Ep 2: What will the future of peace look like?
feat. Tom Daly & Margaret Beavis
Associate Professor Tom Daly, the Director of global online research platform Democratic Decay & Renewal; and Dr Margaret Beavis, the President of the Medical Association for Prevention of War and the co-chair of the International Campaign to Abolish Nuclear Weapons, about the future of peace!
Tom Daly: I grew up in Ireland in the Republic of Ireland. [So] I grew up in a peaceful, small, relatively prosperous state, but one that had conflict on its doorstep with Northern Ireland [you know]. I was 18 when the peace agreement - the Good Friday Agreement - was actually achieved in 1988. That really was a watershed moment for me, because it was sort of this sense of “peace is achievable, peace can be realised”. And we were very aware at the time, you know, even as teenagers, and that really was [a sort of] a process that shaped my thinking and my outlook on life and peace in general.
Other serious conflicts that were happening at the time in my childhood seemed very remote, Whether it was the Iraq war, or the genocide in Rwanda, it was something that was out there. And even Northern Ireland seemed like something that was more remote - it wasn't at home, it wasn't something happening right before me.
[But] I was 21 [then] when 9/11 happened, and it didn't have any sort of immediate impact on me.
I started working in the Irish Supreme Court in the 2000s. I was there for about six years running the Office of the Chief Justice. I started representing the court in the Council of Europe, which is a huge organisation focused on democracy, the rule of law and human rights. I saw up front how the council was facing issues like extraordinary rendition, this transfer of people to avoid laws in particular countries regarding torture and interrogation.
How do you deal with human rights considerations and all of that? The big issue here was hybridity, [you know] - the blending or the mixing, the blurring of the ages between peace and war. So in the 2010s, I went off to do a PhD. And that was where I became much more closely involved with peace building in the area of peace-building.
I was focused on Brazil in my PhD, and this is a country where there is no formal conflict. They're not at war with anyone, but seven people are killed every hour, and you have a homicide rate six times that of the US, [you know] 60,000 people were killed in 2017 alone. And in more recent years that engagement with peace-building has intensified, especially through the Constitution transformation network at Melbourne law school with people like Professor Cheryl Saunders. We've been very focused on the Asia Pacific region, looking at countries like Sri Lanka, asking questions like “How can you build an inclusive government, when you have the demands of a substantial minority in the state?”.
And through that, I have been seeing different dimensions again, of conflict and fought peace means and here, what's been coming front and centre for me is the idea of shock power. This is what people are starting to call this phenomenon of [you know] the Russian and Chinese governments, for example, engaging in cyber conflict; not only hacking elections, but engaging in widespread disinformation campaigns and so on. So there's this sense that the global conflict is now not something out there, but it's something in our homes, on our phones, it's even in our heads to a certain extent. And so I feel that even reflecting on my own experience, the shape, the nature of conflict and peace has changed so much.
Margaret Beavis: I am a GP, I grew up in Melbourne and it wasn't anything terribly special. I really didn't get active in any sense much until my mid 30s. And then [through joining] environment groups, I ended up convening locally and then getting involved with the environment. I then realised that [really] the two big threats for us existentially were climate change and nuclear weapons. Then came deciding which field I would go into.
There are a lot of good people in climate change, and not many people in the nuclear weapons space. So I joined an association called the Medical Association For Prevention of War about a decade ago.
I think the first thing I learned was that you didn't need particular expertise to join an organisation. If you join an organisation that you're passionate about, get involved and learn, and then continue to learn and continue to work, things just evolve. But the second bigger issue is with ICANN, we joined together with 570 partner organisations. [So] that's unions, churches and social groups in over 100 countries. By mobilising all those people in all those countries, the conferences held in 2014 where about 150 governments came, sending official representatives to listen to what the humanitarian impacts of nuclear weapons are. We sort of shifted the political strategic prestige of having nuclear weapons to what a humanitarian disaster they are, not just immediately, but also with a nuclear winter. By educating governments, this then led on to be processed at intergovernmental conferences, processed with the United Nations and then eventually in 2017, the United Nations Treaty on the prohibition of nuclear weapons, likely to be enforced in the next 12 months [from July 2020].
It's important to know how we define peace before knowing how we can achieve it. So we asked Tom and Margie to tell us how they personally envision peace.
