By end-2003, poliomyelitis had been eliminated from all but 6 countries in the world as a result of the Global Polio Eradication Initiative, the largest international public health effort to date. Nearly 5 million children are walking who would otherwise have been paralyzed by polio and 1.25 million childhood deaths have been averted by distributing Vitamin A during the polio immunization campaigns. Once polio has been eradicated, the world will reap substantial financial, as well as humanitarian, dividends due to foregone polio treatment and rehabilitation costs. Depending on national decisions on the future use of polio vaccines, these savings could exceed US$ 1 billion per year. The Global Polio Eradication Initiative Strategic Plan 2004-2008 outlines activities required to interrupt poliovirus transmission (2004-2005), achieve global certification and mainstream the Global Polio Eradication Initiative (2006-2008), and prepares for the Global OPV Cessation Phase (2009 & beyond). This Plan reflects the major tactical revisions that were introduced in 2003 to interrupt the final chains of polio transmission, the revised timeframe for certification of eradication, and the decision to stop immunization with oral polio vaccine (OPV) globally as soon as possible after global certification Of the 4 objectives outlined in the Plan, the over-riding objective is the rapid interruption of polio transmission in the 6 remaining endemic countries. Eliminating these reservoirs during 2004-2005 is now an urgent international public health issue because the cessation of mass immunization campaigns in most polio-free countries has left the world increasingly vulnerable to importations of this disease. Objective 1 of the Plan details the supplementary immunization, routine immunization, and surveillance activities needed to finish the job of eradication and protect the investment made in polio-free areas. Particular attention is given to 'intensifying' supplementary immunization activities to improve quality and reach every child. The Plan highlights the 3 countries linked to over 95% of cases in 2003: Nigeria, India and Pakistan. It recognizes, however, that with the reduction in polio transmission in India and Pakistan in late 2003, the risks to global eradication are increasingly concentrated in Nigeria. The postponement of eradication activities in key areas of that country in 2003 led to a marked increase in the number of polio-paralyzed Nigerian children and the re-infection of at least 5 neighbouring countries. The narrow window of opportunity that now exists to eradicate polio can only be exploited if the leaders of the endemic areas ensure that every child is immunized during intensified supplementary immunization activities in 2004 (SIAs). Objectives 2 and 3 of the Plan outline activities for certifying the world polio-free and preparing for the Global OPV Cessation Phase that will follow. With the certification process and criteria having been validated in three WHO regions, Objective 2 focuses on improving surveillance quality (especially in the 19 countries yet to achieve certification-standard), reversing declines in surveillance sensitivity in the regions that have been certified, and completing Phase II of the Global Action Plan for the Laboratory Containment of Wild Polioviruses. Objective 3 outlines the implications of the 2003 decision to stop OPV after global certification. Although trivalent OPV will continue to be the vaccine of choice for routine immunization through 2008, the plan outlines the work required to develop the specific products needed to facilitate the safe cessation of OPV. These products include: a 3rd edition of the Global Action Plan for the Laboratory Containment of Wild Polioviruses (specifying the longterm requirements for wild poliovirus, vaccine-derived polioviruses and Sabin-strains), monovalent OPV (mOPV) stockpiles, IPV produced from Sabin strains (S-IPV), and appropriate IPV-containing combination vaccines. The plan also discusses the development of mechanisms to ensure that countries which desire or need these products have access to them by 2008. The fourth and final objective of the plan addresses the work required to integrate and/or transition the substantial human resources, physical infrastructure and institutional arrangements that were established for polio eradication into other disease control, surveillance and response programmes. This objective also details the programme of work to 'mainstream' those polio eradication activities that must be continued indefinitely (i.e. surveillance, stockpiles, containment) into existing national, WHO and UNICEF structures and mechanisms for managing other serious pathogens which are subject to high biosafety levels. The greatest risks to achieving the annual milestones of this plan are ongoing wild poliovirus transmission in any of the 6 remaining endemic countries and an increased frequency of polio outbreaks due to circulating vaccine derived polioviruses (cVDPVs). Implementing the full activities outlined in the Plan requires continued technical support from a strong polio eradication partnership, financing for the shortfall of US$ 150 million to interrupt poliovirus transmission, and identification of funding for the US$ 380 million budget to achieve global certification and mainstream the Global Polio Eradication Initiative. The Global Polio Eradication Initiative Estimated External Financial Resource Requirements 2004–2008 outlines the resources required to implement the Global Polio Eradication Initiative Strategic Plan 2004–20083 and the financial implications of the major risks to the annual milestones of the Plan. ; Abbreviations and acronyms -- -- 1. Executive summary -- -- 2. Background -- -- 3. Goal -- -- 4. Objectives and milestones -- 4.1. Objective 1: Interrupt poliovirus transmission -- 4.2. Objective 2: Achieve certification of global polio eradication -- 4.3. Objective 3: Develop products for the Global OPV Cessation Phase -- 4.4. Objective 4: Mainstream the Global Polio Eradication Initiative -- -- 5. Cross-cutting challenges -- 5.1. Political commitment and engagement -- 5.2. External financing -- 5.3. High-quality polio vaccines -- 5.4. Conflict-affected countries and areas -- 5.5. Public information and social mobilization -- 5.6. Biocontainment -- -- 6. Roles of partner agencies -- 6.1. Governments -- 6.2. Spearheading partners -- 6.3. Donor and technical partners -- 6.4. International humanitarian organizations and NGOs -- 6.5. Vaccine manufacturers -- 7. 2009 & beyond--the Global OPV Cessation Phase ; World Health Organization . [et al.]. ; In the 15 years since the decision to eradicate polio, an extensive network of national governments, international agencies, private corporations, foundations, bilateral donors, humanitarian organizations, nongovernmental organizations (NGOs) and development banks have formed a "global polio partnership", spearheaded by the World Health Organization (WHO), Rotary International, the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) and the United Nations Children's Fund (UNICEF). ; Includes bibliographical references. ; CDC publication
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The study of International Relations is founded on a series of assumptions that originate in the monotheistic traditions of the West. For Siba Grovogui, this realization provoked him to question not only IR but to broaden his enquiries into a multidisciplinary endeavor that encompasses law and anthropology, journalism and linguistics, and is informed by stories and lessons from Guinea. In this Talk, he discusses the importance of human encounters and the problem with the Hegelian logic which distorts our understanding of our own intellectual development and the trajectory of the discipline of IR.
Print version of this Talk (pdf)
What is, according to you, the biggest challenge / principal debate in current IR? What is your position or answer to this challenge / in this debate?
I don't want to be evasive, but I actually don't think that International Relations as a field has an object today. And that is the problem with International Relations since Martin Wight and Stanley Hoffmann and all of those people debated what International Relations was, whether it was an American discipline, etc. I believe you can look at International Relations in multiple ways: if you think of à la Hoffmann, as a tool of dominant power, International Relations is to this empire what anthropology was to the last. This not only has to do with the predicates upon which it was founded initially but with its aspirations, for International Relations shares with Anthropology the ambition to know Man—and I am using here a very antiquated language, but that is what it was then—to know Man in certain capacities. In the last empire, anthropology focused on the cultural dimension and, correspondingly separated culture from civilization in a manner that placed other regions of the world in subsidiarity vis-à-vis Europe and European empires. In the reigning empire, IR has focused on the management and administration of an empire that never spoke its name, reason, or subject.
Now you can believe all the stories about liberalism and all of that stuff, but although it was predicated upon different assumptions, the ambition is still the same: it is actually to know Man, the way in which society is organized, to know how the entities function, etc. If you look at it that way, then International Relations cannot be the extension of any country's foreign policy, however significant. This is not to say that the foreign policies of the big countries do not matter: it would be foolish not to study them and take them into account, because they have greater impact than smaller countries obviously. But International Relations is not—or should not be—the extension of any country's foreign policy, nor should it be seen as the agglomeration of a certain restricted number of foreign policies. International Relations suggests, again, interest in the configurations of material, moral, and symbolic spaces as well as dynamics resulting from the relations of moral and social entities presumed to be of equal moral standings and capacities.
If one sees it that way then we must reimagine what International Relations should be. Foreign policy would be an important dimension of it, but the field of foreign policy must be understood primarily in terms of its explanations and justifications—regardless of whether these are bundled up as realism, liberalism, or other. Today, these fields provide different ways of explaining to the West, for itself, as a rational decision, or a justification to the rest, that what it has done over the past five centuries, from conquest to colonization and slavery and colonialism, is 'natural' and that any political entities similarly situated would have done it in that same manner. It follows therefore that this is how things should be. Those justifications, explanations, and rationalizations of foreign policy decisions and events are important to understand as windows into the manners in which certain regions and political entities have construed value, interest, and ethics. But they still belong, in some significant way, to a different domain than what is implied by the concept of IR.
I am therefore curious about the so-called debates about the nature of politics and the proper applicable science or approach to historical foreign policy realms and domains, particularly those of the West: I don't consider those debates to be 'big debates' in International Relations, because they are really about how the West sees itself and justifies itself and how it wants to be seen, and thus as rational. For the West (as assumed by so-called Western scholars), these debates extend the tradition of exculpating the West and seeing the West as the regenerative, redemptive, and progressive force in the world. All of that language is about that. So when you say to me, what are the debates, I don't know what they are, so far, really, in International Relations. The constitution of the 'international', the contours and effects of the imaginaries of its constituents, and the actualized and attainable material and symbolic spaces within it to realize justice, peace, and a sustainable order have thus far eluded the authoritative disciplinary traditions.
Consider the question of China today, as it is posed in the West. The China question, too, emerges from a particular foreign policy rationale, which may be important and particular ways to some people or constituencies in the West but not in the same way to others, for instance in Africa. The narrowness of the framing of the China question is why in the West many are baffled about how Africa has been receiving China, and China's entry into Latin America, etc. In relation to aid, for instance, if you are an African of a certain age, or you know some history, you will know that China formulated its foreign aid policy in 1964 and that nothing has changed. And there are other elements, such as foreign intervention and responsibility to self and others where China has had a distinct trajectory in Africa.
In some regard, China may even be closer in outlook to postcolonial African states than the former colonial powers. For instance, neither China nor African states consider the responsibility to protect, to be essentially Western. In this regard, it is worth bearing in mind for instance that Tanzania intervened in Uganda to depose Idi Amin in 1979; Vietnam ended the Khmer Rouge tyranny in Cambodia in 1979; India intervened in Bangladesh in 1971—it wasn't the West. So those kinds of understandings of responsibility, in the way they are framed today in the post-Cold War period, superimposes ideas of responsibility that were already there and were formulated in Bandung in 1955: differences between intervention and interference, the latter of which today comes coded as regime change, were actually hardly debated. So our imaginaries of the world and how it works, of responsibility, of ethics, etc., have always had to compete with those that were formulated since the seventeenth century in Europe, as "international ethics", "international law", "international theory". And in fact that long history full of sliding concepts and similar meanings may be one of the problems for understanding how the world came into being as we know it today. And this is why actually my classes here always begin with a semester-long discussion of hermeneutics, of historiography, and of ethnography in IR and how they have been incorporated.
How did you arrive at where you currently are in IR?
I came to where I am now essentially because of a sense of frustration, that we have a discipline that calls itself "international" and yet seemed to be speaking either univocally or unidirectionally: univocally in imagining the world and unidirectionally in the way it addresses the rest of the world, and a lot of problems result from that.
I had trained as a lawyer in Guinea, and when I came to the US I imagined that International Relations would be taught at law school, which is the case in France, most of the time, and also in some places in Germany in the past, because it is considered a normative science there. But when I came here I was shocked to discover that it was going to be in a field called Political Science, but I went along with it anyway. In the end I did a double major: in law, at the law school in Madison, Wisconsin, and in political science. When I came to America and went the University of Wisconsin, I first took a class called "Nuclear Weapons and World Politics" or something of the sort, it was more theology and less science. It was basically articulated around chosen people and non-chosen people, those who deserve to have weapons and those who don't. There was no rationale, no discussion of which countries respected the Non-Proliferation Treaty, no reasoning in terms of which countries had been wiser than others in using weapons of mass destruction, etc.: there was nothing to it except the underlying, intuitive belief that if something has to be done, we do it and other people don't. I'm being crass here, but let's face it: this was a course I took in the 1980s and it is still the same today! So I began to feel that this is really more theology and less science. Yes, it was all neatly wrapped in rationalism, in game theory, all of these things. So I began to ask myself deeper questions, outside of the ones they were asking, so my Nuclear Weapons and World Politics class was really what bothered me, or you could say it was some kind of trigger.
This way of seeing IR is related to the fact that I don't share the implicit monotheist underpinnings of the discipline. That translates into my perhaps unorthodox teaching style, unorthodox within American academia anyway. Teaching all too often tends to be less about understanding the world and more about proselytizing. In order to try to explore this understanding I like to bring my students to consider the world that has existed, to imagine that sovereignty and politics can be structured differently, especially outside of monotheism with its likening of the sovereign to god, the hierarchy modeled on the church, Saint Peter, Jesus, God, uniformity and the power of life (to kill or let live), and to understand that there have always been places where the sovereign was not in fact that revered. Think of India, for example, where people have multiple gods, and some are mischievous, some are promiscuous, some are happy and some are mean, so there are lots of conceptions and some of these don't translate well into different cultural contexts. The same, incidentally, goes for the Greek gods. Of course, we had to make the Greeks Christians first, before we drew our lineage to them. You see what I mean? Christianity left a very deep impact on Western traditions. Whether you think of political parties and a parallel to the Catholic orders: if you are a Jesuit, the Jesuits are always right; if you are a Franciscan, the Franciscans are always right. The Franciscans for instance think they have the monopoly on Christian social teaching. In a similar way, it doesn't matter what your political party does, you follow whatever your party says. The same thing happens when you study: are you a realist, are you liberalist, etc. You are replicating the Jesuits, the Franciscans, those monks and their orders. But we are all caught within that logic, of tying ourselves into one school of thought and going along with one "truth" over another, instead of permitting multiple takes on reality..
For me, as a non-monotheist myself, everything revolves around this question of truth: whether truth is given or has to be found and how we find it. Truth has to be found, discovered, revealed—we have to continuously search. The significant point is that we never find it absolutely. Truth is always provisional, circumstantial, and pertinent to a context or situation. We all want truth and it is always evading us, but we must look for it. But I don't think that truth is given. It is in the Bible, the Quran, and the Torah. And I am comfortable with that but I am not in the realm of theology. I dwell on human truths and humans are imperfect and not omniscient, at least not so individually.
If I had the truth, then I might be one of those dictators governing in Africa today. I was raised a Catholic by the way, I almost went to the seminary. If you just think through the story of the Revelation in profane terms, you come to the realization that ours are multiple revelations. Again in theology, one truth is given at a time—the Temple Mount, the Tablets, and all that stuff—but that is not in our province. I leave that to a different province and that is unattainable to me. The kind of revelation I want is the one that goes through observing, through looking, through deliberating, through inquiry—that I am comfortable with. There can be a revelation in terms of meeting the unexpected, for example: when I went to the New World, to Latin America for the first time, I said, 'wow, this is interesting'. That was through my own senses, but it had a lot to do with the way I prepared myself in order to receive the world and to interact with the world. That kind of revelation I believe in. The other one is beyond me and I'm not interested in that. When I want to be very blasphemous, even though I was raised a Catholic, I tell my students: the problem with the Temple Mount is that God did not have a Twitter account, so the rest of us didn't hear it—we were not informed. I don't have the truth, and I don't really don't want to have it.
What would a student need to become a specialist in IR or understand the world in a global way?
I am not sure I want to make a canonical recommendation, if that's what you are asking me for. Let me tell you this: I have trained about eleven PhD students, and none of them has ever done what I do. I am not interested in having clones, I don't want to recreate theology, and in fact I feel this question to betray a very Western disposition, by implying the need to create canons and theology. I don't want that. What I want is to understand the world, and understanding can be done in multiple ways: people do it through music, through art, through multiple things. The problem for me, however, is actually the elements, assumptions, predicates of studies and languages that we use in IR, the question to whom they make sense—I am talking about the types of ethnographies, the ways in which we talk about diplomatic history, and all of those things. The graduate courses that I was talking about have multiple dimensions, but there are times in my seminars here where I just take a look at events like what happened in the New World from 1492 to 1600. This allows me to talk about human encounters. The ones we have recorded, of people who are mutually unintelligible, are the ones that took place on this continent, the so-called New World. And what this does is that it allows me to talk about encounters, to talk about all of the possibilities—you know the ones most people talk about in cultural studies like creolization, hybridization, and all those things—and all of the others things that happened also which are not so helpful, such as violence, usurpation, and so forth.
What that allows me to do is to cut through all this nonsense—yes I am going to call it nonsense—that projects the image that what we do today goes back to Thucydides and has been handed down to us through history to today. There are many strands of thought like that. If you think about thought, and Western thought in general, all of those historically rooted and contingent strands of thought have something to do with how we construct social scientific fields of analysis today—realism, liberalism, etc.—so I'm not dispensing with that. What I'm saying is that history itself has very little to do with those strands of thought, and that people who came here—obviously you had scientists who came to the New World—but the policies on the ground had nothing to do with Thucydides, nothing to do with Machiavelli, etc. Their practices actually had more to do with the violence that propelled those Europeans from their own countries in seeking refuge, and how that violence shaped them, the kind of attachments they had. But it also had to do with the kind of cultural disposition here, and the manner in which people were able to cope, or not. Because that's where we are today in the post-Cold War era, the age of globalization, we must provide analyses that are germane to how the constituents (or constitutive elements) of the historically constituted 'international' are coping with our collective inheritance. For me, this approach is actually much more instructive. This has nothing to do with the Melian Dialogue and the like.
All of the stuff projected today as canonical is interesting to me but only in limited ways. I actually read the classics and have had my students read them, but try to get my students to read them as a resource for understanding where we are today and how we were led there, rather than as a resource for justifying or legitimating the manner in which European conducted their 'foreign' policies or their actions in the New World. No. I know enough to know that no action in the New World or elsewhere was pre-ordained, unavoidable, or inevitable. The resulting political entities in the West must assume the manners in which they acted. It is history, literally. And of course we know through Voltaire, we know through Montaigne, we know even through Roger Bacon, that even in those times people realized that in fact the world had not been made and hence had not been before as it would become later; that other ways were (and still) are possible; and that the pathologies of the violence of religious and civil wars in Europe conditioned some the behaviours displayed in the New World and Africa during conquest and enslavement.
For the same reason I recommend students to read Kant: I tell them to read Kant as a resource for understanding how we might think about the world today, but I am compelled to say often to my students that before Kant, hospitality, and such cultural intermediaries as theDragomans in the Ottoman Empire, the Wangara in West Africa, the Chinese Diaspora in East and Southeast Asia, and so forth, enabled commerce across continents for centuries before Europe was included into the existing trading networks. This is not to dismiss Kant, it is simply to force students to put Kant in conversation with a different trajectory of the development of commercial societies, cross-regional networks, and the movements to envisage laws, rules, and ethics to enable communications among populations and individual groups.
This approach causes many people to ask whether the IR programme at Johns Hopkins really concerns IR theory or something else. I actually often get those kinds of questions, and they are wedded to particular conceptions of IR. I am never able to give a fixed and quick answer but I often illustrate points that I wish to make. Consider how scholars and policymakers relate the question of sovereignty to Africa. Many see African sovereignty as problem, either because they think it is abused or stands in the way of humanitarian or development actions by supposed well-meaning Westerners. I attempt to have my students think twice when sovereignty is evoked in that way: 'sovereignty is a problem; the extents to which sovereignty is a problem in Africa; and why sovereignty is unproblematic in Europe or America'. This questioning and bracketing is not simply a 'postmodernist' evasion of the question.
Rather, I invite my students to reconsider the issue: if sovereignty is your problem, how do you think about the problem? For me, this is a much more interesting question; not what the problem is. For instance, if you start basing everything around a certain mythology of the Westphalia model, particularly when you begin to see everything as either conforming to it (the good) or deviating from it (the bad), then you have lost me. Because before Westphalia there were actually many ways in which sovereigns understood themselves, and therefore organized their realms, and how sovereignty was experienced and appreciated by its subjects. Westphalia is a crucial moment in Europe in these regards—I grant you that. If you want to say what is wrong with Westphalia, that's fine too. But if Westphalia is your starting point, the discussion is unlikely to be productive to me. Seriously!
In your work on political identity in Africa, such as your contribution to the 2012 volume edited by Arlene Tickner and David Blaney, the terms periphery, margin, lack of historicity recur frequently. What regional or perhaps even global representational protagonism can you envisage for IR studies emerging from Africa and its spokespeople?
The subjects of 'periphery' and 'marginalization' come into my own thinking from multiple directions. One of them has to do with the African state and the kind of subsidiarity it has assumed from the colonization onward. That's a critique of the state of affairs and a commentary on how Africa is organized and is governed. But I do also use it sometimes as a direct challenge to people who think they know the world. And my second book, Beyond Eurocentrism and Anarchy (2006), was actually about that, and that book was triggered by an account of an event in Africa, that everybody in African Studies has repeated and still continues to repeat, which is this: in June 1960, Africans went to defend France, because France asked them to. This is to say that nobody could imagine that Africans—and I am being careful here in terms of how people describe Africans—understood that they had a stake in the 'world' under assault during World War II. And so the book actually begins with a simple question: in 1940, which France would have asked Africans to defend it: Vichy France which was under German control, or the Germans who occupied half of France? But the decision to defend France actually came partly from a discussion between French colonial officers in Chad and African veterans of World War I, who decided that the world had to be restructured for Africa to find its place in it. They didn't do it for France, because it's a colonial power, they did it for the world. That's the thing. And Pétain, to his credit, is the only French official who asked the pertinent question about that, in a letter to his minister of justice (which is an irony, because justice under Pétain was a different question) he said: 'I am puzzled, that in 1918 when we were victorious, Africans rebelled; in 1940, we are defeated, and they come to our aid. Could you explain that to me?' The titular head of Vichy had the decency to ask that. By contrast, every scholar of Africa just repeated, 'Oh, the French asked Africans to go fight, and the Africans showed up'.
