd here to listen and learn from the world’s chief humanitarian advocate, Mark Lowcock.

For those of you that don’t know me, my name is Kimberly Flowers, and I direct both the Global Food Security Project and the Humanitarian Agenda here at CSIS.

Today’s event is a collaboration between the Humanitarian Agenda and the CSIS Human Rights Initiative, and it will highlight the importance of the global humanitarian system. There is no better person to speak about this than Mark Lowcock. So, Mark, thank you very much for joining us today.

Before I introduce our guest, I want to take a moment to share with the audience that the effectiveness of humanitarian aid is very high on the radar here at CSIS. This year I’ll be leading a taskforce on humanitarian access. The initiative is co-chaired by Senator Cory Booker and Senator Todd Young, and includes 22 members who are leading experts in the humanitarian field. I’m excited to say that Valerie Amos – who I’m sure you know, Mark – who formerly held Mark’s position at the UN is a part of this prestigious group. CSIS will release a report this fall with the taskforce recommendations on how to best reduce access constraints so that lifesaving aid can reach the most vulnerable, particularly in protracted conflicts. And our report is specifically for leaders like Mark or those in his position, so we will be engaging OCHA throughout this process and looking forward to their feedback on our recommendations as well.

One additional update. In partnership with Melissa Dalton from CSIS that many of you may know, as well as her – with her Cooperative Defense Project, we recently had a team from the Humanitarian Agenda go out to Amman, Jordan, to look at cross-border humanitarian access in response to the crisis in Syria. So a CSIS policy brief on the findings from that field research will be published about early March, so be on the lookout for that if that interests you.

There are many reasons why humanitarian assistance has been elevated both within an organization like CSIS, as well as I would say should be elevated as a top foreign policy priority. The instability of fragile states is an obvious and direct threat to U.S. national security. The number of active conflicts has nearly doubled in the world and the average length of these crises have more than tripled since 2005, and the humanitarian resources to respond to them are being stretched further and further.

I’m sure Mark’s going to give you a lot of numbers today, but I’ll give you the ones that I’ve been thinking about lately. Between 14 and 20 million people are food insecure in Yemen right now. Over 6 million people are internally displaced in Syria alone. In Venezuela, the political crisis I would say is overshadowing the horrible humanitarian crisis happening there, where nearly 300,000 children were predicted to die last year from extreme malnutrition. All these numbers, they’re quite staggering. They’re a bit overwhelming. And yet, the humanitarian community remains resilient in trying to meet the needs of those affected by political instability, civil war, terrorism, or all of the above.

In my opinion, the resiliency of the humanitarian system is in many ways quite dependent upon UN leadership and coordination. So the UN Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs – or UN OCHA, which I’m sure we’ll refer to it as today – is a critical player in this space. The world relies on UN OCHA not only for reports on global humanitarian needs or for trends, but also on their ability to connect and coordinate this growing global system of donors and of implementing partners. Reforms are never easy, but the global aid architecture has to continue to evolve and adapt to this changing and I would say disordered world.

So, with that, it brings me great pleasure to introduce our guest, Mark Lowcock. He’s served as the head of UN OCHA since 2017, and he’s pushed for UN reforms both broadly within the system as well as within his own agency. As a(n) undersecretary-general and emergency relief coordinator, Mark has a lot of responsibility in terms of overseeing the UN’s many coordination efforts.

I met Mark first when he joined me in 2017 when the Humanitarian Agenda, we held a private event for congressional staff. And he emphasized then that there were three main challenges that he felt like he was going to face in his role. They were addressing the declining compliance of international humanitarian law, or IHL; mitigating famine; and responding to the growing population of refugees and displaced persons. Of course, these challenges persist and will remain long after his tenure.

With more than three decades of humanitarian and development experience, Mark is a top expert in his field. He previously worked as the permanent secretary for the Department of International Development, or DFID, in the U.K. There, he responded to humanitarian crises all around the world and natural disasters, including Libya, Iraq, Syria, Nepal and the Philippines. But he’s also had significant field experience in Kenya, Malawi, and Zimbabwe. And all of those shape the leader that he is today. He’s an outspoken advocate for peace and for all people’s right to humanitarian assistance.

Thank you, Mark, for your hope, your leadership. Let’s give him a warm applause. Mark? (Applause.)

MARK LOWCOCK: Kimberly, thank you very much indeed. It’s really an honor to be here.

Thank you to all of you for coming today, as well. I know that there’s another speech being given here today and you could have made a different choice. I know also that there’s a tradition over there for the speech to be interrupted by rounds of standing ovation. I just want to tell you that I have realistic expectations for the next 20 minutes. (Laughter.)

Thank you, CSIS, for the invitation. You have been an influential voice in international policymaking for decades, and your multidisciplinary approach to international affairs is the best one to analyze and tackle the most complex challenges facing the world. I think the work you’re undertaking in the Humanitarian Agenda initiative, as well as the important contributions that Amy is leading in the human rights program, Steve Morrison on the Global Health Policy Center, and Dan Runde at the Project on Prosperity and Development are all contributing in significant ways.

In the words of my boss, Antonio Guterres, today’s world is one in which “global challenges are more and more integrated and the responses are more and more fragmented.” In many places round the world the very premise and value of cooperation to tackle shared problems is being questioned, sometimes by those who had been its most staunch advocates in decades past. But today I want to tell you how the global humanitarian system, which is the bit of the multilateral system I’m responsible for, is a great example for how and why international cooperation can be effective.

Last year, through UN-coordinated programs, we reached 100 million people across the world with humanitarian assistance. We unquestionably save millions of lives every year and protect the most vulnerable people in the conflict-ridden corners of this Earth. We are not complacent. There’s much we need to do to reform and improve our system, and I’m going to talk about that. But I think it makes sense for policymakers in capitals around the world, including Washington, to support the global humanitarian system. Why?

First, it is a moral responsibility. Our basic humanity demands that we act with compassion to reduce suffering among our fellow human beings.

And, second, it’s in the national interest of countries like the United States to ensure an effective and efficient global humanitarian system.

These arguments are not mutually exclusive. The two are intertwined with one another. As Kimberly said, in my last job I ran the U.K.’s Department for International Development for six years. And every day in that job I was thinking about how I could justify to the British public and parliamentarians why a growing U.K. aid budget was not only the right thing to do for moral reasons, but also the smart thing to do, as it contributed to their safety and prosperity.

For decades American leaders and the public have understood this well. U.S. leadership on humanitarian affairs has been a constant throughout my 35-year career in this sector. My first job was as an aid worker working on the British government’s response to the Ethiopia famine in the mid-1980s. During that crisis President Reagan was unequivocal on the need for a principled U.S. response. “A hungry child knows no politics,” he said, and committed U.S. food aid to those starving children even though Ethiopia was run by a communist government at the time.

The U.S. has a strong tradition as a champion of humanitarian action and human rights. The U.S. remains the largest financial donor to the humanitarian system, and you’ve been that for many decades. You have unmatched capabilities bringing together financial resources; global presence and influence; research and policymaking capacity and reach; your fantastic humanitarian NGOs; and, obviously, your military strength.

But I do not take U.S. support for granted. In Washington and in many other capitals around the world, tough questions are rightly being asked of the humanitarian system. Is it really in our interest to spend money on people thousands of miles away? Is the global humanitarian system efficient, effective, and well-coordinated? Are humanitarian actors committed to reform and ensuring every dollar is spent wisely?

Today, I want to answer those questions. I’ll give you a sense of the scale and complexity of the challenges we’re facing. I want to explain how my organization coordinates the system to make it more efficient and effective, and to outline the effort we are making to reform, to cut waste, and to be fit for purpose for 21 st century.

Let me start with the humanitarian landscape. This year more than 130 million people will need humanitarian assistance and protection just to survive, most of them in places affected by conflict. The pace, tempo, and longevity of conflict, as Kimberly has said, and the displacement that accompanies it today, means that NGOs and UN humanitarian organizations are mounting major responses on nearly every continent.

People describe the current phase in history as a ‘chaotic transition.’ We are maybe moving into a multipolar world. But we have not reached a new global equilibrium, and the transition process is not delivering greater peace or security to the world. Regional competition, fragile politics, terrorism, economic inequality, underdevelopment, climatic shocks, and mounting pressure over natural resources have all been factors fueling conflict.

In many contemporary conflicts, fighting parties splinter into dozens – or even hundreds – of factions. That means military victories are harder to achieve and conflict resolution is more difficult to sustain. The result – again, as Kimberly said – is that conflicts last twice as long as they did in 1990. Fighters break international humanitarian law with impunity. Rape, starvation, besiegement, and the targeting of schools and hospitals have been widely adopted as deliberate tactics of war, especially over the last 10 years.

So what does all this mean for the humanitarian system? The most obvious result is the explosion of need in the last 10 years, but it’s not just scale. We’re increasingly operating in more complex and insecure environments. Too many state-controlled armed forces show scant regard for international humanitarian law. And globally interconnected terrorist groups that explicitly reject accepted norms of behavior in conflict terrorize local populations and commit unspeakable acts of violence and destruction, including against aid workers. That includes the Islamic State’s variants in Iraq, Syria, Yemen, Afghanistan, Nigeria, the greater Sahel region, and elsewhere.

The Africa expert Alex de Waal has identified the emergence of a new political ideology of “counter-humanitarianism.” He describes this as “an approach to conflict that legitimizes political and military action that is indifferent to human life.” These are worrying trends, especially this year when we mark the 70 th anniversary of the Geneva Conventions.

Against this backdrop, I have to say I really welcome the CSIS initiative to launch the high-level taskforce on humanitarian access. We need some political energy behind this issue and innovative ideas to address it, and you have assembled a terrific group of people for the taskforce. And I want to support the group in any and every way I can.

I also understand that there is an initiative by the U.S. Congress – and I’ve come just now from the Pentagon – to bring greater transparency to reporting on civilian casualties related to U.S.’s own military operations. This is a really positive step, which others should emulate. Although some of these issues may raise political sensitivities, they are issues all nations need to address.

So it’s easy to feel pessimistic about the state of the world. But despite the obstacles that we face, the global humanitarian system is achieving remarkable things. And without it things would, I am afraid, be a great deal worse. Humanitarian actors cannot claim to bring wars to an end or to halt terrorism, but we do contribute to global security in other important ways.

My colleague and good friend Governor David Beasley – the head of the UN’s World Food Programme – recently observed that his agency was the first line of defense and offense against al-Qaida, al-Shabaab, and ISIS. He tells a story of a woman he met who said her husband joined a terrorist organization because there was no food.

Humanitarian agencies also ensure that almost 9 million children receive education in emergency settings in more than 20 countries. These are children who would otherwise not be going to school. An education gives them a better chance of a livelihood as an adult and arguably also makes them less susceptible to joining radical groups in the future.

The World Health Organization, UNICEF, and others are on the front line of preventing the outbreak of deadly diseases turning into regional and global pandemics.

And when conflict causes people to flee from violence, either across borders or within their own country, agencies like the UNHCR – the UN’s Refugee Agency – and the International Organization for Migration and others are there to provide those people with shelter, protection, and support.

Counterterrorism, economic development, stopping global pandemics, dealing with mass displacement: humanitarian action plays a real role in contributing to solutions to these challenges.

The next question people ask is whether or not the humanitarian system is effective and well-coordinated. In short, the answer is yes, with room for improvement. We are delivering real results in a coordinated way. In the discussion we might perhaps get into some of the details of Yemen, Syria, South Sudan, Venezuela, the Rohingya crisis, and other places, but let me just summarize some key results at the global level.

Every month of last year international humanitarian agencies provided lifesaving help and protection to 8 million Yemenis, more than 5 million people inside Syria, and nearly 5 million South Sudanese. UNICEF provided clean water to more than 32 million people, vaccinated 18 million children against measles, and provided psychosocial support to 3 ½ million children.

The World Food Programme provided food assistance to more than 90 million people – very cheaply, by the way; just 40 cents per person per day in Yemen. And in non-conflict areas, it’s just 30 cents a day.

In the Democratic Republic of Congo and neighboring countries, the UN has vaccinated 60,000 people against Ebola since August last year. The World Health Organization and UNICEF run medical clinics for people with symptoms of Ebola. They ensure that doctors and nurses have the necessary supplies, protective clothing, and pharmaceuticals. And UNICEF go door to door to make sure people know how to keep their families safe from Ebola.

Our main financiers clearly recognize and value these results. UN-coordinated humanitarian appeals – which, by the way, support many NGOs as well as UN agencies – alone last year raised a record $15 billion, up from 4 billion (dollars) in 2005. The UN has the largest market share in humanitarian action. We have never been better funded, although needs constantly outstrip available resources.

Each agency plays a key role in a response, but the strength of the system is that we ensure that the sum is greater than the individual parts. Effective coordination is key to that. The countries that make up the UN decided, in their wisdom, to create and finance a set of different institutions to support humanitarian action. In the UN we have an agency for refugees, an agency for food, an agency for children, an agency for population issues, and so on. Each is governed separately and seeks money for their activities separately. But no one agency or organization has the mandate, scale, reach, capacity, or expertise to provide all the necessary support in any significant crisis. And that’s why a coordinated response, getting the best from everyone, is essential.

My office – and the clue is in the title of my office, the Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Assistance – is charged with ensuring the system is well-coordinated. So what in practice do we do? Four main things.

First, assess and communicate the needs of vulnerable people caught up in crises. Some of that’s about me briefing the Security Council and others on the big picture, but a lot of it is about detailed analytical work deep in the midst of the crises, gathering and presenting data on what are people’s needs. A rigorous assessment of needs means that we’re less likely to waste money on low-priority activities. We can make that system even better. I’ve been discussing ideas on that with Admiral Ziemer at USAID, which I hope we can take forward before too long.