Tom: I suppose for me, when I started thinking about that question, it was really about “what are the dimensions of peace? What do you want peace to look like?” And for me, for example, peace has to be inclusive, peace has to be peace for everyone, but you can't have peace that is at the cost of one particular minority. For example, peace has to be inclusive in the sense of being gender inclusive. And as we all know, conflict affects genders differently in many ways, and it has lingering effects on people in a very different way. So all of these kinds of issues have to be kept in mind for me as well.
Peace can't just be based on formal agreements where you have a ‘before you have the agreement’, and then you have an after, which is called peace; the conflict, and then the peace. What we're seeing more and more is that there's a great political settlement project, and it's a global project based in the UK. What they're seeing having coded a lot of information is that often what happens is, if the peace agreement and what was called conflict gets shifted over into the criminal arena, and you still have people dying a lot more than you would have, in part you would expect from peacetime, so the conversation just gets shunted over. But it's fragile, and it's a false peace in many ways, and moving closer to home in Northern Ireland, just over 20 years since the Good Friday Agreement, there are more peace walls to keep the communities apart in Belfast. Now there are twice as many as there were in 1998. So for me, peace has to be something that is lived, that is multi dimensional. And that sort of touches everyone.
Margaret: Yes, I would concur with what Tom says. And I think there's two sorts of nuances on that, that I would add.
One is that I think peace very much can't be imposed, that it has to be developed by the nation that's involved in the communities that are involved, and really is a very time consuming, complicated systems based undertaking.
I also think often we have to settle initially for what I'd call - for lack of a better phrase - a good enough peace, which actually really isn't peace, but it's a stop to the overt conflict, and then with a good enough peace, over the years, you can try and negotiate something that approaches real peace. But I think often in the past, peace has sort of been imposed on countries, and the systems that have been imposed have not culturally been appropriate. I mean, you only have to look at the Pakistan-India border in Kashmir to realise that somebody's idea of a peaceful settlement can be an absolute disaster for the cultures around it. I mean, the Kurds would also be a prime example of this. So I think recognising that peace does need to be inclusive of all groups and work for all groups, but that often you have to settle for a good enough peace and then continue to work towards that, because it's such a long term undertaking with needing [sort of] social and cultural change in the building of restoring sort of constructive relationships between many, many groups.
Tom specialises in studying democracy and its impact in society. So we asked how it could work for and against peace.
Yeah, I mean, it's a really interesting question. It’s a difficult one. There's a whole research field on whether democracies are less likely to go to war, for example, and that is a long held claim. Now, there is a contest about that. But there is a lot of data that shows that democracies are less likely to go to war. But in recent times, people tend to point to a lot of the leading democracies in the world and say, “Well, they're always at war”. So what, what is this claim?
I think, in general, what you're trying to do in terms of having meaningful democracy is precisely that of not having the majority winner-takes-all approach. You're trying to model inclusive governance, where even if you're not winning the elections, the state is still part of the community, the state still serves you as well as people who support the current government. And that has been one of the biggest issues worldwide in recent years - there has been a rise in sort of parties, wings of parties and governments coming into power, who believe that the whole state is theirs once they've won elections and they don't have to go over it for anybody other than their own supporters. And what they tend to do as well, is frame the society in very divisive ways - us versus them, the ‘real Americans’, for example, which is sort of racially and religiously encoded.
And we all know what it means; it means certain people who are outside of the community. You have that in so many other states as well - in Hungary, they'll talk about the Christian nation. In the government in Turkey, they'll talk about the true Turks. They all mean similar things.
They're a way of putting a fence around who you think deserve to be in the state and who you think don't deserve either to be in the state or to be a full citizen.
And I think that thinking alone is very dangerous [because] it tends to focus on what divides us rather than what we share. And when you scale that up to the international level, as we're starting to see, that type of government is often very bad at multilateralism. They're anti multilateralism, [but] multilateralism is one of our best ways of trying to avoid conflict. So for me, there is a strong link between democracy and peace in terms of that [sort of] type of government and that type of political persuasion. I haven't said the word populist yet, because populist can be very easily misunderstood. But you know, we all understand the type of government we're talking about where they really frame it as a division of “us versus them”.