Our inability to understand that Africa actually sees itself as a part of the world, as a manager of the world, has so escaped us today that in the case of Libya for instance, when people were debating, you saw in every single newspaper in the world, including my beloved Guardian, that the African Union decided this, but the International Community decided that, as if Africans had surrendered their position in the international society to somebody: to the International Community. People actually said that! The AU, for all its 'wretchedness', after all represents about a quarter of the member states of the UN. And yet it was said the AU decided this and the International Community decided that. The implication is that the International Community is still the West plus Japan and maybe somebody else, and in this case it was Qatar and Saudi Arabia: "good citizens of the world", very "good democracies" etc. That's how deeply-set that is, that people don't even check themselves. Every time they talk they chuck Africa out of the World. Nobody says, America did this and the International Community decided that. All I am saying is that our mindscapes are so deeply structured that nothing about Africa can be studied on its own, can be studied as something that has universal consequence, as something that has universal value, as something that might be universalizing—that institutions in Africa might actually have some good use to think about anything. Otherwise, people would have asked them how did colonial populations—people who were colonized—overcome colonial attempts to strip them of their humanity and extend an act of humanity, of human solidarity, to go fight to defend them? And what was that about? Even many Africans fail to ask that question today!
And it could be argued that this thinking is, to some degree, down to widespread ignorance about Africa. We all are guilty of this. And oddly, especially intellectuals are guilty of this, and worse. Let me give you an example: recently I was in Tübingen in Germany, and I went into a store to buy some shoes—a very fine store, wonderful people—and I can tell you I ended up having a much more rewarding conversation with the people working in the shoe shop than I had at Tübingen University. Because there was a real curiosity. You would like to think that it is not so unusual in this day and age that a person from Guinea teaches in America, but you cannot blame them for being curious and asking many questions. At the university, in contrast, they actually are making claims, and for me that is no longer ignorance, that is hubris.
Your work presents an original take on the role of language in International Relations. How is language tied up with IR theory?
The language problem has many, many layers. The first of these is, simply, the issue of translation. If I were, for instance, to talk to someone in my father's language about Great Power Responsibility, they would look totally lost. Because in Guinea we have been what white people call stateless or acephalous societies, the notion that one power should have responsibility for another is a very difficult concept to translate, because you are running up against imaginaries of power, of authority, etc. that simply don't exist. So when you talk about such social scientific categories to those people, you have to be aware of all the colonial era enlightenment inheritances in them. When we talk about International Relations in Africa, we thus bump into a whole set of problems: the primary problem of translating ideas from here into those languages; another in capturing what kind of institutions exist in those languages; and a third issue has to do with how you translate across those languages. Consider for instance the difference between Loma stateless societies in the rain forest in Guinea, and Malinke who are very hierarchical, especially since SundiataKeita came to power in the 13th century. But the one problem most people don't talk about is the very one that is obsessing me now, is the question how I, as an African, am able to communicate with you through Kant, without you assuming that I am a bad reader of Kant.
The difference that I am trying to make here is actually what in linguistics is called vehicular language which is distinct from vernacular language. Because a lot of you assume that vehicular language is vernacular—that there is Latin and the rest is vernacular; that there is a proper reading of Kant and everything else is vernacular; or you have cosmopolitan and perhaps afropolitan and everything else is the vernacular of it. But this is not in fact always the case. The most difficult thing for linguists to understand, and for people in the social sciences to understand, is that Kant, Hegel and other thinkers can avail themselves as resources that one uses to try to convey imaginaries that are not always available to others—or to Kant himself for that matter. And it is not analogical—it is not 'this is the African Machiavelli'. It is easy to talk about power using Machiavelli, but to smuggle into Machiavelli different kind of imaginaries is more difficult. Nonetheless, I use Machiavelli because there is no other language available to me to convey that to you, because you don't speak my father's language.
Moreover, there is a danger for instance when I speak with my students that they may hear Machiavelli even when I am not speaking of him, and I warn them to be very careful. Machiavelli is a way to bring in a different stream of understanding of Realpolitik, but it's not entirely Machiavelli. If you spoke my father's language, I would tell you in my father's language, but that is not available to me here, so Machiavelli is a vehicle to talk about something else. Sometimes people might say to me 'what you are saying sounds to me like Kant but it's not really Kant' then I remind them that before Kant there were actually a lot of people who talked about the sublime, the moral, the categorical imperative, etc. in different languages; and if you are patient with me then we will get to the point when Kant belongs to a genealogy of people who talked about certain problems differently, and in that context Kant is no longer a European: I place Kant in the context of people who talk about politics, morality, etc. differently and I want to offer you a bunch of resources and please, please don't package me, because you don't own the interpretation of Kant, because even in your own context in Europe today Kant is not your contemporary, so you are making a lot of translations and I am making a lot of translations to get to something else: it is not that I am not a bad reader.
At an ISA conference I once was attacked by a senior colleague in IR for being a bad reader of Hegel, and I had to explain to him that while my using Hegel might be an act of imposition, and a result of having been colonized and given Hegel, but at this particular moment he should consider my gesture as an act of generosity, in the sense that I was reading Hegel generously to find resources that would allow him to understand things that he had no idea exist out there, and Hegel is the only tool available to me at this moment. But because all of you believe in one theology or another, he insisted that if I spoke Hegelian then I was Hegelian, and I retorted that I was not, but that deploying Hegel was merely an instance of vehicular language, allowing me to explore certain predicates, certain precepts and assumptions, and that is all. In this way, I can use Kant, or Hegel, or Hobbes, or Locke, and my problem when I do this is not with those thinkers—I can ignore the limitations of their thinking which was conditioned by the realities of their time—my problem is with those people who think they own traditions originating from long dead European thinkers. Thus, my problem today is less with Kant than with Kantians.
Or take Hobbes: Hobbes talked about the body in the way that it was understood in his time, and about human faculties in the way that they were understood at that time. Anybody who quotes Hobbes today about the faculties of human nature, I have to ask: when was the last time you read biology? I am not saying that Hobbes wasn't a very smart man; he was an erudite, and I am not joking. It is not his problem that people are still trivializing human faculties and finding issue with his view of how the body works—of course he was wrong on permeability, on cohabitation, on what organs live in us, etc.—he was giving his account of politics through metaphors and analogies that he understood at that time. When I think about it this way, my problem is not that Hobbes didn't have a modern understanding of the body, the distribution of the faculties and the extent of human capacities. Nor is my problem that Hobbes is Western. My problem is not with Hobbes himself. My problem is with all these realists who based their understanding of sovereignty or borders strictly on Hobbes' illustrations but have not opened a current book on the body that speaks of the faculties. If they did, even their own analogies may begin to resonate differently. There is new research coming out all the time on how we can understand the body, and this should have repercussions on how we read Hobbes today.
The absence of contextualization and historicization has proved a great liability for IR. Historicity allows one to receive Hobbes and all those other writers without indulging in mindless simplicities. It helps get away from simplistic divisions of the world—for instance, the West here and Africa there—from the assumptions that when I speak about postcolonialism in Africa I must be anti-Western. I am in fact growing very tired of those kinds of categories. As a parenthesis, I must ask if some of those guys in IR who speak so univocally and unidirectionally to others are even capable of opening themselves up to hearing other voices. I must also reveal that Adlai Stevenson, not some postcolonialist, alerted me to the problem of univocality when he stated in 1954 during one UN forum that 'Everybody needed aid, the West surely needs a hearing aid'. Hearing is indeed the one faculty that the West is most in need of cultivating. The same, incidentally, could be said of China nowadays.
One of the things I would like to deny Western canonist is their inclination to think of the likes of Diderot as Westerners. In his Supplément au Voyage a Bougainville (1772), Diderot presents a dialogue between himself and Orou, a native Tahitian. Voltaire wrote dialogues, some real, some imaginary, about and with China. The authors' people were reflecting on the world. It is hubris and an act of usurpation in the West today to want to lay claim to everything that is perceived to be good for the West. By the same token that which is bad must come from somewhere else. This act of usurpation has led to the appropriation—or rather internal colonization—of Diderot and Voltaire and like-minded philosophers and publicists who very much engaged the world beyond their locales. I have quarrels with this act of colonization, of the incipit parochialization of authors who ought not to be. I have quarrels with Voltaire's characterization of non-Europeans at times; but I have a greater quarrel with how he has been colonized today as distinctly European. Voltaire rejected European orthodoxies of his day and opted explicitly to enter into dialogue with Chinese and Africans as he understood them. Diderot, too, was often in dialogue with Tahitians and other non-Europeans. In fact, the relationship between Diderot and the Tahitian was exactly the same as the relationship between Socrates and Plato, in that you have an older person talking and a younger person and less wise person listening. A lot of Western philosophy and political theory was actually generated—at least in the modern period—after contact with the non-West. So how that is Western I don't know. I encounter the same problem when I am in Africa where I am accused of being Western just because I make the same literary references. It is a paradox today that even literature is assigned an identity for the purpose of hegemony and/or exclusion. Francis Galton (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Francis_Galton) travelled widely and wrote dialogues from this expedition in Africa, so how can we say to what extent the substance of such dialogues was Western or British?
So in sum you are not trying to counter Western thought, but do you feel that the African political experience and your own perspective can bring something new to IR studies?
I am going to try and express something very carefully here, because the theory of the state in Africa brought about untold horrors—in Sierra Leone, in Liberia, and so on—so I am not saying this lightly. But I have said to many people, Africans and non-Africans, that I am glad that the postcolonial African state failed, and I wish many more of them failed, and I'm sure a lot more will fail, because they correspond to nothing on the ground. The idea of constitutions and constitutionalism came with making arrangements with a lot of social elements that were generated by certain entities that aspired to go in certain directions. What happened in Africa is that somebody came and said: 'this worked there, it should work here'—and it doesn't. I'll give you three short stories to illustrate this.
One of the presidents of postcolonial Guinea, the one I despise the most, Lansana Conté (in office 1984-2008), also gave me one of my inspirational moments. Students rebelled against him and destroyed everything in town and so he went on national TV that day and said: 'You know I'm very disheartened. I am disheartened about children who have become Europeans.' Obviously the blame would be on Europe. He continued, 'They are rude, they don't respect people or property. I understand that they may have quarrels with me, but I also understand that we are Africans. And though we may no longer live in the village', and it is important for me that he said that, 'though we may no longer live in the village, when we move in the big city, the council of elders is what parliament does for us now. We don't have the council of elders, instead we have parliament. They, the students, can go to parliament and complain about their father. I am their father, my children are older than all of them. So in the village, they would have gone to the council of elders, and they could have done this and I would have given them my explanation'. And the next morning, the whole country turned against the students, because what he had succeeded in doing was to touch and move people. They went to the head of the student government, who said: 'The president was right. We had failed to understand that our ways cannot be European ways, and we can think about our modern institutions as iterations of what we had in the past, suited to our circumstances, and so we should not do politics in the same way. I agree with him, and in that spirit I want to say that among the Koranko ethnic group, fathers let their children eat meat first, because they have growing needs, and if the father doesn't take care of his children, then they take the children away from the father and give them to the uncle. Our problem at the university is that our stipends are not being paid, and father has all his mansions in France, in Spain, and elsewhere, so we want the uncle.' He was in effect asking for political transition: he was saying they were now going to the council of elders, the parliament, and demand the uncle, for father no longer merits being the father. He was able to articulate political transition and rotation in that language. It was a very clever move.
The second one was my mother who was completely unsympathetic to me when I came home one day and was upset that one of my friends who was a journalist had been arrested. She said, 'if you wish you can go back to your town but don't come here and bother me and be grumpy'. So I started an exchange with her and explained to her why it is important that we have journalists and why they should be free, until our discussion turned to the subject of speaking truth to power. At that moment she said, 'now you are talking sense' and she started to tell me how the griot functioned in West Africa for the past eight hundred years, and why truth to power is part of our institutional heritage. But that truth is not a personal truth, for there is an organic connection between reporter and the community, there is a group in which they collect information, communicate and criticize, and we began to talk about that. And since then I have stopped teaching Jefferson in my constitutional classes in Africa, as a way of talking about the free press, instead I talk about speaking truth to power. But it allows me not only to talk about the necessity of speaking truth to power, but also to criticize the organization of the media, which is so individualised, so oriented toward the people who give the money: think of the National Democratic Institute in Washington, the Friedrich-Ebert-Stiftung in Germany, they have no organic connection to the people. And my mother told me, 'as long as it's a battle between those who have the guns and those who have the pen, then nobody is speaking to my problems, then I have no dog in that fight'. And journalists really make a big mistake by not updating their trade and redressing it. Because speaking truth to power is not absent in our tradition, we have had it for eight hundred years, six centuries before Jefferson, but we don't think about it that way. I have to remind my friends in Guinea: 'you are vulnerable precisely because you have not understood what the profession of journalism might look like in this community, to make your message more relevant and effective'. You see the smart young guys tweeting away and how they have been replaced by the Muslim Brotherhood, because we have not made the message relevant to the community. We are communicating on media and in idioms that have no real bearing on people's lives, so we are easily dismissed. That is in fact the tragedy of what happened in Tunisia: the smart, young protesters have so easily been brushed aside for this reason.
The third story is about how we had a constitutional debate in Guinea before multipartism, and people were talking about the separation of powers. And I went to the university to talk to a group of people and I put it to them: why do you waste your time studying the American Constitution and the separation of powers in America? I grant you, it is a wonderful experiment and it has lasted two hundred years, but that would not lead you anywhere with these people. The theocratic Futa Jallon in Guinea (in the 18th and 19th centuries) had one of the most advanced systems of separation of powers: the king was in Labé, the constitution was in Dalaba, the people who interpreted the constitution were in yet another city, the army was based in Tougué. It was the most decentralised organization of government you can imagine, and all predicated on the idea that none of the nine diwés, or provinces, should actually have the monopoly of power. So those that kept the constitution were not allowed to interpret it, because the readers were somewhere else. But to make sure that what they were reading was the right document, they gave it to a different province. So the separation of powers is not new to us.
In sum, the West is a wonderful political experiment, and it has worked for them. We can actualize some of what they have instituted, but we have sources here that are more suited to the circumstances of the people in that region, without undermining the modern ideas of democratic self-governance, without undermining the idea of a republic. Without dispensing with all of those, we must not be tempted to imagine constitution in the same way, to imagine separation of powers in the same way, even to imagine and practice journalism in the same way, in this very different environment. It is going to fail. That is my third story.
Siba N. Grovogui has been teaching at Johns Hopkins University after holding the DuBois-Mandela postdoctoral fellowship of the University of Michigan-Ann Arbor in 1989-90 and teaching at Eastern Michigan University from 1993 to 1995. He is currently professor of international relations theory and law at The Johns Hopkins University. He is the author of Sovereigns, Quasi-Sovereigns, and Africans: Race and Self-determination in International Law (University of Minnesota Press, 1996) and Beyond Eurocentrism and Anarchy: Memories of International Institutions and Order (Palgrave, April 2006). He has recently completed a ten-year long study partly funded by the National Science Foundation of the rule of law in Chad as enacted under the Chad Oil and Pipeline Project.
Related links
Faculty Profile at Johns Hopkins University Read Grovogui's Postcolonial Criticism: International Reality and Modes of Inquiry (2002 book chapter) here (pdf) Read Grovogui's The Secret Lives of Sovereignty (2009 book chapter) here (pdf) Read Grovogui's Counterpoints and the Imaginaries Behind Them: Thinking Beyond North American and European Traditions (2009 contribution to International Political Sociology) here (pdf) Read Grovogui's Postcolonialism (2010 book chapter) here (pdf) Read Grovogui's Sovereignty in Africa: Quasi-statehood and Other Myths (2001 book chapter in a volume edited by Tim Shaw and Kevin Dunn) here (pdf)
Tese de doutoramento em em Pós-colonialismos e Cidadania Global, apresentada à Faculdade de Economia da Universidade de Coimbra ; Las actuales ciudades posmodernas se han desarrollado sobre la base de una lógica neoliberal que ha tenido graves consecuencias en términos de segregación y exclusión social. La contestación a este modelo urbano dio origen a la formulación teórica del derecho a la ciudad a finales de los años 60 (Lefebvre, 2009 [1968]). En América Latina, y especialmente en Brasil, el derecho a la ciudad se ha erigido desde finales de los 80 en una importante bandera política que ha articulado la voz de múltiples colectivos de la sociedad civil. Las movilizaciones que han tenido lugar en esta región, así como dentro del movimiento altermundialista, han contribuido a que esta narrativa arraigara también en otros países del mundo y fuera usada por un amplio abanico de actores. Como resultado de estos diferentes usos y apropiaciones (unos más emancipadores que otros), existe una notable ambigüedad conceptual en torno a este concepto, que hace necesarios ejercicios de análisis pormenorizados sobre su significado. Este trabajo persigue realizar una aportación en este sentido ahondando en la comprensión del derecho a la ciudad, no solo a partir de su formulación teórica, sino sobre todo a partir de cómo ha sido usado en el marco de luchas sociales. Uno de los principales objetivos del hecho de analizar esta noción "desde abajo" del derecho a la ciudad ha sido explorar en qué medida contribuye a dar voz a lo que se ha denominado en este trabajo los condenados de la ciudad, parafraseando a Fanon (2002 [1961]). Esta preocupación motiva la pregunta que da título al volumen: ¿Puede el derecho a la ciudad ser emancipatorio? Para responder a esta cuestión, la investigación explora de cerca la experiencia brasileña y, en particular, la que emana de la ciudad de São Paulo, donde se exploran las presencias, las ausencias y las emergencias de la articulación política del derecho a la ciudad. Para ello, se ha recurrido al método del estudio de caso alargado (Burawoy, 1991, 2009; Santos, 2009a) y a las lentes teóricas de los estudios poscoloniales, concretamente las epistemologías del Sur y la sociología de las ausencias y de las emergencias (Santos y Meneses, 2009; Santos, 2005). Para la identificación de algunas de las principales ausencias y emergencias del derecho a la ciudad, la hipótesis de trabajo manejada ha sido considerar el mundo de lo simbólico y del imaginario colectivo como espacios donde se manifiestan "vibraciones ascendentes" representativas de malestares sociales que no se articulan a través de movimientos sociales clásicos. Ante la creciente juridificación de la vida social, se ha recurrido a un tipo de racionalidad opuesta e inferiorizada: la estético-expresiva, un terreno fértil para la problematización de la realidad y para la construcción de utopías protopolíticas. En concreto, la investigación explora determinadas expresiones de arte urbano paulistano denominadas estéticas de las periferias (Leite, 2013), fundamentalmente el hip hop de protesta y la literatura periférica, que se han considerado en este trabajo como disidencias artísticas decoloniales. Su análisis ha puesto de manifiesto que uno de sus logros más destacables ha sido promover la apropiación del arte y de la cultura por parte de los colectivos que se autodefinen como "pobres, negros y periféricos". Las estéticas de las periferias se han convertido, así, en una importante herramienta política que ha contribuido a crear una ciudadanía insurgente, a través de la cual se expresan fuertes críticas a la situación de "apartheid urbano" (Santos, 2009a) vivida por estos colectivos. Ello, a su vez, ha hecho posible la gestación de un discurso de autovalorización identitaria y de memoria colectiva. Estos resultados han permitido a afirmar que el derecho a la ciudad precisa ser resignificado con la entrada de nuevos actores y de nuevas luchas para poder renovar su potencial emancipatorio. A la luz de una mirada no institucionalizante del derecho como la que aporta el "pluralismo jurídico" (Santos, 2009a), se arguye que también son una expresión del derecho a la ciudad determinados procesos sociales desde abajo que tienen como resultado la ampliación de facto del estatuto de ciudadanía. Las estéticas de las periferias constituyen un buen ejemplo de ello porque han contribuido a crear múltiples "espacios de representación" (Lefebvre, 2000), a través de los cuales los habitantes de las periferias paulistanas se han apropiado de la ciudad, resignificando estas áreas urbanas y construyendo espacios simbólicos donde es posible el florecimiento de utopías. El arte es el espacio del sueño y sin sueños no es posible desarrollar la imaginación y pensar alternativas, tan fundamentales en la lucha por la emancipación social. En suma, este trabajo defiende la necesidad de desjuridificar y descolonizar la mirada sobre el derecho a la ciudad para poder captar aquellas experiencias (como las que emanan del campo artístico-cultural decolonial) que, sin abanderar de manera explícita el derecho a la ciudad, constituyen efectivamente una expresión no normativa de él. ; As atuais cidades pósmodernas se desenvolveram com base numa lógica neoliberal que teve sérias conseqüências em termos de segregação e exclusão social. A resposta a este modelo urbano deu origem à formulação teórica do direito à cidade no final dos anos 60 (Lefebvre, 2009 [1968]). Na América Latina e especialmente no Brasil, o direito à cidade emergiu desde o final da década de 1980 como uma importante bandeira política que articulou a voz de múltiplos coletivos na sociedade civil. As mobilizações que ocorreram nesta região, bem como no movimento altermundialista, contribuíram para que essa narrativa também se enraizasse em outros países do mundo e fosse utilizada por uma ampla gama de atores. Como resultado desses diferentes usos e apropriações (alguns mais emancipatórios do que outros), existe uma notável ambigüidade conceitual em torno desse conceito, o que torna necessária a realização de exercícios analíticos detalhados sobre o seu significado. Este trabalho tem como objetivo contribuir com esse entendimento ao aprofundar na compreensão sobre o direito à cidade, não apenas a partir da sua formulação teórica, mas especialmente de como ela foi usada no contexto das lutas sociais. Um dos principais objetivos de analisar essa noção "de baixo para cima" do direito à cidade tem sido explorar até que ponto ele contribui efetivamente para dar voz ao que se denomina neste trabalho os condenados da cidade, parafraseando Fanon (2002 [1961]). Essa preocupação motiva a questão que dá título ao trabalho: pode o direito à cidade ser emancipatório? Para responder a esta pergunta, a investigação explora detalhadamente a experiência brasileira, particularmente o contexto da cidade de São Paulo, onde são exploradas as presenças, ausências e emergências da articulação política do direito à cidade. Para isso, tem-se recorrido ao método do estudo de caso alargado (Burawoy, 1991, 2009, Santos, 2009a) e as lentes teóricas dos estudos pós-coloniais, especificamente as epistemologias do Sul e a sociologia das ausências e das emergências (Santos e Meneses, 2009; Santos, 2005). Para a identificação de algumas das principais ausências e emergências do direito à cidade, a hipótese de trabalho utilizada foi considerar o mundo simbólico e do imaginário coletivo como espaços onde se manifestam "vibrações ascendentes" representativas de desconfortos sociais que não são articulados pelos movimentos sociais clássicos. Diante da crescente juridificação da vida social, utilizou-se um tipo de racionalidade inversa e inferiorizada: a estético-expressiva, um terreno fértil para a problematização da realidade e para a construção de utopias protopolíticas. Em particular, foram exploradas determinadas expressões da arte urbana de São Paulo chamadas estéticas das periferias (Leite, 2013), fundamentalmente o hip hop de protesto e a literatura periférica, que são consideradas como dissidências artísticas decoloniais neste trabalho. Sua análise mostrou que uma de suas conquistas mais destacadas tem sido a apropriação da arte e da cultura por parte dos coletivos que se autodefinem como "pobres, negros e periféricos". As estéticas das periferias tornaram-se, de esta forma, uma ferramenta política que contribui para criar uma cidadania insurgente, através da qual se expressam fortes críticas à situação de "apartheid urbano" (Santos, 2009a) vivenciada por estes grupos. Isso, por sua vez, tornou possível a gestação de um discurso identitário auto-valorizador e de uma memória coletiva. Esses resultados levaram a afirmar que o direito à cidade precisa ser resignificado a partir da inclusão de novos atores e novas lutas para que possa ser renovado seu potencial emancipatório. À luz de uma visão não institucionalizante do direito como a que é fornecida pelo "pluralismo jurídico", argumenta-se que determinados processos sociais também são uma expressão de baixo para cima do direito à cidade que resultam numa extensão de fato do estatuto de cidadania. As estéticas das periferias são um bom exemplo disso porque contribuíram para a criação de múltiplos "espaços de representação" (Lefebvre, 2000), através dos quais os habitantes das periferias de São Paulo se apropriaram da cidade, resignificando essas áreas urbanas e construindo espaços simbólicos onde florescem utopias. A arte é o espaço do sonho e sem sonhos não é possível desenvolver a imaginação e pensar sobre alternativas, tão fundamentais na luta pela emancipação social. Em suma, este trabalho defende que é necessário desjuridificar e descolonizar o olhar sobre o direito à cidade, a fim de capturar essas experiências (como as que decorrem do campo artístico-cultural decolonial) que, sem utilizar explicitamente a bandeira do direito à cidade, constituem efetivamente uma expressão não normativa do mesmo. ; Current postmodern cities have been built on the basis of a neoliberal logic with serious consequences in terms of segregation and social exclusion. The call into question of this urban model framed the theoretical underpinnings of the right to the city in the late 1960s (Lefebvre, 2009 [1968]). In Latin America, and in particular Brazil, the idea of the right to the city emerged from the late 80s as an important political banner that voiced the concerns of a multitude of civil society groups. The mobilisations that ensued in this regional context, and in the Alter-globalisation movement, enabled this narrative to take root in a number of countries and to be adopted by a large range of actors. As a result of these different uses and appropriations (some more emancipatory than others), a notable conceptual ambiguity arose round this concept, which makes it a necessary requirement to conduct a detailed analysis about its meaning. The purpose of this work is to deepen understanding of the right to the city, not only from a theoretical perspective, but especially how it has been used as an icon of some social struggles. One of the main objectives of analysing the notion of the right to the city from a "bottom-up" perspective, is to determine to which extent it has effectively contributed to provide a voice for the condemned of the city, to paraphrase Fanon (2002 [1961]). This apprehension prompted the question underpinning the title of this volume: can the right to the city be emancipatory? To answer this question, the research looks closely at the Brazilian experience, with a particular focus on the city of São Paulo, where the presences, absences and emergences of the political enunciation of the right to the city are explored. To this end, the analyses draws on the methodology of the extended case method (Burawoy, 1991, 2009, Santos, 2009a) and the theoretical lenses of post-colonial studies, specifically the epistemologies of the south, and the sociology of absences and emergences (Santos and Meneses, 2009; Santos 2005). The principal challenge of the investigation was indeed identifying some of the main absences and emergences of the right to the city. The working hypothesis has been framed in an exploration of the symbolic world and the collective imaginary as spaces that contain manifestations of "ascending vibrations", representative of social discomforts that are not expressed through conventional social movements. Against the backdrop of an increased juridification of social life, the research gave precedence to an opposite rationality which is often considered inferior: aesthetic expressive rationality- fertile ground for the problematisation of reality and the construction of proto-political utopias. In particular, some expressions of São Paulo's urban art, known as the aesthetics of the peripheries (Leite, 2013) were explored, such as protest hip-hop and peripheral literature, defined in this work as decolonial artistic dissidences. One of their greatest achievements has been the appropriation of art and culture by groups that define themselves as "poor, black and peripheral". The aesthetics of the peripheries have thus become an important political tool for the creation of an insurgent citizenship, and a means to level strong criticism against the "urban apartheid" situation experienced by these stakeholders (Santos, 2009a). This, in turn, made possible the gestation of a self-valorising identity discourse and a collective memory. These results demonstrate that the right to the city needs to be resignified by welcoming new actors and new struggles so that its emancipatory potential can be renewed. Through the lens of a non-institutionalised view of the law, provided by "legal pluralism" (Santos, 2009a), it is argued that certain "bottom-up" social processes are also an expression of the right to the city which result in a de facto extension of citizenship status. The aesthetics of the peripheries are a good example of this because they have contributed to the creation of multiple "spaces of representation" (Lefebvre, 2000), through which the inhabitants of the peripheries of São Paulo appropriated the city, resignifying these urban areas and building symbolic spaces where utopias could flourish. Art is the breathing space of dreams, and without dreams it is not possible to develop an imagination and to think about alternatives, that which is of utmost importance in the struggle for social emancipation. In short, this work argues that it is necessary to move towards a dejuridification and decolonisation of the right to the city, with the view to capture the experiences (such as those that constitute decolonial cultural-artistic expressions) that, without explicitly utilising the banner of the right to the city, effectively embody a non-normative expression of it.