Secondly, working with the implementing agencies, we use the needs assessments to develop response plans. Every year my office publishes the Global Humanitarian Overview, which is the world’s most sophisticated, authoritative, and comprehensive assessment of humanitarian needs and response. One area we are improving is how we monitor the impact and results achieved against those plans.

And that response-planning function links to the role I try to play on getting the humanitarian sector – the UN agencies, but also the NGOs and the Red Cross – better financed so that they can deliver. For me, a crucial part of that is a fairer sharing of the burden. And I am pleased that as part of last year’s record fundraising we also saw a reduced share from the traditional donors like the U.S. We saw other donors, including from the Gulf, taking on more. Persuading nontraditional donors to support multilateral humanitarian agencies is a long-term endeavor that takes time. But we must keep investing time and effort into this, and I am doing just that myself.

Thirdly, I attach great importance to the role my office plays in improving access for aid agencies to people most in need. We talk to governments and to nonstate armed groups, and we persuade them to let us safely deliver to people caught in the midst of fighting. That requires my staff to have a mix of local understanding, operational savviness, and the ability to build relationships of trust with everyone from the president of a country to a local-level commander on a checkpoint.

A key part of negotiating access is civil-military coordination. In Yemen, the world’s worst humanitarian crisis, my team operates a deconfliction system to ensure the warring parties don’t attack aid personnel or facilities or convoys. We provide the coalition with coordinates of schools and hospitals and water points and the like, and we let them know when the humanitarian convoys, the immunization teams, and the other assistance missions will be on the road. This system has proven highly effective in sparing the aid operation from accidental or incidental harm in what remains a very hot war with more than 30 front lines. Without that system, we would simply not be able to deliver assistance safely in Yemen.

Within my office, we are strengthening our civil-military liaison capability and will soon have more than 40 people across the world working on that in the toughest parts of every crisis-affected country. I am very grateful, by the way, for assistance from the U.S. government in staffing up that capability.

Fourthly, I take seriously my responsibility as coordinator for the humanitarian agencies. The UN resolution establishing my position back in 1991 gives me a mandate to coordinate not only UN entities, but also the NGOs and the Red Cross family. All those organizations have their own governance, their own mandate, and their own finances. What I am trying to do is to be a supporter, a convener, an enabler, and a champion for all of them.

There is a strong commitment at the top of all the organizations to working together better in the interests of people whose lives we’re trying to save and improve. We can join up more and better. That’s reflected in, for example, the agreement Henrietta Fore at UNICEF, David Beasley at the World Food Programme, Filippo Grandi at the UN Refugee Agency, and I have reached to join up and develop a single shared system for providing cash to people caught up in humanitarian crises.

Another example is our collaboration to deal with the scourge of sexual exploitation and abuse. We’re doing a lot together on that, with excellent contributions especially from NGOs. To give just one example, we are all collaborating to ensure that people guilty of abuse in one organization cannot find a way out through employment in another.

So, as I’ve said, I am clear that the humanitarian system is a global public good which delivers concrete results, but I’m also convinced that it needs to be improved and reformed. One point often leveled at multilateral institutions is that we’re too bureaucratic, too process-heavy, and that we lack innovation, and the UN Secretary-General agrees with that. He’s launched a series of ambitious reforms through the UN to decentralize authority and decision-making to field leaders, to simplify processes, to promote efficiency, and strengthen accountability and transparency. And that’s all already making a difference. But let me give you a few other areas that I think are ripe for innovation and reform.

First, I think we need to look at the way in which humanitarian action is financed. We need to shift our reactive financing model to one that is proactive and centered on early and in some cases preventative action. With increasingly powerful data analytics, we can now track clearly the early warning indicators to predict when and where crises are developing. If we then have in place pre-agreed financing triggers, we can act swiftly when disaster strikes. And this approach can reduce the humanitarian impact of predictable disasters like droughts. It can cut response times, it can reduce costs, and it can save lives. The UN has a developing collaboration with the World Bank on this, which I hope will yield concrete results later this year.

Second, the humanitarian community must do a lot better on harnessing the role of the private sector. Too often, our discussion about the private sector is focused just on charitable donations from firms. I’m obviously not against that. But we also need a different kind of conversation. Primarily, we need to acknowledge the for-profit motives of private-sector entities and then focus on the comparative advantages of the private sector – supply chains, technological solutions, expertise, R&D – and look for win-win opportunities to collaborate with them. I’ve had excellent conversations in recent months with Mastercard, Google, Amazon, Salesforce, major insurance companies, and many others on this.

The final issue I want to highlight that requires some innovative thinking is around how humanitarian agencies navigate areas where proscribed armed groups are operating. That includes handling increasingly complex counterterrorism legislation and managing the risk of aid diversion.

We all understand the crucial importance of tackling terrorism. It affects poor people in poor countries more than it affects anyone else. And we also get why measures to manage the risk of diversion are so important. We need to get every penny to the most vulnerable people. But nobody, I think, wants counterterrorism measures to hinder legitimate humanitarian action, either by criminalizing it or by slowing it down or by making it impossible for aid to get to innocent people who just happen to be unlucky enough to be living in areas where terrorist groups are dominant.

For example, in Nigeria some financiers are saying that civilians who have lived in areas under the control of the Boko Haram insurgents for more than six months need to be vetted before receiving help. That means that women and children who have managed somehow to escape the Boko Haram terrorists need to wait for approval before they can receive help with, say, water and health services.

We need to recognize there are risks in what we have to do. The only zero-risk activity is no activity at all. So the question is how we manage risk sensibly.

Let me make one last point. The global humanitarian system is not the answer to all the world’s problems, but without it the world would certainly be a much nastier and more dangerous place. The UN’s second secretary-general, Dag Hammarskjold, wryly noted, “The UN was not created to take mankind to heaven, but to save humanity from hell.” And that’s exactly what thousands of humanitarian workers around the world are trying to do right now.

Being an aid worker in these conflict-ridden crises is, alongside journalism, one of the world’s most dangerous professions. A hundred colleagues a year are being killed in the line of duty. Everywhere I go I’m impressed with the courage, commitment, determination, and professionalism of the NGO workers, the Red Cross staff, and my UN colleagues. Most of them are nationals of the countries in crisis, often risking their own lives for their own fellow citizens. We know we can do an even better job, and we seek all of your support in doing that.

Thank you very much indeed. (Applause.)

AMY K. LEHR: Hi, Mark. It’s a pleasure to have you here. I’m Amy Lehr. I’m the director of the Human Rights Initiative here at CSIS. Our initiative is quite unique – it’s the only standalone initiative of its type at a D.C. think tank – and I think provides a really vital voice at a time when we know human rights are under attack globally.

Thanks, Kimberly.

I’m thrilled to have Mark here. And I’ll be asking him a series of questions in a conversation up here on the stage, but we’ll have plenty of time for audience questions as well. So rest easy.

I think it goes without saying that Mark’s mandate is directly linked to many aspects of human rights. And, obviously, especially what he was talking about in terms of the trends on respect for international humanitarian law are really, really concerning, both in terms of the impacts on civilians on the ground and aid workers.

I want to start on a slightly more positive note, which is around the point you made on innovation. So one possibility my program’s been thinking about broadly is emerging technologies, artificial intelligence. Clearly, this poses some risks for human rights and human rights activists, but also maybe some opportunities to use it for good. And so when you talk about preventive modeling and how we can identify crises before they’re coming, I wondered if there was differential utility of that in the sense that I can imagine at least what we historically had at hand in terms of tools might have been decently good for predicting maybe famine, maybe public health outbreaks, but how about conflict? Can it help with all of those problems?

MR. LOWCOCK: Well, I think that’s a great question.

By the way, I think the sector isn’t static. It is dynamic and there is an interest in innovation. When I – my first job, as I said, was working on the famine response in Ethiopia in the mid-1980s, and you know – (laughs) – there we thought the deal was truck and dump food or drop it from a plane and maybe do a bit of shelter and a bit of, you know, water, and that was basically it. And now in those big crises we know that, you know, you have to protect people; you have to use more innovative technologies like therapeutic feeding programs, which didn’t exist back in the ’80s; you have to worry about keeping kids in school; and so on. So I think the sector has evolved and developed.

I do think that a lot of the work that is being done to understand the roots of conflict and how things might pan out should be getting more attention than it is at the moment. One of the, you know, facts of life is we never, in fact, know what crises we’ve prevented because we’re never allowed to wander along to the parallel universe where we didn’t prevent them. And my guess is we prevent more things that we really tell the story of. And if we understood how we stop some things happening better, we would be able to do more of the things that do stop that.

And the more we have, you know, research and analysis and – I do think the tools of predictive data analytics have something to offer here, actually. I mean, it’s very early days and we shouldn’t overstate the impact, but it does seem that, you know, some things that happen are correlated with problems later down the road. And if we partner up with tech companies and understand what the correlations are, then maybe we would also get better at understanding the causations, and therefore be able to design interventions.

MS. LEHR: Yeah, no, I think that’s potentially really exciting, and I know there are really interesting public-private collaborations on really trying to use all these new technological tools to solve really hard, pressing problems. So I think it’s terrific that you’re looking at that.

I was really pleased to hear you talk a bit about the impact of counterterrorism efforts and how those can have unintended consequences. My program, we have sort of three main focus areas, and one of them is on – one area is actually on emerging technologies and human rights, and then also global labor supply chains. But one area of our research has been on this issue of closing civic space, so basically the concept that there’s less and less space for civil society to operate around the world for a lot of reasons. But it’s a significant problem, and conflict zones can be one of the areas this plays out. We really count counterterrorism laws in terms of national laws that maybe were overbroad in their definition of terrorism, and therefore it was easy to paint normal NGOs as – that were critics, maybe, of the government as a terrorist group, also issues with financing and banks de-risking those areas. But I’ve heard recently that there has been sort of an increased impact I heard from U.S. counterterrorism laws on the ability to deliver aid to recipients, and so I just thought maybe you could dig into that a little more about what changes might be helpful.

MR. LOWCOCK: Well, I think policymakers are aware of this issue and are trying to find sensible ways through. And I think objectives are shared between those whose job it is to fight terrorism and those who want to protect people in crisis. I don’t think there’s a difference of objectives, actually.

You know, I had a conversation with Ambassador Jeffrey yesterday about how the U.S. is finding its way through the need to comply with your own law while at the same time wanting assistance to get into in this case Idlib, in northwestern Syria, so that people there can be looked after. And it feels to me as though – I understand the secretary has signed something and that’s in the public domain – that that needle is being threaded. And, you know, I think it’s important that we find ways to achieve both objectives, and we just need to keep working on that as the agenda. And I – the fact that that’s a shared goal ought to make this possible in most cases.

Policymakers in this space are not kind of malign. They’re not – they’re not trying to make life difficult for the – for the humanitarian agencies. But they are – there’s a real problem they’re trying to solve, and an open dialogue and working together in a constructive way to find solutions is, I think, the approach we need.

MS. LEHR: And does that tend to be on a kind of a case-by-case basis? Do you find that it’s more like managing – like, that the rules of the road need to be a bit different for different crises? How does that play out in practice?

MR. LOWCOCK: So that’s a terrific point. I’m not really sure we’ve got enough cases to generalize. What tends to happen is that, you know, the problem is crystalized in a particular place. I mean, five, six years ago it was about sustaining the financial flow, the money corridor into Somalia. And so it crystalized in a particular place and then – and gets solved there, and then sometimes it pops up somewhere else. So, fortunately, we haven’t had so many huge cases to deal with. At some point, probably, if we keep bumping into this problem, we’ll have to try and find general solutions. But what’s popping up so far is the specific case rather than the generality, I think anyway. I mean, very much, you know, in the market to be corrected on that, but that’s my impression.

MS. LEHR: Yeah, I think – I think it’s great that you’re working on that and thinking on it, and hopefully we will come up with some more systematic solutions.

Another area where I know there’s been a bit of a barrier to humanitarian aid – again, where I think there’s a bit of a needle to thread – has been with North Korea, actually, which in some ways gets so much attention in terms of the – I mean, obviously, there’s a huge political and security problem there, but also an enormous humanitarian crisis in terms of drug-resistant tuberculosis, acute malnutrition. I know there have been some problems in the past both of getting adequate financing for it, for the crisis, and then also just, again, partly because of U.S. laws that may have some very valid purposes, actually getting aid there. So could you talk about where that stands now?

MR. LOWCOCK: Probably you know I was in North Korea in July and there’s a real humanitarian need. And I was particularly struck by the TB issue because, you know, the Global Fund, which was providing drugs, particularly against drug-resistant TB, for a period has not been able to do that. And, you know, the thing about – (laughter) – drug-resistant TB is it has the potential to spread. And so I took a decision when I came back from the fund I manage, the Central Emergency Response Fund, we would provide some assistance to provide commodities, particularly anti-TB drugs, just to deal with that bit of the problem. And everybody’s accepted that decision and we’re in the implementation phase.

There is a sanctions regime on North Korea, and of course there are very good reasons for that. Everybody understands that. But there are also exemptions for humanitarian assistance from sanctions. So there is a process going on at the moment to make sure the unintended consequence of the sanctions is not to unreasonably delay the delivery of these drugs against TB and other key areas. And I think the U.S. – I’m not sure I’m going to get his title right, but the U.S. special envoy for working on these issues has spoken publicly about the desirability there is here to have the sanctions regime do what it’s supposed to do and not what it’s not intended to do. So I do see a convergence of views on that.

MS. LEHR: That’s great to hear. I mean, this isn’t the first time, also. U.S. sanctions are really complicated and sometimes there are unintended consequences. But it’s good to hear that you feel like there’s been some progress on that because the public health crisis is pretty severe.

Thinking about supply chains and things of that sort, one of the aspects of these protracted crises is that the refugee situation really has reached sort of unprecedented scale and that the length of time for which people are refugees is really new. My background is really originally in the nexus of business and human rights, and so I’m aware that in some countries like Jordan there’s been an effort to really integrate refugees into workforces, or in Uganda to enable them to have land rights so they can farm and so forth. But what is the role of OCHA in trying to deal with these – like, trying to provide sort of livelihoods and decent circumstances for these refugees who are stuck for a lot longer now?

