interviews
Working at the Supranational Level
by Daniel Naujoks
July 31, 2019
This interview with Daniel Naujoks was conducted and condensed by frank news. It is part two of our conversation on The Mobility Mandala.
frank: Today, we often hear about a crisis of cooperation at the international level. It seems that many countries are reluctant to work together and many wonder about the place of the United Nations in today’s world. This is broad – but what influence does the UN have on nations today?
Daniel Naujoks: When we think about the influence of the UN it’s important to recognize that the UN isn't one entity. What we call “the UN” includes many different ways in which states interact with each other, often mitigated or moderated by certain entities of the UN. You have the General Assembly, which, for many people is the quintessential UN. And the Security Council – a highly political body and the only UN organ that has the power to take decisions infringing on states’ sovereignty. On the other hand, there is the UN of the many programs and agencies that have specific mandates and that work with governments and non-state actors to achieve something, like the UN Development Programme, the International Labour Organization, or the UN Environment Programme, to name a few.
When it comes to migration and displacement, we actually had several discussions on these topics at the General Assembly. In 2006, the UN organized the first high level dialogue on international migration and development, for which I was part of the organization team at the UN Population Division. In 2013, we had another high-level dialogue at the UN General Assembly. And after preparing and negotiating for two years, in December 2018, the global community adopted two new compacts. The UN adopted the UN Global Compact for Migration, for safe, orderly and regular migration, and the UN Global Compact on Refugees. These are non-binding agreements but the entire process of drafting these compacts was influential for spurring discussions among countries, between countries and civil society at the international level, and, even more importantly, at the national level.
Often we think of UN issues as matters at the supranational level, happening at the UN General Assembly hall here in New York or in Geneva. And that's true, that is an important venue. But, when we have a UN event or UN treaty, or in this case, a compact, there are also national stakeholders, human rights commissions, NGO networks, ministries at the national level, who have an interest in promoting certain issues. And they have consultations, the press picks up issues. Each country is a little different and it depends on the strength of certain stakeholders and their interests. For example, the U.S. government was largely absent from the process of the UN Global Compact for Migration.
Already in the beginning of the negotiations, the US declared, "We're out." Which, in my opinion, was not a very smart move, because even at that point, it was clear that it would be non-binding.
The risk of somewhat being held accountable would actually be low. And remaining in the discussions would have given the US a way to influence the content. But I think it was more about sending a political message to certain local constituents than an actual policy move in the international sphere.
What is remarkable is that even though the national government withdrew from the process, many U.S. cities said, "Can we be part of that?" New York, Chicago,and other cities really stepped in. Thus, in the end, there was a lot of participation in the U.S., even though the national government declared they don't want to have anything to do with it. So, sometimes, how the UN works is a little more complex than just what the official state department position is on an issue. And there are many venues. There are bilateral consultations, there are regional consultations on human trafficking, on labor migration and so on. There is a Global Forum on Migration and Development, the GFMD, which, since 2007, takes place every year. Governments come, they exchange notes on good policies, and on what can be done, mostly at the working level. At the working level, government officials cooperate and learn from each other. Again, it's non-binding. And the UN provides inputs, they chair sessions, they write background papers, they present case studies.
This is to exemplify that there are systems where policy learning happens in a much more informal setting, than through rigid rules-setting and treaty-making. This is something students in the UN Studies specialization here at Columbia’s School of International and Public Affairs, that I direct, focus on when studying global governance. There are many different ways in which local and national governments, countries’ specific ministries, institutions, and agencies, international organizations, NGOs, and other groups negotiate and collaborate.
And then in the developing world, of course, the UN has a different role, because they are not just advising, they're working with local partners and in actual programs, like funding. And they're advising governments directly on how to do things.
But even there, what people from the outside often don't understand, the UN cannot work without the explicit consent of the host government.
So, when Kenya says that they want to close the refugee camps for Somalia refugees, UNHCR can plead, "Oh, please, refugees have rights and camps are bad." But, unless the Kenyan government gives UNHCR authority to work on certain programs, and provides UNDP consent to implement initiatives on livelihood strategies targeting refugees, these agencies can't do much. This being said, because of certain power asymmetries and donor interests, the so-called technical assistance from UN agencies in the Global South has the potential to influence policy decisions and exemplifies how the work of the UN can have an impact. But the political leverage of many agencies is not as large as is often seen. Which is why there's a lot of bargaining in the background. The things that you don't see that are not official.
Can you give an example?
DN: An example for the fact that the UN has to always ask for permission to work on certain issues is the persistence of the use of refugee camps. For the last 15 to 20 years, we know that refugee camps are not good for refugees. In the very short term, in the immediate aftermath of an atrocity, of a civil war, of a calamity, in the case of a sudden influx, camps may make sense to provide shelter and food and medical services to a large number of people. But, even in the medium term, they're very bad for the human development outcomes of people.