La formulación de políticas para satisfacer las necesidades de cuidado de la sociedad nunca había sido más urgente que ahora. En muchas partes del mundo desarrollado, la creciente participación de la mujer en el empleo remunerado ha socavado el modelo tradicional del padre como sostén de la familia, el cual descansaba sobre la disponibilidad de una esposa dependiente que permanecía en el hogar para cuidar de los hijos y los parientes discapacitados, mayores o frágiles. Con este documento se busca comprender la forma en que se configuran las políticas del cuidado. Se examina la dinámica existente entre la forma en que el público formula demandas de cuidado y las distintas maneras en que las políticas de cuidado se crean y aplican en diferentes contextos nacionales, regionales e históricos. El énfasis de este estudio recae principalmente en las políticas de cuidado infantil para las madres y los padres trabajadores de Europa, pero también se abordan las políticas dirigidas a las personas discapacitadas y a los proveedores de cuidado no remunerados. El objetivo de este trabajo es entender la relación, en determinados contextos, entre (i) la articulación de las demandas con base en las necesidades de aquellos que brindan o reciben cuidado; (ii) los marcos políticos y la lógica de las políticas relativas a las necesidades de cuidado; y (iii) los resultados de dichas políticas para distintos grupos de beneficiarios y proveedores de cuidados. El documento se divide en dos secciones principales. La primera se ocupa de las diferentes formas en que los actores políticos enmarcan o delimitan las políticas de cuidado en Europa. La sección comienza con un breve repaso de las teorías y los conceptos que sustentan el documento, para luego proceder con la aplicación de dichas teorías y conceptos en un análisis sobre la forma en que se interpretan las necesidades de cuidado en las demandas de aquellos que representan a los proveedores y beneficiarios del cuidado. Se definen cinco áreas de demandas: conciliación entre el trabajo y el cuidado; apoyo a las personas discapacitadas; cuidado no remunerado; exigencias de flexibilidad por parte de los sindicatos; y cuidado suministrado por migrantes. Según la autora, las demandas de cuidado en estas áreas, tomadas en su conjunto, amplían las exigencias de reconocimiento, derechos y redistribución de responsabilidades en materia de cuidado y apuntan hacia un marco general de justicia social. El análisis de la formulación de políticas en Europa revela que algunos de los discursos relacionados con las nociones de justicia social se ven reflejados en la política del cuidado, pero también muestra que el marco predominante es el de la política del cuidado como forma de inversión social en capital humano. En este documento se examinan las oportunidades y limitaciones políticas relativas al surgimiento de derechos sociales para los padres e hijos en Europa. En la segunda parte del documento se examinan las políticas en diferentes contextos nacionales a partir de las siguientes interrogantes: ¿qué factores llevan a la formulación de las políticas? y ¿qué significa esto para los resultados que pueden obtenerse en relación con las desigualdades sociales? Los factores analizados son el cambio demográfico, la inversión social, la generación de empleo y la naturaleza mundial de la política del cuidado. A manera de conclusión, se señala en el documento que las políticas del cuidado en Europa están impregnadas de tensiones y contradicciones dimanantes de las perspectivas tanto de los proveedores como de los beneficiarios del cuidado. Por una parte, se han registrado importantes cambios en los diez últimos años. Por ejemplo, el reconocimiento del potencial de empleo de aquellos que hasta ahora han permanecido marginados del trabajo remunerado, como las madres y las personas discapacitadas; el reconocimiento de la capacidad de los hombres para suministrar cuidado; el aumento de las responsabilidades del Estado como proveedor de cuidados, en especial el cuidado infantil; y el reconocimiento de los parientes proveedores de cuidado. Por la otra, estas oportunidades han venido de la mano con limitaciones, entre ellas el sentido de obligación de las madres y las personas discapacitadas de conseguir trabajo a menudo en las partes más precarias del mercado laboral; una mayor comodificación de los servicios de cuidado; y la producción de padres y proveedores de cuidado, personas mayores y discapacitadas que ejercen su opción como consumidores en el mercado del cuidado, en lugar de hacer oír su voz como ciudadanos en el ámbito público del cuidado. Estos acontecimientos también han tenido como consecuencia la creación de una fuerza laboral migrante pobremente remunerada. En esta situación, el desafío clave radica en utilizar aquellos espacios en los cuales el cuidado se ha politizado y se han adquirido derechos para fomentar el valor político, social y económico del cuidado como componente fundamental de las demandas de justicia social nacional y transnacional. / ; Abstract. The question of how to devise policies to meet the care needs of society has become more urgent than ever. In many parts of the developed world, women's increasing involvement in paid employment has undermined the traditional male breadwinner model which assumed the availability of a dependent wife at home to care for children, disabled family members and older, frail relatives. This paper seeks to understand how care policies are shaped. It looks at the dynamic between how constituencies make care claims and the ways in which care policies are constructed and delivered in different national, regional and historical contexts. The focus is mainly on childcare policies for working parents in Europe, but the purview here also includes policies for disabled people and unpaid carers. Its aim is to provide an understanding, within particular contexts, of the relationship between (i) the articulation of claims based on the needs of those who provide and/or receive care; (ii) the political frames and logics of policies which attend to care needs; and (iii) the outcomes of such policies for different groups of care receivers and providers. The paper is divided into two main sections. The first focuses on the ways different political actors frame care policies in Europe. It starts with a brief review of the theories and concepts that inform the paper. It goes on to apply these to an analysis of how care needs are interpreted in the claims of those representing the providers and receivers of care. Five areas of claims are identified: work/care reconciliation; disabled people's support; unpaid care; trade union demands for flexibility; and migrant care work. It proposes that, together, claims in these areas expand demands for recognition, rights and the redistribution of responsibilities in relation to care, and that they look to an overarching frame of social justice. The analysis of policy making in Europe shows that some of the discourses attached to notions of social justice find reflection in care policy but that the dominant frame is that of care policy as a form of social investment in human capital. The paper examines political opportunities and constraints in the emergence of social rights for parents and children in Europe. The second part examines policies in different national contexts by asking which issues drive policies and what this means for outcomes in terms of social inequalities. The issues examined are demographic change, social investment, employment creation and the global nature of care policy. In conclusion, the paper finds that care policies in Europe are imbued with tension and contradiction from the perspective of those who provide and receive care support. On the one hand, the last decade has seen important changes: for example, the recognition of the employment potential of those previously marginalized from paid work such as mothers and disabled people; the recognition of men's caring capacities; the rise of state responsibilities for care provision, especially in child care; and the recognition of family carers. On the other hand, these opportunities have been accompanied by constraints, including a sense of obligation by mothers and disabled people to find work often in the more precarious parts of the labour market; the increased commodification of care services; and the construction of parents/carers, older and disabled people exercising choice as consumers in the care market, rather than exercising their voice as citizens in the public domain of care. Such developments have also had the consequence of creating a poorly paid migrant labour economy of care. In this situation the key challenge is to use those spaces in which care has become politicized and rights have been won to advance the political, social and economic value of care as a crucial component in claims for national and transnational social justice. / ; Résumé. Comment concevoir des politiques qui puissent répondre aux besoins de soins des sociétés? La question se pose en termes plus urgents que jamais. Dans bien des pays développés, les femmes sont de plus en plus nombreuses à avoir un emploi rémunéré, ce qui a affaibli le modèle traditionnel de l'homme soutien de famille, qui supposait la présence au foyer d'une épouse à charge s'occupant des enfants ainsi que des parents handicapés ou âgés et fragiles. L'auteur de ce document cherche à comprendre comment sont conçues les politiques des soins et de l'assistance aux personnes. Elle examine la dynamique entre les revendications des différents publics en la matière et la façon dont les politiques sont élaborées et appliquées dans divers contextes nationaux, régionaux et historiques. Elle s'est intéressée principalement aux politiques de garde des enfants mises en place pour les parents qui travaillent en Europe, bien que les politiques relatives aux handicapés et aux soignants non rémunérés entrent aussi dans son champ d'étude. Son objectif est de faire comprendre, dans des contextes particuliers, la relation entre (i) l'articulation des revendications qui partent des besoins des soignants et/ou des soignés; (ii) les cadres et logiques des politiques soucieuses de répondre aux besoins en matière de soins et d'assistance aux personnes; et (iii) les effets de ces politiques sur les différents groupes de soignés et de soignants. Le document se divise en deux sections principales. La première porte sur la manière dont différents acteurs politiques conçoivent les politiques de soins et d'assistance aux personnes en Europe. L'auteur commence par un bref exposé des théories et des concepts qui informent le document. Elle poursuit en les appliquant à une analyse des besoins en matière de soins et d'assistance tels qu'ils ressortent de l'interprétation qu'en donnent les représentants des soignants et des soignés dans leurs revendications. Elle recense cinq domaines de revendication: nécessité de concilier travail et soins; aide aux personnes handicapées; soins non rémunérés; revendications syndicales de flexibilité; et place des migrants dans le secteur des soins. Elle suggère que, collectivement, les revendications dans ces domaines tendent à obtenir une reconnaissance, des droits et une redistribution des responsabilités en matière de soins et d'assistance aux personnes, et se réfèrent à un modèle général de justice sociale. L'analyse des politiques élaborées en Europe montre que certains des discours qui s'inspirent des notions de justice sociale se traduisent concrètement dans les politiques de soins et d'assistance aux personnes mais que le cadre dominant consiste à concevoir la politique de soins et d'assistance aux personnes comme une forme d'investissement social dans le capital humain. L'auteur examine ce qui, en politique, favorise l'émergence de droits sociaux pour les parents et les enfants en Europe et ce qui y fait obstacle. La deuxième partie est consacrée à l'examen des politiques dans leurs différents contextes nationaux. L'auteur examine les questions qui peuvent être à l'origine de ces politiques-l'évolution démographique, l'investissement social, la création d'emplois et la nature de la politique des soins dans le monde-et se demande quels en sont les résultats en termes d'inégalités sociales. En conclusion, l'auteur estime que les politiques des soins en Europe sont pleines de tensions et contradictions du point de vue des soignants comme des soignés. D'une part, d'importantes évolutions se sont produites en dix ans: on reconnaît aujourd'hui l'employabilité de personnes qui étaient tenues naguère à l'écart de l'emploi rémunéré telles que les mères de famille et les personnes handicapées, de même que les aptitudes des hommes en matière de soins; les Etats assument davantage de responsabilités dans la prestation de services, en particulier dans le secteur des garderies pour enfants et l'on reconnaît le rôle des soignants familiaux. De l'autre, ces chances ne vont pas sans contraintes: ainsi, les mères et les personnes handicapées se sentent obligées de trouver du travail, souvent dans les secteurs les plus précaires du marché; on assiste à une marchandisation accrue des services de soins et les parents, soignants, personnes âgées et handicapées sont plus perçus comme des consommateurs faisant des choix sur le marché des soins que comme des citoyens dans le domaine public des soins. Ces évolutions ont eu aussi pour effet de créer une économie des soins portée par des travailleurs migrants mal payés. Dans ces circonstances, le grand défi est d'utiliser les espaces dans lesquels les soins sont politisés et où des droits ont été acquis pour faire valoir l'aspect politique, social et économique des soins comme revendication cruciale de justice sociale aux plans national et transnational.