MR. LOWCOCK: Yeah. So that’s a great question. Thank you.

I mean, as Kimberly said at the beginning, I’ve basically spent my career on development and humanitarian response, and I’m basically somebody who is very keen to try to get to solutions to these problems. I didn’t talk about it in my remarks, but one thing we’re not doing very well is finding solutions. And displaced people, you know, are right at the top of the people we should worry about for that.

I was very struck going to Darfur about two years ago, possibly three years ago, meeting groups of people who have been displaced for 15 years and had had 15 years of assistance – or, more precisely, had had one year 15 times. And it would be a much better system to invest more in helping people reestablish themselves somewhere else.

And I do see some positive examples of that. I was in Ethiopia and Somalia at the beginning of last year, and the authorities with the support from the agencies are actually working in a creative way to find land for people to be able to reestablish themselves and to think about, well, maybe if we give people a bit more help at the beginning they’d be able to get going faster rather than eking it out over a longer period. And I think we need to do more of that kind of thing and gather more of the lessons.

Lots of us have been surprised by so far how much the new peace deal in South Sudan has begun to stick. And we’re starting to think about, well, maybe could there be a chance this year for millions of people displaced inside South Sudan – never mind the people who are refugees; I’ll come onto that to your question in a minute – is there something we can do this year to help people, if peace is going to be consolidated, go back home, and how best to help them doing that.

Now, on the refugee thing, I think one thing that’s been positive – and you gave the example of Jordan; it’s also been happening in Ethiopia – is to try to provide assistance to the refugee hosting countries in a way which kind of recognizes the burden they’re sharing and integrating it more into the broader economy. So in Jordan, for example, there was an agreement that companies that hired refugees would be able to have preferential access to the EU market for their products, and I think that’s a very smart solution. It supports the local economy, gives refugees an income, but also dignity – dignity’s a really important thing that we don’t pay enough attention to – and has all sorts of other benefits. And a similar thing happened in Ethiopia. So I think those are the kinds of things which are in the box of solutions, a box we should be playing in a lot more and try to get ourselves out of business a bit faster.

MS. LEHR: Yes. Yes. It is always interesting to have a job where you’re trying to work yourself out of business, isn’t it? (Laughs.)

On the – on the solutions front, how much of that responsibility for kind of trying to think through what to do with long-term refugees, et cetera, really falls to OCHA? Is there – is this an area where there actually is more need for coordination, or is there a good home for that kind of thinking?

MR. LOWCOCK: Well, the main mandate for refugees, obviously –

MS. LEHR: Of course.

MR. LOWCOCK: – is with the UN Refugee Agency. I do – my office does have a mandate for internally displaced people, and actually the solutions set is similar for both categories. And we do see a responsibility there.

I mean, I do think this is a space, particularly for IDPs, which has not been very heavily sort of populated by the policy community. Over the last few years there’s been a big focus on the refugee compact, the CRRF, which you’ll be familiar with, and with the migration compact, but that group of people – 14 million or so people who are displaced inside their own country – haven’t been subject to the same degree of kind of attention and thought hasn’t been given to them in the same way about, well, how can we find solutions for those people. And maybe there’s an opportunity in the period ahead to, you know, have some kind of initiative to do a bit better for them. And certainly I’m in the market for that and my office would be engaged energetically with any proposals that come forward.

MS. LEHR: And, obviously, a program like that would have really strong knock-on effects in terms of preventing further conflict, one assumes. Yeah. Yeah, that’s really good food for thought. Thank you.

I’m going to turn it over to the – to the rest of the room in a few minutes, but I just wanted to see if you could touch on Venezuela and just what kind of humanitarian aid is going to Venezuela right now. What are the possibilities? Because it’s obviously a really rapidly evolving crisis.

MR. LOWCOCK: It’s a very substantial crisis with a lot of human need: severe shortages of drugs and vaccines, and lots of malnourished children. Inside Venezuela, the UN has a program we’ve agreed with the government to scale up assistance in the areas of nutrition and health services. It’s a small program initially, $100 million. It’s 50 percent financed, and about 20 percent of what’s financed has come from the Central Emergency Response Fund, which I manage. We’re moving forward, as is required by our mandate, in consultation with the government. And, you know, it is a fast-moving situation.

I have a few more people on the ground who are working now to build a better picture of what all the needs are in different parts of the country so we can make information available to everybody. And hopefully, you know, there will be successful navigation of all the pressures and all the politics of this so that we do get a stronger focus on people who are suffering a lot and who deserve support.

MS. LEHR: It sounds like that’s very much a work in progress then, yeah. OK. Well, I sure – I’m sure we’ll all be watching that quite closely.

Actually, one last question, which is again around the role of the business sector and what their role could and could not be. You know, business, obviously, in conflict can play both positive and negative roles. We see in places like the DRC that, you know, business can be involved in looting and other really bad practices. But, obviously, there’s also hope that business can be part of solutions in many spaces right now. But as I think you wisely cautioned, right, there’s still very much a profit motive and we need to be realistic about that. So where do you see the opportunities, in a more concrete way, for business to play a positive role in these conflicts?

MR. LOWCOCK: Well, I think there’s three sorts of things.

I mean, business leaders do say to me they attach importance to their role – their corporate social responsibility role, and there’s – that’s a philanthropic thing. And that should be valued and welcomed, and more of it would be good. That’s the first pillar.

The second pillar is there are places where there are investment opportunities for a social impact type model. They tend not to be the most extreme crises, to be honest. But places like Ethiopia and refugee settings, there are some investable propositions which – there’s quite a lot of interesting discussion going on on that. And the World Economic Forum, who, you know, organized Davos, where I was with others two weeks ago, are doing very interesting work on trying to identify the genuinely investable spaces, and I do think that’s quite an encouraging area as long as you’re realistic about what really will be around it and what might not be.

And then the third pillar is just using the fact that the private sector has all sorts of capabilities to help do things that humanitarian agencies are trying to do, whether it’s procurement, supply chain, information, financing platforms, lots and lots of areas. And again, one thing I see is private-sector companies are very interested to put their expertise at the service of humanitarian organizations, and partner and collaborate on that as, you know, part of that third pillar if you like.

MS. LEHR: Yeah, so it sounds like part of it is just business being able to help humanitarian efforts be more efficient and more effective.

I’m really curious about the impact of investing and what that really could look like in practice. It sounds like we don’t really have very many concrete examples yet, it’s sort of a work in progress. OK.

MR. LOWCOCK: It is. And I think we’re in a – in that sort of discovery phase, where what would be good would be to try lots of experiments and then report faithfully on what’s worked and what hasn’t worked. My colleague Lisa Carty, who’s in the front row here, is the director for humanitarian financing in OCHA, is just setting up a team who is going to as one of their jobs look at all of these experiments that are being run and try to offer a commentary on the ones that should definitely be upscaled and replicated and taken forward.

MS. LEHR: Well, I’m really glad to hear you’re taking a pretty – I guess a critical approach to that in the sense that it will be really important to understand what’s realistic and what’s not.

MR. LOWCOCK: Yeah.

MS. LEHR: Great. Well, thank you.

I do want to turn to the room now. I’m going to take three questions at a time and then Mark will respond. So I see a question right here in the middle. And someone will come to you with a microphone.

Q: Hi. Teresa Welsh with Devex.

I wanted to ask a little bit more about Venezuela and how you are navigating working with the Maduro government versus Interim President Guaido, which the United States, many other governments, Lima Group have all acknowledged as the legitimate president of Venezuela, and sort of how, you know, from a humanitarian perspective you navigate what is obviously a political issue in terms of getting humanitarian aid to people that need it and, you know, who on the ground it is that you’re working with, and who you recognize essentially as the government. Thank you.

MS. LEHR: There’s a question right across the aisle.

Q: Thank you, Mr. Lowcock, for your remarks and your leadership.

I had a question that I think will draw on both your current experience and your previous experience at DFID. I’d like to know your views on ideas that are going around about donors’ conditionality for aid, particularly to promote reforms in the – in the months after the Grand Bargain of 2016. DFID took a lead on this and now there are discussions here in Washington about how we can best condition at least part of our aid to the humanitarians to promote implementation of the Grand Bargain and other reforms. And I’d like your take on that from both your previous perspective and your current perspective. Thank you.

MS. LEHR: Are there any more questions? Oh, sorry, I just – let’s start in the aisle. There’s a gentleman right here.

Q: Yeah, hi. Paul –

MS. LEHR: Can you wait for the microphone? Thank you.

Q: (Comes on mic.) Hi. Paul Spiegel from Johns Hopkins University and the Center for Humanitarian Health.

A question, Mark, about the future of coordination. I was previously with UNHCR for many years and I’m curious to see how you see cash-based interventions; the Grand Bargain, where we’re moving more towards national and governments; and the cluster approach in the future. And my question is premised on the issue of – that international agencies and international NGOs may have quite a different role in the future than they currently do now.

MS. LEHR: Great. Mark, I’ll hand that to you.

MR. LOWCOCK: Thank you very much.

On Teresa’s question, the – you know, the deal agreed by all the member states of the UN is that the UN has to operate in a member state in consultation with the authorities of that state. The member states can, if they want to, in particular circumstances change that deal. That normally requires agreement in the General Assembly and/or the Security Council. But that’s the fundamental principle on which we operate. And so we do, in Venezuela, operate with the consent and cooperation of the government. At the same time, it’s part of our mandate to talk to lots of other people. And so my colleagues also talk to, for example, the president of the National Assembly and lots of other people.

So, you know, the basic construct within which we operate is that we’re forever sort of threading a needle between on the one hand the fact that we’re required to consult with the authorities, and we can only do things to the extent that is possible through that consultation, and on the other hand we can only do things if someone will give us the money to do them. And a lot of our lives are spent in that lane, if you like, which typically is on the one side a rock and the other side a hard place. We’re just used to that. That’s just what we do.

And, of course, it’s guided by the humanitarian principles, which are the fundamental set of values, if you like, that everybody’s signed up to: that humanitarian assistance should be on the basis of need and need alone, and no other consideration; and that it should be delivered in a way which is neutral and impartial and independent. And we know from hard experience over decades that if we operate in a way which is not consistent with those principles, we quickly run into trouble. And we understand that what we do is not always a popularity contest, but we’ve learned that those principles are very important to us. So we do everything we can to stick to them. So that’s basically the framework which we are navigating through at the moment.

On the question of – thank you for your question on conditionality and reforms and so on. I don’t think that anyone needs to put conditions on the sector to deliver the Grand Bargain. I mean, there’s a lot in implementation of Grand Bargain commitments for the implementing side of the house, as it were. I think we’ve made quite good progress, actually, since the Istanbul summit on quite a lot of what’s in the Grand Bargain.

My general experience over several decades with these initiatives is that you get a burst of energy in the first phase and then they have a certain half-life. I certainly think that there’s a series of things in the Grand Bargain where there are still plenty of energy around them. And I’ve been talking, actually, over the last couple of days here about some of those which I think we can move forward on. Cash is one, actually.

Which brings me onto Paul’s question. The use of cash in humanitarian settings is one of the transformations. You know, I worked on the 1992 famine in Somalia and I worked on the 2011 famine in Somalia, and it was not a good day for me when I saw the at end of 2016, early 2017 that we could have another famine in Somalia in 2017. I hoped never to – (laughs) – see that again. And the reason – the single most important reason in my opinion, having worked on the 2017 response, that we didn’t have a famine in Somalia was because we were able to put in place a huge cash program to reach people all over the country – 600,000 families, 3 million people – transferring purchasing power through text messages. And we couldn’t do that in 2011, and that meant that we were running a lot of convoys into south-central Somalia, too many of which were being stopped and looted by the al-Shabaab terrorist organization. And it turns out it’s much harder to stop and loot a text message. And so we found it easier to get purchasing power to people, and we found markets worked all over the country in 2017. It’s not the only reason why we did – had a more successful response, but it’s one of them.

Cash does have, as it’s used more and more, big implications potentially for the coordination system and the future of the cluster system. We need to work that through as we implement what I hope will be looked back on as an important agreement that Filippo and Dave and Henrietta and I reached that I talked about in my remarks, which by the way is an inclusive – what we’re trying to do is set up an inclusive system which is open to everybody. And one of the things we’re doing at the moment is talking to lots of other agencies who run big cash programs about how they’d like to be included in that.

Cash is not the only thing that needs to happen. I do believe that the more people are given purchasing power to solve their own problems the better, broadly speaking. And the quality of – people generally take the right decision for their own livelihoods if they’re given the opportunity to do so, and that there’s also the dignity and other arguments. But there are other things that need to happen alongside cash, which, you know, are necessary for an effective, and sensible, and comprehensive response. So cash isn’t a panacea, but I do think it’s a massive opportunity. And the more it’s used and adopted the more the implications for how we think about the whole system will be.

MS. LEHR: Great. Well, thank you, Mark. I’m going to take some questions from this corner of the room now. Are there any questions over there? Silence. All right, any more questions? I see one over here. We to need you to wait for the microphone. So please wait for just a second.

Q: Hi. Brian Blonder with IMA World Health in Washington.

I was hoping you could touch for a moment on the humanitarian system is changing and will continue to need to change to meet the needs concerning climate change, because that’s going to impact and magnify all the sectors already being impacted with humanitarian issues.

MS. LEHR: Thank you. I see a question – two questions back in the back.

Q: Hi. So I’m Ana-Sofia. I’m with Refugees International.

And my question you touched on briefly. It’s about IDPs. So why do you think that IDPs have not been given the same attention as refugees? And what do you think can be done to change this in order to find solutions for them?

Q: Hi. My name is Dina Esposito and I’m with Mercy Corps.