Nuclear weapons is an explosive topic that we find daunting to discuss. So we asked Margaret to explain this issue in simple terms, and how it can be handled for the pursuit of peace.
There are a couple of myths regarding nuclear weapons that are sort of tightly held.
One of the myths is that nuclear weapons make us safer, when in fact, really, the absolute reverse is true, the likelihood when we have about 14,000 nuclear weapons left with about 2000 on them on hair trigger alert. In the last four decades, we've come about seven times within an absolute hair's breadth, just a whisker of having nuclear war, and it's really been just luck that’s saved us. And you can't keep relying on luck. I mean, whether it be from technical or human error, whether it be from hackers, whether it be from extremists, or whether it be from a capricious leader of which we have quite a few, nuclear weapons are really a high risk undertaking and it's a complete pretence to say they make us safer, that they have stopped a number of wars. And they continue to be there.
The second that's often under-appreciated, though, I suspect, I'm telling some of you what you already know- nuclear weapons are much bigger and more powerful than they were for Hiroshima and Nagasaki.
And for example, here in Melbourne, if you dropped one moderately large-sized nuclear weapon on the centre of Melbourne, you would incinerate or vaporise everything within the first eight kilometres, then everything else catches fire. And basically it works out to be about a 50 kilometre radius. So going around from Hoppers Crossing all the way up through Whittlesea and down through North Dandenong, there’s such an intense fire storm that everything dies because there's no oxygen. So these weapons are incredibly powerful.
There's good modelling to show that if there was a limited nuclear war between Kashmir in India, which is what we feel, in terms of political wars, the most likely scenario, with less than 1% of the current arsenal, we would have a nuclear winter [and] we would probably kill 10s of millions of people immediately, but then have a nuclear winter affecting crops for about a decade. And that, in turn, would reduce wheat, rice and corn by about 10 to 15%, cause famine, and then put about 2 billion lives at risk. So these weapons are, from a human perspective, absolutely appalling. And the Red Cross has come out saying that the only way you can treat this is to prevent it, [but] you can't. There's no possible response. And that's why we're looking at abolition.
In terms of the impact on democracy; well, you really only have to look at the weapons industry and what it's done to America. [The weapons industry] is a very powerful lobbyist. It’s also very astute. For instance, a company like Lockheed Martin, which is the largest weapons manufacturer in the world, has factories in over [I don’t know exactly, but what I think is over] 40 of the 50 odd states. And what this means is that whenever in Congress someone opposes a program that Lockheed Martin puts forward, they go to the congressmen and say, “This will cost jobs in your electorate”. And it means that they have not only very powerful levers to pull, but by lobbying, and by donating, they have very much distorted the political landscape in America and the gerrymanders that are set up in a number of states that mean that the Republicans can get well below 50%, but still get the Electoral College votes for presidency, are an illustration of that.
So I think here in Australia, the weapons industry is, [over the last decade, both Labour and Liberal have encouraged it as] a jobs creator, which is a furphy because the same amount of money spent on other industries like education, or [the] renewable industry (renewable energy) or health create much more jobs. But we're seeing the same process here that the military industrial complex is alive and well in Australia, and certainly doing a lot of lobbying and a lot of strategic political donations. And we are honestly sliding towards what is happening in America, [but] we're very fortunate to have the Independent Electoral Commission.
Beyond government decision making, there are other ways that we can promote peace on a large scale, which we had our guests outline.
Tom: It's such a difficult one. I mean, I think part of it once again, goes back to [sort of] my early reflections at the start. And it's even believing in the existence of honest brokers. There has grown a tendency towards assuming that there is no such thing as a disinterested party who simply wants to assist. Now, there's always going to be some motive involved in Northern Ireland, it was [sort of] going to be a huge political foreign policy win for the Clinton government to achieve peace in Northern Ireland. And it's something that they placed emphasis on, and there was an electoral win there because of the preponderance of Irish Americans in the electorate. But there was still a good faith approach. And there was a tendency to set the sort of main actors at arm's distance from the government. So it wasn't just a sort of political partisan process. And I think that thinking, that way of doing things, has really sort of become a bit of an endangered species. We have the shell of it, we have the format of it, we have that that practice is still in place. But I think the good faith underpinning it, and that view and the genuine belief in many countries, that that is possible, has really waned. And of course, there are genuine reasons why in some states, that belief has waned, because it hasn't been done very well by many western states; for example, in the Balkans, in a variety of states worldwide, the US. However, it still remains when it is done correctly, and with the best interests of the state and making sure that it is subsidiary so that you were just adding assistance where necessary rather than imposing solutions that I think still remains an absolute [just] vital component for maintaining peace in the world.