"This sweltering summer of the Negro's legitimate discontent will not pass until there is an invigorating autumn of freedom and equality. Nineteen sixty-three is not an end, but a beginning…I have a dream that one day this nation will rise up and live out the true meaning of its creed: "We hold these truths to be self-evident: that all men are created equal…"And if America is to be a great nation, this must become true."Martin Luther King Jr." I have a dream speech" (March on Washington, August 28, 1963)On Wednesday August 27th, at the Pepsi Center in Denver, Colorado, before a crowd of 20,000, Barack Obama became the first biracial man to be officially nominated as presidential candidate by a major party. When the turn came for the delegates from the state of New York to vote, Obama had received 1,549 and Hillary Rodham-Clinton 231. Hillary then made a motion to suspend the roll call vote and select him by acclamation:"With eyes firmly fixed on the future in the spirit of unity, with the goal of victory, with faith in our party and country, let's declare together in one voice, right here and right now, that Barack Obama is our candidate and he will be our president."The night before, Hillary had made a gracious and persuasive speech in support of Obama, calling on her supporters to vote for the man that would bring health care to all Americans and restore the country's standing in the world, thus tacitly acknowledging that their platforms are one and the same. She had also reminded the audience that the (presidential) "glass ceiling now had 18 million cracks", a reference at the number of votes she received and a reminder of how close women had come this time around to win the Presidency, a white male domain until now. That was her way to give comfort to her female supporters, some of which have avowed to vote for McCain in the Fall. Then on Wednesday night it came up to Bill Clinton to put the proverbial final nail in the coffin of the bitter conflict that had bitterly divided the party up to then. He did it with a masterful, authoritative speech, in which he reassured the audience that Obama was just as ready for the Presidency as he himself had been in 1992. The clarity of his ideas and the perfect delivery reminded us all of why he will go down as one of the greatest Presidents in this country's History.Already by Wednesday night there was a sense of fulfillment and relief, since the unification of the Democratic Party was perceived by most Democrats as the Convention's main objective. The party had been divided since the 1970s, when the moderate, blue collar workers and Southerners became disgruntled with McGovern's socially liberal platform and voted for Nixon. Ten years later they would become known as the Reagan democrats, and the label would stick. Bill Clinton was able to bring them all back to the fold by focused policies and his ability to connect both with white and black blue-collar workers. But in the last eight years the divisions have reappeared, as it became plain during the primary: Obama appeals strongly to the black community and to white college educated youth but has been unable to extend that appeal to older women and white workers. That is why Hillary got 18 million votes. That is also why Obama's choice of Vice President is a solid one. Senator Joseph Biden, with his Catholic, blue-collar background, his toughness and his 30 years of experience in the Senate, and his wisdom and knowledge of foreign affairs, has added weight and credibility to the ticket. The expectation is that this formula will reunite the fractured party once again.This has been a historic Convention in more ways than one: the first African-American to win the nomination, the first woman to come so close to winning it, the passing of the torch to a new generation of Americans by Ted Kennedy, the brilliant speech by Bill Clinton which by all measures restores his stature within the party. But more than anything else, this Convention is historic because, as Clinton said, Barack Obama is "the twenty first century incarnation of the American Dream", and a reaffirmation of Ted Kennedy's proclamation on the first day of the Convention, that "the Dream Lives on" in Obama.The climax came on Thursday night with Obama's long awaited acceptance speech at the closing of the Convention. It was a carefully choreographed affair, overlaid with symbolism. Delivered before a crowd of 75,000 at the INVESCO open-air stadium at Mile High, against a background evoking the pillars of the Lincoln Memorial, it was watched by a TV audience of around 40 million and ended with fireworks across the Colorado sky. Barack Obama is also the first candidate since John F Kennedy to choose an open-to-the public venue to deliver his acceptance speech. There were some risks to this venue, from security to climactic. But more than anything else, his greatest challenge on this historic night was to communicate to his huge audience and the American nation at large, that he is not just a great orator but that he understands their woes and has the fortitude to fight for them; that he is ready to battle ahead and bring about the change he so brilliantly articulates in his speeches, and that this young man standing before them, half preacher, half professor, is also a practical politician, able to back his ideas with concrete and feasible plans. As Richard Haas says in his latest article on the Foreign Affairs Journal, the next president must confront "the reality of the country's expectations" and he must do so by "identifying meaningful yet achievable goals and lay them out before the nation…and then achieve them through leadership skills that will be tested by pressures unimaginable to anyone who has not held he job." Obama passed this difficult test on the first two requirements. The third is awaiting him, if elected in November.By most accounts, the speech was an overwhelming success. Obama presented a complete blueprint on how he will govern if elected. He first listed all the issues Americans are dissatisfied with, starting with the economy and ending with Iraq. He then outlined his specific policies to solve these problems. He subsequently gave examples of how McCain is closely aligned with George W. Bush's failed policies, thus demolishing his opponent's claims of independence from the incumbent. Finally, he presented himself as open-minded and pragmatic, willing to find middle ground on the so-called culture wars issues (gays, guns, abortion) that are frequently framed as false choices to elicit emotions, not rationality, from the part of the voters. He re-introduced himself to the public as a common man, with personal accounts of his childhood as son of a single mother, who raised him with the help of her parents and at times had to use food stamps to take care of him; of his admiration for his grandfather, a WWII veteran who went to college on the GI bill and taught him hard work, pride and love of country. Looking straight into the cameras, he humanized his message and connected with people. He was able to turn the tables on John McCain, who he presented as elitist, out of touch and thus, less trustworthy. His move to the middle ground on cultural issues ("We can withhold the Second Amendment and still get AK 47s out of the hands of criminals") and his calls for greater civic and parental responsibility ("Government cannot replace parents in educating their children…") gave consistency to his claim of post-partisanship.By asserting that America is the best hope for the world, he rejected the notion that only Republicans are patriotic ("Democrats can own that, too."). He also defied the fallacy that Democrats are weak on foreign policy ("We are the party of FDR and JFK, so don't tell us Democrats that we cannot defend the country…and restore the moral standing for all who fight for freedom."). And he did all this not so much with the soaring rhetoric of his earlier speeches, but with a tone of strength and defiance. He took the fight to John Mc Cain, promising to debate him not on petty issues but on who has the "judgment and the temperament" to be Commander-in-Chief. He thereby injected the question of McCain's short temper into the Fall campaign. The speech ended with an evocation of Martin Luther King's I have a dream speech delivered on this same day forty-five years ago at the Lincoln Memorial, and a pledge to once more "March forward together."Memories of the Democratic National Conventions and the momentum created by this brilliant speech were not, however, destined to linger for long in the American psyche. They were shattered by two events, one man-made, one natural. On Friday, August 29th, John McCain made an announcement that caused quite a stir in the media and public alike. He chose as his Vice president Mrs. Sarah Palin, the little-known first-term female governor of Alaska, a no exceptions pro-lifer who believes that Creationism should be taught in the schools alongside Evolution, and whose thin political résumé is startling to most observers. After they recovered from the initial shock, some pundits were able to articulate the intriguing yet-to be-answered question: was this the brilliant decision of a crafty tactician or the insane choice of an impulsive, overly ambitious politician? Is this a masterful stroke or a risky gamble? Only time will tell.That same day, Mrs. Palin had to share the limelight with Gustav, an impervious hurricane that was making its way toward the Gulf Coast at vertiginous speed and strength. Plans for the Republican National Convention to start on Monday had to be scrapped, while McCain and Palin made their way to Mississippi, turning this into an opportunity to distance themselves early on from Bush's fiasco during hurricane Katrina two years ago. Most Convention events were suspended for Monday and Tuesday and replaced by a bare-bones schedule of committee meetings, while the crucial events (vice-presidential speech and nomination vote) start this Wednesday and culminate Thursday with McCain's acceptance speech. This could turn out to be a blessing in disguise for Republicans. Courtesy of Gustav, now downgraded to a grade one hurricane, speeches by Bush and Cheney were cancelled. The President, who hastily made his way to New Orleans, may still speak for a short time via satellite on Wednesday, which will give him an opportunity to amend the terrible legacy of Katrina by replacing those images in the minds of the public with a much improved disaster relief response to Gustav.Palin is expected to give a good speech at the Convention. As a young political reformer who has fought corruption in her home state, she has energized the campaign. As a social conservative with deep convictions against abortion she has galvanized the conservative Evangelical base of the party. She is attractive and warm, and connects easily with the public, one of the few advantages of her political experience in Alaska, a sparsely populated state that requires extensive face-to-face contact with voters. An active hunter and life-long member of the NRA, she may be able to connect with the kind of independent blue-collar and rural voters that Obama has not been able to appeal to. But Palin has never been under the extreme national scrutiny that the next few months will bring, nor has she had to answer any unscripted questions about a wide variety of topics from the often vicious national press. Mc Cain picked her over men with extensive experience in economic matters (Mitt Romney) and in homeland security (Tom Ridge), both of whom had been extensively vetted. His choice of Palin as running mate is even more surprising if we consider that his main campaign theme against Obama was the latter's lack of executive experience. In contrast with Palin, Obama has had his trial-by-fire in the primary debates and through 18 months of campaigning. He has run against formidable candidates in the Primary, has been repeatedly tested by the media, and has emerged as the choice of Democratic voters. Palin, on the other hand, has one year of executive experience and a gaping lack of foreign policy knowledge. She is the choice of one man, John McCain, who has only met her twice. What will be the public's perception of Palin's credibility and readiness to step in as President should something happen to McCain? Did McCain, always the maverick, abdicate in his duty to the people by not choosing someone manifestly ready for the presidency? We may have some answers to these questions in a week or two.For those that expect Hillary's women to flock to the Republican side just because of McCain's Vice-presidential pick, think again. If there is one principle those women activists care about is the protection of the Roe v Wade Supreme Court decision, so they would be loath to vote for a strongly anti-abortion candidate such as Palin. Nevertheless, Obama does need to worry about the white blue-collar workers' vote. He has been consistently ahead in the polls but the margin has narrowed somewhat. He is now 6 percentage points ahead in the polls (47% to 41%) but so far has been unable to break the 50% barrier. Given the byzantine workings of the Electoral College in a presidential election, even a sliver of independents and Reagan democrats here and there (especially in Ohio, Pennsylvania and Michigan) can win this election for McCain. The long-awaited Autumn of Freedom would then become for many, the Winter of Discontent.Senior Lecturer, Department of Political Science and Geography Director, ODU Model United Nations Program Old Dominion University, Norfolk, Virginia
This case study summarizes the findings of desk reviews and a field visit carried out in January 2011 as part of IEG's evaluation of the 2007 Governance and Anticorruption (GAC) strategy. The case study sought to evaluate the relevance and effectiveness of Bank support for GAC efforts over the FY2004-10 period, to assess the contributions of 2007 strategy implementation, and to identify early outcomes and lessons. This Background Paper is based on findings of the mission that visited Liberia in January 2011. The team is particularly grateful for informative meetings with officials from the Government of Liberia, Bank staff, and members of civil society. The evaluation aims to help enhance the Bank's approach to governance and anticorruption and to improve its effectiveness in helping countries develop capable and accountable states that create opportunities for the poor. Pursuant to this objective, the evaluation assessed the relevance of the 2007 GAC strategy and implementation plan, as well as the efficiency and effectiveness of implementation efforts in making Bank engagement with countries and other development partners more responsive to GAC concerns. It also sought to identify early lessons about what works and what does not in helping to promote good governance and reduce corruption. The Liberia case study is based on an extensive desk review as well as a field visit to Monrovia from January 17-22, 2011. It evaluates the relevance and effectiveness of Bank support for governance and anticorruption efforts since the launch of the Bank's GAC strategy in 2007. It elaborates on a desk review of the GAC responsiveness of the Bank's Liberia program and reviews the following GAC entry points: core public sector reform (public financial management and decentralization); demand for good governance (including social accountability issues); GAC in the road sector; and the investment climate. The case study also examines the extent to which the Bank's GAC Strategy has made a difference in staff attitudes toward addressing GAC issues in their operational work. The mission interviewed government, Bank, donor, and nongovernmental organization (NGO) staff based in Washington and in Monrovia.
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It speaks volumes that the death of Henry Kissinger, announced on Wednesday, drew major news obituaries that rivaled those of late American presidents' in length and depth. The news was met with equal parts of vitriol and paeans across social media, the former reflected in words like "war criminal" and "monster," the latter, "genius" and "master."His intellectually-driven, hard-nosed statecraft and strategy has long been embraced by realists who appreciate Kissinger's rejection of ideological doctrine in favor of interest-driven realpolitik. They credit him with détente and managing the Soviet threat in the Cold War. His critics say his approach was responsible for government-led massacres in developing nations and Washington's scorched earth policies in Indochina. Humanity suffered while the "great game" was played, no matter how well, from the Nixon White House and in later presidencies (12 total) for which Kissinger advised.But was his impact on U.S. foreign policy ultimately positive or negative? We asked a wide range of historians, former diplomats, journalists and scholars to pick one and defend it.Andrew Bacevich, George Beebe, Tom Blanton, Michael Desch, Anton Fedyashin, Chas Freeman, John Allen Gay, David Hendrickson, Robert Hunter, Anatol Lieven, Stephen Miles, Tim Shorrock, Monica Duffy Toft, Stephen WaltAndrew Bacevich, historian and co-founder of the Quincy InstituteI met Kissinger just once, at a small gathering in New York back in the 1990s. When the event adjourned, he walked over to where I was sitting and spoke to me. "Did you serve in the military?" "Yes," I said. "In Vietnam?" "Yes." His tone filled with sadness, he said: "We really wanted to win that one."I did not reply but as he walked away, I thought: What an accomplished liar.George Beebe, Director of Grand Strategy, Quincy InstituteHenry Kissinger's impact on American foreign policy, although controversial, was on balance overwhelmingly positive. As he entered office in 1968, America was overextended abroad and beset by domestic political conflict. An increasingly powerful Soviet Union threatened to achieve superiority over America's nuclear and conventional arsenals. The United States needed to extract itself from Vietnam and focus on domestic healing, yet any retreat into isolationism would allow Moscow a free hand to intimidate Western Europe and spread communism through the post-colonial world. Kissinger's answer to this problem, conceived in partnership with President Nixon, was a masterwork of diplomatic realism. Seeing an opportunity to exploit tensions between Moscow and Beijing, he orchestrated a surprise opening to Maoist China that reshaped the international order, counterbalancing Soviet power and complicating the Kremlin's strategic challenge. In parallel, the United States pursued détente with Moscow, producing a landmark set of trade, arms control, human rights, and confidence-building arrangements that helped to constrain the arms race and make the Cold War more manageable and predictable.By comparison to 1968, the scale of the problems we face today seems more daunting. The Cold War architecture of arms control and security arrangements is in tatters. Our middle class is more distrustful and disaffected, our international reputation more damaged, and our ability to manage the challenges of a peer Chinese rival more limited. A statesman with Kissinger's strategic acumen and diplomatic skill is very much needed. Tom Blanton, Director, National Security Archive, George Washington UniversityThe declassified legacy of Henry Kissinger undermines the triumphant narrative he labored so hard to build, even for his successes. The opening to China, for example, turns out to be Mao's idea with Nixon's receptiveness, initially dissed by Kissinger. His shuttle diplomacy in the Middle East did reduce violence but it took Anwar Sadat and then Jimmy Carter to make the peace that Kissinger failed to accomplish. The 1973 Vietnam settlement was actually available in 1969, but Kissinger mistakenly believed he could do better by going through Moscow or Beijing. Meanwhile, Kissinger's callousness about the human cost runs through all the documents. Millions of Bangladeshis murdered by Pakistan's genocide while Kissinger stifled dissent in the State Department. A million Vietnamese and 20,000 Americans who died for Kissinger's "decent interval." Some 30,000 Argentines disappeared by the junta with Kissinger's green light. Thousands of Chileans killed by Pinochet while Kissinger joked about human rights. Untold numbers of Cambodians dead under Kissinger's secret bombing.Adding insult to all these injuries, Kissinger cashed in over the past 45 years through sustained influence peddling and self-promotion, paying no price for repeated bad judgments like opposing the Reagan-Gorbachev arms cuts, and supporting the 2003 Iraq invasion. A dark legacy indeed.Michael Desch, Professor of International Relations at the University of Notre Dame Almost all of the obituaries for Henry Kissinger characterize him as the quintessential realist, harkening back to a bygone era of European great power politics in which statesmen played the 19th century version of the board game Risk otherwise known as the balance of power. Kissinger seemed straight out of central casting for this role with his deep, sonorous voice and perpetual Mittel-Europa accent. All that was missing was a monocle and a Pickelhaube. But in reality, Kissinger was at best an occasional realist. His best scholarly book — "A World Restored: Metternich, Castlereagh and the Problems of Peace 1812-22" — came out in 1957 and was more of a work of history than an articulation of a larger realpolitik theory of global politics in which power is used, and more importantly not used, to advance a country's national interest.And while his (and Richard Nixon's) opening to the People's Republic of China in 1972 remains a masterstroke of balance of power politics in action, at the drop of an egg-roll dividing the heretofore seemingly monolithic Communist Bloc, he was more often an inconstant realist.At times Kissinger embraced a crude might-makes-right approach (think of the Athenians bullying of the Melians in Book V of Thucydides) epitomized by the escalation to deescalate the war in Vietnam by invading Cambodia and the meddling in the fractious politics of Third World countries like Chile, seemingly to no other end than that's what great powers do. More recently, he's worked to remain the indispensable statesman through an embarrassingly obsequious pattern of making himself indispensable to nearly every subsequent president, whether or not they were really interested in sitting at the knee of the master realpolitiker. His hedged endorsement of George W. Bush's disastrous Iraq war is exhibit A on this score.Kissinger kept himself in the limelight for much of his career but not as a consistent voice of realism in foreign policy.Anton Fedyashin, associate professor of history, American UniversityIn his long and distinguished career, Henry Kissinger made many decisions that history may judge harshly, but oversimplifying and exaggerating complex geopolitical issues was not one of them. With their instinctive aversion to the trap of conceptual binarism, Kissinger and Nixon applied their flexible realism to China and the USSR in 1972. Abandoning the assumption that all communists were evil forced Beijing and Moscow to outbid each other for U.S. favors. Treating the USSR as a post-revolutionary state that put national interests above ideology, Nixon and Kissinger decided to bring the Soviets into the American-managed world order while letting them keep their hegemony in Eastern Europe.In Kissinger's realist version of containment, statesmanship was judged by the management of ambiguities, not absolutes. As Kissinger put it in an interview with The Economist earlier this year, "The genius of the Westphalian system and the reason it spread across the world was that its provisions were procedural, not substantive." Kissinger's realist wisdom would serve American leaders well as they navigate the rough waters of transitioning to a multipolar world order. The era of great power balancing is back, and non-binarist realism can help Washington manage hegemonic decline rather than catalyzing it.Ambassador Chas Freeman, visiting scholar at Brown University's Watson Institute for International and Public AffairsKissinger embodied a global and strategic view and because it was global, it often offended specialists in regional affairs. Because it was strategic, he often made tactical sacrifices for strategic gain. And the tactical sacrifices that he made were often rather ugly at the regional or local level. The classic example of that is the refusal to intervene in the war in Bangladesh. Obviously, he had nothing but contempt for ideological foreign policy. This has led ideologues, of which we have an abundance, to see him as an enemy, and you're seeing this now with some of the coverage after his passing.Kissinger's achievement of detente at a crucial point in the Cold War will be remembered for its brilliance, as will his significant scholarship. His statecraft and scholarship were inseparable. He was a very good negotiator and probably had more experience negotiating great power relations than any secretary of state since early in the Republic. He was moderately successful in the short term. He was not successful in the long term because his interlocutors correctly perceived that he was manipulative. If one wishes to keep relationships open to future transactions, one must not cheat on current transactions. But this problem is not uncommon. It's very typical in American politics. For example, Jim Baker was famously uninterested in nurturing relationships. He was interested in immediate results in his dealings with foreign governments. He left a lot of anger and dissatisfaction in his wake. Kissinger less so, but the same for different reasons, reflecting his personality, his character, and the character of the president he served.John Allen Gay, Executive Director, John Quincy Adams SocietyKissinger's legacy in the Third World commands the most attention and criticism. He has been made the face of the tremendous toll the Cold War took on the wretched of the earth. Yet his work on great power relations deserves more regard. The opening to China he engineered with President Richard Nixon was a masterstroke to exploit division in the Communist world. Granted, the Sino-Soviet split had happened long before, and the opening was more a Nixon idea, but Kissinger set the table. And Kissinger was also a central figure in détente with the Soviet Union.Both policies were deeply unpopular with the forerunners to the neoconservative movement, but reflected the Continental realist mindset that Kissinger, along with thinkers like Hans J. Morgenthau, brought into the American foreign policy discourse. The opening to China and détente were, in fact, linked. As Kissinger pointed out, the opening to China challenged the Soviet Union to prevent the opening from growing; contrary to the advice of Sovietologists, this did not prompt new Soviet aggression, but made the Soviets more pliable. As Kissinger wrote in his 1994 book "Diplomacy" — "To the extent both China and the Soviet Union calculated that they either needed American goodwill or feared an American move toward its adversary, both had an incentive to improve their relations with Washington. […] America's bargaining position would be strongest when America was closer to bot communist giants than either was to the other." And so it was. Today's practitioners of great-power politics would do well to borrow more from this happier part of Kissinger's legacy. They have instead helped drive China, Russia, Iran, and North Korea together, and have no answer to this emerging alignment beyond lectures and sanctions. The19th century European statesmen Kissinger admired would have seen the failure of such a policy. David Hendrickson, author, "Republic in Peril: American Empire and the Liberal Tradition"The great oddity of Nixon and Kissinger's record in foreign policy is that they gave up as unprofitable and dangerous the pursuit of ideological antagonism with the Great Powers (the Soviet Union and China), but then pursued the Cold War crusade with a vengeance against small powers. Kissinger's diplomatic career reminds me of the charge that Hauterive (a favorite of Napoleon's) brought against the confusions of the ancien regime, that it applied "the terms sound policy, system of equilibrium, maintenance or restoration of the balance of power . . . to what, in fact was only an abuse of power, or the exercise of arbitrary will."Parts of Kissinger's record, like the bombing of Cambodia, are indefensible, but there are good parts too: had Henry the K been in charge of our Russia policy over the last decade, we could have avoided the conflagration in Ukraine. He was sounder on China and Taiwan than 90 percent of the howling commentariat. He was, in addition, a serious scholar who wrote some good books about the construction of world order (A World Restored, Diplomacy). Young people should take his thought seriously, not consign him to the ninth circle.Robert Hunter, former U.S. Ambassador to NATOLike all outstanding teachers, Henry Kissinger was also a showman — and he could be fun. He used his accent and self-deprecating humor as weapons for his policies and getting them taken seriously. Journalists might at times scorn what he was doing and how he did it, but they were still charmed and tended so often to give him the benefit of the doubt — as well as the credit, even when not deserved. Everyone recalls his roles in promoting détente with the Soviet Union and, even more, the opening to China, with Richard Nixon following in his wake. In fact, both policies sprang from Nixon's mind. But when the dust settled, Kissinger was the Last Man Standing."Henry," we could call him who never worked for him (!), made intelligent and literate speeches on foreign policy that everyone could understand, bringing it into the limelight. A man of great ego, he still recruited and inspired talented acolytes at the State Department and White House — matched only by Brent Scowcroft and Zbig Brzezinski. He had other policy positives in the Middle East ("shuttle diplomacy") but major negatives in Chile, in prolonging the Vietnam War, and bombing Cambodia.Take him altogether, a true Man of History.Anatol Lieven, Director of the Eurasia Program at the Quincy InstituteThe problem about any just assessment of Henry Kissinger is that the good and bad parts of his record are organically linked. His Realism led him to an awareness of the vital interests of other countries, a willingness to compromise, and a prudence in the exercise of U.S. power that all too many American policymakers have altogether lacked and that the United States today desperately needs. This Realist acceptance of the world as it is however also contributed to a cynical disregard for basic moral norms — notably in Cambodia and Bangladesh — that have forever tarnished his and America's name.When in office, reconciliation with China and the pursuit of Middle East peace took real moral courage on Kissinger's part, given the forces arrayed against these policies in the United States. But in his last decades, though he initially criticized NATO expansion and called for the preservation of relations with Russia and China, he never did so with the intellectual and moral force of a George Kennan.Perhaps in the end the best comment on Kissinger comes from an epithet by his fellow German Jewish thinker on international affairs Hans Morgenthau: "It is a dangerous thing to be a Machiavelli. It is a disastrous thing to be a Machiavelli without Virtu" — an Italian term embracing courage, moral steadfastness and basic principle.Stephen Miles, President, Win Without WarNearly as many words have been spilled marking the end of Henry Kissinger's life as the lives he's responsible for ending, but let me add a few more. It would be easy to simply say that the devastating impact of Kissinger on U.S. foreign policy was clearly and wholly negative. As Spencer Ackerman noted in his essential obituary, few Americans, if any, have ever been as responsible for the death of so many of their fellow human beings. But Kissinger's true impact was not just in being a war criminal but in setting a new standard for doing so with impunity. Earlier this year, he was feted with a party for his 100th birthday attended not just by crusty old Cold Warriors remembering 'the good ole days,' but also by a veritable who's who of today's elite from billionaire CEOs and cabinet members to fashion megastars and NFL team owners. Sure, he may have been responsible for a coup here or a genocide there, but shouldn't we all just look past that and recognize his influence, power, and intellect? Does it really matter what he used those talents for?And in the end, that's the benefit of Kissinger's horrific life and decidedly not-untimely death. By never making amends for the harm he did and never being held accountable for the horrors he caused, he made clear just how truly broken and flawed U.S. foreign policy is. Perhaps now that he has finally left the stage, we can begin to change that. Tim Shorrock, Washington-based journalistKissinger nearly destroyed three Asian countries by causing the deaths of thousands in U.S. bombing raids, covertly intervened to subvert democracy in Chile, and encouraged an Indonesian dictator to invade newly independent East Timor and inflict a genocide upon its people. These were criminal acts that should have made him a pariah. Instead, he is lauded as a visionary by our ruling elite. And it was mostly accomplished through lies and deceit, in the name of corporate profit.I'll never forget in 1972 watching Kissinger declare "peace is at hand" in Vietnam. After years of protesting this immoral war, I truly thought that Vietnam's suffering, and my own countrymen's, was finally over; they had won and we had lost. But my hope was shattered that Christmas, when Kissinger and Nixon ordered B-52s to carpet-bomb Hanoi in an arrogant act of defiance and malice. Afterwards, a shaky peace agreement was signed that could have sparked an honorable U.S. withdrawal. But it took 3 more years of bloodshed before the United States was forced out.Kissinger broke my trust in America as a just nation and overseas sparked a deep hatred of U.S. foreign policy. Few statesmen have caused such harm.Monica Duffy Toft, Professor of International Politics and Director, Center for Strategic Studies, Fletcher School, Tufts UniversityI have a pair of midcentury teak chairs once belonging to the late eminent scholar Samuel P. Huntington in my office. Sam was a colleague and friend of Henry Kissinger's, and a mentor to me. Sam and I sat in these chairs discussing world politics and the everyday challenges of running a scholarly institute. When a new set of chairs arrived, Sam insisted I take the old ones, but not before emphasizing their significance — reminders of the hours he and Kissinger spent in deep debate and casual banter. These chairs have history.Henry Kissinger was, and shall remain, a controversial figure. His gifts were two. First, across decades of U.S. foreign policy challenges, he remained consistent in his conception of power, and how U.S. power should be used to enhance the security of the United States. Second, he was gifted at assembling, mentoring, and deploying cross-cutting networks of influential people. Like many of my colleagues who study international politics, there are policies — his support of Salvador Allende's ouster in Chile, for example — I find odious. I am also uncomfortable with Kissinger's elitism: his preferred policies favored those with wealth and political power at the expense of those without.But what I admire about Kissinger's U.S. foreign policy legacy and, by extension, international politics, was his profound grasp of the importance of historical context: a thing as important to sound U.S foreign policy today as it is rare; and of which I am pleasantly reminded every time I sit in one of Sam's chairs.Stephen Walt, Quincy Institute board member, professor of international affairs at the Harvard Kennedy SchoolHenry Kissinger was the most prominent U.S. statesman of his era, and that era lasted a very long time. His main achievements were not trivial: a long-overdue opening to China, some high-wire "shuttle diplomacy" after the 1973 October War, and several useful arms control treaties during the period of détente. But he was also guilty of some monumental misjudgments, including prolonging the Vietnam War to no good purpose and expanding it into Cambodia at a frightful human cost. His diplomatic acrobatics in the Middle East were impressive, but they were only necessary because he had missed the signs that Egypt was readying for war in 1973 in order to break a diplomatic deadlock that he had helped orchestrate. His indifference to human rights and civilian suffering sacrificed thousands of lives and made a mockery of U.S. pretensions to moral superiority.Kissinger owed his enduring influence not to a superior track record as a pundit or sage but to his own energy, unquenchable ambition, unparalleled networking skills, and the elite's reluctance to hold its members accountable. After all, this is a man who downplayed the risks of China's rise (while earning fat consulting fees there), backed the disastrous invasion of Iraq in 2003, opposed the 2015 nuclear deal with Iran, and dismissed warnings that open-ended NATO enlargement would make Europe less rather than more secure. Kissinger also perfected the art of transmuting government service into a lucrative consulting career, setting a troubling precedent for others. Debates about his legacy will no doubt continue, but one suspects that the reverence that his acolytes exhibit today will gradually fade now that he is no longer here to sustain it.Dear RS readers: It has been an extraordinary year and our editing team has been working overtime to make sure that we are covering the current conflicts with quality, fresh analysis that doesn't cleave to the mainstream orthodoxy or take official Washington and the commentariat at face value. Our staff reporters, experts, and outside writers offer top-notch, independent work, daily. Please consider making a tax-exempt, year-end contribution to Responsible Statecraft so that we can continue this quality coverage — which you will find nowhere else — into 2024. Happy Holidays!