I have a question about the new way of working, and if you could comment on the progress that we’re making in terms of relief development and, to some extent, even peacebuilders coming together around a common solution set, and where you see the continued challenges in that space.

MR. LOWCOCK: So, on climatic shocks, I mean, you know, I think it’s – it is pretty clear to me, at least, that more and more of the problems that we’re dealing with, for which the symptoms are often conflict and displacement, have as among the underlying causes resource pressures exacerbated by climatic shocks and climate change. It’s just what it looks like to me, in lots of the places where we’re operating. And as I was – I was sort of try to allude to in answer to one of Amy’s questions, we’re actually spending as a global community a lot of time and effort actually on dealing with symptoms – terrorism, you know, military conflict, humanitarian response – and not enough total effort, in my opinion, on trying to get to the underlying causes, which are – you know, are a mixture of governance systems that are not sufficiently accountable and responsive to the systems they’re supposed to serve, resource pressures, shocks of various sorts, and development failures.

And I think that if we don’t – particularly in, you know, some of the regions like the Sahel from west to the Horn of Africa, like Afghanistan, where I’ve been recently where they, you know, just had a very bad drought which has caused hundreds of thousands of more people to be displaced – if we don’t find a way to accelerate development progress, which will mean dealing with resource pressures, we’re in a for a difficult time over the next couple of generations, I think. And that is why, from our point of view, to jump to the third question, we have such a big focus in the UN on trying to join up our effort between humanitarian response, peace and security, and development. Again, David Beasley puts it very well, where he – where he talks about, you know, one of the things we need to do is make humanitarian dollars – of which we have more in the UN than we used to, 15 billion (dollars) last year, as I said – work harder for other benefits, development benefits and development gains.

And actually, there’s a lot we can do there. I think that some of the divides between humanitarian community and development community which I’ve observed for a long time are a bit self-defeating, actually. And I think joining up the sector is the smart thing to do. And that is what we are trying to do in the UN at the moment, through our own governance structures and the way we’re organizing ourselves, and especially by the what the – what we’re trying to do as leaders. So I’ve been traveling quite a lot with my colleague Achim Steiner, my colleague who’s the head of the UN Development Program, to talk about the real opportunities in places where we work to join up better to get faster to solutions. And we will be doing more of that. We have got – we’ve got a few good examples of it happening, but we need a lot more. And we need actually more help from the financiers to allow us to join up better as well.

So why is it that IDPs have not been given the attention that the grand case load would imply they should have been? I think – I mean, there’s a couple of reasons. Firstly, people have been doing other elements of the people movement issue – so refugees and the Migration Compact. I mean, that is a reason. One of the scarce commodities in the world is bandwidth of the policymaking and the implementing communities. So that is one of the reasons. The other reason though, if we’re going to be candid with each other, is that IDPs are an internal issue. And so you bump straightaway into sovereignty and governments. And that, I think, has been – has given some people pause before getting into this issue a bit more. I think there are actually quite a few countries with big internally displaced populations who would like a bit more of a discussion and would like more help with it. So I do think there’s a window of opportunity to engage in a constructive way. And I hope we’ll be able to do that.

MS. LEHR: Fantastic. Thank you. I’m going to take my prerogative as a moderator to ask one more question I should have asked earlier, which is really around this issue of international humanitarian law, the Geneva Conventions, and just the fact that we know respect for them is on the decline, to the extent we can measure these things, with really abominable things happening to both citizens – civilians and aid workers. One of my colleagues here actually, Steve Morrison, did a great film called “The New Barbarianism.” If you have the opportunity to watch it it’s compelling and disturbing.

So you’ve talked about this problem before, and the need to convince I think both states and nontraditional actors that they have a stake in international humanitarian law. Have we actually made some progress on having those conversations? And what are the kind of arguments you’re making, if so?

MR. LOWCOCK: Well, you sort of nail it, really. We’re living in an age of impunity. And I think one useful thing to do is to go back to why in the middle of the 19th century countries decided it would be a good idea to have laws for war. And the core reason was not to do with the moral compass, actually. The core reason was to do with interests. Battle of Solferino in 1863, which spurred the first international laws, concluded with a recognition by the generals on both sides that neither of their interests were being served by huge number of both sets of soldiers ending up on the battlefield with atrocious wounds. And they concluded both sets of – both had interests in finding a way to do better. And that led to the creation of the Red Cross and so on.

So I think taking a perspective on interests actually is a useful prism that our community doesn’t always – doesn’t always start with. I think there’s also a set of things to do with knowledge gaps. There’s quite a lot of evidence that quite a few groups of people committing abuses don’t know you’re not supposed to do that. Some of my colleagues report conversations with field commanders from armed opposition groups in the back of beyond who ask questions like: So where is The Hague and how do I avoid going there? (Laughter.) And that knowledge gap itself is quite revealing.

I do think there’s quite a long list of things we can do on this agenda. And I gave a talk, actually, in Berlin on this in October. And we’re trying to use the opportunity of the anniversary to build further on this. The French government and the German government, when they consecutively hold the presidency of the Security Council in March and April, have got a series of events on this planned as well. And I think a first step would be just to be talking about it more. And then I think there’s quite a range of things that can be done with both the willing and the less-willing to turn things around a bit. And we need to do that. We really need to do that.

MS. LEHR: I’ll be keen to see how that progresses because I think within this building it’s certainly an issue a lot of us are really concerned about it and makes the civilian impact of all these conflicts so much worse.

I can take one or two more questions from the room? OK, there is a question in the front here, and then one in the back. And I’ll try to get to you too.

Q: Sure. Hi. Hi. Bill Deere with UNRWA. I feel like I’m talking to my boss’s boss.

But you talked – I think you talked about the need to comply with the law, but also get the aid to the areas where it needs to go. Do you have any additional information about what might be going on with Ambassador Jeffrey? And you mentioned that he may have signed something, and I was just wondering if there was any additional detail.

MR. LEHR: I think there’s a question right next to him, and then we’ll go to the back.

Q: My name is Vidya Mahadevan. I work on the health side of humanitarian aid or have in the past. I’ve gone back and forth between humanitarian and development.

I have a follow-up question about impunity and the knowledge gap. So in a lot of places it’s – even if it isn’t about knowledge gap, how do you address that? So, like, Bashir, after his ICC indictment, nothing happened. And how do address that growing impunity? And how do we actually enforce this, when there is so little regard – or growing disregard for these laws that have been in place that we used to respect?

Q: Hi. I’m Abby Bruell with Concern Worldwide.

You spoke a lot about – at the beginning of your speech – about the support that the U.S. gives to the humanitarian system, and how that needs to be continued, and, you know, how that has been changing in their thinking. But just wondering what you think the U.S. government can be doing better, even though we’re one of the biggest champions of humanitarian response.

MS. LEHR: Thank you.

MR. LOWCOCK: Well, on the – on Bill’s question, I think, my understanding is, I think arising from a report by the inspector general, there was an initiative created about – because of the – you know, the prominence of al-Qaida affiliates in Idlib, and anxiety about whether providing assistance across the border, which is mandated by a Security Council resolution which was just renewed in December, would run into U.S. counterterrorism legislation. And my understanding is that following legal review and so on it’s been concluded that those programs remain permissible and, indeed, are important things the U.S. government want to pursue. And I know that other governments have, you know, asked the same question, given they’ve got legislation in the same space.

You know, the reason why the Security Council decided that we should have a cross-border operation into Idlib is because there’s 3 million people, a million children, a million of them displaced from other parts of the country, caught in that part of Syria. And the government of Syria are not willing for aid to be delivered to them from Damascus. And I know that because I’ve repeatedly asked the government at the top level in my interactions with them if there’s any chance of freeing things up a little bit. So the only way those people can be helped is through a cross-border operation. And I think, you know, the world’s decided, notwithstanding all the difficulties, the huge majority of people we’re talking about are civilians. They’re mostly women and children, actually. So the world’s decided the right thing to do is to help them. And that’s a legal way of doing that, as I understand, that’s been found in the U.S.

On, you know, dealing with impunity and the knowledge gap, I mean, there are different things. There’s actually the ICRC and other organizations do, when given the chance, do quite a bit to try to educate local-level commanders and groups on what the deal is supposed to be, and why they might think it’s in their interest to comply with the deal. On the impunity issue, there’s a range of things that, you know, could be done to a greater degree or with more finance and more energy. And I’ve given a – you know, I could give you a 20-minute version of this answer. But let me just give you two or three examples. If you’d like to pursue it further I’m going to advertise again my speech in Berlin in October, which gives you the longer answer.

I mean, one thing you can do is gather evidence of abuses. I worked on the Balkans a lot in the early 1990s. And we were all then tearing our hair out about the prospect of whether there would ever be any accountability for people doing the atrocious things that were done. And, lo and behold, a few decades later, Mr. Milosevic and Mr. Karadzic and Mr. Mladic found themselves in The Hague. That only happened because evidence was gathered. At the moment, I think people are doing really, really important work on gathering evidence of what has happened to the Rohingya. And who knows, maybe – it feels a long way away now, I know. Who knows, maybe one day in the future we’ll see something, you know, come out of that.

I think there are roles for commissions of inquiry. I think are international accountability mechanisms that could be made more use of. I know not every country agrees with that, but my observation is that policy thinking evolves as time passes. So I do think there’s quite a range of things that could be done. Some of them, whether there’s a high appetite for new action in this area at the level of governments or not. So I don’t think we should be despairing. I think we should do what we – what we can do.

In terms of the question on the U.S., I’ve been following closely the organization reform in USAID, with the creation for the Bureau for Humanitarian Affairs. I think that’s really a really, really interesting initiative. And the more those things can be joined up, I think the better really. And so I’m, you know, keen to follow the implementation of that decision. But, you know, you shouldn’t underestimate the extent to which there is – there continues to be a loss of U.S. leadership in this space. I see that in lots of places I go. And I see it not just from the official sector, but from the policymaking community, the NGOs. You know, you have many of the world’s leading NGOs, and their umbrella groups, here. I see it in academic institutions. I see it in lots of places. And I think it’s part of the global public good that is the humanitarian system.

MS. LEHR: Thank you. And that’s encouraging to hear. I think obviously U.S. leadership has been really vital to this space for a long time and hopefully will continue to be. We have time for about two more questions. So, any more? There’s one right there, thank you.

Q: Hi. I’m Katie Pickett with Cadasta Foundation, a global land rights foundation that’s co-funded by DFID and Omidyar Network.

And this question is not about land, but – (laughs) – you spoke to the future use of predictive analytics. And those, yes, of course, you will have to – you and your organization and other organizations will have to tap into the private sector in a lot of ways. But in which ways are you building the capacity and the foundation at a data level within your own organization, within your own information management offices around the world at your regional levels? And how are you supporting those staff and bringing in more staff that have those capabilities?

MS. LEHR: Are there any more questions? OK, one back here.

Q: My question is about increasing young population in Africa. There is a clear correlation between youth bulge and civil conflict, as we know. So what risks do you see and as well what opportunities? What could governments do to mitigate that?

MS. LEHR: All right, Mark.

MR. LOWCOCK: OK. On predictive analytics, I have an office in The Hague which is called the Center for Humanitarian Data. And one of the things they do, as well as trying to think about the ethical issues on, you know, privacy, and, well, you have to think about – if you’re going to use lots of data – about people. And they’re also – got a capacity to think about the use of predictive data analytics in decision making, essentially. And we have a fellowship program, actually, where we bring young people – typically with training – postgraduate training in statistics and high-level math and economics – to do modeling exercises for us. We’ve done a very interesting first modeling exercise, trying to identify the things that are correlated with an upcoming food crisis in Somalia.

One theory, which we’re trying to test out a little bit which has been put to us, is that one thing that you might see is a declining use of mobile telephone, especially declining use in text messages, as people run out of money, and therefore become destitute. And so that is an example of, you know, something that’s correlated with something else, that if it is substantiated might be usable for decision makers. Now, I don’t know if that example is going to work or not, but what I’m interested is what are the – what are the set of things you can look at and study? And we are hiring in this space at the moment – Lisa’s hiring, building a team in this space. And we’re keen to collaborate with others. It’s not going to be – you know, my office has lots of things to do and a limited resource base.

But as the coordinator, we have a sort of dispassionate position that enables us to experiment with some things and try to build capacity in some areas. And a lot of humanitarian specialists are maybe not the most skilled in this area I’ve just described. So – and what is not a very good idea is to pretend that people who don’t have a skillset can be put to work on this particular thing. So we are hiring new people in this area. And, you know, we’ll see what we produce. And I do think it’s an interesting area. And time will tell whether my guess is right or not, I suppose.

I think – I’m not sure I fully understood your question, so I apologize if what I’m about to say is not responding to it. But I am very interested in – and talking to them a lot – about the fact that the African Union is building its own capacity for its members to engage on humanitarian issues with each other. They’re talking about an agency. They’re talking about information exchange and collaboration. They’re – I mean, we’re working with them a lot. The UN has an incredibly important, to us, partnership with the AU, with multiple dimensions. And this is an area where we’re trying to support the AU to play a stronger role in the future than maybe it’s been able to do in the past.

MS. LEHR: Well, I really want to thank Mark for what I think was a really interesting, in-depth discussion that covered a huge amount of territory. And I’m personally really thrilled to hear just the extent to which you’re looking at sort of being more proactive and preventive, and also trying to think about innovative ways of doing things so that we do them better. And really appreciate your time. Just want to give Mark a round of applause. Thank you so much. (Applause.)

MR. LOWCOCK: Very good questions. Thank you very much.

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History Resources

The Declaration of Independence in Global Perspective

By david armitage.