Margaret: Yes, to sort of build on what Tom said as well as having honest brokers, you need to have multiple honest brokers, because failure is the normal. So what happens if one country comes in? It's really important to have a second country able to in a few months, or in a suitable time, to step in again and have another go because it often takes a number of approaches to actually reach any resolution. And I think, you look at Canada, you look at Norway, New Zealand, who have all tried to work on this and successfully so, and parts of the US, the UK, and Malaysia have got aspects of their diplomatic core that do try and work on this. So I think it's really important to learn from the failures. In Australia, we did quite well in Cambodia and the Solomons. But peacemaking is actually incredibly cost effective if you look at the global cost of convincing governments that having a dedicated unit to peacemaking and mediation. To do that, you really need a bilateral approach that the whole government, both opposition and government, need to support. But if Australia were able to put forward a mediation unit, and to be accepted as an honest broker and not be quite so tied to US foreign policy, we could do a lot to help the global situation. And it really is extraordinary how much is spent on war and how little is spent on preventing war.
Most importantly, we were interested in how we can be individual champions of peace.
Tom: I think everybody can be a champion of peace in their daily life. I really do. It doesn't have to be, for example, giving to charities, it doesn’t have to be specifically about giving money. You can give up your time, you can give up your attention, you can decide not to feed the factors that are going against peace, correct somebody if you're in conversation, and they're spouting the disinformation that you know to be wrong. I think we all have a role we can play.
I think it depends on what our specific abilities and our specific priorities are as well. I mean, for me, one of the things I tried to do every day is just feed the good side. And one of the ways I do that is a project I started in 2018: ‘Democratic Decay and Renewal’ and it's an online research platform where people can share information about threats to democracy but also how we can do democracy better. And you know, I do that on top of my day job, and some days I grumble about having to do it. I have a team of volunteers. But that's my way. We've relaunched as COVID-DEM actually, in the last month to look at putting together materials on how COVID and state responses to COVID are affecting democracy worldwide. But also you see a lot of glimmers of hope there as well. For me, it goes back to the very start of this event, reflecting on ‘what can I do?’ It can be small, it can be medium, it can be big.
Margaret: Yes, I think there's many, many ways people can contribute, for example, ICANN at the moment is running what's called ‘The City's Appeal’ where basically we're encouraging people to ring up their local city council and urge the city council to join. It's easy to do, which just means getting a few people in your local government area to ring up, talk to their local councillors, then get the councillors to approve a motion. And then that motion calls on the council to talk to Canberra and say that that Council supports nuclear disarmament. It's not terribly time consuming, but it's something that's sort of concrete and doable, and has been achieved in nearly 30 councils so far across Australia, and it's working globally. You can go and visit your local parliamentarian and talk to him about sort of stopping exporting weapons to Saudi Arabia, or stopping subsidising weapons companies or halting the massive increase in defence spending, and instead redirecting some of that money into foreign aid and DFAT so we've got decent diplomatic services. I mean, you can join organisations like the Medical Association, Prevention of War if you're a health worker, or IPAN (Independent Peaceful Australia Network), which are doing really good work. I also sometimes say to people, join a political party, because political parties need good people. And with good people in them, you can with time, work and change, bring things back towards the centre …try and reduce the ‘hard right, hard left’ approach to things. So there's many, many things, but I also agree with Tom that the personal calling out in a very nice way. When people say things that are actually ‘no, that's not right’. Those are the first steps. So just maybe little steps to begin with. But there's plenty of scope and lots to do. And lots of opportunity, even if you don't feel particularly skilled in the area to join and learn.
We would like to thank Tom and Margie for discussing the importance of democracy, inclusive peace, the benefits of nuclear disarmament and working at an individual and community level to create Amity. What I took away from this conversation is that peace is an ongoing practice that we need to engage with consistently over time and advocate for at every opportunity.