They lend themselves to a range of human rights violations, because people live in close vicinity to each other, people who are very heterogeneous among themselves. Just because they're all refugees, just because they're all from one country, doesn't mean they all get along well.
Camps generally don't provide sufficient economic opportunities for people, et cetera. That's why for some time now, we know that limited humanitarian responses to large refugee and IDP movements are not good for development. Definitely not for those people who are displaced, but mostly equally for surrounding communities. I actually developed a role-play simulation on the reasons for and against refugee camps and participants understand quite clearly the mix of international development and human rights logic with local politics and interests.
Addressing the shortcomings of classic humanitarian approaches, different UN agencies have been very strong in advocating for a more development-based strategy. For example, in the Syrian context, there has been the 3RP, the regional refugee and resilience plan, which is headed by UNDP and UNHCR, with I think, about 270 partners. It’s implemented in Syria’s neighboring countries, Jordan, Turkey, Lebanon, Iraq, and Egypt. In addition to each country’s national plan there's a regional plan, which focuses not only on the humanitarian side but also development side. UNDP has been leading these efforts to provide livelihood support, skills, training, et cetera. But even there, we see that the implementation is hampered by a lot of challenges. Take Jordan. In the 2013 donor conference in London, Jordan pledged to give work permits to 200,000 Syrian refugees. They were very committed at the highest level of government.
But, a year later, there were almost no permits for refugees, and everyone asked why. We did a project with Better Work Jordan, which is a collaboration between the International Labour Organization and the World Bank. BetterWork Jordan published a report that my students drafted on why Syrian refugees did not get more official work permits. There are many reasons why employers couldn't employ refugees or couldn't expand their production. The refugees could only work in the export-oriented zones, mostly in the garment sector. They couldn't work in other areas. There was a distance they had to travel. Refugees often didn't want these jobs for a variety of reasons. There were many bottlenecks in the bureaucratic procedure to get work permits. In brief, there were many challenges at the supply side, the demand side, as well as on the bureaucratic transaction side.
These issues combined led to a situation in which this great policy that was mediated by the UN and other donors to actually empower refugees to be economic actors, didn't have the impact people had hoped for. While much of what the UN does can have important impacts, this shows that what can be done at the national level depends a lot on national priorities and politics. How politicians are afraid of negative impacts for the local voting populations. And then, of course, it has also to do with the commitment of the international donors to actually put in money to say, "Yes, we will not only give you minor funds to warehouse refugees but we will partner with you to empower them and your populations." Part of the agreement with Jordan that I mentioned was a pact with the EU. The EU said, "If refugees are employed you can export garments and other goods from export-oriented zones to us duty free." The idea was to use trade and the increase in production in the Jordanian garment sector as a way to increase employment opportunities for refugees. A great idea.
But, you probably need to do more to help Jordanian products to be competitive on the EU market. There's also a time lag. Even if you open up the market right away, these products may not satisfy the EU standards for garments. So, there are many things that the partners need to do to support these endeavors and to really make sure that local leaders are not afraid that if they open the labor market, if they open chances for local integration, that in two years, donors will pull out. And then, they will get stuck with the additional population without the support financial community. So, that's where the UN can help a lot. But, without real commitments from large donor countries or any countries to resettle and share the responsibility for refugees, there's only that much the UN can do.
Thank you so much for your time.
Image via Hannah Wallace Bowman (above).
interviews
Robert Neer: U.S. Military History
by Robert Neer
April 24, 2018
This interview with Robert Neer, a professor and scholar of U.S. Military History, was conducted and condensed by Tatti Ribeiro for frank news. This is part 1 of an ongoing conversation.
1.
My name's Bob Neer. I'm a lecturer at Columbia University and teach a class there called Empire of Liberty: A Global History of The U.S. Military, which I've been teaching for the last several years. So I have a little bit of a perspective on how history of the U.S. military has been taught. Naturally when I first started teaching my course I started looking around at other universities to find a syllabus that I could copy, because that's the easiest way to get started teaching a course. And I was absolutely stunned to discover that at the top American universities, the most selective ones, had almost no courses focused on the U.S. military. There were military history courses about, for example, the campaigns of Alexander, or the way that the German army was successful at the beginning of World War II. Things like that. But if you wanted to understand the U.S. Army as an institution in the context of the history of the United States, at those schools, it was very, very difficult to find out much about that part of our past. There are places where one can learn that history, West Point for example, the service academies, and some state institutions that are centers of excellence for the Study of Military History. Ohio State University for example. But at the institution I was teaching at, Columbia, and other similar elite universities there was very little. Which I found really quite striking because historically American universities have taught a lot of military history, and it's been a very popular subject for people to learn about. So I've talked to people and tried to understand why that might be.