The Declaration was addressed as much to "mankind" as it was to the population of the colonies. In the opening paragraph, the authors of the Declaration—Thomas Jefferson, the five-member Congressional committee of which he was part, and the Second Continental Congress itself—addressed "the opinions of Mankind" as they announced the necessity for

. . . one People to dissolve the Political Bands which have connected them with another, and to assume among the Powers of the Earth, the separate and equal Station to which the Laws of Nature and of Nature’s God entitle them. . . .

After stating the fundamental principles—the "self-evident" truths—that justified separation, they submitted an extensive list of facts to "a candid world" to prove that George III had acted tyrannically. On the basis of those facts, his colonial subjects could now rightfully leave the British Empire. The Declaration therefore "solemnly Publish[ed] and Declare[d], That these United Colonies are, and of Right ought to be, FREE AND INDEPENDENT STATES" and concluded with a statement of the rights of such states that was similar to the enumeration of individual rights in the Declaration’s second paragraph in being both precise and open-ended:

. . . that as FREE AND INDEPENDENT STATES, they have full Power to levy War, conclude Peace, contract Alliances, establish Commerce, and to do all other Acts and Things which INDEPENDENT STATES may of right do.

This was what the Declaration declared to the colonists who could now become citizens rather than subjects, and to the powers of the earth who were being asked to choose whether or not to acknowledge the United States of America among their number.

The final paragraph of the Declaration announced that the United States of America were now available for alliances and open for business. The colonists needed military, diplomatic, and commercial help in their revolutionary struggle against Great Britain; only a major power, like France or Spain, could supply that aid. Thomas Paine had warned in Common Sense in January 1776 that "the custom of all courts is against us, and will be so, until by an independence, we take rank with other nations." So long as the colonists remained within the empire, they would be treated as rebels; if they organized themselves into political bodies with which other powers could engage, then they might become legitimate belligerents in an international conflict rather than treasonous combatants within a British civil war.

The Declaration of Independence was primarily a declaration of interdependence with the other powers of the earth. It marked the entry of one people, constituted into thirteen states, into what we would now call international society. It did so in the conventional language of the contemporary law of nations drawn from the hugely influential book of that title (1758) by the Swiss jurist Emer de Vattel, a copy of which Benjamin Franklin had sent to Congress in 1775. Vattel’s was a language of rights and freedom, sovereignty and independence, and the Declaration’s use of his terms was designed to reassure the world beyond North America that the United States would abide by the rules of international behavior. The goal of the Declaration’s authors was still quite revolutionary: to extend the sphere of European international relations across the Atlantic Ocean by turning dependent colonies into independent political actors. The historical odds were greatly against them; as they knew well, no people had managed to secede from an empire since the United Provinces had revolted from Spain almost two centuries before, and no overseas colony had done so in modern times.

The other powers of the earth were naturally curious about what the Declaration said. By August 1776, news of American independence and copies of the Declaration itself had reached London, Edinburgh, and Dublin, as well as the Dutch Republic and Austria. By the fall of that year, Danish, Italian, Swiss, and Polish readers had heard the news and many could now read the Declaration in their own language as translations appeared across Europe. The document inspired diplomatic debate in France but that potential ally only began serious negotiations after the American victory at the Battle of Saratoga in October 1777. The Franco-American Treaty of Amity and Commerce of February 1778 was the first formal recognition of the United States as "free and independent states." French assistance would, of course, be crucial to the success of the American cause. It also turned the American war into a global conflict involving Britain, France, Spain, and the Dutch Republic in military operations around the globe that would shape the fate of empires in the Atlantic, Pacific, and Indian Ocean worlds.

The ultimate success of American independence was swiftly acknowledged to be of world-historical significance. "A great revolution has happened—a revolution made, not by chopping and changing of power in any one of the existing states, but by the appearance of a new state, of a new species, in a new part of the globe," wrote the British politician Edmund Burke. With Sir William Herschel’s recent discovery of the ninth planet, Uranus, in mind, he continued: "It has made as great a change in all the relations, and balances, and gravitation of power, as the appearance of a new planet would in the system of the solar world." However, it is a striking historical irony that the Declaration itself almost immediately sank into oblivion, "old wadding left to rot on the battle-field after the victory is won," as Abraham Lincoln put it in 1857. The Fourth of July was widely celebrated but not the Declaration itself. Even in the infant United States, the Declaration was largely forgotten until the early 1790s, when it re-emerged as a bone of political contention in the partisan struggles between pro-British Federalists and pro-French Republicans after the French Revolution. Only after the War of 1812 and the end of the Napoleonic Wars in 1815, did it become revered as the foundation of a newly emergent American patriotism.

Imitations of the Declaration were also slow in coming. Within North America, there was only one other early declaration of independence—Vermont’s, in January 1777—and no similar document appeared outside North America until after the French Revolution. In January 1790, the Austrian province of Flanders expressed a desire to become a free and independent state in a document whose concluding lines drew directly on a French translation of the American Declaration. The allegedly self-evident truths of the Declaration’s second paragraph did not appear in this Flemish manifesto nor would they in most of the 120 or so declarations of independence issued around the world in the following two centuries. The French Declaration of the Rights of Man and the Citizen would have greater global impact as a charter of individual rights. The sovereignty of states, as laid out in the opening and closing paragraphs of the American Declaration, was the main message other peoples beyond America heard in the document after 1776.

More than half of the 192 countries now represented at the United Nations have a founding document that can be called a declaration of independence. Most of those countries came into being from the wreckage of empires or confederations, from Spanish America in the 1810s and 1820s to the Soviet Union and the former Yugoslavia in the 1990s. Their declarations of independence, like the American Declaration, informed the world that one people or state was now asserting—or, in many cases in the second half of the twentieth century re-asserting—its sovereignty and independence. Many looked back directly to the American Declaration for inspiration. For example, in 1811, Venezuela’s representatives declared "that these united Provinces are, and ought to be, from this day, by act and right, Free, Sovereign, and Independent States." The Texas declaration of independence (1836) likewise followed the American in listing grievances and claiming freedom and independence. In the twentieth century, nationalists in Central Europe and Korea after the First World War staked their claims to sovereignty by going to Independence Hall in Philadelphia. Even the white minority government of Southern Rhodesia in 1965 made their unilateral declaration of independence from the British Parliament by adopting the form of the 1776 Declaration, though they ended it with a royalist salutation: "God Save the Queen!" The international community did not recognize that declaration because, unlike many similar pronouncements made during the process of decolonization by other African countries, it did not speak on behalf of all the people of their country.

Invocations of the American Declaration’s second paragraph in later declarations of independence are conspicuous by their scarcity. Among the few are those of Liberia (1847) and Vietnam (1945). The Liberian declaration of independence recognized "in all men, certain natural and inalienable rights: among these are life, liberty, and the right to acquire, possess, and enjoy property": a significant amendment to the original Declaration’s right to happiness by the former slaves who had settled Liberia under the aegis of the American Colonization Society. Almost a century later, in September 1945, the Vietnamese leader Ho Chi Minh opened his declaration of independence with the "immortal statement" from the 1776 Declaration: "All men are created equal. They are endowed by their Creator with certain inalienable rights, among these are Life, Liberty, and the pursuit of Happiness." However, Ho immediately updated those words: "In a broader sense, this means: All the peoples of the earth are equal from birth, all the peoples have a right to live, to be happy and free." It would be hard to find a more concise summary of the message of the Declaration for the post-colonial predicaments of the late twentieth century.

The global history of the Declaration of Independence is a story of the spread of sovereignty and the creation of states more than it is a narrative of the diffusion and reception of ideas of individual rights. The farflung fortunes of the Declaration remind us that independence and popular sovereignty usually accompanied each other, but also that there was no necessary connection between them: an independent Mexico became an empire under a monarchy between 1821 and 1823, Brazil’s independence was proclaimed by its emperor, Dom Pedro II in 1822, and, as we have seen, Ian Smith’s Rhodesian government threw off parliamentary authority while professing loyalty to the British Crown. How to protect universal human rights in a world of sovereign states, each of which jealously guards itself from interference by outside authorities, remains one of the most pressing dilemmas in contemporary politics around the world.

So long as a people comes to believe their rights have been assaulted in a "long Train of Abuses and Usurpations," they will seek to protect those rights by forming their own state, for which international custom demands a declaration of independence. In February 2008, the majority Albanian population of Kosovo declared their independence of Serbia in a document designed to reassure the world that their cause offered no precedent for any similar separatist or secessionist movements. Fewer than half of the current powers of the earth have so far recognized this Kosovar declaration. The remaining countries, among them Russia, China, Spain, and Greece, have resisted for fear of encouraging the break-up of their own territories. The explosive potential of the American Declaration was hardly evident in 1776 but a global perspective reveals its revolutionary force in the centuries that followed. Thomas Jefferson’s assessment of its potential, made weeks before his death on July 4, 1826, surely still holds true today: "an instrument, pregnant with our own and the fate of the world."

David Armitage is the Lloyd C. Blankfein Professor of History and Director of Graduate Studies in History at Harvard University. He is also an Honorary Professor of History at the University of Sydney. Among his books are The Declaration of Independence: A Global History (2007) and The Age of Revolutions in Global Context, c. 1760–1860 (2010).

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The humanities and war, in jefferson lecture, faust probes the literary draw of conflict.

WASHINGTON, D.C. — As re-enactors don the blue and the gray to commemorate the Civil War’s 150th anniversary, young men and women dressed in fatigues are locked in combat half a world away under the flag of a nation that was reshaped by that 19th century conflict.

And as hundreds of writers have grappled with the meaning of the War Between the States, hundreds more will try to wrest some sense from the contemporary violence in the Middle East, just as authors have tried to explain war since the time of Homer.

But can we fully grasp the reality experienced by the combatants in Iraq or Afghanistan any better than we do the sacrifices made on the plains of Troy? Do the Civil War re-enactors, clad in their painstakingly replicated uniforms, fully embrace the meaning of the conflict that they play out for enthusiastic spectators?

And what is the role of the writer in framing our understanding of war?

Those questions were at the heart of an address by Harvard President Drew Faust , who Monday night (May 2) delivered the National Endowment for the Humanities ’ 2011 Jefferson Lecture in the Humanities.

Our understanding of any war is shaped by the prevailing sociopolitical dynamics of our time. The humanities play a leading role in that process, since evidence gathered by researchers and writers provides the bulwark for the discussion of past conflicts, said Faust, a historian of the Civil War.

“Will we in this historic sesquicentennial — to be observed at a time when Americans are involved in real conflicts in three sites across the globe — forget what a heavy responsibility rests on those who seek to tell the stories of war?” Faust asked the audience of about 1,500 at the Kennedy Center.

In Faust’s view, the humanities and war have been engaged in a centuries-old seduction in which scholars and poets, drawn to the extraordinary human and political dimensions of military conflict, try to wring meaning out of violence carried out on such a scale that words cannot adequately describe it.

“As we have sought through the centuries to define ourselves as human beings and as nations through the prisms of history and literature, no small part of that effort has drawn us to war,” she said. Noting that the first masterwork of Western literature was “The Iliad,” “a tale that exerts a wrenching power more than two millennia after its origin,” she added that “we might even say that the humanities began with war, and from war, and have remained entwined with it ever since.”

The Jefferson Lecture is the most prestigious honor the federal government bestows for distinguished intellectual achievement in the humanities.

“History can sometimes be more controversial than current events. This is particularly the case with the Civil War where its causes remain subject to differing interpretations,” said former Congressman Jim Leach, chairman of the NEH. Faust’s lecture, he said, “provides important insights into our greatest internal conflict. By placing the Civil War and memories of it in the context of the history of war itself, dating back to the ancient Greeks, she sheds perspective on conflicts of all kinds in all circumstances.”

Rep. John Lewis, D-Ga., a leader of the Civil Rights movement who read Walt Whitman’s “Dirge for Two Veterans” before Faust was introduced, said he had attended many Jefferson Lectures, but “this is one of the most moving.”

“I loved how she had the ability and the capacity to say what war is all about. It’s messy. It’s dirty. We shouldn’t romanticize war. We should see it for what it is,” Lewis said. “I think it’s so fitting and appropriate for the times in which we live.”

More than reflecting the trials and consequences of battle, Faust said, the humanities have played a role in shaping the very concept of war. By labeling violence “war,” we frame it as a story with a plot and actors moving toward a promise of victory.

“How is it that the human has become so entangled with the inhumane?  That humanity’s highest creative aspirations of literature and imagination have been all but inseparable from its most terrible invention: the scourge of war?” Faust asked. “Humans are unique in their creation of an institution of war that is designed to organize violence, define its purposes, declare its onset, ratify its conclusion, and establish its rules. War, like literature, is a distinctively human product.”

The extraordinary nature of an event in which human life is at stake accounts for much of the attraction that war holds for writers, Faust observed, and ages of prose and verse extolling the virtues of an honorable battlefield death helped draw generations of young men into the horrors of war.

Even after history’s lens had shifted and the horrors of war were emphasized as directly as its glories, the attraction persisted. Ernest Hemingway once remarked to F. Scott Fitzgerald that “war is the best subject of all” because it gathers narrative material, speeds up the action, “and brings out all sorts of stuff that normally you have to wait a lifetime to get.” Faust likened Hemingway’s description of war to the dramatic structures laid out in Aristotle’s “Poetics.” “The inherent ‘magnitude’ of a war story is, of course, that it is about life and death, about the quintessential moment of truth when the ultimate is at stake,” Faust said.

The narrative promises of a war, Faust said, can also serve as political expedients. She suggested that declaring “war” on terrorism helped U.S. government leaders frame their response to what seemed a ubiquitous threat. “Responding to terrorism with war replaced the specter and fear of mass murder with a hope for the controlled, ordered force of war,” she said. “It offered the United States the sense of intention, the goal-directedness, and lure of efficacy that war promises and terrorism obliterates. …

“We expect wars to come with endings; that is part of their story. The language of war made Americans protagonists in a story they understood rather than the victims or potential victims of forces beyond their comprehension or control.”