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Six years after former President Donald Trump's withdrawal from the Iran nuclear deal, the disastrous consequences of this decision are still adding up. In addition to Iran being closer than ever to a nuclear weapons capability, now we must consider how the declining security situation in the Middle East has raised the stakes significantly. Trump promised a "better deal" but instead we got an increasingly costly blunder that may be impossible to fix.To fully understand the enormity of Trump's decision to leave the Iran deal, consider this: When the U.S. and Iran were complying with the deal, it was estimated that it would take Iran about one year to produce enough fissile material (in this case, weapons grade uranium) for a nuclear bomb (known as the "breakout" time). The states negotiating with Iran (the United States, Russia, China, Great Britain, France, and Germany) assessed that this would be enough time to respond to possible violations and prevent Iran from producing a bomb. Even if Iran were to acquire sufficient fissile material, it could still take another year for Iran to make a deliverable nuclear weapon. As of May, 2018, the deal was working and considered (by most) to be a great success.Then President Trump unilaterally left the deal, calling it a "horrible one-sided deal that should have never, ever been made." And now we are in a much worse place. Iran says it has no intent to produce nuclear weapons and U.S. intelligence sees no current efforts by Tehran to weaponize, yet Tehran is believed to be not one year but just weeks from being able to produce enough fissile material for a bomb if it chooses to do so. At the same time, the ability of international inspectors to detect violations in a timely manner has eroded. As one U.S. official said of Iran, "they are dancing right up to the edge."Worse still, relations between the United States and Iran have been so damaged by Trump's withdrawal that it does not appear as though the deal can be resurrected. Any efforts to stabilize the U.S.-Iran relationship have been severely complicated by the recent exchange of direct attacks between Israel and Iran. Just as we need a non-military approach more than ever, the prospects for a diplomatic solution appear distant. What's worse is that increasing tensions may be pushing Tehran closer to a political decision to go nuclear. The danger of an Iranian bomb and the related risk that Israel could attack Iran's nuclear sites could lead to wider military conflict in the region. Of course, it did not have to be this way. The deal was working until Trump abandoned it and, if he had not, it could still be working today.How did we get here?To comply with the Iran deal, officially known as the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action or JCPOA, Tehran agreed to significantly limit its nuclear program. Under the deal:Iran agreed to reduce its stockpile of low-enriched uranium by 98% to 300kg and limit uranium enrichment to 3.67%, suitable for civilian nuclear power but well below highly enriched (20%) or weapons grade (90%). Those limits would have lasted for 15 years.Tehran limited the number of uranium centrifuges in operation by two-thirds and committed not to build any new enrichment facilities for 15 years. The Fordow enrichment plant (designed as a secret, underground facility) was prohibited from enriching uranium, and limited enrichment could take place only at the Natanz facility.Iran agreed to redesign another nuclear facility to produce much less plutonium and its spent fuel would be shipped out of country. Iran agreed to provisionally implement additional safeguards under the auspices of the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA).A year after President Trump's withdrawal, Iran began to retaliate by incrementally breaching the terms of the deal. Tehran lifted the cap on its uranium stockpile, increased enrichment beyond the allowed 3.67% and resumed and expanded activity at prohibited nuclear facilities.Many of Iran's advances were taken in response to provocative actions from the U.S. and Israel. In early 2020, the Trump administration killed Iranian Major General Qassem Soleimani, leader of the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps, and soon after Tehran announced that it would no longer abide by its enrichment commitments under the deal. But, even so, Tehran said it would return to compliance if the other parties did so and met their commitments on sanctions relief.In late 2020, Iranian nuclear scientist Mohsen Fakhrizadeh was assassinated near Tehran, reportedly by Israel. Soon after, Iran's Guardian Council approved a law to speed up the nuclear program by enriching uranium to 20%, increasing the rate of production, installing new centrifuges, suspending implementation of expanded safeguards agreements, and reducing monitoring and verification cooperation with the IAEA. The Agency has been unable to adequately monitor Iran's nuclear activities under the deal since early 2021.Iran began enriching uranium to 20% in early 2021 at Fordow and then to 60% at Natanz a few months later after an act of sabotage damaged Natanz. Since then, Iran has been steadily increasing the rate of enriched uranium production. The latest IAEA report (February 2024) estimates Iran's enriched uranium stockpile to stand at 5,525kg, more than 27 times the level permitted under the deal, with 833kg enriched to 20-60%.How close to a bomb?Iran is steadily advancing its nuclear program, getting ever closer to becoming a "threshold state" with the ability to make a weapon while making no overt move to build one.The U.S. government estimated in March 2022 that Iran would need as little as one week to produce enough weapons-grade uranium for one nuclear weapon, according to a State Department official. During a March 2023 congressional hearing, then-Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff Mark Milley testified that Iran could produce this amount of enriched uranium "in approximately 10-15 days."In its 2024 annual threat assessment, the U.S. Office of the Director of National Intelligence concluded that "Tehran has the infrastructure and experience to quickly produce weapons-grade uranium, if it chooses to do so."And in March 2024, France, Germany, and the UK estimated that Iran had acquired enough highly enriched uranium that, if enriched further to 90%, would theoretically be enough for three nuclear explosive devices.There is greater uncertainty about how long it would take Iran to build a nuclear weapon once it has the required weapons-grade uranium. Such steps, referred to as "weaponization," include producing uranium metal and shaping it into bomb parts, producing high explosives and electronics, and fitting it all into a device that could be used for a demonstration test. It would presumably take longer to produce a bomb that could be delivered by aircraft or a warhead small enough to fit onto a ballistic missile.According to official U.S. assessments, Iran halted its nuclear weapons program in late 2003 and has not resumed it. Reportedly, this program's goal, according to U.S. officials and the IAEA, was to develop an implosion-style nuclear weapon for Iran's Shahab-3 ballistic missile. A State Department official stated in April 2022 that Iran would need approximately one year to complete the necessary weaponization steps.We cannot put Humpty Dumpty back together againMuch of Iran's uranium activities can be reversed; centrifuges can be disassembled, facilities can be closed, and uranium stocks can be blended down or shipped out of the country, as was done under the terms of the original deal. However, after years of operating more sophisticated centrifuges, Iran has acquired technical knowledge that cannot be undone.But more importantly, we have lost the political opportunity to reach a comprehensive deal with Iran. The Iran nuclear deal would not have been possible without the active support of Russia and China. Yet these countries are no longer aligned with the West on these issues and Iran is actively supporting Russia in its war with Ukraine and selling oil to China. Iran does not need sanctions relief from the United States as much as it once did.It was often said that although the Iran deal did not solve all the problems in the U.S.-Iran relationship, it solved an important one by taking an Iranian nuclear bomb out of the equation. That even if the myriad problems in the Middle East continued, at least we would not be facing those challenges and Iran on the nuclear threshold. And now that is exactly where we are.The lessons of this tragic tale are clear: a meaningful nuclear agreement is much harder to create than to destroy; if we are lucky enough to get one it should be protected; and if we lose it, we should try to replace it.The Iran deal was a truly remarkable achievement, and we would be much better off today if the United States had rejected the fantasy of a "better deal" and remained in compliance with the one we had. Trump's decision (aided by then-Secretary of State Mike Pompeo and then-national security adviser John Bolton) to walk away was an historic and utter failure. Now, the prospects of finding a new diplomatic solution to the Iran nuclear crisis are daunting. But we must try; the alternatives are worse.
On 28 June 2019, the Southern Common Market (MERCOSUR) and the European Union (EU) concluded the negotiations on the trade chapter of the Association Agreement that both blocs had been working on for twenty years. The conclusion of the negotiations, announced at the G20 summit in Osaka, surprised everyone. They had begun in 1999 but were interrupted (and subsequently retaken) on several occasions due to differences in key issues such as agriculture, services and government procurement. Although a trade agreement was reached in June 2019, we should note that this does not mean the end of the process, as ratification by the parties and entry into force is still pending. At the time of the conclusion of the "agreement in principle", the EU faced the consequences of a multiplicity of overlapping crises and concentrated its foreign policy mainly on its eastern and southern neighbors, while the South American bloc had diverted its external relations to Asia. When everything suggested that MERCOSUR and Europe were drifting apart, they managed to reach the agreement. What were the determining factors for this outcome? The explanation of why countries decide to close a trade agreement leads to a diversity of factors. In the case of the agreement between MERCOSUR and the EU, it was exhibited as an instrument for market access, and as an opportunity to increase the well-being and efficiency of different economic sectors. From the strategic and geopolitical point of view, the agreement was presented as a milestone for the preservation of the international liberal order. With regard to the identity element, the agreement contributes to the consolidation of a bi-regional common identity around a set of shared values. The MERCOSUR-EU agreement, then, does not allow a single appraisal, but it can be elucidated by the presence of at least three kinds of explanatory factors: economic, strategic and geopolitical, and also ideational. A large and growing body of literature on international cooperation, economic integration and inter-regionalism has investigated the selected factors. Liberal intergovernmentalists and international political economy scholars have studied the interaction between economic and geopolitical interests. In the economic integration process, according to these approaches, economic interests take precedence. However, they recognize that in cases where economic interests are indeterminate or diffuse, other objectives might be relevant (such as geopolitical, strategic and, we will add, ideational). In this study, we analyze how these three factors have been present to account for the agreement reached and what their implications are. The aim of this research, then, is to investigate the factors that explain the conclusion of the agreement between MERCOSUR and the European Union, in June 2019, after twenty years of negotiations. Similarly, it attempts to examine whether any of these factors have an impact on the strategic uses that the parties make of the negotiated agreement and its (possible) ratification. Our hypothesis is that the conclusion of a deal between MERCOSUR and the EU is a multi-causal process involving simultaneously three types of factors: economic and trade material interests, strategic and geopolitical interaction, and bi-regional identity. The convergence of factors implies that the trade-off that allowed the agreement to be reached is multivariate, which does not suggest that it is necessarily harmonious. Each of these factors contributes to giving a different meaning or perspective, making available different strategic uses of the agreement by the countries involved. These different uses and meanings attributed to the negotiated agreement on the basis of the factors involved may also affect the dynamics of the ratification process. In methodological terms, the article follows the logic of a qualitative case study. The study is longitudinal, seeking to understand the conclusion of the negotiations while still considering the phenomenon over time. The techniques of data collection and analysis were qualitative, relying on the review of official documents, statements and speeches of the various actors involved, as well as on secondary statistical and bibliographic sources. The study shows that multi-causal analyses with eclectic conceptual frameworks have advantages, in a context where international trade negotiations are becoming more complex and where trade has ceased to be a low agenda issue. Therefore, the research carried out makes it possible to shed light on the tensions underlying the signing of the agreement, which also appear in the ratification process. Moreover, it shows that different actors' viewpoints and motivations coexist regarding the same international policy event –the trade agreement–. This study provides support for our initial argument. On the economic and commercial dimensions, the parties involved managed to bring their positions closer on the most sensitive issues, which –until then– appeared as insurmountable differences. While the structural characteristics of trade and investment did not change and nor did the trade preferences of the sectors, there was a change in the political dimension of these elements. From this perspective, the ratification of the agreement is imperative, but it is precisely because of the sensitivities involved that a higher level of politicization is expected. Geopolitics has also played a relevant role, especially in the strategic use of the announcement of the agreement at the Osaka Summit. Thus, it was presented as a milestone for the preservation of the international liberal order, in contrast to the dynamics of the Sino-American trade war. This strategic game, however, is satisfied with the mere announcement of the arrangement and the geopolitical variable does not generate the same incentives for ratification as it did for the conclusion of the negotiations. Finally, the explanation based on the identity element is constructed from inter-regionalism and makes it possible to argue that the agreement between MERCOSUR and the European Union represents a milestone in the consolidation of a common identity around a set of shared values. However, these are a precondition for the agreement to take place, and do not fully explain the 2019 outcome. Putting these three variables into dialogue has proved indispensable to apprehend the complexity of a long-standing process, and the implications of an eventual ratification. These findings, however, raise new questions. Future work could enrich the study of the MERCOSUR-EU agreement, including the challenges of politicization. Also, since the study suggests a link between the three explanatory factors and the uses of the trade agreement, in future investigations it might be possible to undertake comparative studies between different processes of international trade negotiations. The article has been organised in the following way. After the introduction, the paper goes on to present the definitions related to the conceptual framework and research design. In the first section we focus on the hypothesis regarding material economic and commercial interests. The second section evaluates the geopolitical and strategic variable. The third section presents the characteristics and implications of the interregional link. Finally, we present the conclusions of the investigation. ; El objetivo de este trabajo es dilucidar cuáles fueron los factores que permiten explicar la conclusión del acuerdo entre MERCOSUR y la Unión Europea, en junio de 2019, tras 20 años de negociaciones. De igual manera, propone indagar en si el predominio de alguno de dichos factores ha generado efectos sobre los usos estratégicos que las partes hacen del acuerdo negociado y su (posible) ratificación. Se postula una explicación tripartita y multicausal conforme a la cual el acuerdo MERCOSUR-Unión Europea fue posibilitado por tres tipos de factores: los intereses materiales económicos y comerciales, la interacción estratégica y geopolítica, y la identidad birregional. Esta convergencia de factores implica que el trade-off que permitió llegar al acuerdo es multivariado pero no implica que sea necesariamente armónico. Así, se sugiere que según sea el elemento privilegiado por las partes involucradas, el acuerdo adquiere distintos significados y diferentes perspectivas de ratificación. El acuerdo ha sido presentado como un instrumento para el acceso a los mercados; como una oportunidad para incrementar el bienestar y eficiencia de los distintos sectores económicos. Desde lo estratégico y geopolítico, como un hito para la conservación del orden liberal internacional. En tanto que el elemento identitario permite sostener que el acuerdo entre MERCOSUR y la Unión Europea contribuye a la consolidación de una identidad común en torno a un conjunto de valores compartidos. El trabajo presenta un diseño metodológico cualitativo, basando en el análisis documental. El debate presentado se inscribe en la discusión de los determinantes del regionalismo y la cooperación en materia de integración regional dentro de la disciplina de las Relaciones Internacionales. El trabajo pone de manifiesto que, en un contexto donde las negociaciones comerciales internacionales son cada vez más complejas y donde la variable comercial ha dejado de ser un tema de low agenda, un análisis multicausal con marcos conceptuales eclécticos presenta ventajas. Con este abordaje, la investigación realizada permite echar luz sobre las tensiones subyacentes al momento de la firma del acuerdo, y que comienzan a manifestarse en el proceso de ratificación. Muestra también que sobre un mismo hecho de la política internacional –el acuerdo comercial– coexisten distintas miradas y motivaciones por parte de los actores involucrados. El artículo se organiza de la siguiente manera: luego de la introducción presentamos las definiciones relativas a nuestro marco teórico y encuadre metodológico. En el primer apartado nos centramos en la hipótesis concerniente a los intereses materiales económicos y comerciales. El segundo apartado, toma, por su parte, la de la variable geopolítica y estratégica. La tercera sección expone las características e implicancias del vínculo interregional. Finalmente, se presentan las conclusiones de la investigación.
The article pursues two objectives: a) to comparatively trace the debates on the relationship between armed conflicts or direct violence and situations of stress / water shortage or distributive confrontations (resources or shared basins, for example) surrounding water, and in doing so add to the systematization of recent approaches; and b) based on the results of the aforementioned, propose new tools for the analysis and intervention in these conflicts, taking advantage, by way of example and not of detailed analysis, of ten current and heterogeneous cases of distributive conflicts over water. This issue became popular in the nineties of the twentieth century with striking statements that proclaimed: "the next wars would not be for oil or mineral resources but for access to drinking water." In this sense, the current paper focuses on examining the debate between 1985 and 1995, where the dominant issue was on whether water scarcity or water competition could be a direct causal factor of violent conflicts, or if it was simply a multiplier or accelerating factor linked to other causes. These contributions, while previously dominated by the omnipresence of approaches and texts based on security studies and the then so called "ecological security", are now based on contributions from studies of the analysis, resolution and transformation of conflicts. Meanwhile, new epistemological reflections respectful of cultural and gender bias are also present, along with non-western-centric approaches. Thirty years after the end of the Cold War, factual changes, new narratives, and novel guidelines for analysis have urged scholars to revisit the debate on the present and future relationships between armed conflict -or direct violence- and the scarcity or competition for water resources. I have just mentioned factual changes, among which I will highlight the following: significant ongoing changes in geopolitics and geo-economics; changes in the location and nature of direct violence, given that 80% of homicide deaths in the world are not related to direct violence of a clearly political nature (that is, armed conflict and terrorism), something that is linked with the strong growth of private security actors (legal and illegal) and a partial loss of the state's monopoly on the massive instruments of violence; ongoing mutations in the nature and spread of power; a progressive de-westernization of the international system and of the ways of analyzing it (international theory); the emergence of climate change and the climate emergency agenda and, in addition, the pandemics linked to recurrent zoonosis processes; and, to close this list, and returning to the topic being studies in this issue of the journal, the central position that water occupies in the 2030 agenda and in the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs). Hence, we need new tools that allow us to analyze and better understand these conflicts related to water, in general, and also their occurrences in the major geopolitical areas of the world in the coming decades (Asia, Africa, Latin America and the Caribbean). Regarding the new narratives and analysis guidelines, the paper focuses on the new approaches in the area of analysis, resolution and transformation of conflicts that have emerged from the consensus on liberal peace, along with contributions from political ecology specialized in distributive environmental conflicts and environmental justice. Taking into account these new epistemological reflections, including those related to identity, is important as it allows one to focus on causality, and the tools that facilitate its analysis In addition to its introduction and conclusions, this article has three sections. The first establishes a factual starting point, summarizing the data related to fresh drinking water. Through a succinct description of ten conflicts, both intra and international, and from various continents and regions, this establishes a central thesis: the most significant conflict causation factor is not so much the lack of water, but the management and governance of water in general and its shortages. Secondly, it summarizes the analysis and the results of the debate on water conflicts, in particular on the causation links between water use and scarcity and direct violence from the late 1980s to the mid-1990s of the last century. The third section presents new perspectives, based not on security studies or ecological security, as before, but on the consolidated works of peace research, and studies on conflict analysis and transformation. Specifically, the main contributions and findings are displayed, and, also, a seminal framework to apply them to water conflicts, through three assumptions and seven theses. Finally, the conclusions insist on the need to treat these conflicts as social conflicts, showing that their specificity is linked to the management and governance of the resource rather than the scarcity itself. In the concluding remarks, the paper highlights that the most pertinent features of any analysis and intervention in environmental conflicts, especially those that are persistent and difficult to resolve (what American literature usually calls "intractable" conflicts) do not reside in the adjective "environmental", or "hydric", as the mainstream suggested in the first half of the 1990s. What is really meaningful is that they are social conflicts, basically distributive conflicts, and linked to the search for fairer solutions; that is, related to the allocation, use and / or management of environmental goods. The specificity provided by the adjective "environmental" or "hydric" exists, of course, beyond its growing importance for the contextual reasons already mentioned -such as demographic pressure, climate change or pollution and destruction of resources. However, this does not justify a differentiated treatment for these conflicts, as was the case previously. They are social conflicts, and therefore marked by cultural and contextual differences. Therefore, this means that they must be analyzed and intervened upon, in order to manage, resolve and transform them, with the same tools and techniques used for all the social distributive conflicts. We can call them "environmental", or "hydric" if that is the case, but only if this means that we do not stop dealing with them as social conflicts. And moreover, we must not forget that like most of these conflicts, it is necessary to apply "analytical filters" to them based on knowledge of the logic of collective action, public goods and collective goods Finally, the paper argues that these conflicts and the new analytical and resolutions framework force us to modify the famous formula of "thinking globally, acting locally". Today, to tackle them, you also have to think in a multidimensional way, and, in many cases, act globally. In doing so, the paper emphasizes the governance and governance challenges that need to be addressed. ; El artículo busca dos objetivos: a) exponer, en clave comparativa y treinta años más tarde del momento inicial y candente, los debates sobre la relación entre conflictos armados o violencia directa y situaciones de estrés/ carencia hídrica o enfrentamientos distributivos (recursos o cuencas compartidas, por ejemplo) por el agua. Al hacerlo, se añadirán a la sistematización los nuevos y más recientes enfoques; y b) a partir de los resultados del punto anterior, proponer nuevas herramientas para el análisis y la intervención en dichos conflictos, aprovechando, a modo de ejemplo y no de análisis detallado, diez casos heterogéneos activos en el presente de conflictos distributivos con el agua como incompatibilidad crucial. Los temas mencionados se popularizaron en los años noventa del siglo XX con afirmaciones impactantes que sostenían que "las próximas guerras no serían por petróleo o recursos minerales sino por el acceso al agua potable". En ese sentido, la comparación se centra en examinar el debate entre 1985 y 1995, donde el tema dominante fue si la escasez/concurrencia por el agua podía o no ser factor causal directo de conflictos violentos o si era simplemente un factor multiplicador o acelerador vinculado a otras causas, con las aportaciones y enfoques actuales. Estas aportaciones, frente a la omnipresencia en los años noventa de enfoques y textos basados en estudios de seguridad y la entonces llamada "seguridad ecológica", se centran actualmente en las herramientas que proporcionan los estudios sobre análisis, resolución y transformación de conflictos y en nuevas reflexiones epistemológicas respetuosas del sesgo cultural y de género y no occidentalocéntricas. El texto, además de introducción y conclusiones, tiene tres apartados. El primero establece un punto de partida fáctico, resumiendo los datos relativos al agua dulce y potable, para establecer, mediante una sucinta descripción de diez conflictos, internos e internacionales, de varios continentes, una tesis central: la conflictividad más caliente, incluyendo conductas violentas, no es tanto por la carencia de agua en sí, sino por la gestión y gobernanza del agua, en general y en casos de escases de la misma. En segundo lugar, se resume las claves analíticas y los resultados del debate sobre los conflictos hídricos, en particular sobre los vínculos entre uso y escasez de agua y violencia directa desde finales de los años ochenta a mediados de los años noventa del siglo pasado. La tercera sección presenta nuevas miradas, basadas no en los estudios de seguridad o la seguridad ecológica, como antes, sino en los trabajos, consolidados, de la investigación para la paz y los estudios sobre análisis y transformación de conflictos. Concretamente, se exponen las aportaciones, y se propone como aplicarlas a los conflictos hídricos, mediante tres asunciones y siete tesis. Finalmente, las conclusiones insisten en la necesidad de tratar estos conflictos como conflictos sociales, mostrando que su especificidad está vinculada a la gestión y gobernanza del recurso más que a la escasez en sí y, al hacerlo, ponen el acento, en las dificultades de gobernabilidad y gobernanza que hay que abordar.
