by Richard Gowan | Nov 25, 2008 | Africa, Conflict and security, Global system, Off topic
Like the UN didn’t have enough problems already… After Darfur and Congo, the blue helmets have to take on Jack Bauer. The two-hour prequel to the new series of 24, aired in the U.S. last weekend, appears to have been scripted by John Bolton:
JACK Bauer sustains the usual bumps and bruises in the long-awaited two-hour “24” movie on Fox, but it’s the United Nations that really takes it on the chin.
The producers of “24” evidently have zero respect for the UN. To hammer the point home, their two-hour movie – “24: Redemption,” premiering Sunday, Nov. 23 – includes a representative of a UN “peace-keeping” force who just might be the most spineless, loathsome character ever created for this show.
First, this weasel refuses to believe urgent, eyewitness accounts that heavily armed rebels in the fictional African country of Sangala are sweeping the countryside kidnapping schoolboys and forcing them to become soldiers in the rebel army.
Then, when some of the rebels come rolling up to the rural school where Jack (Kiefer Sutherland) has been helping a former Special Forces colleague (Robert Carlyle) work with orphans, the UN guy (played by Sean Cameron Michael) declares that he’ll pacify the rebels simply by chatting with them.
After catching a glimpse of them, however, he immediately runs to join the children in an underground shelter, leaving Jack to fend off the rebel group all by himself. As if that wasn’t cowardly enough, he later decides to save his own skin by telling the rebels where Jack and the children are hiding.
The producers took pains to make the UN rep look as foolish as possible, even though the impotence of the UN is not even a major plot point in this movie, whose real purpose is to set up the seventh season of “24,” scheduled to start, at long last, in January.
I’d quite like to see a version of “24” accurately depicting the UN’s impotence: tremble as Jack Bauer attempts to get a code cable agreed by all parties, and fails. Thrill as there is a dispute over whether Mr. Bauer can take non-insured personnel in a UN 4×4. Gasp as he has holds a multi-stakeholder workshop with the World Bank and European Commission…
by Charlie Edwards | Nov 25, 2008 | Global Dashboard, Off topic
Do we need to call ‘time out’ on global risk analysis? The NIC report on global trends 2025 is one of a plethora of recent publications on global risks and security challenges from think tanks, Government departments, the defence community, NGOs, business, academia, and the media. Do we really need any more?
3 questions spring to mind:
1. Are we suffocating under the weight of all this analysis?
2. Should we consider having a period of consolidation and reflection?
3. Do we need a transformational shift from analysis to action?
How many times do we need to be told that:
- Since the end of the Cold War, the international landscape has been transformed.
- During the next 30 years, every aspect of human life will change at an unprecedented rate, throwing up new features, challenges and opportunities.
- The unprecedented transfer of wealth roughly from West to East now under way will continue for the foreseeable future.
- The formidable acceleration of information exchanges, the increased trade in goods and as well as the rapid circulation of individuals, have transformed our economic, social and political environment
- New players—Brazil, Russia, India and China will bring new stakes and rules of the game to the international high table.
- Increase in global population will put pressure on resources—particularly land, energy, food, and water—raising the spectre of scarcities emerging as demand outstrips supply.
- There are a set of interconnected set of threats and risks, including international terrorism, weapons of mass destruction, conflicts and failed states, pandemics, and trans-national crime.
Surely it is time to complement existing analytical work with some ideas for action or even, as someone suggested earlier, divert our focus to analysing potential ‘solutions’ rather than identifying the same ‘problems’ time and again. Given the vast number of reports and papers in the system, surely now is the time to consider what improvements and upgrades can and need to be made to the global system in response to the myriad of issues the international community faces.
In order to do this we need to move away from the comfortable exercise of scene setting, describing the world around us and instead take a different approach. One simple way would be to look East and see what Indian & Chinese thinkers and academics are developing. Analysis obviously plays a crucial role in thinking through issues and in policy-making but the very process of analysis can be seductive; providing us with breathing space when we actually need to be pushing on and debilitating by creating ever greater complexity which can often lead to inaction.
In the words of the King:
A little less conversation, a little more action please
All this aggravation ain’t satisfactioning me
A little more bite and a little less bark
A little less fight and a little more spark
by Alex Evans | Nov 25, 2008 | Articles and Publications, Speeches
Speech by Alex Evans at the Tomorrow Network (25 November 2008)
Download Speech
by Mark Weston | Nov 25, 2008 | Global system
A city acquaintance of mine on Facebook “certainly didn’t expect to be at home today and for the foreseeable future.”
Grim times.
by Alex Evans | Nov 25, 2008 | Cooperation and coherence, Europe and Central Asia, Influence and networks, London Summit
As Gideon Rachman notes, the fact that the G20 has now staged a summit at the level of leaders rather than finance ministers – which by my reckoning made it a de facto L20 – means that “the venerable old G8 has a real challenger on its hands”.
In addition to the advantages that Gideon counts off – the G20’s novelty, its inclusion of emerging economies, the fact that the G20 has the earlier summit (G20 in April vs. G8 in July), the Berlusconi factor – there’s also the fact that Gordon Brown (who’s chairing the April G20) is already gearing up for a big push to make a success of the G20 and get the ball rolling in earnest on a Bretton Woods II agenda (c.f. David and my paper on this if you missed it).
Even before you consider the G20, there are some big question marks over the G8. What has it really delivered over the past decade since it enlarged from G7 to G8? My count would go something like this: debt relief; the Proliferation Security Initiative; the Global Fund on AIDS, TB and Malaria; and the Financial Stability Forum. Four credible initiatives, yes – but not much of a tally for ten years’ worth of summits, and also notable that none of these areas really involved any serious domestic implementation commitments.
Part of the problem here is the limited bandwidth of the ‘sherpa’ system that prepares the summit agenda before heads meet in the summer. As I noted in a Guardian piece back in July, sherpas have pretty busy day jobs (like Permanent Secretary at the Foreign Office, or Private Secretary to the PM), which rather curtails their capacity to tee up major global deals as well. It’s a case in point of the problem with moving issues to the leaders’ level: yes, you get the big picture, but at the cost of moving issues to the most over-stretched parts of governments. Hardly surprising that you’re more likely to end up with a media-friendly ‘initiative’ rather than a comprehensive long-term framework.
And perhaps it’s here that we come to what may be the real ace up the G20’s sleeve: its roots in the world of finance ministers. Like leaders, finance ministers have the big picture. But unlike leaders, they also have big departments that already cover most of the global waterfront (apart from a few hard security areas like arms control) – and hence a great deal more analytical capacity for getting to grips with complex issues like climate change, trade and reform of the global financial system.
True, foreign ministries have big departments with lots of capacity too – but they have no way of forcing coherence on the rest of their governments when it comes to implementation. Finance ministries, on the other hand, have a decisive advantage: while herding cats may never be easy, it’s a whole lot more manageable if you control the catfood.
Admittedly, the G8 has a Finance Ministers’ variant too – which has arguably achieved more in recent years than the leaders’ G8. But co-ordination between the two G8 bodies hasn’t stood out as a strong point. With the G20, Gordon Brown has a chance to forge a different, more effective relationship between the finance ministers’ and leaders’ levels; indeed, it would be hard to imagine someone better qualified to do so, given that as well as spending a decade as Finance Minister, Brown was chair of the IMFC for so long.