Looking simultaneously back on the conflict that has been the focus of much of her career and ahead to the conflicts that await American soldiers in the weeks and months to come, Faust recalled the words of poet Walt Whitman, who warned that “the real war will never get into the books.”

“It would indeed be impossible ever fully to capture war’s contradictions, its paradoxes, its horror, and its exhilaration,” she said. “We have grappled to use the humanity of words to understand the inhumanity of war. As we continue to be lured by war, we must be committed to convey its horrors. We must make it our work to tell a true war story.”

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Cornell Rewind: 'Above all nations is humanity'

By elaine engst and blaine friedlander.

“Cornell Rewind” is a series of columns in the Cornell Chronicle to celebrate the university’s sesquicentennial through December 2015. This column will explore the little-known legends and lore, the mythos and memories that devise Cornell’s history.

Sitting next to Modesto Quiroga at an Ithaca boarding house supper table, a young woman heard his difficulties with the English language. Her own brothers had just returned from the Spanish-American War.

“You are a Spaniard,” she said.

“I, a Spaniard? No,” said Quiroga. “I am an American.”

Quiroga – a Cornell graduate student from Argentina – considered himself a world citizen. “His vision took in the whole world,” wrote Thomas Hunt (an agriculture professor, who left Cornell to become Pennsylvania State University’s dean of agriculture in 1907) in the 1906-07 Cosmopolitan Club annual. “[Quiroga’s] philosophy was not circumscribed by any school. He not only had knowledge of world movements and ideas, but understanding, and with it that sympathy that grows out of acquaintance and understanding.”

The idealistic Quiroga embraced national diversity in the highest sense. “Modesto Quiroga is one of those rare spirits who see things in true perspective without local color or prejudice,” explained Hunt.

International students had come to Cornell from the beginning of the university, and some foreign students – graduate and undergraduate – and some faculty created social organizations for themselves. In 1873 the Brazilian students published “Aurora Brasileira,” a monthly newsletter written in Portuguese, and established Club Brasileiro. In 1888-89 Latin American students from Nicaragua, Puerto Rico, Honduras and Brazil created Alpha Zeta, a short-lived, so-called “foreigner’s fraternity.” In 1894, a Canadian Club appeared, and a Club Latino-Americano flourished for a time. The Chinese Students Association was founded in 1904; a Filipino Cornellians group began in 1924.

Origins of the Cosmopolitan Club

Organized by Quiroga, Cornell’s Cosmopolitan Club, a group intended for all international students, first met on Nov. 10, 1904, in Barnes Hall, with 60 students attending. Quiroga – along with faculty members Vladimir Karapetoff, engineering professor; George Prentice Bristol, professor of Greek; and Liberty Hyde Bailey, the renowned dean of the newly established New York State College of Agriculture – led the meeting. By the next meeting, weeks later, more than 100 people crammed into tight quarters at the law school in Boardman Hall (now the site of the Olin Library.)

The group initially rented rooms at 313 Eddy St. Cornell President Jacob Gould Schurman and former President Andrew Dickson White were frequent visitors and honorary members of the organization. Countries represented in the early years included Argentina, Australia, Brazil, Bulgaria, China, England, Germany, India, Ireland, Japan, Mexico, the Netherlands, the Philippines, Peru, Romania, Russia, Scotland, South African, Turkey and Sweden.

‘They might find the best in one another…’

In 1911, the club moved into its newly built residence at 301 Bryant Ave., with rooms for 30-40 men, a dining room for 100, and an auditorium seating 400-500. The building was dedicated on Nov. 11, 1911, with a speech by White on “The Hague Conference and the Maintenance of Peace.” While the Cosmopolitan Club ceased operations in 1954, the building remains in Collegetown as a private apartment house.

For five decades, the Cosmopolitan Club would meld international students and elevate peaceful thoughts. Christian Bues, a German undergraduate student, concisely explained the existence of Cornell’s Cosmopolitan Club: “It was founded to bring intelligent thinking men of different nations in such contact that they might find the best in one another; that they might learn to love, to live on common bases side by side; it was founded to make men understand the spirit of nations so that in difficult international conflicts they might have a clear judgment and correct reasoning.”

The club – with the motto “Above all nations is humanity” – became a machine of continuous activity. It was an opportunity for students and professors to illuminate others students about the world. It participated in university activities and held informal summer programs, important for international students who couldn’t travel home for the summer. It also actively promoted the organization of chapters in other universities, since one of its objects was “to promote the organization of chapters in other universities in the United States of America and in other countries.” As early as 1907, there were chapters in Michigan, Wisconsin and Illinois, and a national Association of Cosmopolitan Clubs was founded.

National nights

The group met to discuss “various forms of government now flourishing in the world” or free trade and protection. In 1905 Professor Nathaniel Schmidt gave a talk on “Travelling Experiences in Palestine.” When the 1906 San Francisco earthquake occurred, geological sciences Professor Ralph Stockman Tarr addressed the club. Professor Jeremiah Jenks, history and political science, spoke to the group on the hot topics of immigration and the Chinese boycott of American goods. The club held national nights for China, Japan, Argentina, the Netherlands, Brazil, the British and South Africa.

At the club’s first annual banquet, June 1905, the members dined on little neck clams, consommé royal, baked bluefish a la creole, veal croquettes and Cosmopolitan Punch, all the while listening to a program mixed with Edvard Grieg’s “Solvejg’s Song,” more music by the Cosmopolitan Club Orchestra and a lecture, “The Present Political Situation in Sweden and Norway,” by history Professor Ralph Catterall. He explained the ongoing civil war following Norway’s breakaway from Sweden. “The quarrel between Norway and Sweden was quietly discussed in the peaceful atmosphere of tobacco smoke,” wrote Abraham Abbey Freedlander ’05, in the club’s annual report.

Initially, women were not included in the club, probably reflecting the relatively few women students from other countries and cultural sensitivities. Events including women were held as early as 1906, and a Women’s Cosmopolitan Club was founded in 1921. Thirty years after the men’s club formed, the group’s constitution was amended to include female students.

‘A more human place…’

In 1920, Leonard Elmhirst became president of the Cosmopolitan Club. Elmhirst, an English student and Cambridge graduate, who had become a disciple of the Indian philosopher Rabindrinath Tagore, had come to Cornell to study agriculture so that he could go back to India to teach farming.

The club was in serious debt, and Elmhirst approached Dorothy Straight, widow of Willard D. Straight ’01. She was sympathetic and particularly interested in fulfilling the request in Willard Straight’s will to make Cornell “a more human place.”

Along with planning for what would eventually become Willard Straight Hall, Dorothy Straight provided an amount equal to 70 percent of the debt and $5,000 to renovate the house. Eventually she married Elmhirst and moved to England to begin a progressive school, Dartington Hall.

‘Peace and security in the near future and forever …’

At the club’s annual Initiation Banquet on Saturday, Dec. 6, 1941, the group dined on vegetable soup and lamb chops. Student George Sutton provided an address, and then-sophomore Shigeo Kondo ’43 gave the night’s welcoming remarks. The next day, their lives changed.

While America was swept into the throes of World War II, Kondo ascended to the presidency of the Cosmopolitan Club. For the club’s annual senior Farewell Banquet, on May 10, 1942, Kondo served as toastmaster.

Kondo’s family had been classified as “enemy aliens,” and in June 1942, after Kondo’s father had quickly sold off the family’s personal belongings, Kondo and his family boarded a ship, the Gripsholm, and sailed to Japan. Kondo was conscripted into the Japanese Army despite only speaking English, having grown up in New Jersey.

(Kondo returned to the United States in 1952, and he is now a retired physician. He was elected to the Cornell University Council in October 2014 during Homecoming, and he was honored in January 2014 at the Cornell Alumni Leadership Conference in Boston with the William “Bill” Vanneman ’31 Outstanding Class Leader Award for his more than 50 years of service as an officer of the Class of 1943.)

Members of Cornell’s Cosmopolitan Club acknowledged the war, all the while keeping their own international spirits alive. Handwritten on a program from the club’s Initiation Banquet on Dec. 12, 1942, was a benediction that encompassed the sincerity of all of its members: “We who are gathered here tonight from all over the world pray that the Great Spirit who rules the Universe will guide us to the accomplishment of the finest that is in us, to the end that all nations and all peoples will be able to live in peace and security in the near future and forever.”

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Essay on Humanity

Introduction to Humanity

Humanity, a word laden with profound meaning, encapsulates the essence of what it means to be human. It transcends existence, delving into compassion, resilience, and connection that define our species. At its core, humanity embodies the capacity for empathy, the strength to endure adversity, and the innate desire for meaningful relationships. In this exploration, we will uncover the complexities of humanity, aiming to comprehend its role in molding individual lives and global society. By delving into its depths, we find timeless truths illuminating the path toward a more compassionate and connected world.

The Evolution of Humanity

Humanity’s remarkable evolution through time characterizes both physical and cognitive transformations. From the dawn of our existence to the complexities of the modern world, humanity has undergone profound changes that have shaped our understanding of ourselves and our place in the universe.

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• Early Human Origins: Our story begins millions of years ago with the emergence of early hominids such as Australopithecus and Homo habilis. These primitive ancestors roamed the African savannahs, forging the beginnings of human lineage. The development of bipedalism and tool use marked significant milestones, enabling early humans to adapt and thrive in diverse environments. Over time, Homo erectus and Homo sapiens emerged, demonstrating increased cognitive abilities and social complexities.
• Cultural and Technological Advancements: The shift from hunter-gatherer civilizations to settled farming groups was a watershed moment in human history. It facilitated the establishment of permanent settlements, crop cultivation, and animal domestication. The development of writing systems such as cuneiform and hieroglyphics transformed communication and paved the path for preserving knowledge and cultural heritage. Technological innovations, including the wheel, metallurgy, and printing press, catalyzed trade, industry, and intellectual exchange advancements.
• Philosophical and Scientific Enlightenment: The Age of Enlightenment in the 17th and 18th centuries brought about an age of logical thought and intellectual inquiry. Philosophers and scientists challenged traditional beliefs, advocating for reason, liberty, and human rights . The Scientific Revolution established the foundation for contemporary scientific research and technological advancement by revolutionizing our perception of the natural world. Enlightenment ideals, such as individualism, democracy, and secularism, continue to shape contemporary societies and influence global discourse.
• Modern Challenges and Opportunities: The 21st century presents humanity with unprecedented challenges, including climate change, global inequality, and technological disruption. Rapid urbanization, mass migration, and digital connectivity reshape global social dynamics and cultural identities. Amidst these challenges, there are opportunities for collaboration, innovation, and collective action to address pressing international issues and build a more sustainable and inclusive future.

The Universality of Human Emotions

Exploring the universality of emotions unveils the shared aspects of our humanity, emphasizing the common thread that binds us together in joy, sorrow, love, and every nuance of the human emotional spectrum.

Compassion, often described as the ability to understand and alleviate the suffering of others, lies at the very core of what it means to be human. It is a fundamental aspect of our nature that transcends cultural boundaries and connects us profoundly. Delving into the essence of compassion reveals its transformative power in shaping individuals, communities, and societies.

• Defining Compassion: Being able to identify and relate to the suffering and difficulties of others while also having a sincere wish to lessen their suffering is what compassion means. It involves kindness, empathy, and a willingness to take action to support those in need, regardless of differences in background or circumstance.
• Examples of Compassion: Throughout history, acts of compassion have been celebrated and revered, from the selflessness of humanitarian aid workers in times of crisis to the simple gestures of kindness exchanged between strangers. Examples abound daily, from comforting a friend in distress to volunteering at a local charity or advocating for social justice causes.
• Impact of Compassion: Compassion profoundly impacts both the giver and the receiver. It fosters a sense of connection and belonging, strengthening social bonds and promoting collective well-being. Research in psychology and neuroscience has shown that compassion can improve mental and emotional health, reduce stress levels, and enhance happiness and life satisfaction.
• Cultivating Compassion: It takes a lifetime to develop compassion; it starts with self-awareness, sensitivity, and a willingness to show others kindness and understanding. People can learn to be more empathetic and compassionate toward others and themselves by engaging in mindfulness, loving-kindness, and compassionate listening practices.
• Challenges to Compassion: Despite its transformative potential, compassion faces numerous challenges today, including societal divisions, systemic injustices, and a culture that often prioritizes individualism over collective well-being. To overcome these obstacles, we must work together to develop empathy, advance social justice, and build welcoming communities where compassion is valued.
• The Role of Compassion in Leadership: Compassionate leadership embodies empathy, humility, and a commitment to serving others. Leaders who lead with compassion inspire trust, foster collaboration, and create environments where individuals feel valued and empowered to contribute their best.
• Building a Compassionate Society: Creating a more compassionate society requires a concerted effort to address systemic inequalities, promote social justice , and cultivate empathy and understanding across diverse communities. By prioritizing compassion in our interactions and institutions, we can build a world where everyone sees, hears, and values each other.

Resilience: The Backbone of Humanity

Resilience, which denotes the ability to rebound from adversity and thrive amidst challenges, is humanity’s backbone. It is a testament to the strength and adaptability inherent in the human spirit, enabling individuals and communities to overcome obstacles and thrive in uncertainty. Exploring the essence of resilience unveils its transformative power and profound impact on shaping human experiences and trajectories.