Yeni medyanın yükselişinden global ölçekte hakimiyet kazanan sosyal ağlara kadar dijital teknolojinin birleştirici etkisi insanların iletişim kurma biçimlerini değiştirmiştir. Yeni teknolojiler ve dünyanın değişen kimyası iletişim literatürüne sanal gerçeklik, artırılmış gerçeklik, türetici (prosumer), kullanıcı (user) vb. gibi bugüne kadar hiç duyulmamış yeni terimleri kazandırırken; gerek kişiler, gerek medya, gerekse kurumsal iletişim mekanizmaları bu hızlı döngüdeki yenilikleri hem takip etme hem de kendi işleyiş yapılarına uygulamada çağa ayak uydurmak durumunda kalmıştır. Mesajın oluşturulması aşamasındaki kontrolün editoryal yapı ya da reklamveren cephesinden "bireylere" geçmesi ise, geçmişin pasif ve süreçte söz sahibi olmayan kitlelerine bireysel temelde önemli bir güç kazandırmış ve onları "Yeni dünyanın cesur kahramanlarına" dönüştürmüştür. Bu mevcut durum aslında 4-5 Mayıs tarihlerinde İstanbul Ticaret Üniversitesi Halkla İlişkiler ve Reklamcılık bölümü tarafından organize edilen 1. Uluslararası İletişim'de Yeni Yönelimler Konferansı'nın çıkış noktası olmuştur. Konferansta sunulan uluslararası hakem ve bilim kurulu üyeleri tarafından kabul edilerek seçilen bildirilerden oluşan bu bilimsel kitap, dijital çağın beraberinde getirdiği "Yeni" Gelişmeler "Yeni dijital kültür", "Dijital Çağın Yeni Pazarlama Trendleri", "Dijital Çağ ve Yeni Reklamcılık", "Kurumsal İletişim ve Halkla İlişkiler Çalışmalarında Yeni Yönelimler", "Siyasal İletişimde Dijitalleşme", "Sosyal Medya ve Yeni Haber Algısı", "Görüntünün Dijitalleşmesi" ve son "Yeni İletişimde Yeni Fırsatlar, Yeni Sınırlar" ana başlıkları çerçevesinde konunun uzmanı akademisyenler ve lisansüstü öğrencileri tarafından yapılan gerek nitel gerekse de nicel araştırmalar ve kuramsal analizlerle değerlendirilmiş; bugünün iletişim dünyasındaki yönelimleri zengin bir bilimsel temelde ortaya koyması adına alana önemli bir katkı sağlamıştır. Bu uluslararası konferansın gerçekleşmesinde emeği geçen ve desteklerini bizden esirgemeyen konferans hakem kurulu, bilim kurulu ve düzenleme kurulunda yer alan değerli hocalarıma, İstanbul Ticaret Üniversitesi Rektörümüz Prof.Dr.Nazım Ekren ve üst yönetime, üniversitemiz Genel Sekreteri Prof.Dr. Murat Kasımoğlu, Genel Sekreter Yardımcıları sayın Adnan Eceviş ve sayın Yusuf Ünal'a; İletişim Fakültesi dekanımız Prof.Dr.Mim Kemal Öke'ye, İletişim Fakültesi İdari Ofis Müdürümüz sayın Mine Tan Şehitoğlu'na; ilgili kitabımızın yayın sponsoru olarak katkılarıyla bizi mutlu eden Nobel Akademik Yayıncılık ve nezdinde sayın Nevzat Argun'a, dijital medya sponsorumuz DijitalAjanslar.com'a ; değerli çalışmaları ile aramızda olan tüm hocalarımıza ve konferans organizasyonunda yer alan sevgili bölüm öğrencilerimize; konferans organizasyonun gerek çevrimiçi, gerekse çevrımdışı tüm sürecinde hiçbir desteğini esirgemeyen ve bu sürecin somut çıktılarının sağlanmasında emeği göz ardı edilemeyen değerli bölüm hocamız Öğr.Gör.İhsan Eken'e sonsuz teşekkürler. Sonraki yıllarda yapılacak konferans serimizin ilkini oluşturan 1. Uluslararası İletişimde Yeni Yönelimler Konferansı'nın alana ilgi duyan, bu yeni dünyayı merakla takip eden ve gönül veren tüm çevrelere yepyeni bir bakış açısı sunması dileklerimle… Dijitalin yeni dünyasına hoşgeldiniz! ; TABLE OF CONTENT / İÇİNDEKİLER NEW DIGITAL CULTURE - YENİ DİJİTAL KÜLTÜR "Examination of the Level of Dependency on Social Media College Students: A Study on Students of Istanbul Kültür University" Res. Assist. Merve Çelik 1 "Socail Media, Fashion and Design" Sema Hatun Türker 11 "The Effects of New Communication Technologies to The Social Life: Internet Marriage Sites" Tarkan Kılıç and Gülhan Gündoğdu 17 "Social Media and Its Impact on Intercultural Communication" Assoc. Prof. Dr. Noureddine Mouhadjer 29 "The Relation between Social Media Usage and Life Satisfaction: A Survey on University Students" Prof. Dr. Şükrü Balcı and Lec. Mevlüt Can Koçak 34 "Interpersonal Relationships of Celebrities in Social Media: A Content Analysis of Famous Turkish TV Series Actors' and Actresses' Instagram and Twitter Messages" Assoc. Prof. Dr. Hilal Özdemir Çakır 46 "New Media Trends Fashion and Beauty Video Vlogs in YouTube" Nesibe Yaraş 54 "Fame, Power, Identity: The Fame Culture in The Context of Social Values And Plausible Identity in Turkey" Res. Assist. Sena Aydın 64 NEW MARKETING TRENDS OF DIGITAL AGE DİJİTAL ÇAĞIN YENİ PAZARLAMA TRENDLERİ "Retail Technology: A Challenge on Shopper Oriented Perception" Assoc. Prof. Dr. Figen Yıldırım and Prof. Dr. Özgür Çengel 72 "Deep Metaphors of Social Media Consumers: A Zmet Study on Social Media" Assoc. Prof. Dr. Sibel Onursoy 79 "Communications Strategy of Turkish Cittaslow Cities" Assoc. Prof. Dr. Şule Yüksel Özmen, Assoc. Prof. Dr. Haluk Birsen and Assoc. Prof. Dr. Özgül Birsen 91 "Analysing the Mobile-Tech Based Transformation of Youth's Leisure Time Activities According to the MTUAS Scale" Res. Assist. Ayşegül Karagülle Çaycı, Res. Assist. Berk Çaycı and Lec. İhsan Eken 101 "Real-Time Marketing as A New Approach to Marketing Communication: A Review on The Shares of Brands in Social Media" Res. Assist. Selçuk Bazarcı and Begüm Mutlu 116 1st International Conference on New Trends in Communication 1. Uluslararası İletişimde Yeni Yönelimler Konferansı "The Impact of Wearable Technology on Fashion Industry" Assoc. Prof. Dr.Gözde Öymen 131 "Rereading Cittaslow Studies in Turkey" Assoc. Prof. Dr. Özgül Birsen, Assoc. Prof. Dr. Haluk Birsen, Assoc. Prof. Dr. Şule Yüksel Özmen and Res. Assist. Onur Oğur 139 "Internet Speed, Consumer Culture and the Necessities: Effects of Transition to 4.5 G Infrastructure in the Concept of Consumption" Assist. Prof. Dr. Can Diker 149 "A Research towards Measuring the Effect of Interactive Communication in Social Networks on Brand Loyalty"-- Assist. Prof. Dr. Murat Koçyiğit and Dr. Ersin Diker 157 "Digital Game Development in Turkey; Current Situation and Problems" Assist. Prof. Dr. Burak Yenituna 168 "A Review on the Use of Corporate Web Sites by Slow Cities: Comparison of Web Site Main Pages of Cittaslow Turkish Municipalities" Res. Assist. Tülay Yazıcı and Res. Assist. Deniz Keba Ekinci 179 "Airport Marketing: An Airport Marketing Analysis on Istanbul New Airport (IGA) Brand Identity" Lec. Selen Butgel Tunalı 194 "The Impact of Using Social Media in the Health Promotion: Turkish Health Ministry's Use of Social Media" Gülhan Gündoğdu and Tarkan Kılıç 206 DIGITAL AGE AND NEW ADVERTISING - DİJİTAL ÇAĞ VE YENİ REKLAMCILIK "Defining Search Engine Advertising Metrics According to AIDA Advertising Model" Assoc. Prof. Dr. Emel Poyraz and Naim Çetintürk 219 "An Assessment on Social Networks and Online Advertisement" Dr. Alev Aslan 230 "A Rising Trend in Digital Advertising: Micro-Video Ads" Assoc. Prof. Dr. Gülay Öztürk 236 "Culture, New Consumer Capitalism And Advertising Narrative in The Digital Age", Assist. Prof. Dr. M.Nur Erdem 247 "Structural Transformation of Advertising Narration in Turkey at Digital Era" Assist. Prof. Dr. Recep Yılmaz 260-- "The Role of Facebook Advertising on the Intention Of Consumer's Purchases: An Investigation on Purchase Behaviours of University Students" Dr. Ersin Diker and Assist. Prof. Dr. Zekiye Tamer Gencer 268 "A New Kind of "Advertainment"": Webisodes" Duygu Yıldırım 280 1st International Conference on New Trends in Communication 1. Uluslararası İletişimde Yeni Yönelimler Konferansı "The Construction of Orientalist and Otherization Discourse in Cumhuriyet Daily Newspaper Advertisements" Fatma Şişli 286 "Happy in Their Own World" Zeynep Betül Kavak 295 "Goodvertising: A New Perspective in the Philosophy of Advertising" Dr. Alparslan Nas 302 NEW TRENDS IN CORPORATE COMMUNICATION AND PUBLIC RELATIONS STUDIES - KURUMSAL İLETİŞİM VE HALKLA İLİŞKİLER ÇALIŞMALARINDA YENİ YÖNELİMLER "New Generation Opinion Leaders in Public Relations: A Research on Snapchat" Assoc. Prof. Dr. Banu Karsak and Assist. Prof. Dr. Gaye Aslı Sancar 315 "Logo Meaning and Logo Likability Relationship: A Research on Istanbul Grand Airport (IGA) Logo Design" Lec. Selen Butgel Tunalı 324 "Crisis Communication in Social Media: The Case Study of Turkcell" Lec. Beyza Nur Kalaycı 331 "The Role of New Media in Social Movements Within the Frame of Corporate Social Responsibility: Adım Adım Formation" Dr. Gözde Sunal and Cansu Sunal 342 "Creating the Manager of Emotional Intelligence in the Digital Age" Arzu Kara 355 DIGITALIZATION IN POLITICAL COMMUNICATION SİYASAL İLETİŞİMDE DİJİTALLEŞME "The Role of Instagram in Digital Diplomacy: The Case Study of "Come See Turkey" Assist. Prof. Dr. Gaye Aslı Sancar 371 "Communication Tecnologies, Political Communication And Public Sphere" Assist. Prof. Dr. Süleyman Güven 381 "Consistency of Public Opinion Polls In Turkey" Res. Assist. Oğuz Göksu 389 SOCIAL MEDIA AND THE PERCEPTION OF NEW NEWS SOSYAL MEDYA VE YENİ HABER ALGISI "User Perception of News Credibility in Social Media" Assoc. Prof. Dr. Deniz Kılıç and Assoc. Prof. Dr. N. Bilge İspir 402 "Social Media and Journalism: An Assessment of Turkish Experience" Dr. Zafer Kıyan and Prof. Dr. Nurcan Törenli 410 "Comparison of Columnists' Twitter Agenda on Turkey June 7TH November 1ST 1st International Conference on New Trends in Communication 1. Uluslararası İletişimde Yeni Yönelimler Konferansı General Election" Assoc. Prof. Dr. Bilge İspir and Assoc. Prof. Dr. Deniz Kılıç 413 "How Do the Television News Use Social Media?" Assoc. Prof. Dr. Funda Erzurum 420 "New Media, New Television: Is this New Era an End to Collective Viewing Dream?" Assoc. Prof. Dr. Oya Şakı Aydın 430 "Whose Are Social Media Accounts: Keeping Social Media Accounts of Journalists Under Surveillance Assist. Prof. Dr. Nihal Kocabay Şener 438 "The Battle of Internet Journalism with Traditional Newspapers: Did Internet Journalism Finish Traditional Journalism? An Update on Opinion of University Students about Internet Journalism" Assoc. Prof. Dr. Mihalis Kuyucu 448 "New Arenas and Approaches in Agenda Setting" Res. Assist. Mehmet Gülnar 469 "New Media and Changing Discourse on News: Example of Hurriyet Daily and Its Online Site" Mert Civeleker 478 "Citizen Journalism Under the State of Emergency vs Anti-Terrorism Nexus in Ethiopia: Courses and Prospects" Yirgalem Abebe Haile 491 "Violence Society in the Social Media: Comments for "Reina Attack" in Instagram" Gizem Güler 501 DIGITALIZATION OF IMAGE - GÖRÜNTÜNÜN DİJİTALLEŞMESİ "New Narrative Forms in Documentary Films in Digital Media" Prof. Dr. Huriye Kuruoğlu and Elçin Akçora 510 "Reading Early Film History in the Digital Era" Assoc. Prof. Dr. Âlâ Sivas Gülçur 523 NEW OPPORTUNITIES, NEW BOUNDARIES IN NEW COMMUNICATION YENİ İLETİŞİMDE YENİ FIRSATLAR , YENİ SINIRLAR "Discussing the "Freedoms" about New Media in the TRNC within the Frameworks of "Legal" and "Ethical" Boundaries" Lec. Ayhan Dolunay and Assoc. Prof. Dr. Fevzi Kasap 533 "Social Media and New Technology Education Access for New Generations" Zeynep Mine Alptekin 546 "The Growing Inequalities Produced by Recognitional Communications in the Digital Age" Lec. Dr. Lukasz Swiatek 555 ; 1. bs.
Introduction Beyond the intrinsic, aesthetic and spiritual values one may assign to nature, the reasons to manage it are multiple due to its central role in a wide panel of ecological functions crucial to human wellbeing and development. For instance, biological structures and ecological processes provide us food, raw materials, water and energy, protect us against erosion or floods, control water quality, pest impact, pollination, give us large enjoyable spaces for recreation, sport and leisure activities, etc. Despite contributing considerably to economic development, social welfare and health, natural resources have often been considered as inexhaustible and unlimited which has caused dramatic damages in economic, social and environmental issues. This is mainly explained by the fact that many ecosystem services (ES) are 'public goods' or 'common goods': they are often open access in character and non-rival in their consumption. Market and policy decisions often fail to capture most ES values with the exception of a few marketed provisioning ecosystem services 'ES' (e.g. food, timber). This systematic under-valuation of ecosystem services and failure to capture the values is one of the main causes underlying today's biodiversity crisis1. ES valuations can serve as methodological baseline for decision support tools aiming at more sustainability thus guiding and accelerating transition. To sustainably manage the supply and the demand of ES, the policy level needs to gain knowledge on where and which services are provided2–4and who are the stakeholders involved. ES maps provide an explicit link between the biophysical data of the ecosystem and expectations of main concerned stakeholders2. There are an essential tool to help for more holistic and transparent decision processes .Additionally, ES valuations allow highlighting ES hotspots, bundles and trade-offs and priority areas for action5. At last, ES valuations can serve as policy efficiency barometer by measuring ES before and after a specific measure. The importance of the ES in policy is reflected at several levels. At the European level, the Strategy 2020 for biodiversity (resulting from the United Nation convention on biological diversity) presents the objective to 'preserve and enhance ecosystems and their services'. Under this objective, one of the actions requested to member states is to 'map and assess the state of ecosystems and their services in their national territory by 2014'6. Recently, the Intergovernmental Platform on Biodiversity and Ecosystem Services (IPBES) was launched to guide the flow of scientific information related to biodiversity and ES to governments and practitioners7. In this context, the Walloon government decided to work on the 'development of the implementation of the ES concept into practice within the Public Service of Wallonia (SPW)' (Walloon governmental decision 24/04/2014).To put the ES concept into practice, a common platform, entitled 'WalES', is currently being designed. Objectives The objectives of the WalES platform are multifold: • Developing a common interface between administrations and scientists and multiple actors to share up-to-date information, methods, tools, means, experiences, multiple data flows at multiple levels, etc. in order to organize a common information system on ecosystem services and develop a common methodological platform. • Providing a planification tool through the assessment and mapping of ES to highlight ES hotspots, priority areas for action and discrepancies between ES demand and supply, all providing valuable information to optimize planification. • Providing an impact assessment tool assessing ES before and after a project (e.g. infrastructure building) or a political measure (e.g. agri-environmental measures) in order to test their efficiencies and their impacts on sustainability. • Communicating to the public the importance of ES and the dependency of humans, society and economy upon them, hence demonstrating the emergency to take actions. Procedure and outcomes of the WalES project Since the platform aims at serving policy making, its development consults actors in an iterative way and by different means. Through an accompanying committee, different actors from distinct background follow and guide the project from its premises to its finalization. Among them, policy makers, Directorate Generals from the Walloon Region, university scientists and Governmental research agencies are involved. Additionally, consultations with the civil society are planned. Such participatory approaches are known, especially in ES valuation science, to improve the procedural quality of the assessment and provide assessments better answering the needs and questions of the different parties. As first step, all Directorates General of SPW have been consulted in order to identify fields within the distinct missions of SPW for which the development of ES-based tools would be feasible and desirable. From there, the project structure, method and objectives have been established. In a second and on-going step, all structures, research projects and actors involved are being inventoried in order to get insight into what is being done, what is already accomplished and what remains to be done. Simultaneously, a common and shared information system detailing all data and data flows which could serve as indicator or proxy or models for ES measurements, collecting all experiences and methods on ES valuation available at the Walloon and more detailed scales and proposing standardized or recommended ES evaluation method are developed. This common and shared database will be made available on the net for dissemination of ES holistic approaches and should be updated on a participative way. Subsequently, ES assessments and maps of the Walloon regions is developed in order to fulfill the requirements of the Biodiversity Strategy 2020. A conceptual and methodological framework is designed and will be submitted to stakeholders. A Walloon ES classification with corresponding indicators is setup and a methodology for mapping and assessing ES at various scales is developed. However, the framework and information system are not only defined as a simple recurring reporting tool. The holistic approach should be put in practices on a large spectrum of activities on the fields of agriculture, forestry, water management, nature conservation, rural development plan, urban development, tourism activities, etc. and all field experiences should be shared to demonstrate how it works and what are the limits. The ability of ES approach as decision support tool by different stakeholders will be assessed. Concurrently, a website is established in order to accomplish the communication objectives of the project. Besides communicating the importance of ES assessments and conservation for sustainability, the website serves as interactive platform where the methodological framework, the Walloon ES classification and the database of all indicators and proxy available is made available to all stakeholders or researchers needing some baseline. It thus also serves as a facilitating tool for future research on ES providing theoretical and practical information to ensure their sound scientific background and their practical policy implementation. Conclusions: implications of the project in terms of sustainable development The link between ES and sustainable development has now been the center of political and scientific attention for a while1,8–10. Much research is being carried out developing frameworks, tools and models to assess and map ES11–13. More recently, the importance of the ES concept as decision support tool for policy makers has been put forward. It is stated that ES assessments could guide policy decisions towards more sustainability by adding social and environmental criteria to the economic ones usually relied on14. In that sense, ES assessments could accelerate the transition by providing sound information upon which sustainable policy decisions could be made. However, to date, despite being a hot topic, ES assessments serving policy decisions are sparse15 and the challenge for real integration remains16. The WalES project is thus a real opportunity for the Walloon government and science to bind together to contribute to filling in this gap while simultaneously comply with European baseline by providing the requested national ES assessments and mapping. References 1. TEEB. The Economics of Ecosystems and Biodiversity: Mainstreaming the economics of nature, a synthesis of the approach, conclusions and recommendations of TEEB. (Progress Press, 2010). 2. Burkhard, B., Crossman, N., Nedkov, S., Petz, K. & Alkemade, R. Mapping and modelling ecosystem services for science, policy and practice. Ecosystem Services 4, 1–3 (2013). 3. Kandziora, M., Burkhard, B. & Müller, F. Mapping provisioning ecosystem services at the local scale using data of varying spatial and temporal resolution. Ecosystem Services 4, 47–59 (2013). 4. García-Nieto, A. P., García-Llorente, M., Iniesta-Arandia, I. & Martín-López, B. Mapping forest ecosystem services: From providing units to beneficiaries. Ecosystem Services 4, 126–138 (2013). 5. Palomo, I., Martín-López, B., Potschin, M., Haines-Young, R. & Montes, C. National Parks, buffer zones and surrounding lands: Mapping ecosystem service flows. Ecosystem Services 4, 104–116 (2013). 6. UE. EU Biodiversity Strategy to 2020. (2011). at 7. Intergovernmental Science-Policy Platform on Biodiversity and Ecosystem Services (IPBES). at 8. Millennium Ecosystem Assessment. Ecosystems and Human Well-Being. (Island Press, 2005). at 9. Abson, D. J. et al. Ecosystem services as a boundary object for sustainability. Ecological Economics 103, 29–37 (2014). 10. Costanza, R. & Folke, C. in Nature's Services societal dependence on natural ecosystems 49–68 (Gretchen C. Daily, 1997). at 11. Nelson, E. et al. Modeling multiple ecosystem services, biodiversity conservation, commodity production, and tradeoffs at landscape scales. Frontiers in Ecology and the Environment 7, 4–11 (2009). 12. Antle, J. M. & Valdivia, R. O. Modelling the supply of ecosystem services from agriculture: a minimum-data approach*. Australian Journal of Agricultural and Resource Economics 50, 1–15 (2006). 13. Barrios, E. Soil biota, ecosystem services and land productivity. Ecological Economics 64, 269–285 (2007). 14. Bagstad, K. J., Semmens, D. J., Waage, S. & Winthrop, R. A comparative assessment of decision-support tools for ecosystem services quantification and valuation. Ecosystem Services 5, 27–39 (2013). 15. Laurans, Y. & Mermet, L. Ecosystem services economic valuation, decision-support system or advocacy? Ecosystem Services 7, 98–105 (2014). 16. Daily, G. C. & Matson, P. A. Ecosystem services: From theory to implementation. PNAS 105, 9455–9456 (2008).