It would seem that one aspect of that change is that there's been a broad shift in the role that universities play. In the past in this country, they would educate a kind of social elite in many respects, and that was often very closely related to the officer corps.
I'm talking about 200 years ago, or 150 years ago, a considerable period of time ago. So a smaller fraction of the overall population went to college and the officer corps, as in Europe, was a place where people from socially elite families could often find a socially elite position.
Those classes were very focused on the actual practicalities of military history. Why Napoleon lost the battle of Waterloo, or how it could be that Britain ruled the seas. Not so much the way that history is taught today as a broad inquiry into the past, and the forces that shaped the present. So one thesis was that the role of American universities has changed ,and therefore the subjects that they teach have changed, and therefore, especially at these elite schools, there wasn't such a demand for that kind of practical military history.
Another thesis was that in the wake of the Vietnam War, American academia in general had turned away from the military. So historically, in this country, there's been quite close connections between institutions of higher education in the military, and certainly that continues today. The tremendous protests that convulsed these institutions of higher education, especially the most elite institutions, were dramatically affected by these protests. The reaction has been in many cases to turn away from the military.
And finally I guess you could say that although in many respects American universities are meritocratic and have generous financial aid policies often in practice, they generally serve the people who already have money and resources.
Most people who have to have a job, and find that to be a job that is relatively remunerative and attractive financially, end up joining the armed services.
I think it's a very important aspect of our past because studying the past is really kind of a way of studying the present. For example, the United States each year spends more money on its military than of all of its institutions of postsecondary education. So all the colleges, all the business schools, all law schools, all the Ph.D. programs, all the community colleges, everything after high school combined — is less than the spending on the military. So that's kind of a lot of money, and an important sort of statement of the country's social priorities. And it's beneficial to learn where it came from as a way of understanding the present.
2.
Let's talk a little bit about how it might be useful or valuable to study the history of the U.S. military. As I mentioned before, history is really just a way of talking about the present.
And if you go and look at the history shelves in a bookstore or on Amazon, I think you'll see that the vast majority of history books that are sold have been written in the last 10 to 20, years as opposed to 100 years ago. Even though the past hasn't changed. So in that sense, it can really illuminate the present.
We're right now in these very long conflicts in Afghanistan and greater Iraq, let's call it against Daesh. It's useful to consider whether that's unusual in our past, or consistent with earlier precedents in the United States. It's popular in many respects to call this current conflict a new type of war, or a forever war, or a conflict which is unprecedented. And it is unprecedented in certain respects. I would say for example, in its global reach, in the thesis that we can use military force almost anywhere in the world without having a specific declaration of war against that particular country, which was characteristic of U.S. military engagements earlier in our past in many respects.
But in fact, the history of the United States, and part of the United States is success I would say, is because of its exceptional ability in warfare, and in the exceptional achievements of its armed forces - dating back to the inception of the country. So if one considers the conflicts with the Native Americans to be a kind of generalized Indian war, as it's sometimes described, then that might really seem to be like a much longer conflict than even the current war in Afghanistan.
And if you look at American history, one characteristic presentation of it, the one that I was taught in high school, was that the United States was essentially a peaceful country that was forced into certain wars at limited times in its past because of perhaps misunderstandings, or the bad behavior of others.
For the early part of the country's history, as I mentioned, there were constant conflicts with Native Americans in different locations, as well as more precisely defined wars with European powers, for example the Revolution, the War of 1812, the Spanish American War. So in that sense it helps to appreciate the current conflict, perhaps not so unusual, and that in turn for people who want to modify it in various ways, arms them you might say. If you think that this pattern is objectionable, you need to be aware that it is perhaps characteristic of the country and people will react accordingly if you try to modify it. If you think that it should be encouraged, you have great resources to draw on ,where you say that one reason the country is the way it is now is because of this past practice.
That's just one example of how studying the broad scope of the history of the military in the United States helps to understand contemporary events at a level of detail and context which is extremely empowering, but which you really can't get if you're not familiar with the fact that there were dozens of wars against Native Americans, that the first time that U.S. troops were ordered abroad was by Thomas Jefferson against the Barbary pirates, that was a war fought in North Africa. I mean maybe many Marines know that because of the song, but most people who live in this society don't know that.
It's also worth considering the extraordinary power of the military in this society right now. If you look at how we spend our money, which in any family, or for any individual, is is a strong statement of what's important to them. We spend more money each year on our military than on all postsecondary education combined. Maybe by necessity, maybe because it leads to our success. Maybe it's a good thing or a bad thing, but to put it in the context of the relative importance of these different fields, suggest to me that everybody in the United States should be familiar with this history, as much as they're familiar with works of literature, or the basic principles of physics, and mathematics, or all the other things our students are taught, because it's such a critical part of our contemporary existence. To shut yourself off from that leaves you almost blind to that important area.