• Understanding Resilience: Resilience is not merely about enduring hardships but about harnessing adversity as an opportunity for growth and renewal. It encompasses psychological, emotional, and social dimensions as individuals draw upon internal and external resources to navigate life’s challenges.
• Historical and Contemporary Examples of Resilience: Throughout history, humanity has demonstrated remarkable resilience in the face of wars, natural disasters, and pandemics. Examples abound in every corner of the globe, from the strength of communities rebuilding after devastating earthquakes to the indomitable spirit of individuals overcoming personal setbacks.
• Factors Contributing to Resilience: Resilience develops through strong social networks, constructive coping mechanisms, a sense of meaning and purpose, and supportive relationships. Character attributes like optimism, flexibility, and persistence are also important in building resilience.
• The Power of Adversity: Adversity, while challenging, can catalyze personal growth and transformation. It offers opportunities for introspection, self-discovery, and the cultivation of inner strength, leading to greater resilience in the face of future challenges.
• Building Resilience in Communities: Building resilient communities requires a collective effort to foster social cohesion, promote inclusive policies, and provide access to resources and support services. Investing in education, healthcare, and infrastructure can strengthen community resilience and mitigate the impact of crises and disasters.
• Resilience in the Face of Global Challenges: In an increasingly interconnected world, humanity faces many global challenges, including climate change, economic instability, and political unrest. Cultivating resilience at both individual and collective levels is essential for navigating these complex challenges and building a sustainable future for generations to come.
• The Role of Resilience in Mental Health: To support mental health and well-being, resilience is essential because it helps people deal with stress, trauma, and adversity in productive ways. Strategies such as mindfulness, cognitive-behavioral therapy, and social support can enhance resilience and mitigate the risk of mental health disorders.
• Empowering Future Generations: Empowering future generations with resilience-building skills and resources is essential for equipping them to navigate the uncertainties of the 21st century. Education, mentorship, and opportunities for experiential learning can help young people develop resilience and adaptability in an ever-changing world.

Connection: The Soul of Humanity

Connection, often described as the intricate web of relationships that binds individuals, communities, and societies, serves as the soul of humanity. It is the essence that transcends physical proximity, fostering a deep sense of belonging and interdependence. As we delve into the intricate tapestry of human connections, we unravel their profound impact on shaping our identities, influencing our well-being, and defining the fabric of our shared existence.

• Exploring the Concept of Human Connection: Human connection includes more than just social interaction; it also contains shared experiences, emotional ties, and a sense of identity. From familial ties and friendships to the broader scope of community and global interconnectedness, human connections form the foundation of our social fabric.
• Importance of Connection in Building Relationships and Communities: Meaningful relationships are built on authentic connection, marked by mutual understanding, trust, and empathy. Communities thrive when individuals forge connections, contributing to a sense of solidarity, collective purpose, and shared responsibility.
• Technology and its Impact on Human Connection: The digital era has significantly changed how people engage with each other by providing previously unheard-of chances for cooperation and communication. However, it also poses challenges, such as the risk of superficial connections, social isolation, and the erosion of face-to-face interactions.
• Cultural and Societal Implications of Connection: Cultural norms and societal structures influence the nature and significance of connections within a given community. Understanding the cultural nuances of connection is essential for fostering inclusivity and bridging gaps in a diverse and interconnected world.
• Connection to Nature and the Environment: The connection between humanity and the natural world is integral to our well-being and the planet’s sustainability. Recognizing our interconnectedness with nature encourages environmental stewardship and a sense of responsibility for preserving the Earth for future generations.
• Challenges to Human Connection: Modern life challenges human connection, including the fast pace of urbanization, the prevalence of digital distractions, and societal pressures that may foster isolation. Addressing these challenges requires intentional efforts to prioritize meaningful connections in both personal and communal spheres.
• Healing Power of Connection: Human connection profoundly impacts mental and emotional well-being, providing support during times of hardship. The healing power of connection is evident in therapeutic relationships, support networks, and the sense of belonging that emerges from shared experiences.
• Global Interconnectedness and Interdependence: In a world growing more interconnected daily, acknowledging our interdependence is crucial to solving global issues like pandemics, climate change , and economic inequality. Embracing a sense of global citizenship fosters collaboration and collective action for the betterment of humanity.

Practice Humanity in Everyday Life

Practicing humanity daily involves incorporating kindness, empathy, and compassion into your interactions and actions. Here are some practical ways to practice humanity in your daily routine:

• Random Acts of Kindness: Engage in simple gestures of compassion, like opening doors for others, grinning at strangers, or allowing someone to go ahead of you in line.
• Listen with Empathy: While conversing with others, try to listen intently. Validate their emotions and express a sincere interest in their thoughts, feelings, and experiences.
• Offer Help and Support: Be observant of the needs of those around you and offer assistance when possible. Whether helping a neighbor carry groceries or offering to babysit for a friend in need, small gestures of support can make a big difference.
• Practice Patience: Cultivate patience in your interactions, especially during challenging situations. Take a deep breath, remain calm, and approach conflicts with understanding and empathy.
• Express Gratitude: Spend some time thanking the people and things in your life for what you have. Send a thank-you note, make a phone call to express appreciation, or simply say “thank you” to those who have helped you.
• Be Inclusive: Embrace diversity and inclusivity in your interactions. Recognize the diversity of viewpoints and life experiences, and strive to foster an atmosphere where everyone treats each other with respect and worth.
• Stand Up Against Injustice: Speak against discrimination, oppression, and inequality. Advocate for fairness and justice in your community and support causes that promote human rights and social justice.
• Show Compassion to Yourself: Practice self-compassion and self-care. Treat yourself with kindness, forgiveness, and acceptance, and prioritize your physical, emotional, and mental well-being.
• Educate Yourself: Take the time to learn about different cultures, backgrounds, and experiences. Educate yourself on social issues and challenges marginalized communities face, and strive to be an ally and advocate for positive change.
• Lead by Example: Be a role model for practicing humanity daily. Demonstrate kindness, empathy, and compassion in your interactions, and inspire those around you to do the same.

Challenges to Humanity

Humanity, despite its progress and achievements, faces a myriad of challenges that span across social, environmental, and technological domains. Fostering a sustainable and peaceful future for the world community requires understanding these issues and practical solutions.

• Environmental Crisis: Climate change poses an existential threat, leading to rising temperatures, extreme weather events, and ecosystem disruptions. Deforestation, pollution, and biodiversity loss further exacerbate the environmental crisis, impacting the planet and human well-being.
• Global Health Pandemics: Emerging infectious diseases, as evidenced by events like the COVID-19 pandemic, highlight the vulnerability of global health systems. The spread of diseases is facilitated by increased international travel, urbanization, and interconnectedness, emphasizing the need for robust public health infrastructure.
• Social Inequality: Widening economic disparities, unequal access to education and healthcare, and systemic injustices contribute to social inequality. The persistence of discrimination based on race, gender, and socioeconomic status impedes the advancement of societies that are inclusive and egalitarian.
• Technological Disruption: Artificial intelligence and automation, two rapidly developing technological trends, present ethical dilemmas, privacy issues, and employment displacement concerns. The digital divide exacerbates inequalities, limiting access to technological benefits for specific populations.
• Political Instability and Conflict: Political unrest, armed conflicts, and geopolitical tensions persist in various regions, leading to displacement, human rights abuses, and a breakdown of societal structures. Resolving these conflicts requires diplomatic efforts, international cooperation, and a commitment to addressing root causes.
• Migration and Displacement: Forced migration due to conflicts, environmental disasters, and economic hardships contributes to the global refugee crisis. Managing migration requires compassionate and coordinated efforts to provide humanitarian aid, ensure human rights, and address the root causes of displacement.
• Public Health Challenges: Besides pandemics, public health challenges include the prevalence of non-communicable diseases, mental health issues, and inadequate healthcare infrastructure in many regions. Promoting global health requires addressing these challenges through preventive measures, improved healthcare systems, and international collaboration.
• Ethical Dilemmas in Technology: Ethical considerations surrounding technology, including data privacy, algorithmic bias, and surveillance, present challenges in maintaining individual rights and societal values. Developing ethical frameworks and regulations is essential to guide the responsible use of technology .
• Education Disparities: Disparities in access to quality education persist, hindering individual and societal development. Bridging the education gap requires investments in education infrastructure, teacher training, and equitable distribution of educational resources.
• Threats to Democracy: The rise of authoritarianism, erosion of democratic norms, and challenges to freedom of expression threaten democratic governance. Safeguarding democracy requires active citizen participation, protection of democratic institutions, and efforts to counter disinformation.

Examples of Great Humanitarians

Throughout history, many people have devoted their lives to humanitarian endeavors, significantly enhancing the state of humanity overall, easing suffering, and advancing social justice. Here are some great humanitarians:

• Mother Teresa (1910-1997): In Calcutta, India, Mother Teresa began the Missionaries of Charity, an organization notable for its steadfast commitment to helping the most impoverished of the poor. She dedicated her life to providing care, compassion, and support to the sick, orphaned, and dying, earning her worldwide recognition and the Nobel Peace Prize in 1979.
• Mahatma Gandhi (1869-1948): Mahatma Gandhi , the leader of India’s nonviolent independence movement against British rule, inspired millions with his philosophy of nonviolence, civil disobedience, and social justice. His tireless efforts to promote peace, equality, and human rights left a lasting impact on the world, earning him the title of “Father of the Nation” in India.
• Nelson Mandela (1918-2013): Racial injustice and inequality were the focus of the life of former South African President and anti-apartheid leader Nelson Mandela . Mandela led South Africa through its transition to democracy and became a global symbol of forgiveness, healing, and togetherness despite serving 27 years in prison.
• Martin Luther King Jr. (1929-1968): Civil rights activist and supporter of nonviolent resistance, Martin Luther King Jr played an essential part in the American civil rights movement. His impassioned speeches, peaceful protests, and commitment to equality and justice helped dismantle segregation and inspired change worldwide.
• Oskar Schindler (1908-1974): German manufacturer Oskar Schindler is renowned for his attempts to employ over 1,200 Jews in his companies during the Holocaust to save their lives. Despite personal risk, Schindler used his influence and resources to protect his workers from persecution, earning him the title of “Righteous Among the Nations.”
• Florence Nightingale (1820-1910): Florence Nightingale, the founder of modern nursing, revolutionized healthcare practices and hospital sanitation during the Crimean War. Her tireless efforts to improve medical care, advocate for public health reforms, and elevate the status of nursing professionals laid the groundwork for modern healthcare systems worldwide.
• Albert Schweitzer (1875-1965): Albert Schweitzer, a theologian, philosopher, and medical missionary, dedicated his life to providing healthcare to underserved African communities. His humanitarian work at the Albert Schweitzer Hospital in Gabon exemplifies his commitment to the principles of reverence for life and service to humanity.

The Future of Humanity

The future of humanity holds both promise and uncertainty and our actions today will determine the legacy we leave for generations to come:

• Technological Advancements: Artificial intelligence , biotechnology, and quantum computing are just a few examples of the rapidly evolving technologies that provide previously unheard-of chances for advancement and creativity. Regulation, responsible development, and ethical concerns are necessary to guarantee that technology advances humanity without jeopardizing morals and privacy.
• Environmental Sustainability: The key to a sustainable future is reducing greenhouse gas emissions and protecting the environment through conservation, renewable energy, and sustainable agriculture.
• Global Collaboration: Solving complex global challenges requires enhanced international cooperation and collaboration. Collaborative efforts in science, diplomacy, and resource management are vital for addressing public health, climate change, and economic inequalities.
• Inclusive Economic Development: Striving for economic systems prioritizing inclusivity and equitable resource distribution is essential. Policies that address income inequality provide access to education and healthcare, and promote fair trade can contribute to a more just and sustainable future.
• Cultural Exchange and Understanding: Embracing cultural diversity and fostering global understanding are essential for a harmonious future. Education, dialogue, and cultural exchange can bridge gaps, break down stereotypes, and promote mutual respect among diverse communities.
• Renewable Energy and Sustainable Practices: We must move to renewable energy sources and adopt sustainable lifestyle, transportation, and industrial practices. Investing in green technologies, reducing carbon emissions, and promoting eco-friendly lifestyles contribute to a healthier planet.
• Health and Well-being: Prioritizing public health, mental health awareness, and accessible healthcare are crucial elements of a thriving society. Investments in healthcare infrastructure, disease prevention, and mental health support contribute to the well-being of individuals and communities.
• Education for the Future: Transforming education to meet future needs involves fostering critical thinking, adaptability, and technological literacy. Incorporating interdisciplinary approaches, promoting lifelong learning, and adapting curricula to emerging trends prepare individuals for a rapidly changing world.
• Ethical Artificial Intelligence and Robotics: Ensuring ethical standards in artificial intelligence and robotics is crucial as technology advances. Establishing guidelines for responsible AI development, addressing biases, and considering the ethical implications of automation is essential for a humane future.
• Space Exploration and Beyond: Space exploration offers humanity new frontiers, from scientific discoveries to potential colonization of other planets. Balancing the benefits of space exploration with ethical considerations and environmental stewardship is vital as we venture into the cosmos.

Humanity is an intricate mosaic of diverse experiences, resilience, and interconnectedness. From the evolution of societies to the profound universality of human emotions, we navigate a shared journey fraught with challenges and adorned with triumphs. Our capacity for compassion and empathy, the backbone of our existence, fuels progress and fosters connections. As we grapple with the complexities of our era, the significance of exploring and celebrating our collective humanity remains paramount. We forge toward a more compassionate, understanding, and united world in our shared endeavors and stories, embracing the timeless essence that binds us all.

Here are some light-hearted jokes and humorous observations related to humanity:

• “Isn’t it ironic how we expect our Wi-Fi connections to be strong, but we struggle to connect with our neighbors?”
• “I called customer service to complain about a product, and they were so nice and understanding that I forgot why I was upset in the first place!”
• “My friend told me about their bad day, and I empathized so much that I started feeling bad for myself, too. Now that’s true friendship!”
• “Traffic jams are humanity’s way of teaching us patience… or testing our ability to resist the urge to honk endlessly!”
• “Ever notice how someone holding the door open for you turns into an awkward dance of ‘No, you go first’? It’s like a polite standoff!”
• “I tried performing a random act of kindness, but it ended up so random that even I couldn’t explain it!”
• “They say laughter is the universal language of humanity. So if you don’t understand my jokes, it’s not my fault; blame humanity!”
• “Trying to find your way through life is like using a GPS without a signal. Sometimes, you take the scenic route, but at least there are interesting sights along the way!”
• “I told someone I’m only human, and they said, ‘That explains a lot!’ I’m not sure if it was a compliment or a roast!”