El Perú en los actuales momentos, se encuentra ante un gran reto, el cual es superar las dificultades que todavía aquejan en materia económica, política y social y así encaminarnos a los cambios y tendencias de un Mundo Competitivo y Globalizado. La minería en sí, es una actividad de alto riesgo, sometido a constantes fluctuaciones de las cotizaciones de los metales en el Mercado Internacional y en el caso de Sociedad Minera Corona S.A. Unidad de Morococha con un tipo de minería subterránea y convencional, ingresó en etapa de crisis económica en estos últimos años y era urgente y prioritario realizar una serie de mejoras operativas, a fin de lograr su sostenimiento y crecimiento. Por los motivos referidos, el estudio que se presenta, se sucinta en lo siguiente: - En el diagnóstico del análisis del entorno del Capitulo II, se ubica el Sector Minero y en especial la Empresa Sociedad Minera Corona S.A. Unidad de Producción - Morococha, cuyos resultados son favorables en los factores políticos, económicos y tributarios. Las fluctuaciones de las cotizaciones de los minerales en el Mercado Internacional (bajas), se deben más que todo al poco crecimiento de las Demandas, comparados a la Producción cuyas causas son atribuidas a los cielos económicos en los países desarrollados. Es así que las grandes empresas, orientan hoy sus inversiones mineras hacia megaproyectos cuyos costos operativos están debajo de: Cobre US$ 0.50/Lb. Oro US$150/Oz.troy - En el Capitulo III, se realiza un diagnóstico interno de la situación de la Empresa, enmarcado en los Resultados de las Áreas Claves, tales como: Recursos Humanos, Producción y Leyes, Productividad, Reservas de Mineral, Seguridad Minera y Medio Ambiente y finalmente el aspecto Económico-Financiero. Como resultado para Mina Manuelita, se evidencia: Las fortalezas, se relacionan a: Leyes de mineral y su Yacimiento del tipo polimetálico. Ubicación y Accesibilidad. Extensión de Concesiones. Calidad del Personal de Supervisión, concerniente a su experiencia y facilidad a los cambios. Por el lado de las Debilidades propias de las operaciones, debemos resaltar; Bajos niveles en las Reservas de Minerales Baja Productividad del Personal Falta de un Sistema de Información Gerencial de las Operaciones Mineras. Alta tasa de accidentes incapacitantes y fatales. Altos Costos de Producción. Baja Rentabilidad En el Capitulo IV se formula las Estrategias Operativas basadas en la evaluación de la matriz FODA (Fortalezas – Oportunidades - Debilidades - Amenazas) y cuyas estrategias resultantes fueron: FO: Incrementar el Nivel de Producción. Mejorar y renovar equipos de Mina. Capacitación y Desarrollo Personal. Ejecutar Programa agresivo en Exploraciones. FA: - Implementar un Programa de Producción por mineral de Ag- Cu ó Pb-Zn, de acuerdo a las condiciones del Mercado. Contar con buena cartera de Proveedores. DO: Mejorar la Productividad y Eficiencia. Mejorar las Políticas de Seguridad Minera. Crear e Implementar un Sistema de Información del Control de las Operaciones. Reducir Costos de Producción. DA: Implementar Programas de Capacitación y Entrenamiento en Productividad y Seguridad Minera. Ejecución del PAMA, compartido con Empresas Mineras del Distrito. - Crear tas Áreas Claves de Resultados y la implementación de los Indicadores claves de Éxito (ACR e ICE). Profundización del Pique Principal desde el Nv. 315 al Nv. 450. Finalmente se establecieron: Nueva Misión. La Misión Futura de la Empresa debe consistir en: contribuir al desarrollo del Negocio Minero, con una eficiente productividad, bajos costos y mantener un nivel de rentabilidad que permita asegurar la marcha del Negocio. Como apoyo a lo planteado, nos comprometemos a: Ejercer un buen control sobre el Medio Ambiente. Buscar la Seguridad; la Producción será el siguiente paso. Establecer y mantener relaciones apropiadas con nuestro cliente y proveedores. Crear un ambiente que aliente la promoción, superación y desarrollo continuo de su personal. Ser sensibles a las necesidades de las comunidades en las cuales operamos. Objetivos Futuros. El establecimiento de objetivos a largo plazo para la Mina Manuelita de Sociedad Minera Corona S.A. será: Mantenerse en un mercado altamente competitivo y crecer gradualmente en su nivel de producción y reservas de mineral. Generar e incrementar sus utilidades, producto de mejoras en la Productividad, Producción y Reducción de costos. Mejorar la Seguridad Minera y el Medio Ambiente. En el Capitulo V, se implemento y aplicó las estrategias Operativas, para lo cual se determinaron: En el aspecto de Administración y Relaciones Humanas: Contar con la misma plana de profesionales y contratistas. Difusión del Plan Estratégico a todo nivel a Objetivos y Metas Anuales para un horizonte de 04 años: Mayor Capacitación y Desarrollo Personal de las Relaciones Humanas. Mejora de la Productividad Anual en 5%. Incremento de la Producción Anual en 10%. Disminución Anual de los índices de Seguridad Minera en 20%. Incrementó Anual de las Reservas de Mineral en 10%. Disminuir anualmente el Costo de Producción en 8%. ; Nowdays in Perú, it encounters a great challenge which is tu becomc ihc difficultics -still in social, economical and political subjects and so on to walk to the chances and trends within a global and competitive workl. Itself mining, it is an activity of high risk subjected lo constant fluctuations in the metal price list in the international market and in the case of Ihe Morococha Unit, Corona Mining Society S.A. with a kind of conventional and underground mining wich entered in a stage of economical crisis in the lasf years and it was urgent and priority to do a series of operative improvements in order to obtain its sustaining and upsizing Due to this, the study that is inlroduced in brief as follows: In the environmental analysis diagnosis in the Chaptcr II is located the Mining Sector and specially the Morococha Production Unit, Corona Minig Society S.A, whose results are favorable in the economical, contribution and political factors. The fluctuations in the metal price list in the international market (drops) is due to the low increasing of the demands, compara lo the production whose causes are atribuied to the economical cyclos in the developed countries. So the large entreprencurs dedicate their mining investments to megaprojects u fiose operativo costs are below of: Coppcr US$ 0.50/Lb Gold US$ 150/Oz.troj In the Chapter III, is carries out an internal diagnosis about the enterprise situation. refered to Key Area Results such as Manpower, Production and Grades, Productivity, Mineral Reserves, Mining Safely and Environment and finally Financial-Economical aspect. As result for Manuelita Mine, it is evident: The fortitudes are related to: Mineral grades and their kind of pollymetallic dupusit. Location and accessibility of the unit. Concessions Lenght Supervision Personnel Quality refered lo their experience and to the change facilities. Refer to the itself weaknesses in the operations we must highlight. Lowe levels in the mineral reserves Low personnel productivity Lack of managing information system of the- mining operations High rate of disabilities and fatal accidents. High productiun costs Low profitubility In the Chapter IV it is formulated the operative Strategies based on the evaluation of the FODA matrix (Fortitudes - Opportunities - Weaknesses -Threats) and whose resultant strategies were: FO: To increase the Introduction Level. To improve and to replace mining equipment. Personal development and training. To execute aggressive Program in Explorings. THR: - To implement a mineral production program such as Ag-Cu or Pb- Zn, in according to íhc Market conditions. - To count with Suppliers Base. WEOPP: To improve the productivity and efficiency. To improve the Mining Safety Politicial. To create and implement an Information System of the Operation Control. To reduce Production Costs. WETHR: - To implement Training Programs and Training about Productivity and Mining Safety. Execution of the PAMA, shared with Mining Enterprises of the District. - To create the Key Areas of the Results and the Implementation of the key Indicators to Success (ACR and ICE). Deeping in the main down raise from 315 to 450 level. Final ly they were stated: New Mission. The Future Mission of our Enterprise must conist in: to contribute. Id Hie developing of mining business, with an efficient productivity, low eosts and to maintain a level of profitability which permits to make sure the continuing business. As support to the cxposition, we assume to: To exert a good control of the Environment. To seek tlic Safety; the Production will he the following step. To state and maintain proper relations with our customers and suppliers. To create an environment whieh incentive the promotion, becoming and continuing development of our personnel. To be sensitive to the needs in the communities which we operate. Future Purposes. The settling of objectives in long term to Manuelita Mine in the Corona Mining S.A. will be: To maintain in a hihgly competitive market and to increase gradually in its production level and mineral reserves. To generate and increase its Utilities, result of increasings in the productivity production and costs reduction. To improve the safety mining and environment. In the Chapter V, it is implemented and applied the Operative Strategies which were determined: In the Administration and Related humans aspects: To count with the same staff of professionals and contractors Spreading of Strategic Plan in all leveis. Objectives and Annual Goals for a horizon of four years: Greater training and personal dcvelopment of the Human relations. Improvement of the Annual Productivity in 5%. Increasing of Annual Production in 10%. Annual Dccreasinn of Mining Salety Indexes in 20%. Annual Increasing of Mineral Reserves in 10% Annual Decreasing in the Productions Cost in 8%. ; Tesis
The Situation In The Middle East Report Of The Secretary-General On The Implementation Of Security Council Resolutions 2139 (2014), 2165 (2014), 2191 (2014), 2258 (2015), 2332 (2016) And 2393 (2017) ; United Nations S/PV.8171 Security Council Seventy-third year 8171st meeting Tuesday, 30 January 2018, 10.35 a.m. New York Provisional President: Mr. Umarov. . (Kazakhstan) Members: Bolivia (Plurinational State of). . Mr. Llorentty Solíz China. . Mr. Shen Bo Côte d'Ivoire. . Mr. Tanoh-Boutchoue Equatorial Guinea. . Mr. Ndong Mba Ethiopia. . Mr. Woldegerima France. . Mr. Delattre Kuwait. . Mr. Alotaibi Netherlands. . Mrs. Gregoire Van Haaren Peru. . Mr. Meza-Cuadra Poland. . Ms. Wronecka Russian Federation. . Mr. Safronkov Sweden . Mr. Skoog United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland . Mr. Allen United States of America. . Mr. Miller Agenda The situation in the Middle East Report of the Secretary-General on the implementation of Security Council resolutions 2139 (2014), 2165 (2014), 2191 (2014), 2258 (2015), 2332 (2016) and 2393 (2017) (S/2018/60) This record contains the text of speeches delivered in English and of the translation of speeches delivered in other languages. The final text will be printed in the Official Records of the Security Council. Corrections should be submitted to the original languages only. They should be incorporated in a copy of the record and sent under the signature of a member of the delegation concerned to the Chief of the Verbatim Reporting Service, room U-0506 (verbatimrecords@un.org). Corrected records will be reissued electronically on the Official Document System of the United Nations (http://documents.un.org). 18-02496 (E) *1802496* S/PV.8171 The situation in the Middle East 30/01/2018 2/10 18-02496 The meeting was called to order at 10.35 a.m. Adoption of the agenda The agenda was adopted. The situation in the Middle East Report of the Secretary-General on the implementation of Security Council resolutions 2139 (2014), 2165 (2014), 2191 (2014), 2258 (2015), 2332 (2016) and 2393 (2017) (S/2018/60) The President: In accordance with rule 39 of the Council's provisional rules of procedure, I invite Ms. Ursula Mueller, Assistant Secretary-General for Humanitarian Affairs and Deputy Emergency Relief Coordinator, to participate in this meeting. The Security Council will now begin its consideration of the item on its agenda. I wish to draw the attention of Council members to document S/2018/60, which contains the report of the Secretary-General on the implementation of Security Council resolutions 2139 (2014), 2165 (2014), 2191 (2014), 2258 (2015), 2332 (2016) and 2393 (2017). I now give the floor to Ms. Mueller. Ms. Mueller: I thank you, Mr. President, for this opportunity to provide the Security Council with an update on the humanitarian situation in Syria. Years of conflict have caused immeasurable human suffering and left countless civilians dead, injured or missing. The United Nations estimates that 13.1 million people are in need of protection and humanitarian assistance, including 6.1 million people who are displaced within the country. Another 5.5 million people have fled the conflict across borders into neighbouring countries. The Council will have heard at first-hand the account of the Emergency Relief Coordinator in his statement to the Security Council on 22 January with regard to his visit to Syria, in which he highlighted the plight of the Syrian people. During the visit, he heard individual stories from some of the people caught up in the violence and conflict. In Homs, he saw entire districts of the city reduced to rubble. The visit was the first for an Emergency Relief Coordinator in more than two years. It was an important opportunity to see ways in which the United Nations can support people in need. It was also a chance to hold discussions with the Government of Syria and our humanitarian partners on how to address some of the most pressing humanitarian needs. As fighting continues, I am particularly concerned about the safety and protection of civilians caught up in the violence in north-west Syria, where hostilities have reportedly caused numerous deaths and injuries. Air strikes and fighting in southern Idlib and northern Hama have resulted in more than 270,000 displacements since 15 December 2017, driving people from their homes to other areas of Idlib. Camps for displaced people are overstretched, forcing most of those displaced to seek shelter in some 160 makeshift settlements. During the cold and wet winter months, many families have nothing else but improvised tents, which they share with others. Attacks on medical facilities and vital infrastructure continue, with reports of at least 16 attacks on health-care facilities during the month of December alone. Yesterday Médecins Sans Frontières reported that air strikes had hit a hospital it supports in the Saraqib district of Idlib, causing five deaths, injuring others and seriously damaging the facility, which is now closed. That was the second reported strike on the facility in nine days. Further north, in Afrin, in Aleppo governorate, the United Nations is carefully monitoring the situation of over 300,000 people living in the district, which is experiencing fighting. We have reports of civilian casualties and that approximately 15,000 people have been displaced within the district, with another 1,000 displaced to Aleppo governorate. We have also received reports that local authorities inside Afrin are restricting civilian movement, particularly for those who want to leave. I am also concerned about the situation in eastern Ghouta and areas of Damascus, where civilian deaths and destruction of civilian infrastructure continue to be reported. In the first 10 days of the year, the Office of the United Nations High Commissioner for Human Rights documented at least 81 civilians killed in the enclave, including 25 women and 30 children. Scores of residential buildings in the area have been damaged or destroyed in recent weeks. I also note with concern that shelling continues from eastern Ghouta into Damascus, resulting in civilian deaths and injuries. Although 29 patients in urgent need of medical care were allowed out of eastern Ghouta in late December, hundreds more, most of them women and children, require immediate medical attention. So far, there have 30/01/2018 The situation in the Middle East S/PV.8171 18-02496 3/10 been 21 civilian deaths among those waiting for and needing medical evacuation. Their needs are critical, and the law is clear. I urge all parties, and all those with influence over the parties, to see to it that all such medical evacuations take place without conditions or delay. With reference to all of the flashpoints I have highlighted, I call on the parties to ensure the protection of civilians and civilian and medical infrastructure, in line with international humanitarian law, and to ensure the safe, sustained and unimpeded delivery of humanitarian assistance to all in need. I would also like to take this opportunity to reiterate my concern about the protection situation in the city of Raqqa, where returns continue despite the widespread presence of explosive remnants of war. Nearly 60,000 individuals have reportedly returned since the end of hostilities in October 2017. However, humanitarian partners continue to emphasize that, given the high prevalence of landmines, booby traps and unexploded ordinance, Raqqa is not safe for civilian returns. Deaths and injuries due to explosions have been reported with alarming frequency, and trauma cases nearly doubled in recent months. More than 534 civilians have been injured in blasts since the expulsion of the Islamic State in Iraq and the Levant from the city in October 2017, of whom 112 people died. Each week, between 30 and 50 civilians continue to arrive at trauma centres in Raqqa after being wounded by improvised explosive devices concealed in their homes and neighbourhoods. Risk from explosive hazards is not limited to Raqqa; there are indications that substantial contamination also exists throughout Deir ez-Zor governorate, where there has been little or no mine surveying or clearance. Despite the desperate humanitarian needs in many areas in Syria, the United Nations and humanitarian partners continue to face serious challenges in accessing those in need. Last month, I briefed the Council that none of our cross-line convoys were able to reach besieged locations and that only two convoys had accessed hard-to-reach areas. This month, the United Nations and its partners have had no access to any such locations at all. Not one convoy has been able to deploy. Discussions about convoys have stalled over requirements to lower the number of beneficiaries and about splitting convoys in a way that would not allow us to provide food or other essential items. Our deliveries must continue to be based on humanitarian principles and international humanitarian law, impartially based on civilian need. At the same time, the United Nations is also seeing access to areas previously reached under regular programming coming to a halt. Local authorities in north-east Syria have twice held humanitarian convoys at the checkpoint with Government-controlled areas in eastern Aleppo. Furthermore, local authorities have requested changes related to the operations of our non-governmental partners, which in turn has blocked our assistance delivery to much of north-east Syria. The situation has been further compounded by the refusal of the Governor of Hassakah to issue facilitation letters for our deliveries. While the cross-border operations of our partners continue, such assistance is not sufficient to meet the needs in the north-east. To solve the situation, I call on all parties and those with influence over them to engage now to see that access to those areas resume. Finally, due to insecurity in the north-west, which has included numerous rocket attacks from within Syria into Turkey, on 20 January the United Nations temporarily suspended cross-border deliveries at the two authorized border crossing points in Turkey. The United Nations remains in discussion with Turkish authorities on restarting operations as quickly as possible to ensure the continued delivery of assistance, which hundreds of thousands of Syrians rely upon every month. Those access challenges underscore the importance of using all the modalities of delivery at our disposal. Despite prevailing challenges, the United Nations and its partners have continued to reach millions of people in need each month. For example, in December, regular programming from within the country resulted in the delivery of humanitarian assistance to millions of people, including over 3 million people who received food assistance through 1,500 deliveries. The United Nations and its partners also provided health, protection and education services. Cross-border assistance also continued to reach hundreds of thousands of people in need, as 653 trucks delivered food assistance to more than 500,000 people, health assistance for over 600,000 treatments, as well as other support for hundreds of thousands. After almost eight years of conflict, people's needs are as vast as they are critical. The United Nations and its partners will continue to deliver to millions of S/PV.8171 The situation in the Middle East 30/01/2018 4/10 18-02496 people in need. The United Nations also stands ready to bolster such support, but requires efficient and effective mechanisms to ensure the safe and rapid delivery of aid. To that end, the Emergency Relief Coordinator has identified five areas where the United Nations is looking to make concrete progress. First, we need to finalize the United Nations humanitarian response plan for 2018, for which we will be seeking $3.5 billion to meet the needs of more than 13 million people in all parts of Syria. Secondly, it is important that there be an agreement on medical evacuations for hundreds of critically ill people trapped in besieged eastern Ghouta. People in other besieged areas should get the same assistance. Thirdly, humanitarian access needs to improve. The United Nations has requested agreement for three to four United Nations and Syrian Arab Red Crescent inter-agency cross-line convoys each week. We need consistent access to all people in need. Fourthly, we must reach agreement on the United Nations-supported aid convoys from Damascus to Rukban in south-eastern Syria. While the exceptional delivery of assistance from Jordan in early January was a positive development, a sustainable solution is required. Fifthly, more effective arrangements are needed to enable the United Nations to support the work of Syrian non-governmental organizations and to enable international non-governmental organizations to perform the stronger role they can, and are ready to, play in relieving the suffering. I hope that we will be able to report to the Security Council next month on real progress achieved in those five key areas, and that, month after month, we will move forward until they are all fully addressed. The President: I thank Ms. Mueller for her briefing. I shall now give the floor to those members of the Council who wish to make statements. Mr. Allen (United Kingdom): I thank Assistant Secretary-General Mueller for her briefing. When considering the Syria humanitarian issue, we always have in mind the powerful plea last December by the Russian Permanent Representative that we should keep our differences over the politics in Syria out of our consideration of humanitarian issues — a view that we strongly continue to endorse. Last week, Mark Lowcock briefed us on his visit to Syria. It was the first time that an Under-Secretary- General for Humanitarian Affairs had visited Syria in more than two years, having been blocked previously from visiting. The United Kingdom commends the Under-Secretary-General's efforts to start a meaningful dialogue between the United Nations and the Syrian regime in order to improve the humanitarian situation for the people of Syria. On the basis of discussions and as we iterated today, the Under-Secretary-General set out five clear asks to enable the United Nations to sustain and improve its aid efforts. The United Kingdom fully supports those asks. Unfortunately, the Security Council has been unable to reach agreement on a text that would unanimously call upon the Syrian regime to ensure that those five asks are granted without delay. I want to reflect on this disappointing situation. One of the five key asks of the Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs is the regime's agreement to allow three or four United Nations and Syrian Arab Red Crescent convoys each week across front lines to provide assistance to up to 2.5 million people in besieged and hard-to-reach areas. These convoys are needed to deliver aid, including both food and medical supplies, to civilians who have lived in a war zone for almost seven years. That request for consistent, regular access to all people in need is crucial. In 2017, only 27 per cent of United Nations inter-agency convoy requests were approved by the Syrian regime in full. That is significantly worse than in 2016, when 45 per cent of requests were approved. Assistant Secretary- General Mueller's briefing was especially concerning in that respect. We cannot let that happen again in 2018. Ninety-four per cent of those living under siege are located in eastern Ghouta. The Al-Assad regime is using humanitarian aid as a weapon of war by restricting access to the besieged population. There were no aid deliveries to the area for the whole of December, and nearly 12 per cent of children under five years of age in eastern Ghouta suffer from acute malnutrition. It is appalling that innocent children are once again suffering the most. The Under-Secretary-General also requested the immediate evacuation of hundreds of people who are in need of medical assistance from eastern Ghouta. We call on those who can influence the regime to use all of their authority to allow for rapid, unhindered and sustained humanitarian access and medical evacuations 30/01/2018 The situation in the Middle East S/PV.8171 18-02496 5/10 for those in need. According to the Secretary-General, 18 people have already died while waiting for the regime's permission to leave the besieged city. People are dying for want of health care and services that are available fewer than 10 miles away, in Damascus. Let us recall that the backdrop of the Under- Secretary-General's visit was the escalation in air strikes in eastern Ghouta and the north-west, including Aleppo, Idlib governorate and northern Hama. Yesterday at least five people, including a child, were killed by an air strike on a hospital supported by Médecins sans frontières in Syria's Idlib governorate. The facility was also seriously damaged and at least six people, including three medical staff, were injured as a result of the attack. The air strikes on the hospital occurred while the doctors were receiving people who had been injured an hour earlier in another air strike on a market. Those strikes had already killed 11 people. These events are taking place are in areas where there are meant to be ceasefires with the stated aim of