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By Brad Plumer

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WASHINGTON — Humans are transforming Earth’s natural landscapes so dramatically that as many as one million plant and animal species are now at risk of extinction, posing a dire threat to ecosystems that people all over the world depend on for their survival, a sweeping new United Nations assessment has concluded.

The 1,500-page report, compiled by hundreds of international experts and based on thousands of scientific studies, is the most exhaustive look yet at the decline in biodiversity across the globe and the dangers that creates for human civilization. A summary of its findings , which was approved by representatives from the United States and 131 other countries, was released Monday in Paris. The full report is set to be published this year.

Its conclusions are stark. In most major land habitats, from the savannas of Africa to the rain forests of South America, the average abundance of native plant and animal life has fallen by 20 percent or more, mainly over the past century. With the human population passing 7 billion, activities like farming, logging, poaching, fishing and mining are altering the natural world at a rate “unprecedented in human history.”

At the same time, a new threat has emerged: Global warming has become a major driver of wildlife decline , the assessment found, by shifting or shrinking the local climates that many mammals, birds , insects, fish and plants evolved to survive in. When combined with the other ways humans are damaging the environment, climate change is now pushing a growing number of species, such as the Bengal tiger , closer to extinction.

As a result, biodiversity loss is projected to accelerate through 2050, particularly in the tropics, unless countries drastically step up their conservation efforts.

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Essay on Humanity

500 words essay on humanity.

When we say humanity, we can look at it from a lot of different perspectives. One of the most common ways of understanding is that it is a value of kindness and compassion towards other beings. If you look back at history, you will find many acts of cruelty by humans but at the same time, there are also numerous acts of humanity. An essay on humanity will take us through its meaning and importance.

Importance of Humanity

As humans are progressing as a human race into the future, the true essence of humanity is being corrupted slowly. It is essential to remember that the acts of humanity must not have any kind of personal gain behind them like fame, money or power.

The world we live in today is divided by borders but the reach we can have is limitless. We are lucky enough to have the freedom to travel anywhere and experience anything we wish for. A lot of nations fight constantly to acquire land which results in the loss of many innocent lives.

Similarly, other humanitarian crisis like the ones in Yemen, Syria, Myanmar and more costs the lives of more than millions of people. The situation is not resolving anytime soon, thus we need humanity for this.

Most importantly, humanity does not just limit to humans but also caring for the environment and every living being. We must all come together to show true humanity and help out other humans, animals and our environment to heal and prosper.

Get the huge list of more than 500 Essay Topics and Ideas

The Great Humanitarians

There are many great humanitarians who live among us and also in history. To name a few, we had Mother Teresa , Mahatma Gandhi, Nelson Mandela, Princess Diana and more. These are just a few of the names which almost everyone knows.

Mother Teresa was a woman who devoted her entire life to serving the poor and needy from a nation. Rabindranath Tagore was an Indian poet who truly believed in humanity and considered it his true religion.

Similarly, Nelson Mandela was a great humanitarian who worked all his life for those in needs. He never discriminated against any person on the basis of colour, sex, creed or anything.

Further, Mahatma Gandhi serves as a great example of devoting his life to free his country and serve his fellow countrymen. He died serving the country and working for the betterment of his nation. Thus, we must all take inspiration from such great people.

The acts and ways of these great humanitarians serve as a great example for us now to do better in our life. We must all indulge in acts of giving back and coming to help those in need. All in all, humanity arises from selfless acts of compassion.

Conclusion of the Essay on Humanity

As technology and capitalism are evolving at a faster rate in this era, we must all spread humanity wherever possible. When we start practising humanity, we can tackle many big problems like global warming, pollution , extinction of animals and more.

FAQ of Essay on Humanity

Question 1: What is the importance of humanity?

Answer 1: Humanity refers to caring for and helping others whenever and wherever possible. It means helping others at times when they need that help the most. It is important as it helps us forget our selfish interests at times when others need our help.

Question 2: How do we show humanity?

Answer 2: All of us are capable of showing humanity. It can be through acknowledging that human beings are equal, regardless of gender, sex, skin colour or anything. We must all model genuine empathy and show gratitude to each other and express respect and humility.

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• Essay On Humanity

Essay on Humanity

Humanity definition.

Humanity is a cumulative term used for all human beings, showing sympathy, empathy, love and treating others with respect. The term humanity is used to describe the act of kindness and compassion towards others. It is one of the unique things that differentiates us from animals. It is a value that binds all of us. A human being requires a gentle heart to show empathy with others.

We as human beings are creative, and with our will and hard work, we can achieve anything in our life. When we reach something in our life, it is considered a milestone of the human race. The value of humanity should be included in academics in schools for a better future.

Humanity can be defined as unconditional love for all human beings irrespective of gender, caste, religion, etc., and it also includes love for plants and animals. The most significant humanitarian dedicates their life serving the poor and needy, which individuals can provide in their lifetime. Serving the impoverished means you are thinking about others more than yourself. If you are capable enough, you must help the poor and needy. It is a sign of good humanitarianism.

Importance of Humanity

As humans, our race is progressing into the future, due to which the true essence of humanity is being corrupted. We should remember that the acts of society should not be involved with our gain, like money, power or fame. Our world, where we inhabit, is divided by borders, but we are fortunate to have the freedom to travel anywhere in this world. A few countries or nations are in the constant process of acquiring land, which results in the loss of many innocent human lives.

Countries like Syria, Yemen, Myanmar and many more have lost many innocent lives. These countries face a crisis, and the situation is still not resolved. In these countries, there is no humanity, but we need it to tackle the ongoing problems. We all should come forward to show true humanity by helping the poor and needy and also for birds, animals, etc. Society will heal and make our environment prosperous.

The Great Humanitarians

While going through our history, we get to know about many humanitarians who used to live among us. These names are well-known personalities that almost everyone knows. A few examples are Nelson Mandala, Mahatma Gandhi, Mother Teresa, etc.

Mahatma Gandhi, popularly known as the Father of the Nation, is a great example who devoted his entire life to free his country from the British rulers. He lost his life serving the nation and working to better the nation. Thus, he is a great inspiration for all humans.

Another inspiration is Nelson Mandela, a great humanitarian who served the poor and needy of the nation. The great poet Rabindranath Tagore truly believed in humanity.

These famous humanitarians’ acts and ways are great examples for today’s generation to help the poor and needy. As good human beings, we should indulge in acts of kindness and giving back. Humanity is all about selfless acts of compassion.

Conclusion of the Essay on Humanity

The happiest man on this planet is one who serves humanity. Real happiness is the inner satisfaction you can get from society; no matter how rich you are, you can’t buy inner happiness.

All religions teach us about humanity, love, and peace in this world. You don’t need to be a rich person to showcase your humanity. Anyone can show their humanity by helping and sharing things with the poor. It can be anything like money, food, clothes, shelter, etc.

But humans have always indulged in acts that defy humanity, but as a generation, we have to rise and strive to live in a world where everybody is living a fair life. And we can attain it through acts of humanity.

An essay on humanity will be of great help while writing an essay. The correct method of writing an essay will help them to crack their exam with flying colours. Students can also visit our BYJU’S website to get more CBSE Essays , question papers, sample papers, etc.

Frequently asked Questions on Humanity Essay

What is the meaning of humanity.

Humanity refers to all the basic qualities that are expected to be exhibited by humans.

Why is humanity important in one’s life?

As a human being, helping and lending support to fellow human beings is an important aspect.

Name some humanitarians who changed the world.

Mother Teresa, Nelson Mandela and Mahatma Gandhi are some humanitarians who changed the world with their actions and are still remembered today.

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Humanity Essay | Essay on Humanity for Students and Children in English

February 13, 2024 by Prasanna

Humanity Essay: The definition of humanity would be as quality of being human; the precise nature of man, through which he is differentiated from other beings. But being human does not necessarily mean that an individual possesses humanity. If you want to know the quality of humanity in a person take notice of how they do for people who give nothing back in return to the favour they have offered.

You can also find more  Essay Writing articles on events, persons, sports, technology and many more. Like, see many more facts and matters about humanity essay in this link, What is humanity essay.

Long and Short Essays on Humanity for Students and Kids in English

We provide children and students with essay samples on a long essay of 500 words and a short essay of 150 words on the topic “Humanity” for reference.

Long Essay on Humanity 500 Words in English

Long Essay on Humanity is usually given to classes 7, 8, 9, and 10.

When we talk about humanity, there can be various perspectives to look at it. The most common way to understand humanity is through this simple definition – the value of kindness and compassion towards other beings. When we scroll through the pages of history, we come across lots of acts of cruelty being performed by humans, but at the same time, there are many acts of humanity that have been done by few great people.

The thoughts of such great humanitarian have reached the hearts of many people across this planet. To name a few people, such as them are Mother Teresa, Mahatma Gandhi, and Nelson Mandela. These are just a few names with which most of us are familiar with. By taking Mother Teresa, as an example of a humanitarian, we see that she had dedicated her entire life to serving the poor and needy from a nation who she barely had any relation. She saw the people she served for, as humans, a part of her fraternity.

The great Indian poet, Rabindranath Tagore, expressed his strong beliefs on humanity and religion in his Nobel prize-winning piece, Gitanjali. He believed that to have contact with the divine one has to worship humanity. To serve the needy was equivalent to serving the divine power. Humanity was his soul religion. Their ways of life have taught us and will be teaching the future generation what it means to be a human—the act of giving back and coming to aid the ones in need. Humanity comes from the most selfless act, and the compassion one has.

But as we are progressing as a human race into the future, the very meaning of humanity is slowly being corrupted. An act of humanity should not and can never be performed with thoughts or expectations of any personal gain of any form; may it be fame, money or power.

Now we live in a world that, although it has been divided by borders, it is limitless. People have the freedom to travel anywhere, see and experience, anything and every feeling that ever existed, but we still are not satisfied. Nations fight now and then to attain pieces of land in the name of religion or patriotism, while millions of innocent lives are lost, or their homes are destroyed who are caught in the middle of this meaningless quarrels. The amount of divisiveness caused by human-made factors such as religion, race, nationalism, the socio-economic class is causing humanity to disintegrate slowly.

Humanitarian crisis such as the ones in Yemen, Myanmar and Syria has cost the lives of million people. Yet the situation is still far from being resolved. All it needs to save them is for people all across the globe to come ahead and help them. Humanity is just not limited to humans. It’s also caring for the environment, the nature and every living being in this universe. But most humans are regressing to the point that they don’t even care about their surroundings.

In this era of technology and capitalism, we are in desperate need to spread humanity. The global warming, pollution, extinction of species every day could be controlled if we and the future generation understand the meaning of humanity rather than just subduing ourselves to the rat race.

Short Essay on Humanity 150 Words in English

Short Essay on Humanity is usually given to classes 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, and 6.

Humanity is an integral part of life which tells that to help other living beings, try to understand others and realize their problems with our perspective and try to help them. For expressing humanity, you don’t need to be a well-off person; everyone can show humanity by helping someone or sharing with them, part of our ration. Every religion in this world tells us about humanity, peace and love.

But humans have always indulged in acts that defy humanity, but we, as a generation, have to rise and strive to live in a world where everybody is living a fair life. And we can attain by acts of humanity. In last I would only say to any religion you belong to be a human first be a human lover strive for humanity as every religion teach us humanity and share your life with others as life is all about living for others and serving humanity that is why “no religion is higher than Humanity.”

10 Lines on Humanity in English

• Humanity is a collective term for all human beings.
• Humanity is also used to describe the value of kindness and compassion towards other beings.
• Humanity is one of the characteristics that differentiate us from other animals.
• Humanity is also a value that binds us together.
• When humans achieve something of importance, it is generally referred to as an achievement for humanity or the human race.
• Humanitarian is a person who wants to promote humanity and human welfare.
• Examples of a few famous Humanitarians are- Mother Teresa, Swami Vivekananda, Nelson Mandela.
• The world at present is facing several humanitarian crises.
• Yemen is the largest humanitarian crisis in the world, with more than 24 million people (some 80% of the population) in need of humanitarian assistance.
• The divided world right now needs the religion of humanity to guide them.

FAQ’s on Humanity Essay

Question 1. What defines humanity?

Answer:  The definition of humanity is the entire human race or the characteristics that belong uniquely to human beings, such as kindness, mercy and sympathy.

Question 2. What are the qualities of humanity?

Answer: Qualities that form the foundation of all other human qualities are honesty, integrity, wholeheartedness, courage and self-awareness. These factors define who we are as human beings.

Question 3. How do we show humanity?

Answer:  Some says to show humanity is to model genuine empathy, to show gratitude, and to express respect and humility.

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Channel characteristics of hybrid power line communication and visible light communication based on distinct optical beam configurations for 6g iot network.

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Ding, J.; I, C.-L.; Wang, J.; Song, J. Channel Characteristics of Hybrid Power Line Communication and Visible Light Communication Based on Distinct Optical Beam Configurations for 6G IoT Network. Appl. Sci. 2024 , 14 , 7481. https://doi.org/10.3390/app14177481

Ding J, I C-L, Wang J, Song J. Channel Characteristics of Hybrid Power Line Communication and Visible Light Communication Based on Distinct Optical Beam Configurations for 6G IoT Network. Applied Sciences . 2024; 14(17):7481. https://doi.org/10.3390/app14177481

Ding, Jupeng, Chih-Lin I, Jintao Wang, and Jian Song. 2024. "Channel Characteristics of Hybrid Power Line Communication and Visible Light Communication Based on Distinct Optical Beam Configurations for 6G IoT Network" Applied Sciences 14, no. 17: 7481. https://doi.org/10.3390/app14177481

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