putting a prompt end to violence and improving the humanitarian situation. Unfortunately for the people of Syria, that could not be further from the reality. The deliberate targeting of civilians and civilian infrastructure in Idlib and eastern Ghouta continues, in blatant violation of international humanitarian law and human rights law. The intensification of hostilities has displaced approximately 270,000 people within Idlib since 15 December 2017, stretching scarce resources beyond their limits. The escalation of air strikes in eastern Ghouta has resulted in hundreds of civilian deaths since 30 December. UNICEF reports that, in the first 14 days of 2018, more than 30 children were killed by escalating violence in the enclave. It is against that backdrop that I call on the regime to allow for immediate, safe and unhindered access to humanitarian assistance to meet fully the needs of those who require food and medical supplies. Let all with influence exert it to ensure that. It is our must crucial, immediate request. It is also imperative that all parties adhere to agreed ceasefires and cessations of hostilities, uphold international humanitarian law and protect civilians. Yesterday, a number of us visited the United States National Holocaust Museum's exhibition on Syria. We saw the photographs of those killed and tortured by the regime and we read their biographies, their life stories. It had a profound effect on me, and it brought home how the tragedy in Syria is not just a geopolitical one — it is a human one. For humanity's sake, all of us around this table must ensure that we have done our all. Mr. Delattre (France) (spoke in French): I would like to thank Ms. Ursula Mueller for her comprehensive briefing. I reiterate France's full support for the recommendations of the Under-Secretary-General for Humanitarian Affairs, Mr. Mark Lowcock, which Ms. Mueller has just referenced. I would also like to express my country's grave concerns about the latest developments in the humanitarian situation in Syria. Several points are of particular concern. We note the extremely dire situation of the population in eastern Ghouta — still besieged and denied the humanitarian assistance and medical evacuations that they need — and the escalation of violence, particularly in the Idlib region. In addition, we are concerned about the attacks on hospitals, medical facilities and the provision of health care, as well as the persistent restrictions on humanitarian access in Syria, which are unacceptable and have tightened further in recent weeks — denying the civilian population the access to the essential resources that they so vitally need. Accordingly, I should like to make three main observations. First, we are particularly concerned about the current escalation of violence in eastern Ghouta and the Idlib region, which adds to the suffering of the affected populations. In eastern Ghouta, 400,000 civilians are victims of almost daily bombings by the regime and its allies. According to the World Health Organization, approximately 750 people in eastern Ghouta are still waiting for emergency medical evacuation. Since 30 December, the wounded have been unable to be transported out of eastern Ghouta to receive care; 21 others have died from their wounds, unable to wait another day. We note and stress that it is the responsibility of the Syrian regime to allow those medical evacuations to proceed without delay. The situation in the south of Idlib and in the north of Hama is very worrying as well. The continued bombings led to the displacement of about 250,000 civilians last month. More than 33 people were reportedly killed in less than 24 hours. The town of Sarakab was bombed yesterday morning, and the strikes hit the town market, killing more than 11 people and injuring a number of others. One hour later, the only public hospital in the district — a hospital supported by the non-governmental S/PV.8171 The situation in the Middle East 30/01/2018 6/10 18-02496 organization Médecins Sans Frontières — was struck, killing five people, including a child, and injuring six others, including medical staff. France very firmly condemns attacks on health-care workers and medical infrastructure, as well as the indiscriminate bombings carried out in recent weeks by the Syrian regime against civilians in eastern Ghouta and in residential areas of Idlib province. France reiterates that indiscriminate bombings and the use of incendiary weapons against civilians represent serious violations of international humanitarian law and could constitute war crimes or even crimes against humanity. It is vital and urgent to bring to an immediate end the bombings in Idlib and the siege in eastern Ghouta. The Astana guarantors have taken upon themselves the responsibility to supervise its implementation, and we therefore urge these States to effectively impose on the Syrian regime a complete cessation of hostilities as well as respect for the basic principles and norms of international humanitarian law and human rights law. The second observation is particularly worrying: the deterioration of humanitarian access in recent weeks in Syria. We have reiterated this concern on numerous occasions in this Chamber: the humanitarian situation will not improve without comprehensive, unimpeded, safe and ongoing humanitarian access to the aid distributed by the United Nations and its partners. Nonetheless, the regime is continuing to create unacceptable obstacles to the provision of humanitarian aid. The Syrian authorities have not authorized even a single inter-agency convoy in several weeks. France condemns this unacceptable attitude and reiterates its call for the safe and unhindered access of the United Nations and its humanitarian partners to civilians throughout Syrian territory. The right of the Syrian population both to humanitarian assistance and to protection must be respected unconditionally. The Security Council cannot remain silent given these recurring violations of international humanitarian law, which require a strong response from the Council. Finally, I would like to touch on the obvious discrepancy between the continuing violence on the ground in Syria and the diplomatic offensives, which are not facing up to the situation. We know that only an inclusive political solution that is elaborated under the auspices of the United Nations and that sets up a political transition in the context of resolution 2254 (2015) can bring a lasting and credible end to the suffering of the Syrian people. However, the regime is continuing its policy of methodical and deliberate obstruction, as we saw during the negotiation session held in Vienna on 25 and 26 January. In this context more than ever, we need to support the United Nations and United Nations mediation in Geneva, as well as eschew any temporary solutions agreed without the opposition, which would be unrealistic as they would not meet the aspirations of all Syrians. It is up to those countries that support the regime, primarily Russia and Iran, to bring to bear the pressure necessary to ensure that the regime puts an end to this negative and irresponsible strategy. Make no mistake: there can be no negotiated political transition in Syria without a total ceasefire, humanitarian access throughout the whole of the territory and the creation of a neutral environment that would restore trust and ensure the safety of all Syrians. How credible is a regime that is stepping up the bombing in Idlib, preventing medical evacuations in eastern Ghouta and refusing to authorize a single humanitarian convoy? How credible can diplomatic efforts be that are devoid of any specific assurances and that do not lead to any significant and lasting improvement in the humanitarian situation in Idlib and eastern Ghouta? We reiterate that humanitarian aid is unconditional and apolitical. We therefore make an urgent request to see proof of this on the ground. That is exactly what France will seek to defend in the weeks to come, in line with the Geneva communiqué (S/2012/522, annex), namely, the establishment of a neutral environment that must include the lifting of sieges, the cessation of hostilities, prisoner exchanges and chemical disarmament, all of this under international supervision so as to ensure genuine constitutional reform and the holding of free elections. That is the only way to bring a lasting end to the suffering of the Syrian people and open the way to an inclusive political process in Syria, in the interests of all the Syrian people. It is for that reason that we will continue to fully support the process stemming from resolution 2254 (2015), and we will make every effort to unite the Council in this respect. Mrs. Gregoire Van Haaren (Netherlands): The Kingdom of the Netherlands wishes to thank Assistant Secretary-General Ursula Mueller for her briefing. 30/01/2018 The situation in the Middle East S/PV.8171 18-02496 7/10 Seven years after the start of the conflict in Syria, the humanitarian situation in the country continues to be a truly heartbreaking drama. While several parties to the conflict are responsible for a wide array of violations of international humanitarian law, it is especially painful to see the horrifying effects of the military actions taken by the Syrian authorities. Instead of protecting their own citizens, the Syrian authorities are bombing them. Instead of providing basic services to their people, the authorities are destroying hospitals and schools. Instead of allowing humanitarian aid into the most affected areas, the authorities are starving some of their own people. The outlook for 2018 remains grim, with a worsening humanitarian situation and a continuation of the battle for influence by regional Powers. Allow me to focus on three important aspects: the current situation on the ground, cross-border aid delivery and the implementation of the Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs' (OCHA) five asks. On the situation on the ground, the international community has been providing funding for a principled humanitarian response. The Kingdom of the Netherlands has provided amply to the United Nations and to international non-governmental organizations in order to provide relief for the suffering of the Syrian people. But this relief is hardly reaching those in need. In besieged eastern Ghouta, we are witnessing the use of starvation as a method of warfare. Not a single aid convoy has reached the 400,000 people trapped there in the last three months. Where have we seen this before? In Idlib, because of the continuous intensified aerial bombardments, aid to more than 250,000 internally displaced persons is extremely difficult to deliver. Improvised explosive devices in Raqqa and elsewhere in Syria have caused large numbers of casualties. The Netherlands urges all Council members to continue their contributions to make all of Syria free of mines and explosive devices. Concerning cross-border aid delivery, it is equally disturbing that today, one month after the Council renewed the authorization of cross-border aid, some of these very aid convoys cannot cross the border because of the security situation. The consequences of this lack of cross-border aid for the large number of displaced people in north-west Syria are tremendous. There is an urgent need to ensure that all convoys can have safe passage to reach those in need, both in Afrin and beyond. In Afrin, the intensification of the military operation there last Sunday has led to more displaced families that have nowhere to go. We call upon all parties to protect civilians, to facilitate humanitarian access and to allow for the safe passage of all people who wish to leave areas under attack. Turning to the implementation of OCHA's five asks, the recent visit by Mark Lowcock to Syria was in itself a positive step, but it is imperative that the dialogue on aid delivery yield effective results as soon as possible. In effect, the requests made by the Emergency Relief Coordinator do not differ much from those of his predecessors, effectively highlighting the lack of progress in terms of sustained, principled humanitarian access to those most in need. The message of the humanitarian and international community has been consistent: respect your obligations under international humanitarian law, protect your own citizens — including health workers and humanitarian aid workers — and allow for rapid, safe and sustained humanitarian access. In conclusion, it is crucial that the Security Council unequivocally unite itself behind the concrete and attainable five asks of OCHA. It remains essential to see progress on the rapid, effective and principled implementation in the coming weeks of all five asks of OCHA. We call on Council members to consider steps to be taken collectively in case no progress takes place and on those who have influence on the Syrian authorities to make sure that humanitarian aid reaches those most in need. Let us not forget that lives are at stake. Mr. Miller (United States of America): The Security Council met only last week (see S/PV.8164) and heard the Under-Secretary-General for Humanitarian Affairs describe his visit to Syria and reiterate a series of requests that, in his estimation, would be a positive step towards improving the humanitarian situation in Syria. Sadly, not only has none of those requests been approved by the Syrian regime, but also the situation in places such as eastern Ghouta continues to deteriorate beyond our worst imagaination. To the surprise of no one, cross-line deliveries in Syria, particularly to besieged and hard-to-reach areas, remain stalled. In S/PV.8171 The situation in the Middle East 30/01/2018 8/10 18-02496 fact, there have been no United Nations inter-agency convoys anywhere for more than six weeks and no convoys to a besieged area for more than eight weeks. We deplore what are, frankly, starve-and-siege tactics, preventing the distribution of aid, which must be needs-based. As a result, many families are going without the most basic food, medicine and other supplies required for survival. Hospitals reuse syringes and other medical items meant for single use and, during the coldest months of winter, families who have run out of fuel and cooking oil burn household items to stay warm. That is happening in Ghouta and elsewhere throughout Syria. We need an immediate, unconditional humanitarian pause in eastern Ghouta, where the impact of air strikes and artillery shelling on the civilian infrastruture has forced the closure of more schools and medical clinics. Those bombings continued over the weekend, further proving that any supposed ceasefire in the area was merely aspirational. We reiterate the need to evacuate hundreds of critically ill people trapped in eastern Ghouta. We have seen no movement on that issue since late December, and the list continues to grow. Only a few weeks ago, we heard that the medical evacuation list contained 600 names, including hundreds of children. That list has now grown to at least 750 people, according to the United Nations staff on the ground. Over the weekend, the United Nations reported that another critically ill person on Ghouta's medical evacuation list died due to the lack of medical treatment. Such deaths are senseless and reflect the Syrian regime's depraved disregard for human life. Such gratuitous cruelty suggests that the regime's siege of eastern Ghouta is directed not at the armed opposition but against the civilian population. We need not remind the members of the Council that a siege directed against civilians is a violation of international humanitarian law. We also appreciate the fact that Sweden and Kuwait worked on a draft presidential statement to address such dire humanitarian challenges. The overwhelming majority of Council members agree that we must be clear in demanding that the Syrian authorities allow immediate medical evacuations and cross-line assistance. When there are hundreds of thousands of Syrians besieged by the regime and starving due to the regime's actions, such demands are the very least that the Council can make. We would also like to take a moment to thank the Government of Jordan for facilitating an extraordinary delivery of humanitarian assistance in mid-January to the internally displaced populations stranded at Rukban. That population now has food and relief items for one month. However, we continue to wait for the Syrian regime's formal approval for the United Nations to begin cross-line aid deliveries to that vulnerable population from Damascus. The United Nations submitted its proposal in mid-November and has still receievd no response. All arrangements have been made for the deliveries to begin as soon as possible. The Syrian regime has only to grant its approval and to stand out of the way for life-saving assistance to reach those in need. As we heard earlier today, members of the Security Council visited the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum in Washington, D.C., yesterday and saw the exhibition about the Syrian regime's arbitrary detention and torture of more than 100,000 civilians. The name of the exhibition is "Please Don't Forget Us". We should bear that, and what the Syrian regime is capable of doing, in mind as we discuss yet again what is taking place in easter Ghouta and elsewhere in Syria. Mr. Llorentty Solíz (Plurinational State of Bolivia) (spoke in Spanish): My delegation wishes to thank Ms. Ursula Mueller, Assistant Secretary-General for Humanitarian Affairs, for her briefing. Bolivia regrets the crisis in Syria, which, after all these years, has caused so much destruction and the loss of so many lives. Ms. Mueller told us that, since the beginning of the conflict, more than 500,000 people have died; currently, there are 13.1 million people who need humanitarian assistance, 2.9 million of whom are trapped in besieged and hard-to-reach areas; and at least 6.1 million people have been internally displaced. We believe that the most recent events have resulted in an increase in the number of dead, of people who need humanitarian assistance and of internally displaced persons. We call for the cleaning and demining of and access for basic humanitarian assistance to the city of Raqqa to take place as soon as possible to allow for the safe and dignified return of those families who were displaced due to the conflict. We regret that, since the month of October 2017, approximately 220 people have died and others have been injured in blasts. 30/01/2018 The situation in the Middle East S/PV.8171 18-02496 9/10 The recent events in Syria show once again the urgent need to revitalize the Geneva political process, reinforcing the tangible results of the Astana meeting, in consultation, of course, with all the parties involved, including the opposition, in order to facilitate the development of mutual confidence-building measures and, as a result, the improvement of the political and humanitarian situation. We are certain that this will also allow for the release of detainees and hostages and the search for the disappeared, as well as for the establishment of conditions for a political process and a sustained and lasting ceasefire. We express our support for the efforts made recently in Vienna and for the work to take place in Sochi. We welcome the decision of the Secretary-General to allow his representative to participate in those events. We once again remind the parties to the conflict that they must allow unconditional access for humanitarian assistance, ensuring and safeguarding the security and physical integrity of humanitarian workers, in particular in the besieged and hard-to-reach areas. In that regard, we reiterate once again our highest recognition for the work being done by the staff of the various humanitarian assistance agencies and bodies on the ground, and we urge the parties involved to meet their obligations under international law, in particular international humanitarian law and international human rights law. We remind the parties involved that they must implement the Astana agreements, respect the de-escalation areas and prevent any attacks on civilian institutions, such as residential areas, schools and hospitals, in line with international humanitarian law, to ensure the protection of civilians and unimpeded access for accredited humanitarian organizations to provide the greatly needed assistance. In that regard, we underscore the work of the Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs, which has reached 800,000 people through cross-border convoys. We hope that those operations can continue, for which better coordination and cooperation between the United Nations and the Government of the Syrian Arab Republic are recommended. In that context, we underscore the agreements arrived at among Iran, Russia, and Turkey on 22 December 2017, and we urgently call for strengthening them so as to free detainees and abductees, as well as to positively identify missing persons. We stress the importance of the work of the Russian Centre for Reconciliation of Opposing Sides in the Syrian Arab Republic, which has become a guarantor of security and the distribution of humanitarian aid, while ensuring the evacuation of persons from areas facing armed conflict. Lastly, it is important to point out that the humanitarian situation, which is affecting more than 13.2 million people in Syria, must be resolved exclusively through an organized, inclusive and political process based on dialogue and led for and by the Syrian people, which would allow for a peaceful solution respecting the sovereignty, territorial integrity and independence of Syria. We call on members of the Security Council to make every effort to ensure that it remain unified on such an issue as fundamental as humanitarian assistance. Mr. Meza-Cuadra (Peru) (spoke in Spanish): We thank Ms. Ursula Mueller, Assistant Secretary-General for Humanitarian Affairs and Deputy Emergency Relief Coordinator, for her detailed briefing. The humanitarian landscape in Syria that she described to us this morning is, once again, disheartening. Over the past several years, the relevant reports of the Secretary-General and Security Council meetings on this issue have repeatedly related victim fatalities, the renewal of the large-scale displacement of refugees, besieged cities, an increasing spread of diseases, a high level of malnutrition, the destruction of medical infrastructure and other scourges. Given such a situation, the only remedy left is to ensure the immediate, safe and unrestricted access of humanitarian assistance and strict compliance under international humanitarian law, in particular respect for the principle of proportionality as related to conducting military attacks and taking the appropriate precautions with regard to their impact on the civilian population. We therefore regret the persistent restrictions placed on access to humanitarian aid in various areas of Syria, in particular the tragic and untenable situation facing the people of eastern Ghouta and Idlib. We hope that the ceasefire agreement in eastern Ghouta, recently deliberated in Vienna, will have a positive secondary effect in addressing the pressing humanitarian needs of its people. We appreciate the work of the Syrian authorities and Russia that resulted in the medical evacuation of 29 people from eastern Ghouta in December 2017. At the same time, we encourage them S/PV.8171 The situation in the Middle East 30/01/2018 10/10 18-02496 to intensify such efforts as there are hundreds of other people who are in need of urgent care. Another issue that deeply concerns us pertains to demining and, in general, to the deactivation of explosive ordnance, in the light of what is happening daily in cities, such as Raqqa in which 30 to 50 victims, who fall prey to such ordnance, are recorded weekly. We see as positive the dialogue aimed at humanitarian goals between the United Nations and the Government of Syria, especially the visit to the country by Under- Secretary-General for Humanitarian Affairs Mark Lowcock. That dialogue and the joint statement on humanitarian mine action issued following the latest Astana meeting positively herald that more substantial progress could be made in that area. Concerning military operations in densely populated areas, such as Afrin, we call for preventing any escalation that could further exacerbate the suffering of the people and hinder achieving a political solution pursuant to resolution 2254 (2015) and the Geneva communiqué (S/2012/522, annex). It is absolutely necessary that the Council show the world its unity and sense of commitment, and send a message that prioritizes human beings over political interests. We therefore hope that a consensus can be reached on the adoption of a text that reflects the five priorities outlined by Mr. Lowcock, which constitute the bare minimum for alleviating the human suffering of the Syrian people, and that is why Peru fully supports them. Mr. Ndong Mba (Equatorial Guinea) (spoke in Spanish): In taking the floor at this meeting on the humanitarian situation of Syrian Arab Republic, I should like to begin by sincerely thanking Ms. Ursula Mueller, Assistant Secretary-General for Humanitarian Affairs and Deputy Emergency Relief Coordinator, for her detailed briefing on the very unfortunate humanitarian situation that Syria is currently undergoing. Moreover, we listened to Under-Secretary- General Lowcock's briefing on 22 January following his visit to Syria, in which he pointed out for us five areas where improvement is needed in order to address the serious humanitarian situation, including the imperative to address the needs of some 13 million people in Syria, to facilitate medical evacuations and freedom of movement across borders, and to adopt measures so that the United Nations and international non-governmental organizations can provide effective assistance to the Syrian people. Both Ms. Mueller and Mr. Lowcock's briefings afford us a very desolate overview that must focus the attention of the international community on making every effort necessary to alleviate the suffering of the Syrian people. The specific situation in eastern Ghouta, in which almost 94 per cent of the people are trapped, is a particularly a worrisome issue. The situation of more than 600 people in need of urgent medical care has been, and is being, exacerbated by air-strike campaigns that have led to the displacement of those in Idlib and Hama. In addition to all this, we also point to the catastrophic humanitarian situation resulting from the ongoingOperation Olive Branch, which is leading to the substantial displacement and suffering of civilians. On the one hand, that can only elicit our deep concern, and, on the other hand, we must call for redoubling the efforts of the United Nations and the international community to find a solution to the very serious humanitarian crisis in the Syrian Arab Republic. The President: There are no more speakers inscribed on the list of speakers. I now invite Council members to informal consultations to continue our discussion on the subject. The meeting rose at 11.30 a.m.
